Sleep Over

by H. G. Bells

  My boss smiled and made his way through the beds to Jim and Jill; he gently took their arms and tucked them back onto the bed so they weren’t hanging down. He put his hands on their foreheads and smiled down at them.

  The other occupants of the beds were similarly settling down, each with surprise or glee written clearly on their faces. Several didn’t seem to react at all, and simply settled in matter-of-factly, getting down to the business of falling asleep. We were watching people falling asleep! Surely out of the twenty strangers, one of them would have told us if it wasn’t real. What had they to gain from such a ruse?

  My boss surveyed the sleepers, nodded with satisfaction, then made his way back to the doors and out of the room.

  Then it went insane. The club goers pressed forwards to the coat room door, everyone wanting a spot behind the glass. A whole bunch of armored guards poured out of the little coat room, making everyone back up and make some space. They set up stanchions, to make a lineup. My boss came out.

  “For them it was free. But now, I must pay for my club. All are welcome. Race, class, age, none matter here. The great equalizer is money, and every bed is the same price.”

  He named it. There was disgust, but some in the club took advantage of the price shock to surge forward again, hands in the air, shouting “Here, here!” or “Me, I’ll pay it!”

  We filled the beds, and it was only a few hours before the news media showed up.

  The lineup outside got insane. We erected pavilion tents all along the sidewalk to keep the rain off as people waited. The street outside turned into one big traffic marmalade until it was cordoned off altogether. I helped keep the peace inside, and the lineup guys had their work cut out for them outside. We worked out a rotation so that the beds were in constant use, but not by any one person for more than twelve hours.

  I only got short glimpses from then on as I managed the club floor and the front of the lineup. People in medical outfits, wearing masks and full body scrubs, carried people off of the beds and onto stretchers. They were taken out of the room, into one of the back rooms beyond, out of sight, to be woken up and sent back out into the world.

  We didn’t see any of that first batch afterwards, but no one cared; everyone was so eager to get a spot in the beds that they didn’t ask questions. Well they did, but no one answered. I was left to field their concerns and infinite questions, for which I had no answers. My boss gave us nothing.

  Where are the sleepers now? Can they tell us how the sleep was? Did they dream? Do they sleep normally now, are they cured?

  Apparently the mystery of it helped spread the word. It lasted long enough for my boss to get rich, and I mean rich. There were maybe fifty beds. And twelve hours of sleep each . . . Jesus.

  There were sleepers that shared their stories, and they varied wildly. I don’t think I’d ever seen them before; I was good at remembering faces, but by then my brain was getting pretty addled, so I couldn’t be sure.

  I ripped up that section of carpeting and took it home with me. I look at it every day, to remind myself. You’d think I wouldn’t need, with our history, god. God!

  When I learned the reality of what I was helping orchestrate . . . the guilt was immense. Still is. I should have asked more questions. I should have tried harder to investigate. But I was only the gatekeeper, trying to maintain the peace in a time when everyone was losing their heads. There were guards everywhere. And I don’t think they knew what was going on either. I don’t think any one person had all the pieces to put it together. He made sure of that.

  It was rather ingenious. We didn’t think it was gas because he was going in with them. And the medics even, taking them away! I was the one that followed his paper trail to the doctor that fixed him up with that hellish implant in his windpipe. The doctor was long gone, so I’ll never know if he could have had it properly removed, or if he was sentenced to a life with that thing in his throat.

  One of the things we knew from Fatal Familial Insomnia was that putting someone into a coma to treat that kind of sleeplessness actually accelerates the symptoms; the brain still cannot achieve the lower-wave sleep states that produce dreams and allow the brain and body to repair itself, and for some reason the coma state makes everything so much worse. Turns out it was the same with our apocalyptic mass insomnia.

  At least my boss had people in place to take care of them afterwards. I hope you’ll remember that. Even after he took off, someone was there to change their IVs and turn them so they wouldn’t get bedsores. He’d set it up so they would be cared for in that warehouse he took them to once they were done “sleeping” on display.

  In the end, as you know, it didn’t matter. When it got to what we thought was surely the end, people stopped showing up for everything. Those people died, sure, but they died in a coma. I think they had it better than most of the rest of us that died. Jim and Jill sure did. The last thing they saw was each other.

  Since the Indus Waters Treaty does not address the sharing of waters between India and Pakistan with the provision of effects of climate change, the two countries need to hold discussions on the treaty in order to make amendments to its present structure. —The Indus Equation, 2011

  —A phrase highlighted on the only piece of paper left in the Wagah Border Stadium, Pakistan

  I don’t know if anyone’s even left that can give you an accurate picture of what happened at the neck of the Red Sea, in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. Maybe you’ve got someone from Yemen or Djibouti that can tell you exactly what the fuck happened there instead of my layman’s piss-poor guesses from the deck of a cruise ship. I was sloshed, trying to have a vacation and forget my mess of a life. But just in case I’m one of the only ones left that knows, I thought I’d write you and make sure you have at least this fragment. I figure, what the hell, at least it will level me up in my History-Keeping stats.

  I was on a cruise, one of the ones making for the Suez Canal right when everything went to shit. Talk about timing—I’m not sure if it was better or worse to have been on the ocean, but I guess here I am, so . . . I got to experience Singapore before the end of the world, had a nice few days of open ocean, then saw Mumbai just at the start of it, when they were just getting the notion to riot. That was fascinating, and not terrifying, solely because I had a cruise ship to retreat to, safety amidst a foreign culture made slightly more predictable with the panic that binds all humanity into that single base emotion: fear. We departed and crossed the Arabian Sea, and were making for the Gulf of Aden, between the Arabian Peninsula, where the Saudis were building increasingly appalling monuments to man’s arrogance, and the sharp horn of the most northeastern part of Africa, Somalia. The Gulf of Aden leads into the Red Sea, which in turn gets you through the Suez Canal and into the Mediterranean.

  A man, a plan, a canal: Panama! I always thought Suez needed a snappy palindrome too. It came first but they really dropped the ball on it. Or maybe it would inevitably involve an old god’s name in a region where we can’t really talk about that? Zeus, are we not drawn onward to new era? Suez! Why all the preamble and geography? Did you ever really think about the route your goods from China took to get to your home? When was the last time you thought about the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal and thought, Good gravy, if we didn’t have those the whole world’s trade system would be drastically different? Well hey, in a world-wide crisis, those two canals became absolutely critical to secure.

  So when our ship got to the Gulf of Aden on Day 5 of the whole shebang, I got to see a run-through of the start of World War III.

  How much food do you have in your house? How many days’ worth of food are in your city, if nothing more was brought in? How long could each country last as an island, a trade island cut off from the world? Throughout all of human history, it’s been proven time and again that every kind of person across every culture in any time period will raid their neighbor before they starve. Every single time when it comes down to it, we pillage and kill to save ourselves and our
kin.

  Ships streaming through the Red Sea towards the Suez, bound for Europe, became gigantic targets.

  Piracy was always an issue, but it was when governments decided to get in on the act, political ramifications be dammed, that things really all went to hell.

  Before the apocalypse, four million barrels of oil per day passed through that straight. Per day. About 10 percent of the all the oil in the world, squeezed through that little thirty-kilometer (twenty miles for those few from Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States) gap and into the Red Sea, onwards to the Suez. So there was always that incentive. But combine it with the threat of trade stopping altogether, and we essentially had a noose around the neck of the world, and every country wanted to grab the last gulps of air.

  And, since everyone reading this will either have been born after the insomnia, or were born before it but not too much before it, I know that none of you were around for the British defending Suez from the Ottoman Empire in WWI, the British defending it from the Axis attempts to capture it in WWII, or the Suez Crisis and the subsequent Arab-Israeli Wars of 1967 and 1973. So because you weren’t around for any of that, or at least old enough to care, what I’m trying to tell you is that one of the most important trade features in the world has been fought over for the entire time it’s been in existence.

  The insomnia apocalypse was no different.

  Day 5, when my cruise ship tried to get through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, we slowed and dropped anchor to watch the start of one of the largest naval battles the world has ever seen.

  Every country with an interest in trade through the Suez showed up. We were only there long enough to realize that the shit was about to get real ugly, and that there was no way we were getting through, so we turned back.

  Back to Mumbai, starting on Day 6. Another five days of crossing the Arabian Sea. I listened to the radio and managed to piece together that China had bombed a bunch of the infrastructure needed to coordinate the shipping through the Suez; Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Yemen all saw missiles pepper their cities in an attempt to keep the shipping artery open. Not that it did much good; the ships that encountered the blockade and subsequent battle turned tail and got the fuck out of there, and by the time it was safe to go through, no one was competent enough to be captaining anything.

  While we were crossing the Arabian Sea, we heard (and felt—oh god, the shock wave was incredible) the blasts that could only have been the nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. That was day . . . 7 I think? A week of it was all it took for the water wars to begin. From that point on I wondered about air currents and the jet stream and how radioactive particles travel . . . I can only surmise that I was upwind of the exchange.

  I stayed in my room. I cannot tell you of the chaos that brews on a cruise ship when the apocalypse strikes; I’m sure it was interesting, but I wanted no part of it. That microcosm of mutiny and intrigue on the high seas meant danger and death. Hearing the gunfire and the sporadic PA announcements urging calm was enough to know that the safety of my room was the best way through that hell. I had a box of protein bars, a fruit bowl, and booze, and on Day 4 I had managed to empty out the vending machine on my floor, so I had a little stockpile to ensure I didn’t have to venture out. I thought if I could be good, if I could just stay put and stay out of trouble, maybe I could get through it.

  By Day 11, when we finally made it back to land, no one was left to operate the ship with enough clarity to avoid crashing us into Kegav Beach, having missed the crucial turns into actual ports.

  Not that getting to the actual port would have done us much good—with the shit going down in the straight and the Suez no longer an option, any ships that had been trying to get through had to go to ground. Everywhere was full.

  A lot of the cargo ships were just washed up on the beaches; we passed close by to one that had smashed into the tip of part of Mumbai that sheltered the port, so close I could read the serial numbers on the crates, and it was swarming with people. It must have been there for at least a day; all of the spilled containers were open and emptied. One of them was still full, but . . . it was full of bodies: women, and a few girls. How many had been crammed in there, being smuggled, before they died of neglect, suffocation, dehydration . . . People were crawling over every inch of the ship, stripping it of anything useful. There was one container that had yet to be opened and there was a fight to control it as our ship sailed past (going much too fast now that I know what was going on at the helm).

  Our boat hurdled towards the beach just as the first gunshots pop-pop-popped out over the ocean.

  The smart (read: living, capable, still functioning) captains were dropping anchor far enough from shore to keep out of the grasp of the ravenous population of a city that was itself choked, starving, and desperate for anything on board any ship in sight.

  There was no one competent left at the helm of my cruise ship. The crash was jarring but I made it through. Be good, stay put. Get through it.

  I had pills with me enough to last more than my planned trip, so I was able to make a pretty good go of it. And when I found someone’s stash in their room; good god, I bet half of the staff were already addicts of one sort or other. Not that I could blame them; cruises had started out as elegant luxury and had devolved into something far more resembling a floating shopping mall. How did staff get through confined hell on the high seas? Pills galore were waiting for me in a myriad of hiding spots.

  I set about, quickly, as soon as we crashed, making my hallway inaccessible. I devised a way to use two doors that opened outwards to make a wall by fastening them together. There were gaps at the top and bottom, but I used part of my closet to cover those and make it look like a single wall. I did the same on the other end of the corridor, so I managed to have the whole hall, with several rooms, all to myself.

  I had the land-side view, a barnacle on a beached whale looking out at the crabs scuttling over the surf’s detritus, so I could watch the city of Mumbai tear itself apart. I’d missed the bulk of the riots, but even on Day 11 and onwards there was sporadic war in the streets. There had been a fire before my cruise ship had crashed, and twenty-two million people had to get out of its way, though most didn’t. The various gangs fought over the ships washed ashore. I watched as leaders rose in the charred warzone and were gunned down, watched as people retreated, then surged back again when they had some superiority, watched micro wars being fought for valuable cargo containers. My ship was taken over, but no one ever got into my hallway. I lasted out the whole time in those rooms, being good, staying put, watching the outside world descend into chaos until there was very little to see. I sat by my porthole and stared out into the dying world.

  Such death wow

  many die

  wow very tears

  eternal slumber

  —Graffiti scattered across Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo, Japan

  >be 23

  >be in gated community

  >suburb pleb

  >rich parents, still basement troll

  >sucking teat of freeloading ‘murican freedom

  >hear thumping, then explosion

  >helicopter crashes on front lawn

  >house catches fire

  >try and save new battlestation

  >dog saves new toy

  >we watch our house burn down

  >our favorite toys clutched against us

  >forgot all the cables inside

  >mfw

  Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed . . .

  . . . The dead will rise incorruptible and we shall be changed.

  —Pamphlet handout of “The Lord Wants Us Awake,”

  Sierra Leone

  I’m sure every brand of church saw its ranks swell. Around the world, lapsed Catholics/Muslims/Wiccans, every church, every kind of follower, at some point tried to reconcile their beliefs, or seek solace in an abandoned comfort. Churches couldn’t hope to hold the congregations that crashed upon th
eir doorstep each day, each new morning when we still hadn’t slept.

  I was one of these.

  My relationship to the church had been one of devotion and complete dedication, until my sister and I began a clandestine hunt for knowledge that led us down the inevitable path to the truth. I think.

  We split the work: she learned about the church’s history, the stuff they don’t want you to know about, and our faith in the institution was shaken. I learned about all the other gods we’d invented over the years, and our faith in faith was shaken.

  We worshipped Yahweh (finding out the name of our god was something that wouldn’t have even occurred to me before—how ingenious to take away their names and proclaim them “god”) purely because of when and where we had been born. Another time or another place, and we’d be singing praises to Wotan, Vishnu, Thor, or one of the thousands of gods worshiped throughout history and geography. Together we helped bring each other out of that haze of blind belief.

  At great cost. They only shunned me. What they did to her was far worse, and, for the sake of this story, all you need to know is that I no longer have a sister.

  But our secret info-sharing sessions live on in my memories of her, and sometimes, still, when I’m debating something with myself, it’s her I have to defend my ideas to. An older version of her, the version they didn’t destroy. She has tattoos and is a badass. She plays the cello and rides a motorcycle.

  The times when I find myself most tempted to believe again is when my heart aches for her, and I wish there was a heaven. What a lovely fiction it is, that I could see her again.