by H. G. Bells
Without sleep, they will not heal, I thought.
And there was Guru Loka’s hand on me once again.
“We are here to ease their departure,” he said. He knew what I knew. I put my hand on his shoulder to thank him, and he was unable to cover a wince of pain. I insisted on seeing his wound, but he refused.
“I will not be here long. I request only a small amount of time at the end for myself, to make ready.” I shook my head, wanting to say some nicety and deny his assessment, but we were far too honest with each other for such a lie to hold any sort of comfort. I smiled.
“Of course my friend. I will stand at your door, or hold your hand, or whatever you desire,” I said.
“Ah, desire,” he answered, “even with so many years of practice, I still feel that tug of want.”
And then I began bargaining, but not with him, for some comfort—with myself, desperately trying to ignore that feeling I had felt while I’d looked into a man’s eyes the moment he died. Guru Loka was preparing for a journey he would not make. I had only a short time left with him, and a selfish snarl of want roiled up inside me. What was the point of it all, what had any of it meant if we were just snuffed out like a candle? He put his hand on my shoulder again.
“It’s all right,” he said, “you have done very well.” He went away then, to help treat infection and oversee the functioning of our death temple.
Somewhat surprisingly, but welcomed none the less, some people still came to the temple. We held sits and lectures and guided meditations, but it was for dozens, not thousands. We were upfront about what had happened, a letter on the door proclaiming the previous and possible still-present danger of gathering at the temple. People came anyway.
Those with small wounds fell prey to the relentless infection and sepsis and necrotizing bacteria that had been waiting for our complacency, the failure of our immune systems.
And then as time went on, after the bomb victims had all perished, and they realized that we were dying too, we were down to only a handful.
Back home, they were being sent off with sky burials, taken away by the birds and ground animals of the steppes, as was our custom. The New York temple made a graveyard at the edge of the grounds as people died one by one. But in the end, when we were down to just a few, and we were so weak that we couldn’t dig, all we could manage were small pyres.
And when it was just me, I couldn’t even manage that.
I don’t know what all the fuss is about;
I finally have time to read.
—On an otherwise blank page on the
story wall of Champs-Élysées
My art contributed to making Paris into what is being called the largest art installation in human history. I orchestrated the Champs-Élysées Sleep-In. There were Sleep-Ins on every major street, and virtually all the city came out to partake. I had a team of ten people I could order around to help with the mission for Champs-Élysées, and each of them had a team of ten, and each of those ten had ten helpers. Us thousand roped in thousands more to partake.
The beds on the street were done up in the most opulent fashion. Voluptuous pillows, luxurious quilts, candles on the beds with posts to hold them. We were dragons, our treasure hoards pillows and blankets.
People wanted to make the performance their own, and asked to put up pictures and stories. I convened with the other artists coordinating the Sleep-In, all in charge of other streets. Victor-Hugo was to be for children: toys and pictures and children’s art, shrines popping up to children as they succumbed. Wagram transformed into a bulletin board; storefronts were plastered with news and art and messages of encouragement for the living. I decided Champs-Élysées was for stories.
Le Patio des Champs became its own entity, transformed into the mustering station for all postings and memorials regarding terrorist attacks. The plane crash and explosion in Phoenix had brought that edge back to Paris, that edge that felt so familiar and so close, an edge we did not want to have to touch again. But when more and more small-scale attacks took place around the world as order broke down, we who had felt the sting of that edge cutting, and cutting deep, posted things in solidarity.
When the conflict between India and Pakistan over water rights started to heat up, when the words “nuclear threat” made its way into our lexicon once more, dredged up from days of Cold War past, I took myself out of the loop and focused entirely on the people of Paris. What did they need? How would this art save them? I narrowed my attention to the beating heart of the project and how I might affect it best.
I directed a bed to be placed under l’Arc de Triomph and we made it the centerpiece of the work. L’Arc itself became plastered with stories. It spilled out from there down Champs-Élysées, every available space playing host to papers with tales from any citizen that wanted to participate. I maintained my attention on the bed under l’Arc. Empty. We kept it empty. All the beds around it were filled, every bed along my street was constantly occupied, part of the work.
I managed to obtain a pallet of LED lanterns that were not too garish. Solar powered, they could be stationed along the street every few beds, and both stayed lit at night and posed no threat the safety of the city or the performers. They were a soft yellow glow that nicely complimented the sodium-vapor orange of the street lamps. And when the street lamps went out, that’s when the piece really came into its own. When it became more than what I had envisioned.
I managed to get some gigantic pillar candles, real ones instead of LEDs, and thought, if I was very careful, if I kept my eye on them, I might put them at l’Arc with the empty bed. I moved them one at a time from the truck that parked as close as it could to the art. The candles were logs; I carried them one by one across my chest from the truck to the bed under l’Arc, where I rested near the bed between each. When I had picked up the fourth and final pillar candle and was shuffling, near exhaustion, towards the bed, I saw a procession coming from the other direction, from Victor-Hugo.
How long had it been since I’d seen a child? Days certainly, maybe weeks? It’s all so hard to peg down the timeline of when things happened.
She was in her early teens. She wore a white gown. Her hair was tied in a ponytail. As I carried the candle towards the bed, she carried her own burden: another child, limp, dead, in her arms. When I saw this I stopped, not wanting to interfere with the evolution of the art, finally seeing a participant with a contribution to the piece that would not be matched by any other.
She walked slowly to the bed. The procession behind her kept its distance, and they stopped when they reached the outer circle under l’Arc, to give her space. We watched as she put the child, a girl, into the bed. She threw back the covers and then adjusted the girl under them before getting into the bed herself, pulling the blankets back over them both, and curling up next to her.
All were silent and still, all watched the comforter rise and fall on one side of the bed with the single breath of life. How many breaths did I watch? How many breaths were we all silent? Those were the breaths that constituted the greatest work of art humanity has ever produced. That comforter rising and falling, those papers covered in stories attached to l’Arc flickering in the breeze, those silent tears. Pure expression, made complete by the two girls in the bed at the center of the whole piece. One alive, one dead, all our present and futures, an act of kindness, an act of resignation, an act of love, an act of suffering.
I was spellbound. Eventually (and again, how long was it? Hours I think), one of my staff came and took the pillar candle from me, which I had put down at some point in the holy mass that was happening all around me. My staff took the candle and completed the center of l’Arc by lighting all four of them. She paused at the bed and stepped towards the girl—I gasped; I felt that at this point it would be criminal to interfere with the work as it was unfolding. She went no further, and instead retreated away from under l’Arc, to a safe distance, where the crowd stood in a respectful circle, watching.
In th
e daylight, the spell was broken, and one of my staff did go to talk to the girl. I watched him lean in and speak to her, then pull back a corner of the blankets, then replace them. He strode swiftly away from the bed and came directly to me. His face was ashen.
“The older girl is dead too,” he said. I nodded.
“Thank you,” I said.
“What . . . what do we do?” he asked.
“Why would we do anything?” I countered.
“But, they’re dead.”
“No one is to move them,” I directed. I pulled aside another passing staff member and reiterated the situation to her.
It’s not like we put up signs saying to leave them there; it was just the same continuation of the art, the evolution of the largest performance piece ever undertaken. They lay there at the center of Paris for the entirety of the crisis, a shrine building up and out from l’Arc, spreading down the streets. Others started dying in the beds on the streets. The ones closest to the monument were filled first, then grew outwards and outwards.
You die if you stop / you die if you stop / you’ll never die if you never stop
—Chant that could be heard on the bucket line during the Cape Town Fire
How much did you love your job? When it came down to it, when all the pieces started falling away, how long did people cling to their work? People that had loved doing what they did for forty years seemed to hold on to them for longer. It gave them direction, meaning, focus. But I was part of a generation that couldn’t fathom that sort of job security. Being in a single job for more than a few years was becoming rarer and rarer, so having a Jack-of-All-Trades background wasn’t so unusual to me.
I had just moved to Seattle, and had just got my license to drive city busses. Before, I had been a forklift operator, a flagger, and even a barista. I wasn’t attached to any one thing. And when all the pretenses fell away and the motivation left, there was really nothing for me to do.
But I had other things going for me; I liked to build things. I always had something on the go; helping a friend rebuild a car, fixing up an old chair, assembling a kegerator for home brewing. It wasn’t the job that kicked in, it was the instinct. The instinct to fix, and to help. In all my jobs, helping was key. It sounds corny, but we’re well beyond any judgement for that now. Corny things got people through it. Corny things saved lives.
So I quit driving my bus, because driving was pretty much a no go after a few days, let alone driving a bunch of other people. But I had to find something else to do. At first it was just helping in the neighborhood, walking people to their doors. Haha, I still wore my bus driver’s uniform, as if it made me seem official in whatever I did. Things made sense at the time.
So there I was, wandering up and down my street in the ‘burbs of Seattle, helping people carry things, helping them up when they stumbled, offering them a smile when I could, which was often, because I was doing something I enjoyed. I was helping.
When the Staring started, I helped them like anyone else.
My landlord, who lived upstairs and rented me his basement suite, was the first. He was an older gentleman whose name was Stephanie Civock, but who everyone called Mitch (I never received a good explanation as to why that was, or what kind of parents would name their son Stephanie). He had come home one day, but not gone inside. Poor Mitch, I’ll never forget the first time I saw him like that. Just standing there, midway down his front walk, a cement path that led from the curb to the front door of his house.
It had started to rain, but he was standing there out in the open, getting drizzled on. His faded teal pants were growing darker by the second as the rain started coming down at an angle, and by the time I reached him, his loose khaki shirt was soaked.
“Hey Mitch,” I said, putting my hand on his arm, which felt thin and limp. “Mitch?” I asked again. He didn’t move, didn’t look at me, but did gently blink as a droplet of water trickled down his forehead and threatened to get in his eye.
I led him to the door. Our neighbor from across the street watched from the window as we went. Other people had dealt with Starers, but not me, not yet. Mitch was my first. We stood at his front door, which was locked. The rain began to pick up.
“Mitch, do you have the keys?” I asked. He never responded, never moved on his own. “Okay Mitch, well, I know where your spare key is, but I don’t want to get it with people watching, so I’m going to check your pocket, okay?” I did as I said and soon enough we were inside. I led him to the living room and went to get a towel. When I returned, he was exactly as I’d left him.
“Damnit, Mitch,” I said softly. I’d heard that once this happened, people didn’t come back from it. But I had to try. I dried him off. I went to find dry clothes, and again when I returned, he hadn’t moved. I maneuvered him to change him out of the wet clothes, leaving the only slightly rained-upon boxers. I wasn’t ready for that yet. Getting him into the pants was okay; when I lifted his leg to get it through a pant, he held it up just for a moment before putting it back down to regain his balance, like a horse teasing his farrier as he was being shod. I pulled the fresh shirt over his head and folded his arms so I could push them through the short sleeves. It was awkward, but we got it done.
“What, you got nothing to say to me? About me being here, picking out clothes for you?” I said, doing up the shirt buttons at the neck. For the sake of this story, just imagine that whatever I do or say, I manage to illicit no response from Mitch.
Not when I sit him down at the kitchen table. Not when I drop one of his special plates on the floor beside him. Not when I sweep it up. Not when I cry on the floor.
He became part of my routine. There was no morning, not as we used to have it. No start to our day, because there was no end. But I did like to still have a sort of order to my time; beginnings and endings went a long way to maintaining, if not sanity, then at least a routine. And through routine, functionality.
At first the beginning was a walk, but after I saw so many people doing yoga as the sun came up, I joined in. The whole street was lined with people doing yoga on their front lawns. Probably a funny sight, but at the time it was just nice to be a part of a group activity that made any sort of sense, and that felt good.
After yoga was “breakfast,” which wasn’t really a breaking of a fast at all, but I couldn’t think of anything better to call it. Meal finished, I would sit Mitch in his living room, and begin my troll up the street. After Mitch, there were others that stared, stopped in their tracks whatever they were doing at the time.
I found them watering their lawn in the rain. Standing at the window inside. Sitting behind the wheel of their car, which was just as likely to be running as not.
Eventually I started knocking on people’s doors to check on them. If they didn’t answer, I would go inside. It was almost never locked. If it was, I found another way in.
Mostly people weren’t home, gone god knows where. Sometimes they’d bit a bullet in their bathroom or taken pills in the bedroom. Lots of people went out with sleeping pills, taking so many that they had to have known it was the end. One last F.U. to the insomnia plague.
But if the house was empty and they weren’t just out or dead, then they were staring.
When it was only a dozen, I kept track of them by putting a tea towel on their front door, jamming it in the mail slot.
The middle of my routine was filled with gathering supplies. Food, water, anything useful, I brought it to Mitch’s. I left a small patch of lawn for me to do yoga on, but the yard turned into a mustering station for everything under the sun. Eventually I let it spill over into the little park next door to us. Rubbermaid bins full of odds and ends. I put most of the food in the garage, so it wasn’t just out in the open, but I had more than enough, and some of it I left out, in a big trunk labelled Help Yourself!
I always watched the sunset. From a roof, usually.
Then the night was for resting. I was no less tired, no less exhausted, from our activities. And, while
I couldn’t sleep, I could sit down, maybe rub my feet, rest my head. Listen to the radio, until the horrific world events overtook even my easy-listening stations and I had to switch to using an old CD player. I think I stopped tuning into the world right around when that mess in Pakistan got so gruesome. I’m sure you’ll have others that can tell you about that stuff, but I didn’t want to know about it. All I could do was keep my routine; a constant commentary on how the rest of the world was imploding would likely not help retain my sanity.
After resting and music, when the sun rose, yoga.
There were fewer and fewer of us doing yoga. And more and more tea towels hanging out of mail slots in doors. It became too many. I couldn’t take care of them all in their own homes, there was just not enough time. It made more sense to group them together. So I took them to Mitch’s.
“Hey Mitch, we’re going to have company,” I explained. “I’ll tell them not to make a mess,” I said sardonically.
His small living room could comfortably hold a dozen, arranged in a circle at the edge of the room, allowing me to get access to them from the inside of it as I moved from one to the next with a water bottle and a bowl of porridge.
I moved others into the houses nearby. The next door neighbors’. The house across the street. Dozens, standing motionless in living rooms, and then bedrooms, hallways.
I left a note in every house I found a Starer.
“I found them staring, took them down the street to XYZ Stoney Lane.”
Only one person ever came for them.
I was doing yoga when a car pulled up. Christ, someone driving; that was a danger we didn’t need on our street. I walked over to tell them off, but a man hurried from the driver’s seat and into the house across the street. By the time I arrived, I could see his passengers: a woman, staring, and a little girl that, if the circumstances had been different, if I had been a toll booth attendant and they were passing by, I might have mistaken for being asleep. But the color was wrong in her face.