Gerardo and Gabo scan their surroundings, pointing their guns at the empty houses around them, at lawn ornaments, at anything that catches their tired, drifting eyes. There’s a small pack of stray dogs gathered in one of the parks in the center of a cul-de-sac. One of them is even asleep, napping in the shade, breathing nice and regular and contently, eyes flicking as they scan their surroundings in a pleasant dream. Gerardo hasn’t seen dogs in a while. The few animals that are left mostly avoid people now. In those early days, when humanity was slowly coming to terms with the fact that it might never sleep again, some people lost it when they realized that, whatever this was, had spared animals. Dogs, cats, birds, cows, probably even fucking insects…they could all sleep.
Some of the most sadistic bastards took pleasure in torturing animals as if to punish them for basking in some forbidden haven. Others, the more deranged denizens of society, had the idea that if you killed an animal while it slept and then consumed its raw flesh, you would be cured. Obviously, that didn’t fucking work. Still, Gerardo narrows his eyes as he looks at that sleeping dog. Lucky bastard.
The gargantuan, ornate doors of Anita’s mansion creak apart slowly, as if whoever’s behind them is suspicious of whoever’s outside. Slowly, the face of a maid with swollen, lifeless eyes appears in the inch-wide gap between one door and the other. Her dead eyes are revived as soon as they fall on Anita’s pained, gallows-walk face.
“Anita?” the maid shouts, “where have you been? Oh my God!”
◆◆◆
The maid pulls Anita, Gerardo, and Gabo into a decadent foyer. It’s cathedral-worthy, a space so wide and tall that the silence itself echoes inside it. The floor is spotless marble, Roman busts and extravagant paintings line the walls.
The maid rushes Anita upstairs, her hand clasped around Anita’s so tightly that both of their fingers are white and bulging under their interrupted circulation. Gerardo and Gabo are quick to follow, their dirty shoes tracking mud and blood onto the carpet.
“Your grandmother’s been worried out of her mind!” the maid says as she and the others stop in front of a door so wide and tall it could only be the one to this mansion’s master bedroom.
Anita gives Gerardo a concerned look. Gerardo nods toward the door. The maid opens it, slowly, politely, as if someone was performing surgery just inside. “Mrs. Andrea?” she asks, speaking softly as if waking a sleeping toddler.
A dim, enormous master bedroom stretches out in front of Gerardo like a cave. A Persian carpet plots a comfortable, ornate path right to a four-post king sized bed truly worthy of a king. The blinds are drawn. Empty pill bottles litter the floor. Dust particles swim through the stuffy air. The atmosphere is so solemn, so tinged with that sacred commandment not to disturb anything, that you’d expect to hear the hiss and hum of hospital machines. But there are none. Whoever lies here, unsleeping, is sick, yes, but she’s as sick as the rest of them, as the rest of the world. There’s no medicine for it. Only sleeping pills, and those are worth more than lives these days. Much, much more.
“Miss Andrea, you're not gonna believe who’s back!” the maid says.
An old woman, pale as a corpse, with the eyes to match, lies mostly underneath the covers. She stares at the ceiling like a marooned soul looking longingly into the horizon. Her small, dry eyes flick to find the maid in the gloomy space.
“Who—” Andrea begins, her voice weak and faint and uneven with disuse and desperation. Then she spots Anita, and the world has life and purpose in it once again. Andrea sits up, reanimated with a range of emotions so potent her body quivers and jerks as she moves at a million miles per hour. “Anita! Where did you go?” the old woman shouts, rushing toward Anita, her voice returned to her fully. She hugs the girl, pulls her close, examines seemingly every inch of her body for bleeding wounds or irreparable damage. Then, when she finds none, Andrea slaps Anita across the face.
“Whoa!” Gabo yells.
“How could you do this to me, you little ingrate?” Andrea asks, “after all I’ve done for you! You’re eleven for God’s sake! You can’t just run around alone—”
Gerardo clears his throat. Andrea turns to look at him and Gabo, her eyes alive with suspicion and defensive rage. Anita blinks back tears and rubs her cheek, suddenly a child again. “We found her,” Gerardo says, “led her past gangs, and angry mobs and even the damn Red Eyes. Back to you.”
Andrea nods. She runs up to Gerardo so fast Gabo’s hand twitches toward his rifle. Andrea grabs Gerardo's hand, shaking it in gratitude about a thousand times too many. “I still can’t believe she ran off,” she says. “Thank you for wrangling her back here. I can’t tell you what it means to me.”
“Right,” Gerardo says, beaming like a schoolboy with a gold sticker on his quiz.
“You have my deepest gratitude, son.”
Gerardo waits for her to finish. She has. “And?” he asks.
“And what?” Andrea asks in response, annoyance beginning to bubble up to the surface.
“Lady, I don't know if you realize how bad it is out there. We just got your granddaughter through hell and back in one piece, dodging starving, dying, murderous lunatics! While you sit in here with a maid for God’s sake! I think a reward is in order.”
Thick, smothering silence hangs in the air between them. Then Andrea finally speaks, relenting, as if she agrees with Gerardo, but hates him for it. “Fine. But then you go,” she says.
Gerardo smiles.
Andrea grabs something from a walk-in closet and walks back out again. In her hands are a pair of round, glass vials and a package of syringes, all in a clear plastic box. “Thank you, but you have to go now,” she says, walking closer to Gerardo, still cradling the box gingerly as if it might break under the slightest pressure. “Take this and go.”
Gerardo analyzes the little box hungrily as Andrea turns it in her hand, then drops all pretense and politeness the second he realizes that this is it. No money. No sleeping pills. Just a couple of glass vials and some syringes. “What the fuck is this?” he spits.
“I don't have any money here. You’re lucky I’m giving you this,” Andrea says, looking at the vials longingly as if they're a family heirloom.
Gerardo doesn't look convinced. Then he reads the label on the glass. ‘Morphine.’ Jackpot. He holds out his hand. Andrea walks up to him and drops the box with the vials and syringes into his open palm. The second she’s within arm’s reach, Gerardo pulls out his handgun and points it squarely at Andrea’s head.
“Gerardo! What—” Anita begins, her voice more childlike now than ever before.
“Don’t move!” Gerardo shouts, “I don’t wanna hurt you. Morphine’s a start, but it’s not enough. Not even close. Where’s your money? Where are your fucking sleeping pills?”
“Don’t! Okay?” Anita pleads, “stop. Just please stop!”
Andrea places a hand on Anita's shoulder and pulls her closer.
"This is all I have. Go ahead, check. I ran out of pills a few days ago.”
Anita’s tough exterior crumbles. She sobs, hiding her face in Andrea’s shirt. “Why are you doing this, Gerardo?”
“Gerry?” Gabo says, “please don’t do this again, okay? Please.”
Gerardo’s eyes widen at the word ‘again.’ He puts his gun back into his belt. Anita's eyes are locked on the floor, dotting the carpet with dark blots with her tears. Gerardo backs out of the room, his face dancing between shame and rage and guilt, with Gabo following reluctantly behind him.
“I’m sorry,” Gabo says, directly to Anita.
◆◆◆
The sun is low on the horizon when Gerardo and Gabo jog up to Gloria, the sky is an explosion of red, purple, orange and pink. In the old days, this would mean the day was almost over. People would be heading home from work, would cook dinner, watch whatever show or terrible movie was currently trending on their favorite streaming platforms, and, a few hours later, they would all be asleep. How Gerardo longed for that feeling, the ease w
ith which sleep came back then. They’d squandered it, they’d reduced it to a simple question, ‘how’d you sleep last night?’ And nobody ever had an interesting answer. Whether it was ‘pretty good, actually,’ or ‘I tossed and turned all night!’ or ‘I had the strangest dream,’ it was perfectly mundane. Sleep was boring, ordinary, as common as the air or the ability to smell.
Gloria’s trailer's open, and Diana sits in front of it while Edu moves boxes of supplies off the trailer. This is where they keep their food, their water, their sleeping bags, and their medicine. They’d run out of all the good shit, across the board, a long time ago. The gauze is running low, as is the rubbing alcohol, and they have nothing stronger than aspirin, and even that’s reduced to a handful of pills.
Gerardo examines the house Edu has parked in front of. It’s the perfect place to camp for the night. There’ll be beds inside, mostly useless, in this new, waking world, but still comfortable to lie in. There might even be food or medicine. Gerardo opens the door, and walks inside, welcoming the chance to forget the events of the day.
NINE
Gerardo, Edu, Gabo, and Diana sit around a dining room table. Around them, the cheerful faces of strangers smile at them from framed photographs. They wear smartwatches, brand-name clothes, lots of hair gel and stand in front of tacky backgrounds. Who knows what happened to them, if they managed to buy enough sleeping pills to last their trip to the United States or Europe or wherever, or if, at some point in their escape, they had to fight each other for them. Were they decent enough to the give the pills to their chubby, vapid-faced children? Or did they, like so many other parents, lie to them and take them behind their backs?
Gerardo and the others eat baked beans and toast with silverware on China plates. It’s a lavish room in a house much like Anita’s. The ragtag group is clearly out of place, and not just because of their filthy clothes or the cuts and bruises on their faces or the fact that their hands are so rough it feels wrong to grip those forks. They’re people who would never step in a house like this unless they were there to perform maintenance under the watchful eye of Mrs. Plastic Surgery in the family portraits.
Once, a lifetime ago and in a different world, Gerardo and the others had built houses like this. They had sweat and toiled under that unforgiving Salvadoran sun to erect a luxury apartment building or a mansion like this one. As they worked, they were keenly aware of the social canyons they were crossing, and that they would always have to go back at the end of the workday. Now here they are, eating on these people’s plates, tracking dirt and mud and blood onto their floors and their upholstered chairs.
Gabo and Diana sit close together. He cradles his well-worn, well-loved CD player. This player fits him like a warm sock on a cold, lonely foot. He’s had it for years, and each minute, each day, each year of sweet, delicious music is marked on plastic smoothed over by hundreds of hours under his sweaty hands. That fingernail scratch there’s from a particularly tough hospital visit. That bit of duct tape holding the CD door in place is from when he dropped it from a set of stairs at the construction yard. Edu kicked it away further, giggling like a schoolyard bully, but Gerardo picked it up, dusted it off, and handed it back to him.
Sure, the thing skips every so often, especially when he moves it while the CD inside is revolving madly, but he prefers it to listening to MP3s on his phone. This is more personal. He likes the artwork printed on the discs, likes the ritual of wiping the fingerprints off each reverse side and dropping them onto the little revolving circle in the center of the player.
He opens the CD player’s creaky door and plucks out the disc cradled inside. Diana grabs it before Gabo can put it back in his case. “So you’re a Beatles guy huh?” she asks.
“Who isn’t? They help me keep my mind off how freaking tired I’m getting.”
“What’s your favorite—” she begins.
“You don’t ask that. That’s like asking what’s your favorite part about breathing? Or what was your favorite part about sleeping? But, between you and me, ‘Here Comes the Sun’ gets me through the morning and ‘Let it Be’ gets me through the night. But I like everything, punk, metal…anything besides silence. What about you? What gets you through things?”
“Prayer,” Diana says, tapping her notebook like it’s an old friend. The cover’s faded, but Gabo can tell it was colorful once, filled with cartoon characters and something he thinks was once a smiling sun. A notebook meant for kids, the off-brand kind they sell in supermarkets or convenience stores.
“What do you pray for?”
“For strength. For my headaches to go away. For this group. Now, I’m praying for Anita. Maybe you should pray too.”
“Nah. My dad was into that, but I never was. He forced me to go to church, which kinda made me hate it.”
Diana wraps her warm hands around Gabo’s clammy ones. “That’s a shame, Gabo. But you can always talk to Him, you know? I think now’s a better time than ever before.”
“Yeah,” Gabo sighs, “maybe I’ll try it tonight.” And he’s not lying. Gabo’s heard of people praying or meditating and saying it’s almost like sleeping used to be. But he also knows it’s dangerous. If you sit still long enough, allow yourself to drop into a pleading, peaceful trance, you become a deep-sea diver stabbing through the black depths of sleeplessness. You might get lost down there, might become convinced that it’s better than ever opening your eyes again, than ever moving again…and you’d never come back.
Edu pulls an elegant glass bottle out of his backpack. It’s ornate, sophisticated, with a gold band ribbon around its body like the winner of a beauty pageant or a corrupt president. Gerardo eyes it with concern. “Compliments of the house,” Edu says with a conspiratorial smile.
That brown glass and the brown liquid inside aren't just old friends, they're blood relatives. Just a whiff and Edu’s back to that little town with dirt roads and bars with plastic chairs and chipped styrofoam cups. The bare bulbs on the ceiling had been covered in colored wrappers and old plastic bottles, drenching the interior of the bar in the kaleidoscope craziness of carnival lights. Edu had first walked in there when he was ten, and was, in more ways than one, raised inside. He’d had his first kiss there, his first fistfight, his first arrest. He and that horde of brown bottles had been through it all together, ups, downs, behind prison bars or at a liquor store with this month’s paycheck. These days he needed that company more than anything. If he could choose the way he’d go, he’d always wanted to go out wasted. And now he actually could.
“You need to stay sharp,” Gerardo says, “that shit’ll just make you groggy, sap your energy, drag you down.”
“But we should celebrate. Got valuable shit to sell now, or shoot up if we wanna sleep a little—”
Gerardo lunges to grab the bottle, the sudden motion executed flawlessly, but Edu’s too fast. He stands, taking the bottle as he goes. “More for me then,” Edu says.
Gerardo sighs. Collapsing back into his seat. He deflates, more exhausted than when the conversation started. This is an old battle that he’s much too tired to keep fighting. Outside, through the window behind him, the Pale Man stands watch. He’s ghostly, like an apparition or a manifestation of a bad memory brought to horrible life. Gerardo turns, catching a glimpse of the man, who grins just as he does so. Gerardo shuts his eyes. “Toluca Street, Pan-American Highway, El Salvador Highway, Mixco Overpass. The Pill Haven.”
Those words, that ritual, prompts Diana to pull out her notebook. Maybe seeing someone else’s coping mechanism triggers her own. Maybe she recognizes Gerardo’s words for what he’d never admit they are: a prayer. Gerardo isn’t simply saying then names of the streets they have to cross to get to what he’s convinced will be their salvation, he’s praying in the only way he knows how. He’s seeing the places in his mind and hoping, willing, pleading to a God he refuses to talk to directly, that they will be clear.
Diana opens her notebook. The pages inside are filled with her neat handwriting,
rows, and rows of her thoughts punctuated here and there with words from the Bible. That’s the way her mind is, too. For each thought, each doubt, there exists next to it the reassuring words of Holy Scripture. Her belief is now, as it has always been, unchanged, unwavering. But it’s getting harder and harder to justify the Insomnia, to square it with the teachings of the Bible. Well, with those in the New Testament anyway.
She’s convinced that there are two kinds of faith in this new world, and two eternal mysteries to go along with them. For those like her, those who have sworn to believe in the Word of God and in His eternal kindness, the question is: ‘why would God do this?’ It’s a tough one, one that has stripped most people of their faith. But for Diana, it’s as difficult as a hundred others back in the old, sleeping world: ‘if God is real, why does cancer exist?’ ‘If God is real, why does He allow babies to be stillborn or be born imperfect, sickly, and doomed?’ She doesn’t have an exact answer. Just a feeling, a blurry image of some eternal, massive scale balancing everything good in existence, every good feeling and every stroke of good luck, with all the bad.
Then there are those who don’t believe in God, those that view the world as a beautiful, impossibly complex, but fleeting symphony with no conductor. Their question is deceptive because it appears to be simpler. But these people, people like Gerardo, Edu, and even Gabo, soon realize that their question is more difficult than Diana’s: ‘why can’t we sleep anymore?’
In the early days, the world became seduced by that question, enticed by the solvable equation it seemed to present. Every person afflicted by the Insomnia rallied behind the flag of that global mystery, willing to conscript anyone and anything to its cause. And so, every biologist, neurologist, chemist, surgeon, pediatrician, nurse, unpaid intern, and, of course, every somnologist, came together in the largest, unified scientific coalition in history. Entire nations became possessed by that feverish search for an answer, for a cure. The United States and most of Europe bankrolled the worldwide research, and then even that wasn’t necessary. People were willing to go unpaid, to give up anything anyone with a ‘Dr.’ in front of their name asked for…and it was all for nothing. Three weeks into the Insomnia, the daily reports stopped coming in and the world began cannibalizing itself…it was every man and woman for his and herself. It had been ever since.
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