The first time Annie came home with him Matt had been guilt-ridden—this had still been very much Celeste’s house and Annie an intruder in it, an insult, he worried, to her memory. And he had wondered how Rachel might take it. A rivalry between Annie and his daughter was a complication he had dreaded.
But Rachel had taken to Annie at once, accepted her presence without question. “Because she mourned,” Annie suggested later. “She mourned for her mother and I think in some ways she’s still mourning, but she isn’t hiding it from herself. She’s letting go of it. She knows it’s all right for me to be here because Celeste isn’t coming back.”
Matt winced.
Annie said, “But you, Matt, you don’t like letting go. You’re a collector. You hoard things. Your childhood. This town. Your idealism. Your marriage. You can’t bear the idea of giving any of it up.”
This was both true and maddening. “I gave Celeste up,” he said. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“It’s not that simple. There’s a certain way you shouldn’t let her go—she’s a part of you, after all. And there’s the giving up you couldn’t help, which is her dying. And there’s the space in between. Not a very big space right now. But that’s the space where I fit in.”
Matt wondered, holding Annie close to him, what had provoked this old memory.
You’re a collector. You don’t like letting go. He guessed it was true.
Clinging to Annie now. Clinging to Rachel. Clinging to Jim and Lillian and the practice of medicine and the town of Buchanan. Everything’s changing, Lillian had said. But it was too much to let go of.
A cool finger of air touched the skin of his shoulder, and Matt pulled up the bedsheet and closed his eyes in the summer dark; and then, like Annie, like Rachel, like Jim and Lillian and everyone else in Buchanan and in the sleeping world, he began to dream.
A wave of sleep crossed the globe like the shadow of the sun, a line of dreaming that lagged only a few hours behind the border of the night.
It was a sleep more complete than the planet had known since the human species migrated out of Africa. Sleep tracked across North America from the tip of Labrador westward, and it possessed almost everyone equally: possessed the shift workers, the insomniacs, the wealthy, and the homeless; possessed the alcoholic and the amphetamine addict alike.
It possessed farmers, fishermen, the inmates of penitentiaries, and penitentiary guards. It possessed Methedrine-saturated truckers spinning Waylon Jennings tapes in the cabs of eighteen-wheelers, who pulled into the breakdown lanes of empty highways and slept in their rigs; possessed airline pilots, who landed 747s on the tarmac of sleeping airports under the direction of air-traffic controllers who methodically emptied the sky, and then slept.
There were isolated, and temporary, exceptions. Medical emergencies were rare, but telephone lines were maintained by a few dazed workers (who slept later); ambulances evacuated injuries to hospitals, where a few residents, functional but dazed beyond wondering at the events that had overtaken them, stanched the few wounds of a few sleeping patients… whose injuries, in any case, seemed to heal without much intervention. Fire crews remained functionally alert, though curiously sedated. No one slept until they had attended—without much conscious thought—to the obvious dangers: cigarettes were extinguished, ovens switched off, fireplaces damped.
Chapter 7
The Quiet
The fires that did break out were accidents of nature, not humanity. In Chicago, a welfare mother named Aggie Langois woke from a powerful and incomplete dream—which was not a dream—to find flames licking out of a 1925-vintage wall socket and kindling the paper curtains of her two-room apartment. She took her sleeping baby and her wakeful but calm three-year-old and hurried them downstairs, two flights to the sidewalk… and was surprised to find the other occupants of the building calmly filing out behind her. The crack dealer from 3-A was carrying the legless old man from 4-B; and Aggie’s personal nemesis, the neighbor girl who was a cocktail waitress and who liked to party after hours when the children were trying to sleep, had brought out a score of blankets and handed three of them to Aggie without comment.
Someone had paused long enough to dial 911. The fire engines arrived, not just promptly, but in eerie silence; the crew hooked up their hoses with an easy, economical motion. It was as if only a part of them was awake: the fraction necessary to do this job and do it efficiently. A man from the building next door—a stranger—offered Aggie a sofa to sleep on and a bedroll for her babies. Aggie accepted. “It’s an unusual night,” the man said, and Aggie nodded, mute with wonder. Before an hour had passed, the fire was extinguished and the occupants of the building had been dispersed to new locations, all in a strange and dignified silence. Safe and with her children safe beside her, Aggie began once more to dream.
Apart from the telephone exchanges, local communications dwindled and international networks began to fail. Within hours, the Earth had dimmed appreciably in the radio and microwave frequencies. Night overtook the western cities of Lima, Los Angeles, and Anchorage, and began to darken the ocean, while Israelis watched their CNN satellite feed shutting down due to “unexpected staff shortages,” according to one weary Atlanta announcer; and then there was only a static logo, then only static—as overseas subscribers blinked at the horizon and guessed something was wrong, something must be seriously wrong, and it was odd how calm they felt, and later sleepy.
Some resisted longer than others. By some quirk of will or constitution, a few individuals were able to shake off their sedation, or at least postpone it a few moments, a few hours.
A sales rep for the Benevolent Shoe Company of Abbotsford, Michigan, driving a rental Chrysler northbound on 87 from the Denver airport, pondered the miracle that had overtaken him in the darkness. He was due to check in at a Marriott in Fort Collins and face a convention of western footware retailers, beginning with a “reception buffet” at seven, for Christ’s sake, in the morning. The miracle was that some kind of formless disaster had spared him the necessity of scrambled eggs and bacon with a bunch of sleepy entrepreneurs wearing “Hello My Name Is” stickers.
The miracle had seemed to commence sometime after sunset, when his flight landed at Stapleton. The airport was nearly empty despite the fact that its gates were crowded with motionless aircraft. At least half the passengers on his flight stayed aboard, curled up in their seats… flying on to some other destination, he supposed, but it struck him as peculiar nonetheless. The terminal itself was cavernous and weirdly silent; his luggage was a long time arriving and the woman at the Hertz booth was so spaced out he had trouble holding her attention long enough to arrange a rental. Driving north, he was startled by the emptiness of the highway… cars pulling over into the emergency lane until his was the last mobile vehicle on the road, humming along like a sleepy wraith, listening to a Eurythmics tune that seemed to rattle in his head like a loose pea. Then the Denver oldies station abruptly signed off, and when he tried to find something else there was only one other signal, a country-and-western station, which promptly faded. Not normal, he admitted to himself. No, more than that. This was way past not normal, and it should have been scarier than it was. He pulled into the emergency lane, like everybody else, and climbed out of the car. Then he climbed up on top of the car and sat on the roof with his heels kicking at the passenger door, because—well, why not? Because he understood, in a feverish flash, that the world was ending. Ending in some strange and unanticipated and curiously sedate fashion, but ending, and he was alive at the end of it, sitting on top of this dung-colored Chrysler in a cheap suit and hearing for the first time the quiet of an abandoned night, a night without human noises. His own scuffles on the car top seemed achingly loud, and the wind made a hushed sound coming over farmland through the grain, and the smell of growing things mixed with the hot-engine smell of his car and his own rank sweat, and a dog barked somewhere, and the stars were bright as sparks overhead… and it was all a single phenomenon, the quiet, he named it, and it was awesome, frightening. He thought of his wife, of his seven-year-old son. He knew—another sourceless “knowing”—that whatever this was, it had overtaken them, too. Which made it a little easier to cooperate with the inevitable. He felt suddenly light-headed, too much alone on this immense table of sleeping farmland, so he climbed down and scurried back inside the womb of the car, where the silence was even louder, and curled up on the upholstery and obeyed a sudden and belated urge to sleep.