So both questions remain unanswered…to most people. Diana might be the only person in the world who is convinced she knows both answers. To her, the answer to the scientific question is simply, ‘God,’ and the answer to the religious one is, ‘because He knows better.’ And that’s that. Still, whenever she sees the body of a child who has succumbed to their exhaustion, or when she hears about people killing Sleepers out of some form of animalistic jealousy, she doesn’t know how to justify it. She can only repeat ‘He knows better,’ over and over until the images are gone.
There’s a pen stuck between the pages of her notebook. She takes it and writes, ‘delivered Anita to Los Pilares, may God watch over her as she sleeps.’ Then she closes the notebook, closing the chapter in her mind along with all of her doubts and insecurities, and surrenders herself to both answers to both questions completely.
◆◆◆
Gerardo lies on his back in an overgrown front lawn. He’s puffing on a cigarette and staring at the moon. He usually keeps his sunglasses on, even at night, to ease the strain on his eyes and reduce the world to a muted shadow of its usual self. With sunglasses on, it’s almost like closing your eyes all the time. But the moon? He could stare at it for hours without ever minding the strain.
Something's comforting about it. There’s nothing as beautiful as that white shape marred by beautiful craters that look like they belong the way words do on a page. When he sees those gray sands that look white now, he’s reminded that the universe holds more than just this sleepless, hellish planet. Maybe somewhere, there’s another planet just like this, except it's one where people are still able to sleep. One where people don’t string each other up from street lights and cut each other’s eyelids off.
A metallic snap makes Gerardo jump. Diana limps across the tall grass, she’s barefoot and holding two cans of soda. One of them is open. She hands it to Gerardo. “Trade you for a cigarette,” she says. Then she drops to sit next to him, keeping her injured leg as straight as possible. The bandage just above her knee has a red blot in its center. It has several concentric circles, each a different shade of red, as her blood dried and scabbed over, then was ripped opened again as she moved.
“How’s the leg?” Gerardo asks, tossing her a plastic lighter and a cigarette.
“Pretty rough,” she says, “Red Eye arrows are a bitch. Y’know they supposedly piss on them?”
“Wouldn’t that—”
“Make them sterile? Yep. They’re not the brightest, but if it means I won’t an infection, I’m not complainin’”
Gerardo lifts his soda to his chapped lips and takes a delicious, stinging swig as Diana lights up. He sees that she’s staring at the moon too. On nights like this, with everything so still under a thick blanket of darkness, it’s easy to forget the fact that you won’t be able to sleep tonight. You can just sit there, enjoying the way that lying down eases your aches, and pretend that you’ll be able to drift off. But you won’t. It’s a sick trick. Which is why Gerardo doesn’t often sit or lie down unless he has to.
After a while, the silence is too much, even for him. Silence does that to you when you haven’t slept for almost a day. Silence is oppressive, demanding, like a dictator with a hair-trigger temper. It seems to command you to sleep, ‘well? You kept complaining about how loud everything was, right? Why don’t you fucking sleep now that you’re comfortable? Why are you just sitting there with your eyes open if your brain is screaming for a break?’ That’s why you’ve got to keep moving, to keep yourself busy. You’ve got to ignore the pounding in your head and the fire making every joint shriek. And sometimes, humor is as effective as aspirin.
“What’s the matter?” Gerardo asks, “can’t sleep?”
Diana chokes on her cigarette. She snorts. Gerardo smiles.
“Shit...we haven’t used that one a while, huh?” she asks.
“Wasn’t too funny at the start.” Jokes would’ve gotten you killed at the start, Gerardo knows, not that anyone would have felt like cracking one.
A swarm of fireflies lights up the air in front of Diana, probably fresh out of…wherever it was that fireflies slept the blinding sunlight away. Their lively, luminescent dance seems to mock them, as they sit there, beaten down by fatigue and hanging onto their sanity by a thread.
Diana takes a deep breath. “Why didn’t we take her up to the Sleeping Place?”
“Oh, goddamnit,” Gerardo says, “can’t we have a normal conversation for once?”
“We know fuck all about the Pill Haven.”
Gerardo rubs eyes red from the strain of being open long past their closing time. “No, we don’t know anything about the Sleeping Place. We at least know the Haven has pills.”
“That’s all you care about, isn’t it? They could be enlisting us to be in a death squad as long as they have sleeping pills, right? You’ve always put your faith in pills, Gerry. They’re man’s solution to something we don’t even understand. I mean, they run out, don’t they? You develop a resistance to them and they don’t work anymore. Maybe it’s time to find another solution, one that’ll always work.” She lets that hang between them for a while, hoping it’ll manage to penetrate the web of deadly routine that’s grown around his head. When he doesn’t say anything, she asks the real question, “why do you think we can’t sleep anymore?”
“Fuck, I don’t know,” Gerardo says, with more than a hint of impatience, like she’s a five-year-old asking why he thinks the sun shines. “Some said it was the light from our screens, but that’s stupid. Maybe an air-borne virus or hormones in our food.”
“Those things wouldn’t hit everyone at once. God did this, Gerardo. And there’s a reason people like Anita can sleep when we can’t. He chose them because they don’t deserve this hell. He chose them because they’re worthy to pick up the pieces after all the rotten people are gone. People like us. You and Diego ran with gangs, Edu’s a drunk and a violent womanizer, and I’m...well what I am isn’t condoned by the church. The only one I can’t place is Gabo.”
“Diana, that’s not why you can’t sleep, alright? You can’t sleep because everyone else can’t either. The Sleepers are just immune somehow. The second you bring God into this, it stops making sense.”
“Look, maybe what happened with Diego...maybe it was supposed to be a lesson that pills aren’t the answer. Maybe it means you should look for an answer somewhere else. ”
Gerardo grips his can so hard it crunches. “I don’t want to talk about what happened with Diego,” he growls.
“Alright,” Diana says, putting her hands up as if she’s giving up. “I’m gonna go back inside. Enjoy your soda.”
Diana storms off across the lawn, her bare feet leaving wet gashes in its uniform carpet. Then she reaches the door and slams it shut. Gerardo chugs what’s left of his soda, then flattens the can and tosses it. It zips through the air in a lazy arch and lands on the front lawn of the mansion across the street. Then he gets up and walks back inside.
◆◆◆
Gerardo opens a door carefully, quietly, as if not to wake someone inside. Which is stupid, considering nobody in this house, in this entire condominium, can sleep. Except for Anita, that is. He walks into what was once a young boy’s room. On the wall, the name, ‘Ricardo’ is scrawled in a playful font. Next to it are posters of victorious superheroes and sniveling villains. Gabo sits on the kid’s bed, flanked on all sides by stuffed animals.
“Hey, kid,” Gerardo says. Gabo flinches, looking at Gerardo like he’s covered in someone else’s blood. “Look, I’m sorry about today. I made a mistake. It’s just getting hard to think. To do things right.”
Gabo takes a deep breath. When he speaks, it’s like he’s rehearsed this many times. “This isn’t you, Gerry. And it isn’t us. Remember how we were in the yard? Everyone else just clocked in and out without giving a shit. But you made us a family. You and Diego were always on your own before that, but you took care of us. But now? You’re a killer. We all are. I don’t e
ven know if we should make it anymore.”
The mask of patience slips from Gerardo’s face. It’s like he’s no longer talking to Gabo, it’s like he’s talking to anyone else. “We should make it and we will. No matter what. Whatever it fucking takes. We’ll go back to being who we were once we can sleep. I promise.”
“I hated my dad,” Gabo says, flinching away from Gerardo like he’s just whipped out his belt. He regards the childish room around him with sadness as if it had been his own. “I used to want him to be more like you. But now? Now I miss him, and I’m starting to be afraid of you.”
This stings Gerardo hard. He’s losing Diana. He’s already lost Edu. And now? Now he’s losing the one member of his crew whose opinion of him matters the most. Gabo was convinced that Gerardo was the one who had helped him. The truth was, back in the yard, Gerardo was truly lost. He hated himself, hated what he and Diego had done before finding a more acceptable profession. But Gabo had changed all that. He backs up, hanging his head, forcing his body to move, and shuts the door behind him.
TEN
One of Los Pilares' last guards paces behind the metal gate. He’s one of three, and they’re all that’s left. Two weeks ago there were another three. Two weeks before that, there were three more. Nine in total. When the Insomnia had begun, management pooled every guard they had hired for every shift and made them an offer: stay here, protecting some of the city’s wealthiest, and they’d get a guaranteed ration of sleeping pills.
Hector here had jumped at the opportunity. And why shouldn’t he? He’s the youngest of a huge family, yes, but they all live in a little village about three hours out of the city. He’d die on the way back there, he’d be crazy to even try. So he stayed behind. Of course, things weren’t exactly as advertised. He didn’t think that management had thought things through. They probably figured they’d get maybe three guards tops, not all nine. The fact that they had offered sleeping pills at all was almost too good to be true.
And it was. By the time all nine guards were gathered in front of the remaining members of the condominium’s executive committee (all of which were residents themselves), they had been told the truth: they’d be getting melatonin. That was back when most people didn’t know much about sleeping medication, so some of them figured it was good enough. But it wasn’t. Melatonin didn’t work. It relaxed you but did nothing to grant you a reprieve from the endless, hellish, never-ending day. So most of the guards had left, some even killed the remaining committee members on their way out.
So why had Hector and his two colleagues remained? Mrs. Andrea. She was one of the last residents that were still here, waiting for her granddaughter, she said. She took pity on them for the way they’d been duped into becoming guard dogs, told to shoot any poor souls that wandered too close to the gate. But it was worth it in the end, because Mrs. Andrea had sleeping pills. And she did the unthinkable, something that, to Hector, put her shoulder to shoulder with Mother Teresa and a hundred other saints…she shared them with them.
Mrs. Andrea had, given her old age, struggled with insomnia for years. She was also a bit of a hoarder, of medication especially. So she had a nice little treasure trove. She had given each of them one pill a night, something that was worth as much as a bar of gold, in this new world. Back then, there’d been four of them, but one of them had begun drooling, salivating like a hungry hound, and decided that Mrs. Andrea was already gonna die anyway. She was old, frail, and the Insomnia took the very old and the very young first, didn’t it? She might as well be flushing the pills down the toilet when she took them every night. Hector and the other two had stripped that guard of his foolish notions very quickly. They made him change his tune. And now, when Hector and the others walk by his boarded-up locker, they don’t hear any tune at all coming from inside.
But even saints have to look after themselves. When Mrs. Andrea began running low, she gave them each five pills and told them that was the last of it. They’d have to ration them themselves. Hector had started taking a quarter pill every four days, and by the twelfth, he was up to a whole pill. Now, he was out. He hadn’t slept in two days and was fading fast. He feels like a zombie, like a shadow of his former self in every way. He can’t think straight, can barely walk around anymore, spends most of his time leaning against any surface he can. He’s waiting for the end now, just waiting for the day when he’s far too tired to even stand. His heart will give out, he knows, within two days. That’s alright. It might feel like drifting off to sleep, like shutting the lights off on the Red Eyes and the corpses baking in the sun and the headache that started a week ago and has only gotten stronger.
His crusty eyes drift lazily toward something: an orange light blinking on and off in the distance. It glows brighter, suddenly growing, doubling, tripling in size. Its tall form dances, casting silhouettes the size of Japanese science fiction monsters as it spreads in every direction. Hector’s confused for a moment.
He hasn’t been hallucinating exactly, but that’s not out of the question. Another one of the guards says he sees people or faces in the dark. Still, Hector’s convinced this isn’t that. He’s just not sure what he’s looking at. Then he smells it, the stench wafting through the air toward him so quickly and so glaringly he wonders how he didn’t smell it first…smoke. The buildings in the distance are all on fire.
Chief bursts through flames, like a horrifying pirate ship stabbing through thick fog on its way to a helpless harbor. His skeletal horse jerks to a halt, hair matted with dried blood and covered in enough burns and stab wounds to have killed it a hundred times over. Somehow, it’s still alive, still awake, just like Chief. A hundred pairs of red eyes glint in the firelight behind Chief’s horse, an army of insomniac warriors, gathered in full force.
A gasp pops out of Hector’s mouth like a bullet from a gun. This is the moment of truth. Every painful moment of consciousness, every second spent dealing with the leaky hull that his body has become, every sip of coffee or rum to sate the hot needles stabbing into his brain...it’s all led up to this. In a way, he’s glad to see the Red Eyes, glad to be given the chance to die on his feet instead of on the ground with the Lazies. He raises his shotgun, welcoming its weight in his shaking hands, and fires. The blast is useless. The Red Eyes are still too far away, and now they know exactly where he is. Shit.
Something long and sharp whizzes past his head. He ducks, knowing it won’t be the last thing shot in his direction. If he can make it to the security booth, to cover, he might—Hector gasps. A spear stabs through his stomach.
A Red Eye boy is crouched in the shadows in front of him, scarily thin, no older than ten, and perfectly hidden in the dark. Hector laughs, feeling the tangy taste of rust filling his mouth. ‘It’s okay,’ he thinks, dropping a hand that feels like it weighs a ton onto the boy’s shoulder, which is sharp with malnutrition. ‘It’s not your fault kid, you—’ then the boy pulls the spear out and runs it through Hector’s throat in a single fluid movement. There’s no remorse in his wide, red eyes. Only hunger. Only glee.
◆◆◆
Gerardo sits at the dining room table, head between his arms. Nighttime is always the worst. It’s like your brain knows it’s supposed to be asleep by now and it becomes indignant, rebels against you, squirms and screams against the skull holding it in place. Your body, too, is conditioned to lie down for most of the night. So when you sit for hours or stand in the dark, it becomes restless, longs for a bed.
The Insomnia brought with it a whole host of other problems. Being awake longer means that you have to eat and drink more often. Your heart rate increases as the stress and the exhaustion pile up, meaning that most people who die of fatigue are really dying of heart attacks. Any preexisting medical conditions are exacerbated and worsened by a lack of sleep. Gerardo himself has a bum tooth he should have gotten looked at months ago, and now it throbs for hours at a time. It all just comes down to one fact: those that can endure the pain and weariness can survive. Those who can’t endure
die. And that’s that.
Gerardo rolls a syringe filled with morphine in his hands. He can endure. Has to endure. For his sake and everyone else’s. He brings it up to his forearm, the immediate need for sleep and the need for the Pill Haven tickets are locked in a tug of war. There’s a series of scratched out numbers on his skin. First ‘15 hours,’ then that ‘15’ became a ‘16,’ then a ‘17…’ now it’s a ‘23.’ Twenty-three hours, almost an entire day awake. Gerardo needs a filter, a buffer, between him and his noxious thoughts. He’s convinced that the human mind wasn’t built to exist uninterrupted for so long. His is a film running on a loop and becoming blurry, burning up in the projector. He needs to switch reels, to turn the damn thing off, even if it’s just for a second. The needle reaches his skin when an explosion rocks the dining room windows.
The syringe flies from Gerardo’s hand. Smacking against the wood tiles on the floor and rolling toward the window. He ducks, scooping it up, rolling it in his hands and checking for any cracks. All good. He sighs, then looks out of the window. In the distance, an orange ball of flame consumes the front gate. It’s the Red Eyes. Has to be. No one else hits that hard, that fast, and with that much firepower. Gerardo has seen what’s left after their little expansions from one neighborhood to another. Has smelt the people they leave behind, eyes opened and bowels emptied. When they break in, they’ll do that to everyone still alive inside, and paint every house red just for shits and giggles. Gerardo runs for the door.
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