Before She Sleeps

by Bina Shah

  “I didn’t consent.”

  The skin near his eyelids flickers. “To the operation? I know, I explained …”

  “Not that.”

  “What are you saying?” He stops short.

  “If it happened,” I swallow hard, “it happened while I was asleep. Or unconscious. I don’t remember anything.”

  Furrows appear in his forehead as if time and worry have troweled them in so deeply that they spring to life at the slightest provocation. And I know that this is a big one. “Your Husbands?” he says, gently. So he’s heard the stories, about Wives and what really goes on in Green City marriages. But that’s not my problem right now.

  “I don’t have any Husband. I’m nobody’s Wife. I’m not even supposed to be here in Green City. I’m illegal.”

  Julien’s eyes slowly change from warm blue to cold and unforgiving gray. His pupils narrow and he shifts away so our arms and knees are no longer close enough to touch. My bare feet are naked and vulnerable next to his white shoes. There’s a spot of blood on the right one. Is it mine? Does he understand, at last, who and what I am?

  After a long pause he speaks again. “I’ll go back and look again at your tests.” His voice is calm, his expression neutral. But now he realizes fully what he’s done. Only now does he know that when he opened me up like a gutted fish, he reshaped my world, but also his, and linked his fate inextricably to mine.

  I’m overcome by weariness, sudden and bewildering. I want him to go away. “I think I need to sleep some more.”

  “No,” says Julien. “Don’t sleep. Walk as much as you can. I’m sure you want to get out of here as quickly as possible. It will speed things along if you walk.”

  He’s already got one hand on the door as he gives me these instructions. He’s the one who wants to get out of this room as fast as he can; I’m the one who can’t escape. I glance toward the window—if only I could open it and fly out, straight back to the Panah. But I will be here at Julien’s pleasure, for as long as he wants to keep me here.

  I doze for a fitful hour or two in the evening. I’m startled out of sleep when my hand hits the steel railing at the side of the bed. I jerk awake, breathing unevenly, the darkness disorienting me, making strange monsters out of all the shapes in the room, and I can’t tell where the door is. Then it all comes back to me.

  If only I’d had access to hospital-grade anesthesia all those nights in the Panah, when thoughts marched across my brain like ants, when the mornings were a sick fog and my body felt like it was bursting at the seams with exhaustion. I would have done anything for this kind of rest. And then I remember: that last night at Joseph’s, I had fallen asleep in his bed. Was it because I was finally, utterly exhausted, or was my body, burdened by this deformed pregnancy, already starting to betray me?

  I push away the recollection and try to think of Lin instead. Is she looking for me now? But my mind careens to the moment after I stepped out from the building and looked for the car. I remember the road, the way it tilted and seemed to come up and meet me as I tumbled down. Then this strange room with Julien’s unfamiliar face hovering above me. And all the pain, the disorienting drugs, pointing the way to somewhere in the past, an action against my body that I can’t remember …

  Again I’m straining to pull out the memory: which one of my Clients would do such a thing to me? None of them touched me as far as I know. I don’t recall being injected with anything, being told to smell anything. I’d been pregnant for at least five weeks, according to Julien, so it didn’t happen when I fainted just before coming here. Can I even believe what he said? Maybe I wasn’t pregnant, and this is all a trick, a way for the Agency to capture me?

  Why can’t I remember anything? I press my fingers hard into my eyes. If I press hard enough, will they make me see the truth? Was I awake when it happened, or unconscious, on my back or on my stomach?

  All the faces of my Clients appear in my mind, yet none of them strikes any notes of recognition, any instant of pure and absolute knowing that he was the one. My sense of the hours I spent with those men is expanding and contracting. I can’t pinpoint the moment five or six weeks ago where I may have fallen asleep long enough for one of them to steal his act of sex from my body. That makes him a thief, not just a rapist. But he gave me something in return, something that I lost before I even knew I had it.

  I have to get away from here. I have to run.

  Swinging my legs over the side of the bed before I even realize what I’m doing, I put on my shoes, and begin to walk, cringing in pain. My feet hit something lying on the floor between the bed and the door. I stifle my scream. It’s a person huddled in a blanket; I’ve just narrowly avoided kicking him in the head.

  He turns so that the moonlight shining in through the window illuminates his face, his wide-awake eyes. It’s Julien.

  “What are you doing here?”

  His eyes focus on me. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m getting out of here.”

  “You can’t just …” He sits up and pushes the blanket aside. He wears a light sleeping shirt, and in the light, his bare, thin arms gleam.

  “I can’t stay here. I have to go back …”

  “Julia,” he says, “it’s not safe. Please don’t do this. I don’t know where you want to go or what you’re going to do. Stay here!”

  “You can’t keep me here.”

  “You’re not well enough, can’t you see that?”

  “Don’t tell me anything more. I have to go home.” I have no plan, but all I need to do is find a display—there has to be one somewhere in this hospital. I’ll send a message to Lin across the Deep Web, to tell her where I am. I still remember how to do it. She’ll find a way to help me, to get me home again.

  “But where is your home?” says Julien, as he rubs the sleep out of his eyes. He blinks at me owlishly in the half-light. “You said you don’t come from Green City. Where do you live?”

  “You didn’t tell me why you’re in my room.”

  When he speaks again, after a minute or so, it’s too dark to see but I can hear the blush in his voice. “Keeping an eye on you.”

  “Am I a prisoner?”

  “I’m watching out for you,” he mumbles. “You’re my patient.”

  “You do this for all your patients? Sleep on their floors?”

  “No …”

  “So open the door.”

  Any moment now Julien will reach out to catch me by the leg; I’m ready to kick out with all the strength in my weakened body. He slowly rises to his feet, hands raised to show me he won’t touch me. He puts his hand against the door handle, which beeps softly as it unlocks. Then he pulls the door open for me. “Go,” he says, under his breath. I watch him, wary and confused. I’m unaccustomed to an enemy that gives in so easily. “Leave, but do it fast. There’s an emergency exit on the fourth floor; it leads to a corridor which heads north, towards the Old Quarter. But there are alarms everywhere. You won’t even be able to see them.”

  I haven’t even thought about alarms. “I—I just need a device or a display. That’s all. I need to send a—message to someone. Do you have one?”

  He shakes his head. “I can’t let you do that. They track me. I’m a doctor, but that makes me a government official. A minor one. Whatever I do on my device, they can see it.”

  I slump down, feeling trapped.

  “But there’s an office downstairs that staff are allowed to use. There’s something there, I think. A public display or two. I’ve never been, but we all have access. But you’ll have to go on your own. I can’t go there for you. I could be tracked.”

  Not quite understanding, I say, “How will I know the right room?”

  “There’s a symbol on the door. Looks like a monkey’s tail. They have it on all the places where there’s display access.”

  “Just in this hospi
tal?”

  “All over Green City. I think. But I’ve never needed to use one.”

  He takes my hand, writes something on my palm with a pen he takes from his pocket. A short series of numbers is glowing on my skin.

  As I brush past him, he leans over and presses his lips to my cheek, just once, a tenderness that makes no sense in that moment. His lips against my skin are soft and tentative.

  “What are you doing?” I don’t want his touch, I don’t want any man’s touch on me ever again.

  He stiffens, then backs away. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t do it again!”

  This time when he blushes, the moonlight is bright enough that I can see it.

  The corridor floor has rows of phosphorescent lights that mark a trail to the service elevators in the dark corridor. Specific security codes haven’t been set in this unused part of the hospital, hence the general code that Julien’s written on my hand with his dermapen. I place my palm on the wall next to the elevator shaft. In a few seconds, the door slides open and I step inside, shivering. The elevator plunges down, down, down, and my stomach cramps while my ears fill with the pressure.

  I’m in shadows as I step gingerly down the hallway, my eyes darting left and right. I’m looking for a small alcove where a few displays are recessed into the tables, just before the main hall of the hospital.

  I quickly assemble a plan as I move: I’ll try to access the Deep Web to send Lin an SOS. I go over it in my mind as I follow the trail of blue lights, praying that there will be no guards along the way, that the communication channels are still open on the Deep Web since the last time I used them.

  A luminous thermometer on one of the walls glows as I pass by. Somehow the cold muffles all sounds, as in an underground cave. I shiver, as much from fear as from the chill in the air.

  To distract myself, I search for that strange symbol Julien mentioned—the monkey’s tail. Above ground there are so many things I know nothing about: gestures, ways of speaking, jokes, signs. I’d have to learn a whole new language if I ever reemerged into normal life.

  I edge around a corner toward a warm light emanating from the end of the hallway. I slow down, my eyes sliding along the walls. Is this it? No, it’s a toilet. How about here? No, an office.

  The locks on each door pulse soft green, inviting a handprint, but the wrong touch will alert Security in an instant. I round another corner and suddenly the main hall appears, an empty cavern. Where are the patients and doctors and nurses coming together and moving apart? Where is the dance of life in the hospital? This is more like an abandoned airplane hangar, desks empty, chairs pushed back and left. The main lights are switched off; the amber lights of the night cycle pulse overhead in a pattern that resembles blood rushing through the four chambers of the human heart.

  But this means I’ve gone too far. Or that I’ve gone down the maze of corridors in the wrong direction.

  I retrace my steps back to the beginning of the corridor. I still can’t find the strange little symbol or anything even close to it. Maybe it’s so small that it remains hidden in the gloom. I drop my line of sight, looking lower, and that’s when I see the sign embedded in the door handle. It looks nothing like a monkey’s tail, I think, in annoyance. Stupid doctors.

  I reach out to grasp the handle, matching the dermacode to its imprint. It glows green, and smoothly the door unlocks and opens.

  Just then, another door right next to the display room begins to open. I’ve only got a split second to react: terrified, I push myself into the alcove, where I cower, legs shaking, as the alcove door stays open for an eternity, like a yawn that won’t come out.

  Someone’s emerged from the room into the hallway. I don’t recognize the shadowed face—he’s not tall enough to be Julien. My own door isn’t closing quickly enough. Whoever it is will peer inside the room, if he’s curious. He’ll see me, if I make any noise.

  He stands in the hallway, a blue ghost. Then he goes back inside and the alcove door slowly shuts. I release my breath sharply, pressing my arms into my stomach.

  The lights flick on as soon as the door closes. I’m in a simple storeroom, nearly empty except for a few bedding supplies. But wait: in the corner, a desk, with a single display on top. I don’t know if this is the place Julien meant.

  I inch toward the desk, reach up to the display, and wait for the dermapen code to be accepted. I blink once or twice and see the message flashing across it:

  Code invalid. Access Denied. Contact IT for more information.

  “No!” I moan out loud.

  There’s no time to think, to fantasize about my life underground, to wonder whether Lin’s upset, or Diyah’s lighting candles for me in the shrine in the Charbagh. I retrace my steps all the way down the corridors, back to the elevators. The corridors, empty as starving bellies, are haunted by guards and Agents only in my imagination.

  Soon I’m back in front of my room door, shaking and sweating. I lean against it, too tired to lift my hand to the handle. The door swings open for me, sending me stumbling, off-balance, into the room.

  “Julia?”

  Julien’s been here all this time, waiting for me, good as his word. He sits on the edge of my bed, his hair pushed back from his smooth forehead. The darkness marks out the hollows beneath his eyes. What makes a young man look so old?

  “I couldn’t do it. I … the code didn’t work,” I say.

  My knees buckle. Julien reaches out soundlessly for me, and I fall towards him. He enfolds me in his thin, strong arms and helps me to the bed.

  The moon observes us through the window; we’re both spirits in its brilliant wake. I won’t sleep for fear of what will happen to me tomorrow. At least for now, in these few bright hours, nothing can touch us while we shelter each other.

  Julien

  When had they lain down together? After Sabine had come back from her failed mission, and Julien put his arm around her to comfort her. He couldn’t remember how it happened, but suddenly he and Sabine were pressed together in the narrow hospital bed, two people holding on to a raft for fear of drowning. He shifted his body away an inch or two to put some distance between them, but they always seemed to come back to one another on invisible currents.

  She’d finally told him that her name wasn’t really Julia, but Sabine; she had been in a place called “the Panah” since the age of seventeen, when she had run away from home. She’d contacted the Panah over illegal channels. She disappeared into an underground life: he couldn’t even imagine her daring, her foolishness. Her job: to spend nights with the rich and powerful men of Green City, nights that were not marked by sex, but rather to share sleep, a type of contact and comfort that had become impossible decades ago. She’d been in the Panah so long, she said, that she didn’t desire any other life.

  “Where are your parents now?” Julien had asked her.

  “My mother died when I was twelve. My father … I don’t know if he’s dead or alive.”

  “What happened? The Virus?”

  Her fingers, resting lightly on top of his, had stiffened. He could feel her tense up; he loosened his arms around her until she settled down again, like a hawk rousing its feathers. “She killed herself.”

  “Oh, god,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Oh, god? I haven’t heard anyone say that in a while.”

  “My grandparents used to say it a lot. I guess I picked it up from them. They were Religious. Old-fashioned.” He was glad the darkness hid his blush.

  His mind always moved in a practical, scientific way. To put a man and a woman alone into a room together, and expect nothing to happen … What an impossible paradox. This was a game of the most dangerous kind. And how vulnerable those women were to those powerful men. No wonder Sabine had ended up here. He didn’t know what to be more amazed by: the women’s courage or Sabine’s naïveté.
>
  He believed she was telling the truth. He had gained some understanding of human nature, listening to patients all day long. Their history, how much they exercised, how much they ate, smoked, drank—he could discern who was honest and who was being evasive; he had developed an ear for the unsaid, the unexplained, the unarticulated. Sabine, he could tell, told the truth as if her life depended on it. He shook his head, bewildered at the scenario he’d gotten himself into. Holding this woman in his arms was like pulling a time bomb close.

  “What?” she whispered.

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  Her quiet laugh had so many colors that he couldn’t tell if he was being mocked or reassured. “You would never hurt me. Would you?”

  Julien grew instantly alarmed. He meant her life in the Panah, but suddenly he felt like an assailant. “But … after what happened to you, and then I operated on you without your consent. How could you not hate me?”

  “I can’t hate what I don’t remember.”

  Julien had treated victims of male-on-male sexual attacks, reported immediately to the Agency, punishable by immediate execution. It was an inevitable part of life in Green City; the absence of women caused more harm than the authorities let on. Julien had been trained to handle them clinically and procedurally. He knew which reports to file and which Officers to alert. He followed the DNA protocols precisely, referred the men to the right department in the hospital for deprogramming to treat their trauma.

  There was a parallel track at the hospital: a more compassionate philosophy, pioneered in part by Julien’s senior and informal mentor, Dr. Rami Bouthain. White-haired, wrinkled, and grand, Bouthain was still strong on his feet even at the age of sixty-eight. He worked six hours a day as Shifana’s senior consultant in the department of internal medicine.

  As a young medic in the army, Bouthain treated many wounded men in the border skirmishes, where unspeakable things happened between men. Rape, torture, mutilation were all commonplace, haunting the men for years after their military service. Only talking of their experiences relieved their mental burdens. As a result, Bouthain developed a keen interest in psychiatry and psychology. Most psychiatric aid was now relegated to psychotropics that targeted gut bacteria and body inflammation rather than the brain. Talk therapy had gone out of vogue decades earlier. But when Bouthain came to Shifana Hospital after the fighting, he created a trauma program where military veterans underwent counseling and rehabilitation. Most important, they could talk about what had happened to them, a curious route to healing, but one which Julien found himself agreeing with as he witnessed its results with the patients.