Her phone is ringing. This time, she picks it up.
“I made chicken wings,” Louise’s mother says. She starts to cry. Joanne and Louise’s mother is a very composed person, the kind who wears a bra even when she’s home alone. Through her tears she tells Louise she’s found a new marinade recipe.
“It is just perfect,” she sobs.
Across the highway, Louise sees the red of the streetcar. If she catches it, she can make the 1:43. There is a break in the traffic and she staggers for it. She clanks up the steps and uses her five-dollar bill to pay almost twice the fare, not making eye contact with anyone, on account of the wetness of her pants. The window by her is open, though it is so cold, and as the streetcar pulls out of the stop, the trees thin and she sees Ben and the others far away, across the highway and that giant floe, four dots together.
They are doing t’ai chi in a row, standing with their faces to the sun. They know the sequence off by heart, always sure of which curled arm, which gliding foot, which steady hand comes next. Like a gym class on ice, they follow each other’s movements in snail-paced unison.
Louise sticks her arm out the window and cranes her neck to watch them, until they disappear behind the trees. Her phone is still in her hand and though the wind blisters her fingers as the streetcar gains speed, she doesn’t pull her arm back in. She feels the freezing air rush into those spaces between her phone and palm, and she imagines what it would feel like to let it go.
Phoenix
Alex Leslie
We sit in this office by the front entrance, Dom and I, and a nurse goes in and out restless with the need to be useful. Dom’s the front desk guy and he never takes a day off. I’m the support worker, which means I’m jack-of-all-trades for the endless minutiae of needs of the people who live in this hotel. A spreadsheet pinned to the wall shows the list of the residents in Dom’s shaky hand-drawn lines. In careful columns: who’s woken up in the past eight hours; for how long; who’s passed the eighteen-hour mark of continuous sleep, in which case they need to be roused with the bell Dom keeps hanging on the hook above his desk. I often wonder where he got that bell—a fat battered thing like a ship captain’s bell. I go with Dom to the doors of the red-flagged sleepers and he clangs that goddamn bell until the person in the room rolls over twice. The nurse crouches and checks for breaths, fingers held to the side of the neck.
I can’t figure Dom out. He’s worked at the hotel since forever, since before this was just another place for sleepers, since before the public health emergency was declared, before the poster campaigns on all the busses, before I took the support worker job here because catering got unbearable, walking around conference halls holding spoons of cold turmeric-yellow soup like a metaphor for opulent uselessness. Now I can’t make myself quit, because when a sleeper wakes up and looks me right in the eyes, I see a world orbiting in their pupils, and for a moment I feel what it would be to never panic again. When our first sleeper died—a sweet Dutch guy who used to run a bike repair shop before he got ALS—Dom shrugged and said, “Water runs downhill,” and I watched him, waiting for the rebound smirk that never came. Sometimes he’s just like that, blunt and inscrutable. His black hair is gelled and combed straight back, and his eyes are hooped in purple like a flower in bloom on the Adriatic at twilight. I can’t tell how old he is. “I know why they don’t want to wake back up,” he’s said to me a few times, and I just nodded. I dodge invitations to his backstory. I think that he protects the sleepers because he wishes he could be one.
I work in one of those hotels full of the sleepers over on Clark Street. Not one of the nicer private ones, just one of those places where the people are curled on mats or hospital beds in rooms like stacked shoeboxes. We watch them on the tiny monitor in the office—every now and then they raise their heads and look around. We see their eyes in the static, the half-darkness of a failing celestial connection. In our daily afternoon meetings, we discuss the sleepers in batches, triaged according to acuity. The nurse speaks bluntly of a young woman who told her yesterday that she wished she could just fall asleep forever. “Suicidal ideation,” the nurse intones. “Evolving acute sleep disorder.” I nod. I’ve accepted that these terms are her way of dealing with the sleepers, their remote limbs, unreachable minds. The nurse won’t come apart and she can’t give up quite yet, so she hovers in clinical language like a wasp hovering over the deathly sweetness in a bottle. “Monitor for signs of progression,” she says. “Blood pressure, temperature. Blood samples for iron deficiency if she’s agreeable. Regular bed checks.”
Dom’s eyes glaze. “I’ll talk to her,” he says.
The nurse nods. She knows she cannot rescue, only maintain.
Next, we discuss the heat.
In the summertime, the hotel stifles, a grimy hand pressed to my mouth. There’s routine housekeeping, sort of, but it’s like dirty water is being dumped on top of the dirty floors and just sort of being sloshed around and it’s impossible to tell what colour the floor is supposed to be. The inside of this place is the colour of exhaustion, the plate at the bottom of the sink left there for years.
Dom tells the nurse that he’s heard from higher-ups that there might be funding for some industrial fans.
The nurse asks if there’s a timeline on that and Dom says, “Medium range expectations.”
I’m always surprised by Dom’s dismissiveness of the hierarchy and his contradictory loyalty, the way he widens his eyes into a smile and makes pronouncements like “Medium range expectations” as if he has just swallowed a master-key to the infrastructure, or like he’s making fun of us all, walking on the ceiling of our abjection. He spent a few years on the street before this job, before he “figured it all out,” he told me.
Since the sleeper crisis rocketed and families have started doing newspaper interviews about sleepers in their homes and the slow exile to hotels like this one (and for those who can afford it, private buildings with more nursing staff), the government has started to put some money into the hotels. Once in a while, one of our sleepers leaves for a treatment facility—this is rare, not just because there are only a handful facilities in the country, but because the seduction of the sleep is so strong. Very rarely, someone goes into remission.
We tell them: please don’t visit. Not this place. You need to be out there, in the world of eye contact and rainstorms and birds firing radar pulses through the sky.
Hans, a guy in his fifties on the fourth floor, has a gorgeous set of false teeth. “I got a mouth full of re-birth stones,” he told me when I started working here. He tried to explain the sleep to me once, back when I thought it was helpful to ask clarifying questions. I was like a cross between Siri and your most memorable seventh grade teacher.
Hans asked me three questions: if I’d ever shot up, if I’d ever been in a car accident, if I’d ever been in love. No, no, no, I answered, his directness tearing strips off my ability to think on my feet.
Then he roared in my face: “This is like trying to explain fucking to a virgin.” Then he took pity on me. “OK, kiddo, OK. Tell me about a time you felt totally … aaaaaahh … just free … you know … just out there … like nobody could ever find you.”
I shook my head, whitebread and useless.
“The best you can do is be harmless,” Hans said to me, and walked off, swinging his dog Ulysses’s sparkly purple leash in his hand.
I stood there, an imposter beside a door that said EAT PUSSY DIE YOUNG. I went back to the office, like I always did in those days, to hide.