I’m at the daily meeting with Dom and the nurses. There are three day nurses now; and one overnight nurse who leave notes in hieroglyphics interspersed with the phrase continue to monitor like a poem about breathing or an instruction manual for maintaining the spiritual lives of robots.
The nurse who’s been here the longest, maybe five months, Shay, says she has a safety concern. One of the first things she did when she arrived at the hotel was decommission Dom’s bell and put in a requisition for alarms, which are now installed in every room beside the cameras. Her eyes fixed on her notepad, she says this is a difficult subject and nobody likes to make accusations. But she walked in on Dom sleeping in a stairwell last Thursday at four-oh-seven p.m. and she feels that not bringing it up would be unfair to the people we serve here. I can tell she’s starting to burn out. I can see it in the unnatural rigidity of her late-twenties body, the hardness in her eyes, like her grief has sprouted cataracts.
“Oh you want to be fair,” Dom says.
“Yes.”
“And objective too.”
A brand-new nurse who sips a smoothie through every meeting glances between them and says, “Shouldn’t this be managed privately?”
“No,” Shay says. “This is a safety issue that affects us all.”
“I have submitted my version of the event to the appropriate channels,” Dom says. I have no idea what he’s talking about—we have ever-shifting management and zero day-to-day oversight. There are fifty hotels like this one now, just in this city. Dom likes to say, proudly, that we were the first.
“You’re the door guy,” she says, and in that moment she loses control of the conversation, because Dom is the veteran of this place, the only one of us who belongs. “What qualifications do you have?”
“I watched a lot of Dr Phil and now I play with people’s lives for the government,” he says and smiles, showing white and gorgeous silver teeth.
Shay turns to me. “You’ve been here the longest, besides Dom,” she says to me. “Like, four years, right? What do you think?”
“I didn’t see Dom sleep,” I say.
“What?”
“I didn’t see Dom sleep.”
“I didn’t ask you that,” she says, and I force my eyes blank, to match hers. “I asked you what you think of my report. I’m concerned.”
What do I think? I think I’ve seen hundreds of people sleep here and lots of them have died but I haven’t seen Dom sleep. Here we are. This is it.
“I heard—I heard on CBC last night that six thousand people have fallen asleep in this city since January and you’re—you’re worried about fucking Dom? He’s nothing. Do you know that this is a public health emergency with no new medicine, no plan, no cure, no nothing? Nothing. Do you know? You’re fiddling while Rome burns. Fiddling while Rome burns.”
“Thanks kid,” Dom says, sips his coffee.
And then, because there are no more items on the agenda, the meeting ends.
Dom and I sit around in the office, write up a few notes, shoot the shit, watch the sleepers on the monitors. A few stir. The psychiatrist who’s interviewing sleepers for a research project comes by. He’s a nice guy in his sixties, relaxed in his casual blazer, and always takes the time to ask us how we are, how things at the hotel are these days, but it always feels staged, like we’re part of what he’s researching. I want to interview everyone who lives at this hotel, but I would ask different questions. I would ask them: where were you the first time you woke up from the sleep, when you allowed yourself to surrender? I would ask: how has the sleep made the edges of your life more beautiful, or bearable? I would ask: are we awake together right now? Why can’t I go where you go?
The way a body goes.
Signs of premature drowning.
Drowsiness in the core.
Heart slugging, dropped electric threads.
Electric surge and wander.
Water creep around the eyesockets, lips.
Blue sweet giveover.
Limbs tremble distant.
Doors thump closed one by one through the whole house.
Edge of mind, cooler.
Lungs go cloud.
The brain is the last refuge, hums dark computer.
For a long time, neural whisper.
Cells kick the current.
But who really knows.
I’m not in there.
Neither are you.
One morning I pull up to the hotel and a crowd of people is on the sidewalk.
I jump out, find Dom as fast as I can. “Fire?” The worst case scenario—the sleepers trapped, drugged by smoke as the papery old building wicks in a purple haze with a voiceover by a local anchor about another dark curiosity for the public collection.
Dom shakes his head. “Gas leak. Nurse smelled it.”
“Where?”
“Fourth floor.”
Residents I haven’t seen on their feet in weeks blink at the sky, birds waving their shining arms down at us. Our people mill around like a small sidewalk convention of serene monks, off-kilter with fragility and wonder.
The gas safety people roar up in their van and charge inside.
“How BOUT a SONG,” Hans bellows.
There he is—standing on top of a newspaper box.
He leads us in an arrhythmic version of “Kumbaya,” then “Country Roads,” then “This Little Light of Mine.”
Dom joins in and a few minutes later is bellowing like a devout choirboy.
Hans conducts, arms raised in the pure May light, his khaki coat lit from behind, drawing out notes and stomping flourishes on the newspaper box, which groans the emphasis of a subwoofer speaker.
Paramedics carry out a few sleepers who couldn’t get up and lay them on the curb.
The gas guys come back out of the building and roar off.
They didn’t find any gas.
We all go inside and the day goes on as if none of this happened.
People crawl back onto their mats and leave the world.
Later in the day, a nurse tells us that it was a durian. That huge stinky fruit. A sleeper had stored one in their room, forgotten about it. Smells just like gas.
When I catch Dom napping—once in a stairwell, curled up like a chubby cobra in his sweatpants and leather jacket; once on the floor under our shared desk, cap balanced on his face; once in a dead resident’s room, on their mat, when I thought he was cleaning up—I wake him gently, ask him how long he’s been out, give him a few blasts of the medicine, and walk him to the bathroom to splash water on his face, rinse the wrinkled towel on his brain. I need him. The nurse who ratted him out quit soon after that meeting and Dom and I toasted her departure with mason jars of rum and coke in the office. “Ding dong the bitch is dead!” we chanted, laughed. We were the survivors.
After Dom rouses himself and slurps ginger ale he keeps in the minifridge in the office—goddamn the sleep is dehydrating, he laments—we sit together and say nothing for a long time. I won’t report Dom. Having someone is better than having no one.
One day I get this weird feeling while I’m checking Twitter on my phone in the lobby and I run down the hall and he’s grey-lipped in the bathroom. I administer seven doses of medicine, my hands sweating and slipping on the glass. I pour cups and cups of water down his throat until he gargles and hacks and water sprays on my chest. I pour water on his shirt and back and hair and knock his head gently against the wall, make sure his airway is clear, and for the first time since my childhood, I pray. Wake up.