by H. G. Bells
“No, I feel like going for a walk,” he said simply. We exchanged tired smiles and I acquiesced. There’s no accounting for taste, as the saying goes. He walked out our front doors and I watched him go. I don’t know why I watched him. Usually I would have been in a hurry to escape back to the safety of my booth. Usually I wouldn’t have even said anything to anybody. But something was different. Maybe I was just slow from the fatigue. Or maybe I’d seen something in him.
So I watched him go. I watched as he made his way to the curb to cross the street. He didn’t wait for the light to change though, and stepped out onto one of downtown’s busiest streets. A bus shot through the intersection and hit him. It didn’t stop right away, either. I heard the screech of tires half a block away.
Evolution Revolution? So much time for activities! Call if you still want to do stuff!
—Printout, with detachable phone number tags, on a cork board, Tamaulipas, Mexico
At first it was kind of fun.
It was all anyone could talk about, and we never got tired of talking about it. It was new. It was a small-talker’s dream. At the office, people actually seemed to enjoy coming in, just to share whatever new tidbit they’d learned. The omnipresent hum of the lights was perhaps a little louder and more annoying, but I felt comfortable in the familiar arrangement of desk islands in the open plan office. Comfort in routine, comfort in the familiar faces that had become my second family.
It felt like a sleepover; a weird thing to equate it to, but it was that same feeling of quiet, punctuated by “Hey Jenny, are you awake?” “Yeah. You?” “Did you know that we used to be diurnal?” and then suddenly everyone in the surrounding desk islands were listening. Ginny in sales spoke to Fan, manning the secretary desk. Fan was a young man quite adept in sales himself, but he was filling in for the usual guy, who hadn’t shown up that morning. He looked up with his huge brown eyes and I could see the whites all the way around them as he seemed jolted out of whatever he was doing. But then his lids dropped and he relaxed, and Ginny went on.
“Yeah, I was reading that we used to actually have two sleeps every night—at dusk was the first. Then we’d wake up and do stuff for a few hours. There’s records of people like going and hanging out in the middle of the night, like leaving the house and doing stuff, because everyone was awake. And then we had what they call the Second Sleep, and get the rest of the night’s sleep until dawn.”
“Well what the heck, man,” said Hackie, our IT guy, clearly able to hear just fine from beneath the desk he was working under. His name was Hakimoto (sorry if I butcher the spelling—even on his commendation plaque his name is Hackie) but I guess it was too perfectly like a “hacker” to not earn him the nickname. His sleek attire was a departure from the expected garb of “one who works in IT,” and I was constantly trying to steal fashion tips from his style.
“So what, people would like, go to a movie?” asked Fan, clearly more interested in Ginny than about what she was saying.
“No, silly—” ah, it was reciprocal perhaps, for how long I wondered “—it was before electricity.” Fan made some hand-waving gesture.
“So a play, then,” he supposed.
“No, no, nothing big like that. It was just for a few hours, and it was a quiet time. An In-Between-Time, some called it. I mean, most people stayed home and read or did quiet things in the candlelight. The ones that went out are more interesting because they left more of a record. Two sides of the story recorded then, corroboration,” said Ginny. Fan nodded and Hackie stood from his wire adjusting under the desk and stretched out his back. Shirt tail deliberately untucked? Or an oversight in dressing due to fatigue? Didn’t matter, looked casual and good on him.
“I had a prof,” he started, and it was like a sleepover again—this was the conspiratorial call to garner a listening audience, even though Ginny had already set one up for him. “He wanted to see how little sleep he could get away with having, so he started chopping fifteen minutes off of his nights. Each month he’d take it down another fifteen minutes. He’d been at it more than a year when he told us about it, and by then he was down to under four hours a night.”
“Jesus and they let him teach? Was he a mess or what?” asked Fan.
“Seemed fine,” said Hackie with a shrug. “Said he had a lot of extra time for things.” This was directed over Ginny’s table to Walt, who’d abandoned any pretense of work for the last several hours, and was methodically painting a miniature game figurine. “What do you think Walt, more time for painting?” said Hackie, trying to draw him in.
“More time, but more mistakes.” He sighed, tiny paintbrush hovering over his work, a slight shake in his hand translating to a huge jitter at the tip of the brush. “I’d rather sleep and get it right in two hours instead of effing it up and taking three to do a shitty job in the end anyway.” He held up the piece he was working on, inspected it dramatically, for our benefit, sighed, put it down, and leaned back in his chair.
“Quality, not quantity for you then,” said Hackie. “For my prof anyway, he seemed to learn how to live with it. Said he would drop right into delta wave sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.”
“Did you ever try it?” I asked.
“Hell no, I need my full seven hours or I’m a mess,” he said.
“Seven!” said Fan, eyebrows up and making his broad forehead into a canvass of wrinkled valleys and rolling hills. “I need at least eight or I end up biting someone’s head off the next day,” he said, frowning at Ginny in what I guessed was an apology for some past digression, explained by a night of less-than-eight.
“Why is it so different for everyone . . . why do we all need different amounts?” asked Ginny to no one in particular.
“Did you ever stay up a whole night?” asked Walt after a pause in the conversation, abandoning his painting in earnest now.
“I guess kind of, but I went to sleep in the morning.”
“What?” said Hackie. “You didn’t have stuff to do the next day?”
“Well, no, it was during a vacation,” he said.
“And did you wake up in the afternoon and then sleep normally the next night?” continued Hackie, intrigued with Fan’s seemingly alien experience.
“No actually, I slept straight through to the next morning.”
“You slept for twenty-four hours?!” said Hackie.
“What? I had to reset myself and I was tired. Have you guys never—” he asked, seeing all of us aghast at his anecdote.
“No man, god no, how on earth can someone sleep for twenty-four hours?” said Walt. “You stay up the whole night, you make it through the next day and just go to bed a little earlier the next night to fix it.”
“Yeah man,” said Hackie, “unless you have to stay up that night too.”
Hackie upping the ante. He was not usually one to play the one-up game, so we took him at his word when he told us this.
“Two nights?” said Fan. “Wouldn’t you get some kind of kernel panic?” Ooh, throwing out a computer term at the IT guy; bold move, Fan-from-sales-masquerading-as-a-secretary . . . Hackie shook his head.
“And the day after too. Day, night, day, night, day— then sleep. Ten hours that night, I’ll admit, but after that I was fine.” We were quiet for a while after, mulling over these new tidbits, formulating the next part of the conversation.
It was a practiced repartee between us. Sometimes the conversation would begin in the morning, we’d be quiet and diligent workers almost until the clock was up, and then we’d resume like no gap had occurred between part one and part two of our discussion.
Sometimes we did this deliberately around our boss, and he joked that we’d developed some sort of group telepathy from being in the same room for so long. We enjoyed the notion and even went so far as to plan little bits of conversation ahead of time, to play into his rather charming idea. He would sometimes pretend that he was in on it too, and make some response with a wink, as if it were all part of the arrangemen
t. I think sometimes he got lonely in his office. The rest of us out here, having our sleepover moments, and he, alone, doing—what could he possibly be doing on day three? What were any of us really doing?
Comforting each other.
I caught a glimpse of the boss man, peering at us through the venetian blinds of his office. He caught my eye, gave me a slight nod, and withdrew back into invisibility.
I think he knew that he would break the spell by joining in. It just wasn’t the same with him around. He was a nice guy and all, but the mood just sort of changes when the boss is around, no matter how personable they are. What he was doing in the office though, was part of the spell. He was the one casting it.
Other office managers told people they didn’t have to come in any more. Most didn’t want to be there themselves, so it was their ticket out, during the time. But not ours. Danie Greyston was the reason why it was fun for us. He let it happen, let us keep coming in.
Those first few days were a riot.
Fan cooked some phở for us in the break room on the second night, and we sat around and told stories of great food we’d eaten. Ginny brought out some cupcakes she’d made for desert, and they had had spirals of icing on them.
“What is this supposed to be?” asked Hackie, turning a cupcake over for inspection.
“Like a hypnotist’s thing,” she said, waving one up in front of Fan’s face. “You are getting sleepy, sleeeepy,” she said. Fan lurched forwards and chomped into the cupcake. Ginny looked shocked, then laughed and smushed the rest of it against his lips. He recoiled and caught it as it tumbled away from him.
“It’s delicious,” he said though chewing. And they were. Gentle orange flavors with a hint of cinnamon in the spiral icing.
On our way out that night, we saw the sway of the blinds in Danie’s office, a giveaway of his hasty retreat, perhaps from watching across the open office into the break room window. We exchanged some guilty glances, knowing we were having a good time while he was alone, in there.
“Here,” said Ginny, handing Fan one of the leftover cupcakes. “Go,” she said, gently prodding him towards our boss’s office. Fan hesitated, then strode forwards and knocked boldly on the door.
Danie called from within, and Fan stepped in, leaving the door open. Danie was behind his desk, some stacks of papers on either side of him, an important looking notepad splayed out across his keyboard.
“Gettin’ it done?” asked Fan.
“Lots,” said our boss. “Loads. Oh, is that for me?” he asked. Fan leaned in and presented him with the cupcake. Danie leaned aside so he could see us through his doorway. We were getting ready to head out, hats and coats and all that, but watching him nonetheless. He waved the cupcake at us.
“You are all getting sleepy, sleeeeepy,” he said.
“See!?” said Ginny. We smiled at him.
“Have a good night everyone,” he said. “See you tomorrow.” We nodded and left.
He always stayed until we were ready to go. Even on the nights when it started to get bad and we didn’t even leave—he stayed with us. Near us. He was never invited to our sleepovers, but without him we wouldn’t have had them.
“Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.” —Mark Zuckerberg #movefast #breakstuff #DayofIdeas
—Front page of Facebook on their “Day of Ideas”
Can you even imagine being the marketing firm that had just launched the “Tired of sleeping?” campaign? The aerosolized spray meant to keep you awake? Can you imagine getting that email forward? The one with only the work “FUCK” in the subject line. The email that linked to the most popular clickbait site that had a list of Top Ten Most Likely Causes the World Can’t Sleep. Clicking it. Seeing your product at the bottom as Suspect Number One. Seeing the “We’re not saying this is a marketing stunt, but if it is holy fuck you made your point!” at the bottom of the page.
Of course we had nothing to do with it. No, we didn’t somehow disperse it in the atmosphere with those Falcon 12 rockets tests; no, we didn’t somehow fuck up and accidentally release a contagious form of our compound; no, it wasn’t a marketing stunt. I mean for christsakes it’s a goddamn energy drink, only in aerosol form. But because we were different and we were new, and we launched right before the insomnia hit, of course we were responsible.
My social media team was on it. But all it took was one goddamned wrong-footed tweet and we went up in flames like a moth over a campfire.
“@TiredofSleeping Looks like it works!”
What. The. Absolute. Fuck. Were they thinking? There’s no such thing as bad publicity? Do you know how many people died because of that tweet? I don’t, and I never want to. Some stupid ass intern thinking they were helping us out fucking threw a goddamn water balloon full of gasoline on the campfire. All us moths warming ourselves near the gentle and lucrative flames of energy products had our wings melted off in a fireball and plummeted into the inferno.
The ensuing Twitter war dwarfed any online spectacle that had come before it. It transitioned from digital to meatspace impressively quick. The reaction videos, the videos of people burning our product, of people trying our product, of that corner store clerk getting held down and sprayed with it . . . The doxing, the DDOSing, the office printer getting hacked and printing death threats and pictures of beheadings. The explosion at the Redbull factory was related, I’m sure. As was the mobbing of that research lab.
The talk shows that had experts on to talk in our defense couldn’t save us, nor could the hourly tweets we put out to educate the public about our product in an attempt to acquit ourselves in the court of public opinion.
We tried releasing the test results that showed that our product was actually pretty ineffective, we tried tweeting the videos of people trying our product and falling asleep (from before, of course).
Fake.
Liars.
Die in a fire.
I wonder if your canisters can fit into an eye socket; I am going to find out.
Tweets of the addresses of our employees, our distributors, the artists that designed the label, the freaking timetable of our release schedule.
After that, I packed as many supplies as I could and went to my friend’s cabin in the mountains.
For the record, we didn’t cause it. We were just the first easy scapegoat, and we were a sign of things to come.
Survive and try again; the world needs parents like you.
—Handwritten note in a “Congratulations, It’s a Boy!” card, Jackson Memorial Hospital, Miami, Florida, United States
People in the medical profession, especially in a high-volume hospital like Jackson Memorial, are no strangers to sleep deprivation. The morning after, I mean the first morning after that first night, everyone was just overtaxed. I think everyone had gone through that before; been up all night studying, or had to take a late shift or something. Us nurses especially.
And yet it was worse than that. Before, it was just you, just the one in a group wherever you went that had missed out on a night’s sleep. We were all used to having to cover for someone at the end of a huge shift, when they got sloppy, or when they were at the end of their rotation and were exhausted.
But that first morning, it was everyone. And no one was understanding, no one was accommodating. Everyone was off in their own little hells, sullen and angry and grumpy and just trying to function.
We were trying to keep up with a night shift that should have been quiet but instead was full of people who, when not asleep, had nothing better to do than worry why they weren’t asleep. So the people getting off night shift were not happy. And the people getting on in the morning were equally unhappy, having been up all night.
I sulked in the break room off of obstetrics. People were guzzling coffee. I dug out the old coffee machine that we had replaced a while back. The new one was nicer, but the old one still worked, so I put it to use, so there was even more java to be had by the constant trick
le of people, all bleary eyed, all desperate to focus and attend to the day. I got out my sticky note pad and drew a smiley face on it and stuck it to the old coffee pot. It was a sad attempt at a peace offering, but I liked to think that a smile was usually helpful. A smile and a fresh pot of coffee? Well, no one wants to work with a sourpuss, so maybe it was more self-serving than I realized at the time. I stared at the sticky-smiley as the coffee began pouring out of the filter and into the carafe, and tried to heed my own advice. I managed a meagre smile.
Things were pretty standard at first. The tiredness was there, sure, but I mean the workload was much the same. We went about the business of doing our jobs, if not well, then at least adequately. Until around noon, when a woman was bussed to Emerg. in early labor. She was a patient here before, and her due date wasn’t for another three months. Her doctor was miraculously on shift, and I and several others assisted him in such a task as he hoped to never have to face.
It was all hands on deck trying to save a preemie and her mother. Dangerous, but not unsalvageable. Modern medicine has become so advanced, compared to our past methods, that we sometimes forget how dangerous childbirth is. You don’t expect a woman to die in childbirth, not in one of the best hospitals, with the best doctors, in a first world country. Well maybe the public doesn’t expect it, but when you are in the business of handling births, you know it’s a possibility. I’d lost one mother before, the only patient I’d ever lost, and it was as horrible as I’d feared it would be. She had gone into labor three months early too, which is why, when this patient came in to us after a night when none of us had slept, I felt the pang of terror and guilt and sadness hit me in the guts. Every patient is different. I needed to not have some weird PTSD trigger; I needed to be able to deal with women who were in labor three months early. I sucked it up and put on a happy face and talked to her.