When a sleeper goes, the paramedics come and perform their ballet, bag the sleeper like a fresh peach. I like the paramedics—their driven efficiency so united and cordial, footsteps as coordinated as thieves. Their starched uniforms and wide-eyed regard: “Are you the one who called?” They give dose after dose of the medicine that revives some sleepers, most of the time, after the third or fourth dose, but sometimes it takes seven or eight. The medicine is administered in a mist pressed down through a funnel placed over the mouth and nose. It was developed and released six months into the crisis; thousands had already died. Whether the person returns to consciousness is all in the timing, the course of the sleep, and little flickering coin-flips in the bloodstream, how cells gape their throats or do not, how a person’s lizard-brain lurches for the surface or does not and I sit in the office at the front entrance and I sort the mail and press my feet to the floor and feel the floating-away knowledge that another one of our residents fell asleep forever today like so many others who have been lost to the sleep this year, and that there will be many more, and I feel that we are in the midst of a tide with no visible limits. A vast surge and keening.
I had lied to Hans. Yes, I’d been in love. A woman in my senior anthropology seminar, like a truck swerving toward me out of morning river-fog. I did nothing about it.
Hans’s three questions had been a challenge issued to me: If you could write a catalogue of moments of weightlessness in our life, what would they be? How precious were they to you, and what would you do to make that feeling continue?
The public health emergency was declared over a year ago now.
When a sleeper goes, it’s usually at night. We’ve lost so many that the shock of losing a sleeper lessens each time. The numbness is burnt off by the steady noise of emails, notes, the chorus of residents’ voices, the minor hum of the engine of countless small demands. The tinny music of dailiness and conversation with Dom keeps my brain going.
Months pass. The nurses quit, replace each other. Sporty nurses wearing stethoscopes and sneaker; palliative nurses who scan their iPhones during meetings; tiny-emperor nurses citing safety protocols; student nurses who linger at doors, knocking hopefully, treading tentatively as astronauts. I know they have never seen a place like this. Most people keep their doors closed, but it’s an ongoing debate: keep sleepers’ doors closed to reduce theft, or leave doors open to increase the chance of being revived? The nurses carry glass balls of the medicine; government-issued kits hang from their belts. Dom and I stay in the front room alone a lot, in a wordless workplace bearhug of solidarity or tacit professional suicide pact. My other company in the office is Ulysses. Dom sorts the mail and puts it in residents’ boxes. I answer the phones. For my first season here, I worried about contagion.
The family members are the hardest calls. I hear the voice shake—“Hi I’m Shania’s mom” or “Hi I’m Rocket Star’s son”—and I brace myself. I know all the sleepers at our hotel, but there are 120 rooms, so sometimes I need remind myself with the master spreadsheet where I scrawl notes beside names—purple board shorts, yellow budgie, fisherman’s hat, tattoo of green rose, Irish accent, pink slippers, black guitar, jumping jacks, knock-knock jokes, scoopy limp. My fingertip on the name—oh yeah the shy guy on the fourth floor with the Rocky 2 poster and the fur coat—and I tell the grateful loved one on the other end of the line, “Yes they’re still awake.” It isn’t my job to give prognoses. It isn’t my job to inform next of kin about deaths either—that’s the hospital’s job, after the ambulance collects the body—but our hotel is a magnet for the bereaved anyway. Dom and I are always so busy that it takes us a day or two to get to cleaning out a room when someone goes.
When a lover or mother turns up at the entrance, I buzz them in. I take the master key and Ulysses and lead the way up the stairs. The elevator is always broken. The elevator is a running joke. It strains and tugs, a spirit in an iron lung. The stairs are narrow, yellow, dank, up and down in claustrophobic geometry, and if someone comes rushing down at me, I have to press my body to the wall because the residents here, when they’re not sleeping, are always in a rush. They awaken briefly and insist to me about tasks relating to their tax deadline, storage locker, sick aunt on the island. I make way for the driven and the blind. I’m on this side of life, moving further and further away from them, the sleeping and the nearly-breathing. I hold their voices, fulfill their requests, scribble down their thoughts, micro-manage the dwindling dailiness of it all, but when I turn on the car radio every day at 5:37 p.m. there’s the report of the number of people who fell asleep today, the reports of the globes of medicine set over their mouths in increasingly potent doses, the public health experts and doctors calmly reiterating, “This is not enough, people will continue to die.” Many workers like me are quitting. There are reports that people are beginning to fall asleep in public too, found slumped at their desks with the signs: blued skin, white lips, shallow breathing—at the till in Starbucks, behind the wheel of the bus, in a leather jacket factory.
Dom stopped me in a hallway one morning last week and leaned very close to my face: “How are you doing?” I almost giggled at the honey note of concern.
I smiled at him, tilted my head to the side: “How can I support you today, Dom?” I cooed.
He punched my shoulder. “You’re good shit, kid,” he said, and walked away. I don’t know much about Dom, but I know he’ll last here longer than I will.
Anyway, when a family member of a recently-dead sleeper turns up, I lead them to their door and unlock it. Ulysses roams and stress-whines about the ghost-funk vibe, and I watch the visitor circulate, brush fingers on the mat, the windowsill, the walls. I used to feel shame about the filthy state of the hotel but not anymore—this is one of the only places for sleepers to come. Sleepers are brought here in ambulances called by their landlords or family members. Sometimes the visitor asks me questions about my job, which I’m skilled at deflecting. I understand I’m a screen for their disbelief, a repository for their guilt.
I learn to stand at the door while they walk around. I never go inside. I keep the master-key pressed to the always-tender spot in the centre of my palm, a toothy reminder that I can leave any time I want.
Before this job—before I clicked “Apply” on that online ad for “community support worker”—I had an anthropology degree, a bunch of ESL teaching experience, and a Serving It Right certificate for catering work on the side. I was planning to apply for a Masters or go to Japan or Korea to teach ESL, because after the recession set in there was no point going into debt I’d never be able to repay. I believed in the minutiae of my sister’s and friends’ life-admin problems; I listened to international news sitting in the centre of my own personal pink salt lamp; I knew my life would play out normally but had never really thought it through; I had never been in a relationship serious enough to make a hole in me (when my sister had fallen in love and married, I’d observed with surprise that felt callous); I thought the social safety net existed; I thought hospitals fixed things; I imagined people died with dignity; and I had never walked around a person’s room the day after their death, my skull frail and hot as a halogen bulb, knowing they were just one of many. Hurry to get the room ready for the next move-in.
I never wondered why the people around me chose to continue to breathe.
I do now.
Today on my commute I listen to a doctor, a politician and a journalist duke it out over the cause of the sleeper crisis. The doctor insists on environmental causes—generations eating meat ripe with hormones, vegetables in a permanent greenhouse afterlife, water spiked with disinfectants.