by H. G. Bells
There was muffled screaming from the trunk. Thrashing. Someone in the throes of a living nightmare. A Dreamer.
“Don’t touch my family,” said the man, pointing a large gun at me as I backed away from the car window. He had an older gentleman’s arm draped over his shoulders as he led him out of the house. He advanced slowly, gun shaking. I put my hands up as I continued to back away.
“It’s okay. I take care of the Starers here,” I said.
“I found your note,” he said. “Thank you. But I’m taking him now. He’s my dad, he should be with us.”
“Okay,” was all I said. He got his father into the back seat, next to the lifeless little girl, and shut the door after him.
He put the gun in his belt and got back behind the wheel. He pulled out into the road and sped away.
I went in to check on the others inside, and they seemed fine. Unfazed in every sense of the word.
For a few minutes, I indulged in reminding myself that they were awake and alive. To accomplish this, I raised their arms up in front of them at ninety-degree angles and watched them slowly drop back to their sides. I tried to make a sort of synchronized pattern, making a circle of slowly falling arms that was like a slow motion wave all around me as I twirled in the center of the circle.
It made sense at the time.
There were fewer and fewer of us doing yoga in the sunrise. One was a nurse several doors down. I had an eye on her before, flirted every now and then, but nothing had come of it. Unless you were on drugs, which I wasn’t, you didn’t feel much like flirting, or sex, or anything really. But especially sex.
She was looking at me more these days, when I did my walk up the street, when I went to check on the many houses full of Starers.
There were too many. It was starting to eat way into my resting time, feeding them, taking them each to the toilet. Dozens of them. It made sense at the time. But the exhaustion was wearing on me, and I began to despair. Sometimes I’d catch her looking from her front porch, which she was converting into a greenhouse, and it would brighten my day.
I’d incorporated a stop to her porch into my routine.
Our conversations went like this:
“Hey Ash,” she’d say.
“Hey Willow. Team Tree still going strong?”
“You bet. Want any—” (and here she’d insert her herb-du-jour).
“I’m good, thanks. You want any people to stand and stare in your living room?”
“No, I’m good, thanks.”
“See you beautiful.”
“See you handsome.”
Seven lines between us for every day that we both lasted. She saw me growing more and more exhausted as I tried to keep up with the huge number of Starers that we had on our street. It had grown into a seven house operation; seven houses full of people that had to have everything done for them. It brought an order to my world, a routine that was helping people. I was keeping them alive, at the cost of my own health and sanity.
But it made sense at the time.
Willow came by after yoga one morning.
“Ash, you’ve got to stop,” she said. “You’ve done enough. You need to cut back to just however many you can handle.”
“Thanks, Willow, but I’m helping them.”
“Ash, you look terrible.”
“Terribly handsome?”
She smiled, and as most nonmedicated smiles were in those days, it was sad.
“Sure, Ash, sure. You take care now. See you on your walk,” she said.
I did my walk, passing by house after house with various markers on them, markers whose meanings I had adapted after I moved the Starers into the group houses. The neighborhood was empty now. Either the people had left (tea towel), offed themselves (candlestick with a burned-down candle), or were standing in one of my safe houses, near Mitch’s (tea cup). The reason I used those objects was because every house had tea towels and teacups; no one took their teacups when they were fleeing the end of the world. And the candlestick with a burned-down candle was something I did for the dead; I couldn’t bury them, but I could light a candle for them at least.
Then it was just Willow and I. I stopped by her porch, as usual.
“Hey Ash,” she said.
“Hey Willow. Team Tree still going strong?”
“You bet. Want any rosemary?”
“I’m good, thanks. You want any people to stand absolutely still and stare in your living room?”
“No thanks, I’m good.”
“See you beautiful.”
“See you handsome.”
And I went back to the houses of Starers to take care of them. It ate well into my resting time, but I managed to sit for about two hours. Two hours in my basement suite, in this beat-up old armchair that I’d worked a nice butt-groove into, twiddling my hands around a Rubik’s Cube for fun. I wasn’t trying to solve it. Had no idea how to. But it felt wonderful, flipping the layers of cubes around and around, clicking the colors in and out of alignment, sliding them into place to form a perfect shape in my hands, and then throwing it into disarray once more. Over and over again, flip, turn, click, slide; methodical, mindless.
At the sunrise, I did my yoga, surrounded by the supplies on the front lawn.
I set out for my walk. Tea cup, candlestick, tea cup, towel, candlestick, towel, towel. On the way back, Willow wasn’t on her porch. Instead, there was a little bundle on the railing, a floral print handkerchief tied with a blue satin ribbon. Beautiful. There was a note.
“Fresh mint for tea. See you later, Ash. I did it to save you, I’m sorry. I hope I left you enough.”
I was puzzled, but not worried. Strange notes were all the rage. When your brain doesn’t work properly, it prioritizes things in odd orders. Mint might have been important to Willow, but I had no idea what to make of her note. I took the bundle of fragrant greens and made my way back to my house, to start the routine of caring for the Starers.
I went into the first house and gave my usual greeting.
“Ash Ash, here to help,” I said automatically. Maybe Willow was right, I was taking on too much.
The living room circle was in disarray. They had decided to lay down. I was excited; it was the first time any of them had moved on their own. But then the stench hit me; the smell of dozens of bowels and bladders having been emptied where they lay. Their faces were slack. I’m sure I knew they were dead, but I couldn’t quite get my whole brain on board with it right away.
I lifted one of their arms and let it go. It fell heavily to the floor. I did this to all of them, all of the bodies lying in a rough circle in the living room.
They seemed whole and perfect. No obvious gunshot wounds, no bashed-in skulls, no bruises around their throats. Just a single pin prick of a needle entry point in their necks.
Then the panic hit. I rushed out of the house to the one next door, another Starer house.
It was the same there. All dead.
And the next.
And the next.
All of my houses, except for Mitch’s house. More than a hundred dead.
I stood in the middle of the circle of Starers at Mitch’s house. Twenty left. Thirteen in the living room, four in the den, two in the hallway, and one, Mitch, in his bedroom.
I pulled the bundle of mint from my pocket and read Willow’s note again.
I hope I left you enough.
I pressed the mint up to my nose.
“Who wants mint tea?” I asked. I went around and raised up each hand, one by one. They fell back to their side slowly.
“Everyone! Wonderful,” I said. “Willow picked this for us. We shall share a hot drink.”
I made mint tea. I fed it to them, then fed them lunch, a feast of macaroni and cheese. I took them all to the washroom. I changed their clothes. I combed their hair. I put on some music and moved them around, not quite dancing, but sort of leading them in a circuit from the living room, down the hall, into the kitchen, in a tight circle in the mud room, down
another hall, around a bedroom, and back to the living room.
Twenty times I did all this.
And by the end, it was time to rest, and I could.
Those twenty were far better cared for. And I didn’t die of exhaustion.
I didn’t save anyone, but Willow managed to save me.
Beware frauds! Trust your instinct, or if you’re too out of it, come and ask me, Knowledgeable Nolan, and we’ll find the truth together!
—Sandwich board outside of Nolan’s Books,
Moscow, Russia
When I got hired on at Club Petrichor, I was just one of the guys that helped with the lineup. Those times when I could be inside were the best; Berlin has some not-too-great weather, sure, but mostly the club was inviting, warm, and the carpets were literally works of art. You’d think it would get old after a couple of days, but just when my head was down and something was eating me up, I’d see some new pattern, some new way to fit the pieces of it together to make a dog’s head, a tire iron, a fish, and I would feel better.
They told me you were translating the non-English works—I hope my English is good enough to not need it. If there’s mistakes, leave them in, maybe it’ll be funny. Germany had a huge percentage of English speakers, and Berlin was a growing tourist hub that was starting to rival London in international draw. It was good I learned to speak it so young; I had to interact with the wealthy traveling class that had been slipped the Club Petrichor card and wanted an adventure.
The poor people from the puritanical colonies . . . Do you know bars in Canada close around 2:00 a.m.? And most had to leave before then so they could catch the last train home? These people had no idea what they were getting into! Petrichor was just getting going at two in the morning. My typical shift was the 1:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m., so I got the brunt of all the crazy shit that went down in the night.
The English tourists were, while perhaps unprepared for what lay ahead of them, quick to join in when things got rowdy. So I’d have a bunch of regular clubbers and the dub-metal crowd would trickle in after one concert or another, and sometimes they’d sing and sometimes they’d fight, and the tourists would join in, and always I was there to help out.
At the end of it I’d sit on this camel saddle in the hall. What a camel saddle was doing at Club Petrichor in Berlin, I’ll never know, but it was there, in this little alcove, and I would sit on it and lean against the wall and catch my breath. If it had been bad, I would lean forwards instead and hang my head, and stare at the carpet there.
I got pretty familiar with that patch of carpet.
If it hadn’t been on the news, we might not have noticed. It was perhaps just slightly busier at the club that first night. And then after, when we knew, it got really busy.
Boss closed off one whole section of the club. We thought he was mad, when our lineups had never been longer, to take away capacity. But he told us he had some sort of plan, that Petrichor would need to adapt and he was creating something even better.
There were these dividers that rolled along a track in the ceiling that he used to cut the club basically in half. New workers came and went through a door that connected to a little coat room that served both halves of the club, and thus served as an entrance to whatever secrets lay beyond.
One day these guys came in carrying huge sheets of acrylic or bulletproof glass or something like that, sheets and sheets of it. The boss waved them in and ushered them down the hall and into the secret part of the club, the part he was obviously upgrading for something or other. Those guys didn’t even look at the carpet. That night there was a fight and I looked at it long enough for all of us.
It was a few days of nonstop work, whatever he was up to. Power tools could be heard, and then strangely, nothing could be heard. Still those dividers stayed up. Our capacity was reduced, and we were busier than ever. We sort of fudged our attendance to let more people in than we should have; a disaster if there had been a fire, but the bigger disaster would have been not serving the function we were there to do.
The escape offered by Petrichor was simple, and people continued to flock to us, and all the other clubs for that matter, to escape the night. We didn’t have a curfew like most other countries; Germany carried itself with decorum throughout, though there was much worry of the Turks and other foreign-born nationals causing trouble. As long as we kept things civil we could maintain our freedoms. What do you do with all that time suddenly on your hands? When dancing to a raging beat is the only thing that makes sense; people will dance.
Once the staff started not showing up, we hired some new people for lineups, and I moved inside for good. I had good earplugs, a good spot near the entrance hall, and a good view of the whole club. Well, the part of the club that was still open to the public.
When the boss opened up the rest of it, he didn’t tell us. No staff meeting or anything, no explanation, he just removed the dividers that had been hiding his renovations for days. And he did it in the middle of the night, when we were so busy we were full to bursting.
The dance floor was one writhing, flailing mass of flesh, jumping up and down to the beat, lasers and spotlights trailing over their heads and cutting through the slight fog of the artificial atmosphere. Once the song ended, it would usually have transitioned to another one seamlessly, so the club wouldn’t be interrupted in the slightest by the cut. But this time the revelers were jarred out of the trance of screaming sweating dancing as the music stopped.
No fanfare, no announcement, no nothing. Construction guys came out of that little coat room and then moved the dividers to reopen the club. But it was still sealed off; in their place were panels and panels of clear dividers, bulletproof glass held in place by formidable framing. Not just one, but three layers of glass.
The new part of the club was hardly lit. There were soft spotlights that fell in a regular grid, onto beds. There were several dozen of them; single beds, extra long, each with a medical monitor next to the headboard. At the front of them all, near the glass, one of the beds was occupied. It was parallel to us so we had a side view of the occupant.
It was a little girl, and she was asleep.
The crowd jostled for position to see the new part of the club, but when the whisper traveled throughout that the girl was asleep, things got rowdy. People pushed and shoved to get to the front to see the little girl in that bed.
Her golden hair lay still on a white pillowcase, and the royal blue sheet on top of her rose and fell with her even breathing, which we could see clearly. The medical monitor was hooked up to her arm, and it told a tale of her blood pressure and pulse, that steady blip of her heartbeat bobbing up and down in a line which we could barely believe.
“It’s a trick!” said someone in the crowd, as was natural.
My boss came out from the coat room and stood on a raised part of the bar.
“It’s not! Try it yourself!” he shouted at the one who had voiced his doubts. The man in the crowd smirked.
“I’ll try it just to see what your trick is. If I don’t walk to that bed on my own volition, you know something’s up!” he shouted at us. We generally agreed, curious, hopeful, and glad to have a guinea pig to test out the what what.
I knew the man in the crowd. He was a regular, but I don’t think the boss paid him or anything. So when he went into that coat room and the crowd held their collective breaths waiting for him to emerge on the other side of the glass, I was right there with them. Duties forgotten, most everything forgotten in the wake of oh god please let it be real.
The man from the crowd emerged on the other side of the glass and was led to a bed next to the little girl. He got under the sheet, lay down, and rolled his eyes at us, like he didn’t think it would work. It took perhaps a minute, but, while my boss hooked up the medical monitor, the man in the bed blinked heavily once, then again, then looked wide eyed at us on the other side of the glass. He wriggled himself into the sheets and bunched the pillow into the shape he wanted. He smiled, and he fe
ll asleep.
The boss waited a moment, and turned to us and raised a finger to his lips, playfully, telling us to be quiet. But by then there were the fakers, the artists, the people just pretending. How do you prove to a crowd of skeptics that someone is actually, genuinely, asleep?
He slapped the man across the face and he woke up. We saw his blood pressure spike, his heart rate jump. He bared his fists at my boss, who laughed. They exchanged some words, but we couldn’t hope to make them out—it was quite soundproof. My boss nodded, the man smiled. He gave us the thumbs up, then laid back down, and fell back asleep. It could have still been an act, so we waited.
The monitor showed his heart rate slowing back down, his blood pressure falling slightly. His breathing came deep and regular. My boss leaned in close to him and snapped his fingers right by the man’s ear. He didn’t flinch.
My boss came back out and addressed us.
“Obviously he could be faking it. I have not been able to come up with any method of demonstrating that someone is actually asleep, to the satisfaction of onlookers like yourselves. So I offer twenty spots. Twenty people. With that many, surely, if I am a fraud, one amongst you will get up out of the bed and tell everyone.
“Do I have any volunteers?” he asked.
About half of the hands in the club shot into the air. Those that didn’t were snuggly tucked in crossed arms, or clenched into fists.
Twenty were picked out, and I could see clearly that they were not from one particular clique, and almost completely separate. There were two that got in together that were regulars, Jill and Jim, a nice couple that came to dance the night away when they felt the spirit move them. But other than them, none of the others knew each other. They were all simply club goers. Some I recognized, some I didn’t.
They went through the coat room, went to one of the many beds, and laid down. Jill and Jim laid across from each other, impish smiles on their faces, as if they were about to be part of some punchline in a prank. My boss stood by the door with his arms crossed, watching as they got comfortable. Jill’s eyes drooped, but then shot open in surprise, staring at Jim. They talked animatedly. Jim held his hand out across the gap between them, and Jill took it. When they fell asleep, their hands slipped from each other’s grasp.