“You’re saying thousands of people are dying because of … weed killer?” the politician says. She goes on about mental health coverage—the over-crowded hospitals, psychiatrist shortage, lack of research about the cause of the sleep, experimental treatments, alternative medications. “We have no etiology of the acute sleep disorder,” she says.
Then it’s the journalist’s turn and he begins, his rage a blizzard assaulting the microphone: “This is why so many died from AIDS—they were killed by indifference.”
“We know the people at highest risk have … difficult histories. We know this impacts our most vulnerable populations with the most complex presentations.” I remember the first time I heard a nurse refer to a person’s “presentation,” meaning the clinician’s impression. I thought of the sleeper’s face projected outside of himself onto the air, a slideshow organized into (1) Ignoble Birth; (2) Traumatic Childhood; (3) Shit Happens (4) Inevitable Descent Into Depravity; (5) Untimely Death.
I pilot my tiny hatchback through the rivering smog of commuter traffic and listen numbly, eyelids stiff with exhaustion. Yesterday, the paramedics had to be called to our hotel nine times to revive sleepers whose heartbeats had begun to stroll away into a warm retreating tide. They were all revived. Dom and I ate McNuggets, waiting for the ambulance to leave so we could.
The doctor continues. “We need consider carefully as a society—what do we mean when we say people are palliative? People who are electing to be … inactive … are these people palliative? Are we just waiting for them to die?”
Sometimes, lately, the thought has nudged itself uninvited against the interior shell of my ear: let them go. If they want to sleep forever, just let them sleep. Sing lullabies, dim the lights, hand out pyjamas.
The radio program ends; they didn’t interview anyone struggling with the sleep; they didn’t interview any workers like me. They call us “front-line workers.” I’ve always hated the military language.
When I get to the hotel, Hans is there chatting with Dom about the radio program. They listened to it together in the office (Hans has a way of always inserting himself into things, like honorary staff). Hans crosses his arms and says, “My big problem with research is that no professor knocks on my door in this slum and tells me my friend croaked.” He points at me. “Kid, you know how many people I know who’ve fallen asleep?” I shrug. I don’t want to be pinned by the facts of Hans’s life. “Guess,” he says.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Ill-advised!” Dom shouts.
“Guess!”
“No!”
“Come at me, kid.” He’s sprightly, razory, this morning. He’s been sleeping for a few days, in full oxygen rebound, pupils lapping up my sweltering hesitation.
“Ten?” I say. Safer to guess wrong than to try for tragedy.
“Ha! Ten! Ten!” He points at me. “I won’t tell you the real number, kid. It’ll just fuck you up.” On his way out, he hugs me. His body is rock-hard and smells like rubber tires and garlic powder.
At the centre of an epidemic it is silent, it is still, there is the open mouth of the paramedic as he approaches, the cupped hands of the family, there is the empty space on the spreadsheet wiped of the name, there is the room after it is cleared and cleaned, there is the helpless gaze of the helper, there is the blank bullet at the centre of the eye again, the nearly imperceptible whistle of the dreamer and the dreamed.
It’s through no fault of their own that they’re sleepers. There have been so many editorials in the paper speculating about the cause for the sleep. Are these people more sensitive, more susceptible somehow than the rest of us? Can the sleep be transmitted? How does it spread? My older sister, an accountant, has called me up many times to tell me she worries about me. I started working at the hotel just before the sleepers started to edge their way into the news—and then the slow and then rapid build. When I hear the radio reports, I see faces and hear voices of our residents. When I read the newspaper, I see the doors and feel the sticky stairs on the bottoms of my shoes, that suck of neglect. The sour air fills my mouth. How do they end up here? When a person can’t hold down a job, the basic structures of life fall away quickly. A few months and the savings are gone; the unemployment insurance gets cut off; and then if they don’t have family, they’re in one of the hotels that will accept the government’s shelter allotment in exchange for a few nurses and mats and sandwiches. I try to remember that they all had different lives before—many had normal lives, lives with neither distinction, nor scandal. And then this—some stress valve embedded deep in them, virus or magic spell, and here we are, on different sides of the glass, and I watch today’s nurse mark times of waking beside their surnames, and I stand beside Dom as he clangs his bell and eyes rush open—I’m up I’m up I’m up. If the eyes stay shut, we call the nurse to administer the medicine, or we just call the paramedics ourselves when the lips are blue, which is often enough for my hands to shake by 10 a.m.
Their eyes, when they do open, hold worlds. I stay for this, for those who awaken.
Their irises of variegated fern green, opal iridescent with tidal wash, impenetrable forest browns. Pupils tunnel to another place.
I stay for the few who leave this hotel. Groggy, aching from the first deep weeks or months of little movement, wasted limbs, always with family. It will take months of rehabilitation to live normally again. Most fall back.
They’ve told me the sleep is dreamless, without memories, a profound break, just so nice.
One afternoon, I ask Hans, “What can I do to help?”
And he answers, “Can you bring people back from the dead?”
That sure shut me up for a while.
Another time I ask him, “Why is this happening?”
He answers: “You know what none of you people ever talks about? How amazing the sleep is. How fucking amazing it feels. If something’s that good—why should I stop? Because I might not wake up? We all go. We all go sometime.”
“Wait—can a person stop?” I ask, suddenly desperate, my mind clear as a dead person’s wide-open porch at sunrise.
He doesn’t answer me, though. I’m useful for things like phone calls and food stamps but I’m not witness to the mysteries that happen beneath eyelids, in skulls adjacent to consciousness.
“Every day I wake up is a good day,” Hans says.
When I was a kid, I used to sleepwalk, and now I dream every night about the people in the hotel. I know I care about them way too much. I dream about Hans, smoking out the window with one hand, dangling a shoe for Ulysses to snap at with the other. I dream of our youngest resident, Nomi, who drifted off permanently two months ago, she’s sitting cross-legged on the roof of the hotel and I am sitting across from her and she’s instructing me in the basics of meditation. Just let your mind go blank and try to observe your thoughts without attachments, she says. I dream about Lucifer, who always screamed at me on the stairs about the non-present elevator, and in the dream we meet in an afterlife boardroom aglow with fir and glass, and he has typed up all his complaints– three washing machines for over a hundred people and half the time all three are broken; five distinguishable breeds of cockroaches—and he moves his hand back and forth through the air like a small-town DJ. I dream about the living and the dead and, in between, I work in a building that belongs to neither and both.