Sleep Over

by H. G. Bells

  When I asked if anything had been wrong recently, she said that she couldn’t sleep. The obvious was everywhere, with every conversation we heard that no one had slept, with every glance we could see it etched into people’s faces. And yet there’s something so powerful about denial . . . and also about childbirth. We got her through it, and that overshadowed what was actually the larger symptom of all encompassing, inexplicable insomnia. We didn’t understand the scope of it yet, even if it was plastered all over social media and digital news outlets.

  Our second early labor came in at two, our third half an hour after that. Within six hours, every available space in obstetrics and emergency was taken up by mothers going into premature labor. Every length of gestation. Not all were early labor; many expectant mothers rushed to us with the feeling that “something was wrong,” which they were usually right about; it was a flip of the coin whether an expectant mother went into early labor or whether examination revealed an intrauterine fetal death.

  We set up a triage for all the women coming to us for help. The ones in early labor were sent straight into delivery so we could try and save the mother’s life. After a few of those deliveries, we realized that we weren’t going to save any of the babies. I couldn’t yet tell you why they were going into early labor, but my guess was that it was a combination of the stress on the mother and the disruption of the neonatal REM sleep cycle. Or there was something else at work, something that we still do not understand . . . it couldn’t have been insomnia alone that killed all of humanity’s unborn, could it?

  The ones who had in-utero deaths were shuttled to psychiatric, where we called in every available councilor, social worker, psychiatrist, or otherwise remotely qualified person that we could to help them cope with having their baby die inside them, and have to wait to have anything done about it.

  The ones who were coming to us in distress, the ones at or near term, were sent for further assessment. Many of those, I am pleased to say, ended up giving birth to healthy babies. They were robust enough that the early days of insomnia were distressing, but not fatal. At least not until after they were born.

  For hours, it was chaos. Running from one mother to the next, trying your best to do your specific task or pick up the slack when someone wasn’t there for theirs; god, it was a frantic, awful mess. And yet we functioned like a well-oiled machine, even with all that; we did our jobs and did them well, though sometimes maybe our sterilization practices weren’t quite up to code. When the seemingly never-ending stream of women finally abated, we were exhausted, shell-shocked, numb, devastated . . .

  I was shaking. A support staff came by and handed me a Danish.

  “Eat this honey,” she said. “When did you get on?” she asked.

  “Ten,” I answered.

  “Ten . . . three hours ago?” she asked, perplexed.

  “What time is it?” I said incredulously.

  “Honey it’s one o’clock in the afternoon.”

  “Tuesday?” I asked.

  “Wednesday,” she answered. She fished into her support bag and handed me a protein bar.

  “You eat this right this minute,” she commanded. I did. I’d been on for twenty-seven hours, and twenty-three of them had been filled with the most death and sadness that a person could experience.

  Twenty-three hours of the city losing its next generation. Even with the few newborns that had been successfully delivered at term being swaddled and warmed in the incubators, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they would soon face the terrible consequences that lack of sleep wreaked on a developing brain.

  The grief was there, but it was overpowered by denial. Bewilderment and denial. It couldn’t have possibly just happened like that. Perhaps it just didn’t hit me right away.

  I had a cry. The support sat there with her hand on my back as I clutched the protein bar and cried. It was brutal, but it was quick. A few wracking sobs that made my face feel like I would break all the capillaries in it. As it was, it just forced out a stream of tears from both eyes. I indulged for a moment, then took some gasping breaths which transitioned to quivering, deliberate deeper breathing. I wiped my eyes.

  “Eyeliner check?” I asked the support staff, as part of pulling it together. She nodded. “Then we’ve got more work to do,” I said, standing. She held onto the fabric of my scrubs and didn’t let me leave.

  “Finish it,” she said. I took a big bite out of the bar, chewed it enough, and popped the last of it into my mouth. She let me go.

  I got on the phone to my friend over at St. Joseph’s.

  “Angie?” I said. There was a tremor in her voice as she answered.

  “You too?”

  “All those babies,” I said, covering my mouth with my hand.

  “Oh Maddie, what is happening?” she said, her voice cracking.

  “I’ll see if anyone’s called the CDC,” I said.

  I hurried to the head administrator’s office. He was already on a call; it was on speaker phone. He paced back and forth, with a cell phone pressed against his ear, on a second call.

  The speaker phone line was busy. He slammed a finger on the receiver and redialed, keeping the other phone pressed to his ear. He hadn’t noticed me yet, but I took a step inside, towards one of the chairs across from his desk. I caught his eye and I gestured at the phone. He nodded. It connected as I sat, and we were put on hold. I ate a sandwich I’d remembered I’d thrown together before my shift. We were in a hold cue for two hours. Please do not hang up and call back; your call will be answered more quickly if you stay on the line.

  While I waited, I went in and out of the office to help with other things as they needed me. I made more coffee, three times, sending grounds spilling into the sink on my first try. After I put on the third pot, I turned the chair in the office to face out the window in the corner and watched as doctors and nurses came and went without seeing me. But eventually people noticed and word got out that we were in queue at the CDC, and people trickled in to hear the call. When we finally got through, the administrator’s office was packed with people waiting.

  As it rang, he turned to us, all his gathered staff.

  “What do I even tell them?” he asked, exhausted. Someone picked up on the other end.

  “CDC, hello this is Gwenevive, please report your location and situation,” she said hastily. I jumped right in.

  “My name is Maddie Hopkins, and I work in the obstetrics department of Jackson Memorial Hospital, and today, all of our expectant mothers came in and either went into premature labor, or presented with intrauterine fetal demise.”

  The operator was so matter-of-fact, so cold, almost dismissive, that it felt like a slap to the face: “What percentage of each, how many babies did you lose, how many mothers did you lose, and how many did you manage to deliver?” came the voice on the other end. Such a blasé reaction to the most horrible thing everyone present had ever witnessed.

  “Um,” I started. What percentage? What kind of reaction is that? The kind where they were gathering data. No shock. This was not news to her. I was one of an unending number of calls exactly like this for her today.

  “Um, we lost . . .” I tried to count the numbers in my head.

  A doctor, the attending doctor who had dealt with the first death of the night, stepped in to answer, referring to a chart on which he’d done up some math.

  “Twenty percent of the mothers. We lost perhaps 90 percent of the babies; the other 10 percent were at or over term. We delivered seven successfully, all of the mothers survived.” That felt good to hear.

  “And they are healthy?” she asked again, cold, calculating, dry.

  “As far as we can tell. But if they don’t sleep . . .” The attending physician’s shoulders tensed. Another nurse put her hand on his back to comfort him. I could feel an edge of desperation and righteous anger creeping its way into my gut, into my voice, uncontainable in my exhaustion. And certainly unquenchable.

  “What’s going on? What
do we do?”

  “We don’t know yet. Monitor the newborns, and the other infants in your neonatal unit. We’re starting to lose them.”

  “What? What do you mean, lose them? Is it a flu? Is it a virus?” I asked, desperate for her to elaborate on the one piece of information she offered us, so it was not just a one-way transference of mortality statistics.

  “Turn on your news, there will be a CDC press conference on all stations in one half hour. It will answer some questions.” Then the line went dead.

  The attending physician spoke to the administrator, his cell still pressed to his ear, waiting on another call to god knows who. The rest of us who were just beginning to experience the true nature of the tragedy listened to the exchange, hoping to glean some hope, some sense of the shape of things.

  “They need sleep to form their neural connections. The extreme stress of it is going to affect the youngest first,” he said, without elaborating on what that would mean. Affect.

  “If that’s all that’s going on,” said the attending.

  “To your stations. We will save who we can,” said the administrator. He put his cell phone down and I could see that it wasn’t even turned on. That whole time, a dead phone pressed to his ear. Jesus.

  We dispersed, and many people rushed with me to the incubation room. Doctors were already crowded around one of the newborns, trying to save its life. A nurse called out from another infant’s incubator. I hurried to help her. The infant’s eyes bugged out, wide, searching left and right, scanning randomly.

  “He’s having a heart attack,” said the nurse. “I need the baby de-fib!” she shouted over her shoulder at the others attending to another infant. Another baby’s alarm went off.

  Today’s Specials:

  Insomnia Bomber: Four shots espresso &

  5 mg of amphetamine—$45

  Blaze of Glory: Six shots espresso &

  800 mg THC drops—$23

  —Sandwich board outside Confeitaria Colombo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

  No one was buying my coffee, but that was okay. I was just glad that they were stopping by. I had a sign by the till that read CDC Press CONFERENCE: 5:00 P.M., and the crowd gathering were those that couldn’t be home in time to catch it. So I turned up the volume and passed out some cups of water. This was day two, after two nights of sleeplessness. The world was worried, but not panicked—not yet. Not when the internet gave us unending venting capacity, where we could let waves of commiseration wash over us from every angle now that the Eastern hemisphere had had their first night of insomnia.

  Funny how the timing of it cost us a day. Because it happened during the day for China, for India, and early in the morning for Europe, they didn’t really see what was happening until they had their first night. Even though the Americas knew that something was terribly wrong, for everyone else all over the globe it was just something that was happening to someone else. Because more than half of the world didn’t have it happen right away, it didn’t really seem real.

  But after everyone on the planet, and in orbit if I recall correctly, had missed sleep, then it was real. Then we were all in it together. Only the Americas were one night down, at the front lines of the sleep apocalypse.

  And my coffee shop was transitioning into an upper café.

  A Centers for Disease Control splash screen was up with a timer counting down until the press conference. The crowd shuffled nervously, a few muttered “sorry” and “no worries” as people bumped elbows while they jockeyed for a better view.

  The timer ran out and we waited tensely while it began to count backwards into the negative for a solid minute before it cut to their podium, where a man in a suit stood before the camera. He had silver patches at his temples and grey flecked in his stubble, which he rubbed absentmindedly before he put his hand hurriedly at his side, perhaps getting the signal a second late that they had gone to air. He straightened up and took a deep breath.

  “The CDC is aware that there is a situation occurring,” he started lamely. He coughed, glancing off-camera nervously. After a second’s pause, he mustered his courage and straightened up, spiked the camera, and spoke directly to us all in a confident and convincing tone. “This is a new one. We are doing everything in our power to learn what is causing this mass-sleeplessness. Please have faith in your government, and the scientists around the world who are sharing their work. We will unlock this puzzle box. In the meantime, please remain calm. Do not leave your house if you do not have to. Right now the biggest danger to us all is the clumsiness that comes from not getting a good night’s rest. If you have a nonessential job, do everyone around you a favor and stay inside, safe and sound, and do your part to keep order during this health concern.” He was handed a piece of paper from off screen, and he took it and held it up. The camera zoomed in. Apparently, control room technical capabilities were already slipping, and they couldn’t get text up on-screen in time; they made do with a printed sheet of paper with a phone number on it.

  “If you have any information you think urgent and pertinent, please call this number. Do not call to report that you are not sleeping—no one is sleeping. Only call if something other than that is occurring.

  “We are not alone in this. This is happening to every country.

  “We have very good people working on this. Very tired, but very good people,” he said, with a half smile on his tired face in an attempt at disarming humor. “So we ask that everyone be patient, be safe, and please, do not operate heavy machinery or drive while you are too sleep-impaired to be doing so.

  “We will have another update for you tomorrow, unless we all get the best sleep of our lives tonight,” he said. The CDC splash screen logo came back up.

  I thought that was good of them, to mention not driving. They knew what happened every year, after daylight savings time. When people even lost a single hour of sleep, there was a noticeable increase in traffic accidents. Hurry up already with the self-driving cars. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a curfew was the next step in trying to keep things under control.

  “That’s it?” asked one of those gathered. “No questions? No answers? What the hell is going on?” he said.

  There was a loud honk and a piercing crash as two cars collided in the intersection outside my café.

  “Jesus,” said a woman, rushing out to help. We filed out and hurried to the scene: a head-on collision in the intersection. It was a stupid intersection to begin with; a hill leading right up to it in one direction, and at ninety degrees, a hill leading down to it. I’d seen many accidents there before, during the course of pulling espresso and grilling paninis.

  I went to a smashed green Volvo, where one of the men who’d been watching the press conference with me was trying to keep the driver’s head straight, keep him from moving too much, while we began to free him from the twisted wreck of his car. I marveled then at the wonder of engineering, that these two metal hulks could smash into each other at such speed, and yet both the drivers were not only not splatters on the windshield, but also looked like they could very nearly walk away from it.

  I was pulled backwards by someone as the world became a jumble of screeching and crumpling metal; the green Volvo lurched away from me as it took another hit. It scraped along the asphalt until the momentum of the added collision had been spent. We were just regrouping to help again when another car hit, and the one behind it swerved and avoided the wreck, but smashed into the streetlight pole on the corner by my café.

  “Get back, everyone get back!” I shouted. “Get off the street!” We did, retreating to safety as yet another set of screeching tires sounded out in the intersection.

  Just One-a-Day’ll Keep the Insomnia Away! Shake & Take AntiWake™!

  —Hand-painted billboard in Karachi, Pakistan

  Traffic was a mess, everywhere a mess. People were anxious to keep from driving, so the need for rides in an already taxi-poor Vancouver was well beyond any sane capacity. Strange that they thought we could
drive when they couldn’t; but then, we were supposed to be professionals. I fixed my cab up with a sign on the roof that read I’LL GET YOU THERE, FOR A FAIR FARE. Other cabs had outrageous and garish signs or even paint jobs to lend credence to the idea that somehow we were okay to drive even when the general public was not.

  And when people saw an available cab, they were fighting for them. Things were getting downright rowdy on the sidewalk of Kitsilano, where whole blocks consisted of nothing but coffee shops, yoga studios, and extremely niche specialty stores, like All Alpaca Yarns, and Button Button, which sold, as you may be able to guess, alpaca yarn, and nothing but buttons, respectively.

  I had a degree in business, but I was having trouble finding work. My English wasn’t so good yet, and perhaps my degree being from Delhi worked against me, I’m not sure. The bottom line was that I couldn’t find work in my field, and I was waiting on the mind-numbingly slow process of getting my family into Canada to join me. So I drove cab, and in my free time, I lined up interviews and searched for something better. Perhaps I wouldn’t have seen what I saw without driving cab though, so maybe it was for the best.

  I worked alongside these monstrosities of specialty stores and played a game called “How long will it be there?” I had pretty deep analysis going on of Kitsilano especially, because the business models there were so fascinating in how much they were able to fly in the face of reason. . . . For a few months, anyway. And then the fickle public would find some new extravagant craft or hobby, some new fair trade organic emu plumes or what have you. It was at once fascinating and sickening.

  It didn’t take my degree to viscerally understand what supply and demand would mean for cab drivers. I hung back as things got more dangerous, trying to see where my fellow drivers were succeeding, and where they were going wrong. Fatally wrong, in one case. But mostly it was just difficult, dealing with desperate and exhausted people, just difficult. Profitable enough to make it worth it, though.