by H. G. Bells
“It’s all right, thank you,” I said. Still she frowned. Hannah was never one to accept failure though; I diverted her attention to the juice.
“You take over here for me, would you?” She didn’t smile, but I could see a look of satisfaction at having a task to do. God, it was so nice to have children eager to help. I ducked out from behind the desk, letting Hannah take over, and went to Jarred.
He sat on a cushion, one of the ones we had taken from the old blue couch in the teacher’s lounge. He sat on his hands, legs crossed, back straight, eyes wide, fixed on the screen we had been watching the movie on.
“Jarred dear?” I asked. He was absolutely statue still. I had to watch him for a moment to see his chest rising and falling, which it did slowly and regularly. I snapped my fingers next to his face. He didn’t twitch, didn’t so much as blink. I put my hand on his shoulder and rose to find every eye in the room on me.
“Oh goodness, maybe he’s day-dreaming of riding Maximo!” I said jovially. Some of the others smiled and one of the boys did their best impression of the horse from the movie. I used the distraction to find a flashlight, and went back to investigate Jarred. I sat in front of him. He still stared; he didn’t move, even when I was right in front of him, eyes directly in his line of sight.
I brought the flashlight up to his face and shone it in one of his eyes. The pupil contracted in the light. I moved the beam away, and the pupil reacted. I did the other eye, and it was the same.
“Jarred darling,” I said, “can you hear me?” I felt his neck and counted his pulse; it was slow, but steady.
The other children were back to looking at me examining him. I stood.
“Hannah, you’re in charge for just a minute. Would you hand out the granola bars? I think it’s just about time for a story!”
“What about Jarred?” she asked. One of Jarred’s grade two classmates came to his side. She studied his face and looked up at me with alarm.
“He’s not there!” she said. “Where did he go, Mrs. Teller?” I smiled gently at her.
“He’ll be all right,” I said. “I’m going to take him to lay down and he can be in a quiet place.”
“But he’s not even there,” she said again, stooping down to put her face in front of his, moving it back and forth, running her own brand of diagnostics. She prodded him on the cheek.
“Now now, let’s not be bothering him,” I said. I stood and freed one of Jarred’s hands from underneath him.
“Jarred, we’re going to go for a walk. Can you get up, sweetie?” I asked. No response. I pulled on his hand and he leaned forward to follow the motion. I took his other hand and pulled, and he unfolded from his cross-legged sit and got to his feet. His eyes still stared into nothingness.
“There we go. Let’s get you somewhere to lie down,” I said. I led him by his hands, and he took halting steps after me. The children watched us go.
“Thank you, Hannah,” I said. She didn’t acknowledge me. “Please save me one of the chocolate chip bars,” I said with a wink.
“Chocolate chip bars!” said one of the children, rushing to Hannah. I led Jarred out into the hall and over to the classroom where Mrs. Miles had the other half of the bunch. I let go of his hand and it sunk slowly to his side. I walked around him, to see what he’d do. Nothing. He stared at a blank patch on the wall underneath a cork board covered in handprints cut out of construction paper with glitter and googley eyes glued all over them.
I peeked my head into the classroom and found Mrs. Miles and the children engrossed in Minions. She saw me and rose to join me at the door.
“Are any of your children, um, staring?” I asked. She looked puzzled. I stepped aside, out into the hallway, to show her Jarred. She scrutinized him, stooping down in front of him to look him in the eyes.
Unlike me, Mrs. Miles had children. They were grown up and off in other cities for university or work.
“Jarred honey?” she asked. “Hey Jarred?”
“His eyes react to light. His pulse is normal. And he’ll move if I move him,” I said, taking his hand and leading him down the hall, then in a tight loop, and back to Mrs. Miles.
“Oh dear,” she said.
“What do you think I should do?” I asked.
“Put him in the coat hall?” she suggested. “Lay him down, and keep him away from the others. This is terrifying enough for us, imagine what they . . .”
I nodded.
“Let me know if any of yours . . .” She nodded grimly.
I led Jarred back into our classroom and all eyes snapped to us.
“Jarred’s not feeling well, and going to lay down for a while,” I said to them. “Does anyone want to come and wish him a Get Well Soon?” I said. It had long been a tradition of mine to have the class make get well soon cards for any of their classmates that had fallen ill. They crowded around and offered hands on his shoulders or small hugs and various versions of “feel better.”
“Good, good. See Jarred? Isn’t it nice to have such wonderful schoolmates?” I asked, squeezing his hand.
He blinked, slowly, but never moved his eyes. I led him away to the little coat hall at the side of the classroom. I left him standing there and went to retrieve one of the couch cushions for him to lay on. When I returned, Hannah was standing in front of Jarred with his hand in hers. I thought it was sweet at first, until I saw the terror on her face. I rushed to her and found Jarred’s limp wrist in one hand, a stapler in the other. There was a staple in his hand, sticking in near the back of his wrist.
I snatched the stapler away from Hannah and hurried to take the staple out of Jarred’s hand. He didn’t flinch, didn’t move.
“Is this what’s going to happen to us all?” she asked. It was half question, half statement. Even then, some of them knew. Just as they knew that Jarred wasn’t there any more, they knew that it might happen to them too.
“Hannah, what are you thinking? Go back to the class,” I said, trying to keep my voice down in both volume and horror. She remained in front of Jarred, demanding an answer. I sighed and watched as Jarred’s hand sunk slowly back to his side.
“I don’t know,” I said sadly. “I hope not,” I added. “All we can do is take care of each other,” I said. “No more staples,” I said. She nodded, placated by my honest answer.
“I’m sorry, but I had to know,” she said.
“Don’t tell me you’re sorry, tell Jarred.”
“It doesn’t matter; he’s not there,” she said as she turned and left the coat hall.
I got Jarred to lay down on the cushion. He stared up at the ceiling, unmoving, blinking occasionally. I went back to the other children, not certain I could hide the terror that was roiling away in my gut.
He was the only one that night to get the Stares, to become one of “the away people,” but the next night there were two more, and it only got worse from there.
That was of course only one of several responses to the insomnia plague. It was one of the more forgiving; at least we could move children around, put them in safe places, feed them, take care of them. They’d use the toilet if we put them on it. They would drink water if we held a glass up to their lips.
The other reactions . . .
Some of the children were hallucinating, which was pretty obvious. At first it was confusing, them asking about things that weren’t there, trying to interact with imagined people, animals, monsters. It was pretty harmless, but some of them started basically dreaming nightmares while they were wide awake. And walking around. Or running.
Some people thought the Screamers were a separate archetype, but I am pretty sure they were just Dreamers who weren’t moving around as much. Still in the grip of waking dreams, but only able to react verbally to them.
When it was just a few, we could handle the Dreamers. We put them in closets and empty hallways, or, if they were prone to at least sitting still, we could keep them in the classrooms with us. Early in the symptoms, they would snap out of it and jo
in the real world in brief moments of lucidity, but mostly, once they slipped into the waking dreams, they were there permanently.
One morning when I was outside with some of the kids, waiting to see if anyone would show up to collect them, or drop off any others for the day, Hannah jumped off the roof of the gymnasium and landed right in front of the school. She died instantly. We rushed to cover her up and shield the children from the gruesome sight. Some didn’t react at all, and I wondered what they had seen already.
The suicides were not intentional, I don’t think. Sure a lot of them were I suppose, but not Hannah. She was one of the Dreamers.
“‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
—Wayne Gretzky’
—Michael Scott”
—Jake Wellington
—Graffiti on the steps of the Washington Monument
We couldn’t report on kids jumping off of roofs, we just couldn’t. We had to find adults, and sort of mash their stories together.
My journalistic integrity took a hit during the Panic, sure, but god, I was trying my best to get the information out there as fast as possible, and as delicately as possible. We knew we were on the verge of a panic, and, despite how it might look in hindsight, we were trying our damnedest to prevent it.
Once the Dreamers started jumping, and they were all fuckin’ kids? Jesus Christ, how do you report that? So we took their symptoms and used adult jumpers, the ones that were just jumping to get away from it all, to try and spread the word.
Is someone in your household hallucinating? Ensure they are in a safe place, and do not have access to high places. We didn’t say it was children. We couldn’t. Maybe we could have, I don’t know. We have a lot to second guess, the media especially, but I mean come on. We only got one shot at it, and yeah, maybe there’s some stuff we’d change, but I don’t think that was one of them.
The Panic? No, we didn’t cause it. It would have happened without TV or radio or the newspapers. God that was one of the funniest things I think I saw in the whole mess—a Newsie standing on the corner, selling papers and actually calling out headlines like it was 1850. Even funnier? People were crowded around him, listening. Jesus. We were all traveling back in time.
“Two weeks to live? How long can society keep it together? First man dies of insomnia plague!”
OK maybe we incited the panic, a little. But I mean, come on, that was the way of it. Any newsworthy event got the full nine yards, and the insomnia was no different. We gave options, nothing more. We explored what it could be, and what people were doing to try and cope.
You get two birds with one stone here, right? Along with my brilliant on-the-street reporting during the London riot, you get my expertise on the whole Fatal Familial Insomnia bent, right? Practically no one had heard about FFI before. But after my piece on it, well. And since it was the closest analogue to what we were going through, people ate it up even though it made everything just that much more terrifying.
Realize that FFI had only ever occurred spontaneously in eight people before. Eight.
All the other cases were genetically inherited, hence the Familial part of Fatal Familial Insomnia. And then it was only present in about forty families, affecting only a hundred people worldwide. It is a prion disease. Certainly once gene therapy gets better, we’ll be able to repair the mutated protein on chromosome 20; where codon 129 should be aspartic acid (D), there is instead asparagine (N).
Basically, you’re fucked in your DNA and there’s shit all to be done about it.
In about three-quarters of cases of FFI where the patients were administered barbiturates or sedatives, it actually accelerated their symptoms drastically. Once people present with symptoms, it is an inexorable decline through four stages into death.
Stage one is a bummer; light insomnia, coupled with the panic attacks, paranoia, and phobias that develop as a result.
Stage two is shit; basically escalation as the insomnia becomes more pronounced, and hallucinations get added to the increasing panic attacks as the body starts to realize just how hooped it truly is.
Stage three: you’re fucked. It begins when sleep becomes completely impossible. Accompanied by rapid weight loss.
Finally, in stage four (completely, ultra-mega-fucked), people exhibit what is essentially severe dementia. They become completely mute and unresponsive. If no one was taking care of people at this stage, they would die (as if they could even make it to this stage without being cared for).
Death arrived from seven to thirty-six months after the onset of symptoms.
After the Panic hit, I could only speculate that everyone in the world had, essentially, jumped straight into stage four.
We went from zero to completely, ultra-mega-fucked overnight.
And while it was a good blueprint for some sort of semblance of a timeline, it wasn’t exactly what was happening to the world. I mean, with FFI, it was a gradual introduction of all these symptoms as sleep became progressively interrupted and sporadic. We had very little data to suggest what we should expect with the sudden and absolute cessation of sleep. Though as I said, it was as if we’d jumped straight into stage four, completely ultra-mega-fucked.
So yes, the FFI article was mine. Everyone picked it up and ran with it. Gene therapy got a huge boost, both in attention from the public, as well as in the medical community. It was all hands on deck as they honed in on it to see if that was the cause.
So am I the devil for giving them a possible cause? With a timeline?
At least my report wasn’t so sensationalist. It was the shitstorm that came after it, all those panic-inducing headlines, that really got the ball rolling.
Aside from FFI though, reporting on what was happening was difficult enough.
The Arab states were starting up with that blockade and it wasn’t getting meaningful coverage—some real shit was about to go down in the Red Sea and all I could do was hope to find out about it after the fact. You can bet there will be some spectacular drone footage if anyone had the sense to automate monitoring that clusterfuck. But for me, I could only document my immediate situation. So I did.
How do you report suicide as a side effect when there’s a standing ban on reporting suicides? The copy-effect was too costly. We knew this from the past, before all this mess. Report a suicide, and more would follow, as a direct result. But not saying things would have allowed more people, more children, to wander up to rooftops and jump, fleeing demons, chasing angels. We don’t know how many were from the copy-effect and how many were Dreamers. I think we saved more than we killed.
I hope so, anyway. Not that it did much good, in the end.
But once the information was out there, that was the first step toward panic. The next, I think, was when we started looking at studies of sleep deprivation. Aside from FFI, human-caused sleep deprivation was our best window into what we were experiencing. And my god, it was well documented. It never ceases to amaze me the capacity we have to inflict suffering on our own. The CIA torture techniques got blown way out of proportion, I’ll admit that. But goddamn, two hundred and sixty-four hours resulting in three deaths? Those were the only human studies really, that resulted in death I mean.
And two hundred and sixty-four hours is eleven days, just to do the math for you. Same as the voluntary world record.
There were the Nazi experiments too, but people didn’t really want that as part of the dataset. Some things are just too awful. Of course we couldn’t help ourselves; we, the media, looked them up. But there was a silent agreement that somehow that was too far, that the Nazi horror experiments were off-limits. And the Japanese stuff. Awful.
The animal studies though, people ate that shit up. Puppies died after five days, rats after two weeks, give or take a few days, and dogs got seventeen to thirty-three days. And that’s in a laboratory setting, where they’re getting all their nutrition and welfare taken care of (you know, other than not letting them sleep).
People could relate t
o dogs the most. Seventeen to thirty-three days.
I think maybe that’s what set it off, when people realized just how short a ticking clock we were on.
It’s not like there was an enemy to fight. All our firepower, our armies, all our contingency plans, and the closest thing we had to help us were plans in place for influenza outbreaks. But how to you counter a disease (and we didn’t even know if it was a disease) which already had one hundred percent saturation? How do you enact plans when our collective competency was dipping past the point of klutziness and into danger?
We panic. We do the only thing to combat it that we can, which, for a lot of people, turned out to be rioting. Those with the energy to do so took to the streets, and those without the get-up-and-go took drugs to join them. A lot of the deaths in the riots were from ODs. People who’d maybe not taken anything that exciting for a decade or two or three, and didn’t know what they were taking or how much. People wanting to kick themselves into gear to join the mass protests, the marches, the parties, all of which inevitably turned into riots.
I was covering the march in London. I saw the danger, but goddamn what a story. A million people in the streets cannot be ignored, not by a reporter with a camera crew and speed pumping through his veins. Yeah yeah, but what do you expect. Someone had to document it, and it at least gave me some clarity, some goddamn energy to keep up with it all. Find me a reporter with a clean urine test during the panic and you’ll have found a needle in a haystack the size of the sun.
About 15, maybe 20, percent of the marchers were hopped up on something-or-other.
And if you want sources for anything during that madness, all you’ll get is someone’s observations. It’s not like we have blood work or an exit survey or anything. So when I say that maybe 20 percent of the people there were on drugs, it was because to me it looked like one in five of them was strung out on something. This is just personal opinion. Terrible journalism, but it’s all we got from that time, as far as a record goes. I have footage I suppose, so we could go through and try and attribute behavior to symptoms of insomnia, versus symptoms of drugs, versus the adrenaline of being in a riot, but really, how would you tell?