by H. G. Bells
First would be Yichang, almost a million, then Jingzhou, 1.5 million, Wuhan, 10 million, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera—all the way down until that water hit the ocean, it obliterated every town, every city, every single thing in its way was sloughed off the face of the earth and carried away in a gushing wave of water and debris.
Sometimes being in the belly of the beast has its advantages—after the hours of it draining, the water level lowering almost imperceptibly at first, then each minute seeing the far shore grow and grow, I felt a sort of calm come over me. I was on the wrong side of the river, but at least my family and I were upstream of the dam. I had a bag full of medicines. There was food in my house.
The erosion that the reservoir had already caused, before the dam was blown up, was only exacerbated by the earthquakes it also caused. It sat on top of not one but two fault lines, and the weight of it was actually enough to make the area geologically unstable. Not exactly what you want for such a delicate piece of infrastructure. So as the lake drained and drained, all that silt and debris became visible on the banks and all the way down the steep slopes to the valley below.
Old houses and buildings emerged as the silt settled, their geometry warped by the years under the water. A mucky forest, a mire of farms, all the things that we’d built along the river before we were displaced became visible again, a grotesque vision of what they had been.
I had to watch as the rushing outflow took every boat that had been upstream with it. There were many: ferries, barges, all sorts of vessels, but the one that sticks with me was just a wooden raft with a single person on it, standing at the bow. They had accepted their fate somewhere well upstream, and were ready to meet death through the burst dam with peace and clarity. Or at least, that’s what I chose to believe I was seeing from a distance. They certainly looked peaceful, standing, facing away from me as they watched the far shore streak by them, taking in the sights while they readied for their end.
The water level fell and fell, and I started trying to imagine how I was ever to cross such a disgusting waste. I made a few tests near the edge, seeing what the consistency of the silt and muck was, but I uncovered some twisted steel, a discarded ship part perhaps, that made me fear for what else might be hidden in the muck. It was slippery. It was filthy. Looking down the banks, I would have to pick my way through the wreckage of a once-inhabited village, through the dead trees and houses . . . and then what? Somehow cross whatever water would still inevitably be flowing?
And then the earth began to shake.
I scrambled back up the shore towards the pharmacy. I sat on the steps, away from anything that might fall on me, and watched the silt spring to life. Tendrils began sprouting from it, globs dancing upwards, black and grey putrefying arms of the dead shaking towards the sky in a curse. Cursing us for that place.
And no, I wasn’t hallucinating, not yet—the silt and muck was a sort of non-Newtonian fluid, and the resonant frequency of the shaking was animating it into that tendril alien dance. The whole place became a carpet of jittery tendrils raising up, fragmenting, raising higher still.
The dam itself was only built to withstand a magnitude 6 to 7, so it would have probably gone eventually the way things were going. But I can tell you it was sabotage. That barge was full of explosives, I saw it. The earthquake was after. The earthquake was enough to turn what had been a huge hole in the dam into an all-out catastrophic collapse of the remaining structure. It was also the earthquake that sent the silty plateaus of the surrounding valleys sliding into the water, to be rushed away and scrambled through the hell of the collapsing remnants of the dam.
I didn’t look at the chaos. I went to the observation binoculars nearer the dam and turned them towards the far shore, where my farm was, where it had been.
I could just make out the ginkgo tree, the one my great-grand-father had planted. In that instant my vision shrank to a single point, and my mind decided that it would be my mission in life to get back to that tree. If the tree still stood, perhaps my family was somewhere safe. If my family was somewhere safe, I was needed. The medicines I had were needed.
As the water level fell and fell, a cluster of boats and part of a pier washed down and got caught on some structure that was emerging from the depths. I grabbed an umbrella from the pharmacy; it was long and I could use it to poke and prod in the silt to make sure the way forward had footing.
With more bank for them to catch on, the boats became more stable. I used the hook end of the umbrella to help scale up onto them, crooked and tilted bridges across the surging death that lay between me and my family.
I became a machine. I knew I had to be slow, and careful. Every meter I gained was simply part of my mission to get back to the gingko tree, and as long as my goal was realized it didn’t matter how fast I was. A long as I was steady and relentless, I would get there.
I climbed the caught ship and traversed the deck. I was vaguely aware of some of the crew still in the helm, watching me.
On the far shore I found myself knee deep in the muck, and going was extra slow as I sunk the umbrella in before me, then had to pull my leg free of the sucking mire, then find my footing all over again, blind to what lay beneath.
On and on, a seemingly never ending journey: probe, pull, plunge, probe, pull, plunge.
I had, in the bounty from the pharmacy, and at my wife’s request, secured a bottle of amphetamines. When I probe-pull-plunged and found myself unable to continue, I hazarded a glance upward to check my progress. I may as well have been on a moon of Jupiter; alone, stuck in the silt, surrounded by the ghosts of how we were before the water rose, I could not see the gingko tree. I became a robot again, and turned my inner memory to the picture I’d stored there, the picture of the tree. Somehow my family was there, I could see them, all around the trunk and standing on the deep roots.
But even robots need fuel. I set the backpack onto the muck and fished out a pill to take. The effect was almost immediate. But where I had blessed energy, I was also cursed with a clarity of sight that I wish I could have forgone—suddenly I could see the bodies around me, caught on old houses, stuck in the silt where they had met with the shore as the falling water had carried them to their final resting place.
I stabbed the umbrella down, found a place to get my next step, yanked my leg free, and plunged it back down for the next step. Over and over, forever and ever.
When I ascended the far shore and the silt began to be shallower and shallower, I was able to go faster. When I made it back onto land, I had to stop. I collapsed and lay, facing away from the hell I had traversed, to rest.
At the gingko tree I had to fully become a robot, and relied on the picture in my mind’s eye to get me through it. I fixated on the idea that if I waited at the tree, my family would come to me. It became my home. My view was the destroyed dam, the carnage of where the water had been. My back pressed against my tree, my supplies at my side, I waited for my family.
It’s like, everything’s foggy. Not vision, though that too, but my brain. It’s a thick sort of stupidity. Things take so long to think of. Words take ages to form properly. Trying to pluck the right word out of myself feels like wading into a swamp and brushing aside not just plant detritus, but terrible forms obscured in the murky depths.
It took me, just then, several minutes to remember the word “detritus.” Several more to figure out what appropriate adjective should go before “depths.”
And this, from someone with a shelf full of literature awards sitting next to her.
What a shame. But also, and better, what an opportunity to record. I shall never, I hope, have this chance again, to record what my brain is like under these circumstances.
It has been a full hour of trying to remember the word I’m looking for, but it escapes me. Such frustration, to have spent a lifetime amassing the perfect vocabulary to use as a tool kit for my trade, when here I am, reduced to ruin by the absence of sleep. God it makes me furious; the anger being stoked in
my gut feels like a furnace, painful and growing with each word that gets tossed into it.
And here I am, losing even my own voice I fear, in favor of what last I read—for Coriolanus is fighting in my mind, where Shakespeare has taken up his post to try and see me through. It’s easier to think with him at the helm.
Oh Queen Mab even you I would welcome grace this muted scribe.
But not muted yet.
Not yet.
But how I wish the world could be muted—how loud is everything. The birds which still have cause to sing, awakening from their night’s slumbering, greeting the dawn that mocks us with another false start. The loudness of it all is as knives into, not just my ears, but my very brain. Such pain have I experienced these last few days, that I fear something must be going wrong with the tool I’ve honed to be my life’s work.
And save it yet I cannot. I’ve tried crosswords and Sudoku puzzles, hoping against treacherous hope that I could fend off this wretched deterioration. And then knives in my temple. Behind my eye. Sometimes at the base of my neck, where my skull rests upon this column of old bones that houses the cables to convey electrical impulses to control my earthly form.
And in this sleep of death, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?
I know that soon, for me, I shall come to the end of my tolerance for this hellish madness. If it takes too many more words from me I shall have to kill it, and with it, me, before it has a chance to take them all. I shall never surrender the tools I’ve stowed so deeply in my heart, but which this accursed thing is tearing away from my enfeebled grasp.
You cannot have them.
Acquit. Fecund. Zephyr. Defenestrate.
You cannot have them.
Rescind. Obligation. Morass. Jubilation.
You cannot have them.
Reciprocity. Calligraphy. Herpetology. Sommelier.
You cannot have them.
PART 3
“SOLUTIONS”
West wind, summer streams, them’s the cure right there fam, boy howdy thanks Emily Brontë.
—Permanent marker on a white board, Carlthorp School, Santa Monica, California, United States
My team and I were on it on Day 0, even though we didn’t know we were doing anything but our regular job. My lab was already doing sleep studies in a large population trial (Phase II, two hundred people), as part of the approval process of a new sleep medication.
I guess everyone wants to know what was being done to find a cure, right? I think there were two kinds of paths taken. One was where the government swooped in and tried to do what it thought it should do, which usually ended in a travesty of human rights violations. The other path was like what happened with me and my lab, where we knew what we were doing and we were left alone to get to it. We did have people from the CDC show up, and various officials, but they were observing, staying out of the way. Thank Christ; at least I could make a go of working at finding a cure and keeping my ethics while doing so.
On Day 1, after the first night of insomnia, we were joking about out fortuitous situation at first; but as the day wore on and each time we checked online we saw just what kind of phenomenon we were dealing with, we got much, much more serious. At 5:00 p.m., when we would normally be packing up to toodle-oo for the day, we held a powwow in the break room.
Right off the bat we scrapped the double-blind nature of the experiment, and opted to divulge all information to the researchers and make it a single-blind. The subjects remained unaware of their treatments, but by revealing what had once been secret to those running the trial, we could better understand what was happening.
We split our group in two: one-quarter of the participants were kept as planned, continuing treatment with this new experimental drug that we were tasked with vetting. The other three-quarters, well, they had already signed all the necessary consent agreements to be experimented on for the purpose of sleep research. We divided them up into three groups and began running different streams of therapy on them.
None of the subjects knew about the insomnia affecting the whole world. Their whole existence was a controlled laboratory setting, which included no electronics, where all their information was controlled by the researchers. It was a perfect setup to find out what was taking away our sleep, and we had it all ready to go right off the bat, no ethical dilemmas or anything.
So we began with the four groups, which eventually split into sixteen when we realized that nothing was working to put them to sleep.
I won’t repeat what the Sleep Report has put in the forefront of everyone’s minds, but I will remind your readers that humans have three separate and distinct modes of consciousness: REM sleep, non-REM sleep, and being awake. Suddenly we were only able to experience one form of consciousness: being awake. Parts of our mind process were suddenly cleaved away, leaving us with what we think of as the human experience, the waking part of our lives. And even that third is further divided into two, with the two halves of our brains existing in completely different modalities.
With sixteen groups, twelve to a group, we had either “leftovers” which we made into a thirteenth group.
It’s just how the numbers worked when we started with two hundred. Group 13—lucky, or unlucky I wonder? They were the exciting ones. We had them sign additional consent forms. I think they must have known something was up, but we still kept them in the dark as far as connections to the outside world went.
They didn’t interact with us face-to-face, so they couldn’t have seen how awful we were starting to look from the lack of sleep. They were isolated from each other, so they couldn’t have shared their ideas about why the change in their study had occurred. They were trapped in their sleep labs, so they had nowhere to go and nothing to do but what we allowed them.
We had two hundred people and we started trying out all sorts of drugs, alone and in combination.
Near the end we started killing people and bringing them back, making wagers with Death to see if there was some switch that could be reset. We managed an eight-minutes-dead resuscitation: on a warm person it was impressive in and of itself, but then we started really pushing the bounds. The lower the temperature of the person, the longer they could be clinically dead before being brought back to life. It had been done with animals before, but I think I managed to document the first instances of some amazing resuscitations on humans. With a core temperature of 52°F, I managed to revive a woman who’d been dead for 91 minutes. I pushed further with another, dropping them to just 35°F, and managed a revival after 182 minutes of death—over three hours.
It didn’t matter how long they’d been dead, or how functional they were when revived: the ones we brought back were still unable to sleep.
Nothing worked. None of it. If anyone, anywhere, had actually been able to produce genuine sleep, it would have been shouted from the rooftops.
Anger is useless, it has no value - The Dali Lama
PRUNE JUICE IS A WARRIOR’S DRINK
—Graffiti, Grand Rapids Buddhist Temple and Zen Center, Michigan, United States
When none of us slept, we knew. The connection we shared by doing the work together made it impossible not to be able to feel the change in each other.
Guru Loka felt the change even before that first sleepless night. He had cultivated such awareness that he was able to feel the moment when we stopped being able to sleep, even though it was midafternoon, and none of us were trying to sleep. He didn’t tell us right away, but he did discuss it with Guru Paul. Guru Paul also felt something, but neither had known what it meant.
The next morning, though, they knew. We had a group sit, the whole temple, to explore these new feelings, and then to talk. The meeting was not to discuss that we would be inundated with people—this was obvious—but rather how we would accommodate them.
We had the news on of course; we were not locked in the dark ages in an ancient temple away from all the comforts of civilization you understand. We avoided the television
, but sometimes it provided useful things, like lectures on the work, and yes, news. We didn’t want to be ignorant of the state of things, not when we knew we would develop a target on us.
Every temple where people did the work developed a target on them.
Some were overrun by desperate people, and they were unable to keep out the masses with their misconceptions and hunger for a solution to their pain and death.
But we were accustomed to the tour groups. We could guess how it would go.
We did the work, but we also made the temple look the most wonderful it would ever look, as part of the preparation for welcoming the New Ones.
I spent an afternoon with beeswax polish and made the main hall doors’ woodwork shine like glassy obsidian. The tree had been old, had seen the growth of our civilization all around it, and had soaked up the early air of our industry before we had cut it down to be a part of our temple. With each carved leaf I went over I remembered with the tree, saw how the mill worker had stripped off its living bark, planed the wood to get this very thickness of door. I also saw the carver at work, how he had moved his hand just so to get this vein to appear, how he had curved the chisel in behind this leaf to lift it away from the background. And I marveled at the bees who created more honey and wax than they could use, letting us harvest it, while we tended them and provided them with the flowers of blueberries, herbs, and apple trees. I worked with the miller and the carver and the bees to make their work shine. And when I stood back and saw it polished anew, it was them I thanked, for I had only maintained their creation, brought it back to what they knew it could be.