by H. G. Bells
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SLEEP OVER
“A book that gains momentum as it unfolds, taking a truly panoramic approach to a worldwide apocalypse that’s both unexpected and unsettling to read. Highly original and recommended.”
—Cat Sparks, author of Lotus Blue
“Prepare for many sleepless nights. Sleep Over is richly realized, and I fully admit: reading the dozens of accounts of what would be personal hell was instead an absolute pleasure.”
—Andrew Post, author of Aftertaste
“Bells creates some truly memorable, haunting images and vivid scenes that stay with you long after your eyelids are closed. Whether or not you get any sleep is another matter entirely.”
—Mike Bockoven, author of FantasticLand and Pack
“H.G. Bells is brilliant in this chilling, down-to-earth tale that illustrates with frightening ease just how close to disaster our society really is.”
—Bennett R. Coles, author of March of War
Copyright © 2018 by H. G. Bells
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Talos Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bells, H. G., author.
Title: Sleep over : an oral history of the apocalypse / H. G. Bells.
Description: New York : Talos, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016018136 | ISBN 9781940456690 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Insomnia--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Horror. | FICTION /
Science Fiction / General. | FICTION / Suspense. | GSAFD: Horror fiction. | Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PR9199.4.B4577 S54 2017 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018136
eISBN: 9781940456720
Cover design by Jason Snair
Printed in the United States of America
This book is for my friends and family. Your support over the years has been amazing. At last, here’s that thing I’ve been working towards my whole life. Thanks for coming along for the ride, and for all the help along the way.
Love,
H. G.
Table of Contents
PART 1 THE FIRST DAYS
PART 2 PANIC
PART 3 “SOLUTIONS”
PART 4 DEATH
PART 5 WAKING
PART 1
THE FIRST DAYS
Foreword from the editor
If there had been a great bolt of lightning or a thunderclap, if the earth had shaken, if a blood moon had risen and cast a hellish pall over the whole world, we would have had some event to point to and say “There, there is where the end of the world began.” No dogs howled, no wave of prickling goosebumps swept over our skin, no measurable occurrence registered in any of the things we love to measure. The end of the world began not with something happening, but with something not happening. And because we don’t do well with understanding danger from absence, and most people didn’t know that going without sleep is fatal, the whole world began to die.
Every person on earth and in orbit around the earth ceased to be able to sleep. It was instantaneous.
Each one of the survivors that contributed to this collection managed to crawl through the seemingly never-ending gamut of the insomnia and emerge on the other side. It’s with many shards of story, each one a window into that time, that we can begin to see a whole picture of what nearly wiped us off the face of the earth.
At times I almost dream
—Graffiti on the roof of The O2, London, England
Did you know that, without sleep, human beings die? Because no one told me. I mean sure, us projectionist types, people that work in the night, we have messed up sleeping schedules. People in our lives are always telling us we need to get more sleep, get better sleep, sleep between the optimal hours of 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. (thanks mom), but no one ever talks about what happens when people stop sleeping.
We die.
And not like, in a few years we die. In a month. In weeks. In days.
In those early nights though, on that first day, hardly anyone knew that.
I went to work as normal, pretty groggy, but able to drag my feet up through the fire exit stairwell into my projection booth, able to thread up the first set. Digital cinema was taking over the world, but little places like us were last on the list for conversion. People in Lima didn’t seem to mind watching 35 millimeter film films, or at least, when given the choice between the more expensive digital ticket price and our price, we could at least hold our own against our larger competitors. I certainly didn’t mind projecting it; it was fun, and I got quite good at it.
Well, when I wasn’t sleep deprived I was good at it. That first day, after one missed night of sleep, I made three mistakes, but they were injuries to my skin, and not damage to the film prints, thank god.
Most everyone has missed a night of sleep at some point in their life. Staying up all night studying, worrying, working. So the morning after night number one, everyone was pretty sour, but it’s not like we knew the end of the world was beginning.
Social media had exploded in the night. #whycantisleep #massinsomnia #fuck4AM and a myriad of other hashtags spoke to the collective frustration and confusion over the lack of sleep. I didn’t use social media a ton, but that’s how overwhelming the response was—it still made its way back to me, even without a Twitter account, even without much of anything. Print news didn’t have anything on it in the morning, it was too slow for that; but all the TVs in the Tube and at the coffee kiosks had crawls of every sort of headline pulled from the internet. I made it to work okay and continued on, hoping to learn what had caused the night of sleeplessness after my shift.
As usual, I went up to the booth to be alone without speaking to a single other employee.
I threaded up for the day, feet dragging, head groggy, eyes sore.
I took my break by the freight elevator that we used for film deliveries. It was the only place my phone got any reception, and the best place to catch the news while I took my break for dinner, between the first evening set and the last, while most people were already in bed.
The news had an expert on to say something about how solar radiation can mess with our brain function, but we normally don’t notice it. Well we sure noticed it this time, joked the anchor.
At some point in all our lives, we learn what our threshold for detecting patterns is. For most of us, it’s three instances of something. Someone comes to a film three Tuesdays in a row, I expect them on the fourth. My bus driver every Friday is Julio, and he’s wearing a pink knitted hat and has a strangely spiced coffee scent wafting around his driver’s seat; after I’d seen his setup for the third time it was no longer remarkable. I expected it.
But flip a coin three times, and it comes up heads each time? Gotta be tails next, right? Even though the odds of it landing heads is exactly the same as it was for all three previous flips: 50 percent.
Which is why we didn’t get it right away. One night without sleep was still huge, don’t get me wrong, but like I said, no one
had ever talked about a sleep apocalypse before. It wasn’t in the public consciousness that this would be our undoing. It was just something to excite the news media, to speculate over the water cooler about, to use as an excuse to say those terse words you’ve been holding back.
“Sorry, I’m just so goddamn tired,” must have been the phrase of the second day. Everywhere you went, people were grumpy and short tempered, sour and mean.
But that’s not what you asked me to write about, so I’ll talk about that first day, the day after the first night. Or maybe the first night bears a mention? I think there were two types of people that first night, like every night before that. Those who would lay in bed awake, wondering if they should just get up and do something until they felt sleepy, until they gave in and got up. The other type of person lay in bed and tried to will themselves to fall asleep. Some people have breathing exercises. Some people go to a happy place that their mind can wander around in until it transitions to a dream.
In both cases there’s a lot of glancing at the clock. Calculating. If I fall asleep right now, I’ll still get . . .—fingers tapping out the number of hours while the mind advances the clock—four and a half hours of sleep.
I was fond of the getting up method, just doing stuff to occupy me until my mind could get it together to fall asleep. The first sleepless night, I watched a show I was binge-watching, played a bit of Hearts, and had a go at fixing the HD antenna I had made from a two-by-four and coat hangers. I liked to stay away from screens, as in the past I’d found that it only hindered my ability to fall back asleep. In between each of these, I went back to bed, and lay there for an hour. Giving it a good try, of falling asleep. An hour was long enough to really give it a shot, but tolerable enough if it still wasn’t happening.
That night, it wasn’t like my mind was racing, or doing anything really. It just wasn’t sleeping.
I think people like me, we understood something was way more wrong, right from the get-go. Though you’re not really, really sure. . . . Until you see something.
Like I said, I bumbled around the projection booth that first day. I had six projectors to keep track of and run at the same time. The start times were offset so I could go from one to the next and do my dance, threading the film through their rollers and clamping them into the teeth that fit in the sprocket holes to pull the acetate through the aperture at twenty four frames a second. You only have to do it a few hundred times to get the hang of it, and then maybe another few thousand to really get the feel for those beasts. I’d been there seven years. Six projectors, twice each on a shift, five shifts a week: I’d threaded up somewhere around the neighborhood of twenty-one thousand times. More because of rentals and special showings, but also less because of the rare sick day.
So yeah, I was good at the dance. Got good at fixing things on the fly, too. On normal days, my hands knew what to do, and they did it without me having to tell them.
The first time I hurt myself was at number three. I was pulling the head of the leader (that’s the junk film I can get my grimy fingerprints all over as I’m getting it threaded into the projector). Down around the foil sensor, loopdy-loop around the soundtrack reader. Down over the big toothed roller that held it steady in front of the apert—clamping my finger between the intermittent pad and the toothed sprocket. I snatched my finger out from between the teeth and roller and snapped it back and forth a few times. No one was up there with me to hear if I swore, but I was never one to lose my cool, even bitten by a roller like that. It hurt, but there was no blood drawn. I’d done it before.
I was grumbling about it to no one but myself as I rounded the corner of the garbage chute room when I clipped my arm against the key, sticking out of the round doorknob. I did swear this time, but could hardly be mad at it.
It was just a door into a little recessed closet, with a hatch to the garbage chute. One of my favorite things was throwing old projector bulbs, secured in their boxes with foam padding, down that chute and hearing them explode at the bottom. Compressed xenon gas glass hand grenades. Usually touching that key was enough to make me smile with memories of hearing the echo of a spent bulb bursting, a shocking death knell from a faithful piece of equipment. So when instead I clipped my arm on the key and swore, it wasn’t long before I composed myself and forgave the key. I threw some paper tape over the jagged scrape that had left about an inch of my skin bleeding.
And like I said, I didn’t do anything that had hurt the film. But that third mistake was the one that told me something was really wrong.
“Projection?” came the call over my radio. They always said Projection, even though it was always me, on a weekday, always me.
I froze in my tracks. I had a network of hallways that led from projector to projector, and I paced them while I made sure everything was running fine, but until I knew where I needed to be running, I stopped; no sense heading in any direction until I knew it was the right one. I unclipped the radio from my belt, and pressed down its button harder than was strictly necessary.
“Projection here, what’s up?” I asked.
“Number two is—” I started running “—uh, there’s like, squiggly lines all over the left side of the screen,” said the theatre checker. “And it’s all out of focus. And there’s no sound.”
“Oh is that all?” I said, my voice bouncing with each step of my sprint down the number two hallway.
Indeed, it was as bad as all that. The squiggly lines were actually the soundtrack, and seeing them instead of hearing them meant that I had threaded the film in the gate inside-out. Worse, I’d missed the startup of the print. I should have been there right as those sprockets started pulling acetate through the gate at twenty-four frames a second. Why hadn’t I?
“Tell them I’ll be three minutes,” I said, then tossed the radio indelicately onto the bottom of the three film platters, unused and still. It echoed a metal clang from the radio skittering across it as I worked to unclamp the projector and set it right.
It only took two minutes to fix (hey, I did mention that I was a damn good projectionist), and I got it back on screen while it was still in the trailers. No harm, no foul. In hindsight, I don’t think the audience was going to be too harsh with me—not that I ever heard their complaints, but I could feel them, through the port glass that their films shot through onto their screen, I could feel them.
So those were my three mistakes. The two little physical injuries on their own were not remarkable. Even threading inside-out had happened to me once before. But put them all together in the space of an hour, and I knew something was wrong.
I went down to the office.
Prit, my manager, sat in front of one of the two office computers. She held a take-out coffee cup in one hand, up near her cheek, like she might be drawing warmth from it. She didn’t seem to hear me come in. I cleared my throat, and she sat up a little straighter, but didn’t turn around.
“I uh, I messed up threading number two. Everything’s fine now, but, sorry. Threading error, audience interruption,” I said. “Under two minutes, caught it in trailers.” She turned and nodded. I could see she was tired too.
“No one slept last night,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I’m following the news. I thought it was just me. But then Allesandro tried to call in ‘sick’ and Maria has burned two batches of popcorn tonight, and they told me—they haven’t slept either. So now I ask you, with this threading mistake not even rookie-you would have made: did you sleep last night?” Prit was always eloquent. Even as the realization of her revelation was dawning on me, I found myself thinking that she was always clear and precise with her speech.
“So no one slept last night?” I answered her with my own question. She shook her head tiredly. But to me, no one at the theatre looked any different from how they’d look after we’d had a big opening. After the Marvel/DC crossover, when we’d had the busiest weekend of our existence, everyone looked like this. Tired, grumpy, slow.
“But this is differen
t,” I said to Prit. She nodded. Once I was aware of it, the smell of burnt popcorn enveloped us. It’s something you get a little used to, working in a theatre.
“No one slept, here, but we’ll see about back home soon enough,” she said, back home being Jodhpur, India.
“Well goddamn,” was all I could say. “What a weird thing.” She nodded and turned back to the computer.
“Be careful with the rest of the night,” she said. “Our damage deposit’s never been lower thanks to you.” Rare praise. I was hardly ever even out of the projection booth, and most of my communications with the other staff were about problems. Never about my prowess. So I puffed up a bit at this tidbit of flattery.
“And get a good sleep tonight,” she added with a sideways glance.
I took my leave and wondered about the oddity that was a night without sleep. It was something to gripe about, something to shoot the shit with the boss about, something that was a curiosity.
I went back out into the lobby, which I had to cross to get to my preferred fire escape. Maria was at the bar, but her back was to me, as well as a line of people as she frantically scooped burnt popcorn off of the batch of good stuff that sat in the popper. Another burnt batch. My god. The lobby smelled bad. I crinkled my nose and hurried to get to my fire escape stairs, back up to solitary safety and the hum of my projectors. If everyone was bumbling around making mistakes, even me, then I’d have to put all my efforts into making sure the rest of the night went all right. They were here for the films after all.
An older gentleman came out of cinema one and was walking slowly across the lobby when our paths intersected near the front doors. I stopped out of politeness, but also curiosity.
“You’re not staying?” I asked, knowing that number one was only forty-seven minutes into the feature, and that there was no reason for him to find it boring. Or too violent. Or crude. He was number one’s target demographic and he should be sitting there glued to his seat.
