Sleep Over

by H. G. Bells

  But I can—she’s here with me now, as I get around to telling you about all the cults and religions that sprung up around insomnia and sleep and the end of the world. I just wanted you to know that I’ve got church issues. Fair warning. I’ll begin in a church, where I was, with who knows how many other nonbelievers.

  It was overcast outside, but still light enough to make the stained glass rosary window glow brightly in the dimness of the church. Candle flames were steady and peaceful as we sat on pews or stood leaning against the walls.

  Like I said, it was packed full. There was a sermon being given, on the righteousness of helping your fellow man. Not everyone was listening. There was a Starer at the back, whose family had brought her.

  When it came time for communion, they led her up the aisle and the father helped offer her the body, which she chewed blankly, and the blood, which she drank automatically.

  I didn’t go up to receive the sacrament. I wasn’t about to forgive them, even if it was the apocalypse. I was there because I lived alone (my girlfriend had up and left me to go and play “end of the world fuck-fest”) and the world around me was in turmoil. The quiet of the church, just being there with other people, was comforting. I took solace both in the physical space, for it was a beautiful church, as well as the group of my fellow Galwegians (oh yeah, did I mention I’m in Ireland? Just pile on the church issues and when you think you’ve imagined enough, heap another dumpster-full on top of that). We sat listening, or just sat, and the silent hug of community acceptance was a feeling I had missed dearly.

  I just didn’t want to feel alone. I reckon that’s more than the half of why various churches pulled a lot back in. Just sitting with other people, hearing familiar scripture, a kind glance, a tired nod.

  The doors at the back of the church opened and banged against the walls as a dozen people surged inside. Roughly half of them had AKs.

  I’d only ever seen an AK in real life once before, when I witnessed a sketchy trade-off between two vans that were parked ass-end together, four jittery men standing about and hastily transferring black duffel bags. There had been a noise down the street, and one of them pulled an AK from his coat. I ducked back around the corner I had been peering around, and waited for them to drive away.

  I imagine it was the same for most in the church; there were weapons all around us, hidden or hastily tucked away from innocent eyes. We’d all seen them, and we knew they were in vans, in umbrella stands next to doors, taken up whenever the peephole was in use.

  We weren’t unaccustomed to violence either. IRA wasn’t as dead as the international media would lead you to believe. It was not beyond the realm of possibility to see groups with guns. So these few men and women, half with AKs, the other half with hand pistols, were met with exasperation rather than fear. Mostly. Adrenaline flooded into my system as I prepared to fight or flee. Spillover of a riot? IRA? Something yet unforeseen? It was the latter, thank god, the latter, and it was quite benign.

  A leader emerged from the group of interlopers and rushed up the aisle to take the pulpit. The father objected and tried to bar the way, but the leader, a thin man with long limbs, a shaved head, and many, many tattoos on display due to his shirtlessness, sidestepped him easily and took control of the congregation.

  “Look now,” he said in an accent that told me he was from out of town. A Northerner perhaps. “I understand why you’re here. Community. Comfort. Solace. All that fockin’ stuff,” he said. A few in the pews that were still able to feel incensed expressed it with shock and grumbling.

  “This is a place of the lord!” shouted a woman in the front row. “You leave here, Satan worshipper,” she continued.

  The man with the shaved head at the pulpit narrowed his eyes gleefully at her like she had walked right into a trap he’d prepared for just this particular prey.

  “I don’t worship Satan. What does he have to do with sleep or dreams? No, I, and many others with me, have gone back to the old gods. If you join us, we will bring them back, and receive their blessings.

  “Our ancestors knew which gods needed placating to receive a good night’s sleep.

  “Hypnos, god of sleep, demands praise. We must transfer our attentions from this useless Abrahamic god onto the only gods that we need to appease now. Morpheus and Oneiroi, gods of dreams. They will be the ones to send us back into the sacred R.E.M. and, together with Hypnos, allow us the relief of a deep enough sleep to dream.

  “We also worship one of the gods of Ireland’s past: Caer Ibormeith.” The shirtless-bald-tattooed man turned his attention from the woman to the whole of the congregation. “But these are the specifics of a much larger picture. I ask you to come with us, add to the volume of our voices when we call on these old gods. They will be our salvation, but we need your voices to rouse them from their long sleeps! We must wake them and let them know they are not leaving us again.”

  The congregation was awash in mixed reactions. Most were shaking their heads. As if a few sentences of heresy could undo a lifetime of religion. Imagine my surprise when I was the first one to stand up.

  “What are your tenets?” I shouted.

  The tattooed man grinned a wide grin and pulled a sheet of paper from his back pocket. He smoothed and folded it out on the pulpit as he answered me, long fingers smoothing, folding, smoothing, folding.

  “We try different drugs to open our minds to the gods. There is a hierarchy with a military ranking system. The structure allows leaders to emerge and followers to do what they do best. We work together, but there is a strict schedule of prayer. We are trying out different methods. Instead of doing the same things over and over again with no results,” he said, gesturing around the church, “we are changing it up, brother.” He locked eyes on me, and they were intense, predatory, and I found it impossible to look away.

  He flung something at me, and I flinched out of reflex. But a paper airplane floated over the pews towards me. I snatched it out of the air and found it was a flier, which I unfolded.

  RULES OF THE WORLDWIDE OLD GOD AWAKENING INITIATIVE (WOGAI)

  There was a narrow strip of wax paper with colorful dots on it tucked into the spine of the paper airplane.

  “Any who wish to leave this place of ineffectual habits,” and here he laughed, seeing a nun out of the corner of his eye who was glowering at him, creating a pun, “will find a place in a new group, one which is growing by thousands of voices every day, all around the world. Come, take an initiation dose and help us awaken the gods of sleep!”

  “And if I want to leave?” I asked.

  “Ask my men!” he answered. I stood and looked at the dozen or so men who were at the back of the church.

  “Is this legit?” I asked. Several of them shrugged.

  “It’s better than nothing,” said one of them.

  “We’re visiting churches for the rest of the day, seeing if anyone wants to join up. It can’t hurt,” said another.

  “You can leave any time?” I continued. They nodded.

  “Lost one at the previous church; he found some long lost family there and decided he wanted to be with them instead. No skin off our backs,” answered another. The answer seemed genuine. I nodded.

  I looked back at the leader at the front of the church. I raised the strip of wax paper to my lips and peeled off one of the colored dots. I let it dissolve on my tongue, a strange powdery feeling settling into every nook and cranny of my mouth.

  “Who should I be praying to?” I asked.

  “Try Hypnos,” said the man. “Pray for sleep. But don’t beg. Demand it! Take charge! It is your right!” he shouted. “We demand sleep!”

  Two others in the congregation stood and looked to me, convinced enough to at least try something different. I just wanted an adventure at that point; I knew it was futile, but goddamn if it didn’t seem like fun. The leader at the front seemed wild and intense, and I knew he would take me on just such an adventure. I climbed over the incensed parishioners to the aisle,
where I met the other deserters. I offered them the flier and the strip of dots.

  What followed was a wild ride of drugs and sex and violence. In my initiation trip, I stood next to Archie, the leader of that battalion, and in fact the leader of the whole of the Ireland faction, and echoed his pitch in front of a dozen other churches.

  I’m sure it was funny, talking about worshipping these old, forgotten gods, but to me it wasn’t any more ridiculous than the gods the church-goers were in the process of worshipping (Catholicism had ten thousand Saints, remember, essentially a myriad of gods to pray with, for everything as broad as world peace to specific as straightness of wood grain). But to me it seemed deadly serious. In the end of the world, I needed focus, and I wanted a group to belong to again; I would show them my strengths, and play the part of recent convert to help draw in new people to WOGAI.

  It was a parody of those crazy American deep-south gospel shouters you see on Sunday morning television. The father would say something, and someone at his side would riff off it, adding to it or emphasizing by repeating words, hands up in the air par-AAAY-zin’ Jee-zus. But, unlike us, it was probably that neither of such a duo was on mind-altering drugs, other than the ones their bodies were producing, I mean.

  “Join us and awaken the old gods,” said Archie.

  “The old gods will save us,” I added, hands up in the air, head bowed, offering praise to gods whose names I had only just learned.

  “If we are loud enough, we will call Aengus MacOg to visit Caer Ibormeith and sing the song that will make Ireland sleep for three days and three nights!”

  “Oh swan gods sing your song,” I said, wondering at the colors dripping off of the stained glass rosary window, leaving it greyscale.

  Archie’s tattoos swirled and dripped, his skin a mesmerizing display of animated pictographs and disruptive camouflage; for the life of me now I can’t remember what they actually looked like. I only see them through the haze of all the time I spent tripping while watching them swirl and shift.

  After a while, Archie let me do the main sermonizing, and one of the others in the group took over the role of echoing me. Archie watched from the sidelines, his approval and stoic admiration doing wonders for my confidence.

  Those first few days were a hectic haze. When they gave me a break from the drugs (both disappointing and a relief—god, how I taxed my body in such a dangerous time), I had opportunity to learn more about the organization while we traveled. And in that brief window of cogency I learned of all the chaos that was descending upon every corner of the world—the attack and subsequent loss of that American city to one of their many militias, the explosion in Paris, the escalation of what may well be World War III in the Suez Canal and on the India/Pakistan border, and, closer to home, the destruction of the Palace of Westminster and effectively the British government.

  It was perfect timing, as far as my personal psychedelic experience went; I had my wits about me enough to flee and survive when the chaos came our way, when IRA came and destroyed our HQ in Dublin. They came in with the big guns, “purging the lord’s temple of the Satan-worshipping heretics,” they screamed.

  Archie was quiet for a long while after that; a lot of people died. But then Archie and I joined up with another group that had fractured off of the WOGAI, the Hear Us Hypnos movement, who were appealing to Thánatos, Hypnos’s brother, the god of death. They hoped that if we got all of Hypnos’s family on board, that he could be swayed to answer our prayers and give us back our sleep. Eventually it evolved into worshipping his three sons as well; Oneiroi, Morpheus, and Phobetor. Surely one of them would relay our message to their errant father.

  We started up a faction, got it self-sufficient and self-perpetuating, and then moved on, new people clinging onto us and old ones dropping off at every new town.

  My time with them was mostly spent outside, in fields where we set up rings of fire and candles in beautiful patterns laid out by a professional crop-circler. Archie helped mastermind the patterns, pictograms that made sense only when seen from high above. He drew up plans, and we wrote symbols in the grass in fire to call down the gods of dreams, nightmares, sleep, and even death.

  One evening in the field as I helped lay out another pictogram, a plane flew overhead with a huge banner that read NASTASIJA, RUSSIAN GODDESS OF SLEEP, BRINGS HER FOLLOWERS DEEP SLEEP! PRAY TO NASTASIJA!

  One of the guys in my battalion knew some Cyrillic, enough to write out the name of the goddess anyway, and we incorporated that into our design. The fields of Ireland still had their sheep wandering about, but also our messages to the gods, fires contained in borders of stones, with shielded candles and lanterns every now and then to keep fire always on hand. The flames flickered in the breeze as a line of people tended the fires, keeping them lit, keeping them within the stone borders.

  We had a great meeting of the factions. When it was getting on in the Longest Day, when we were starting to go legit insane, we all came together to talk about our direction in the midst of worldwide collapse. And I do mean we were going legitimately insane; we lost many to becoming those Waking Dreamers and even more than that to that oblivion which was stopping and Staring. For the record, too, I feel like I should mention it wasn’t just the Russians that had that rare dog-archtype, those ones turned totally feral and aggressive; we had one of our own go that way, and he ripped out someone’s throat before he was put down. And in the midst of this we still came together for this other form of insanity.

  Even as we dwindled, we kept right on going. To accompany our huge meeting, we had a rave in a field. Drugs flowed freely; everywhere you looked there was fighting or sex or both. When people don’t think there’s a hope of recovery, they will do just about anything. We were all consensual though—not to be confused with those awful groups that went around raping and murdering, or Hunt-A-Human, or any of the other truly heinous organizations that emerged during the destruction. We were just there to have fun and to feel alive.

  I was in the middle of something very salacious with about six other people (I’ll spare you the details—or maybe deprive you of the details? God, it was good), when Archie pried himself from the fray and took the sound system off of the music to scream at us. Insults of every kind, about how we were just as stupid as the sheep that were in the churches. About how we weren’t helping anyone hiding behind this farce of new religion.

  “The old gods are dead! We killed them too! We cannot wake them because there is nothing there. If you continue on this path you are deluding yourself. Sheep! Fools! It’s meaningless!”

  They carried Archie away from the rave and let him weather out the drug cocktail in the quiet of an empty B&B that we had taken over for the meeting.

  In the afternoon, when the drugs had mostly worn off, the leaders of the various factions met at the B&B. I woke up and took the water offered to me, but eyed the accompanying pills suspiciously until someone passed me the bottle they’d come from; common painkillers. Archie apologized and rescinded his words, but they couldn’t help but feel that it was how he really felt, that he was done with the insanity of our old-world god cult.

  “Even if it is true,” said one of his right hands, “we still have each other. We don’t need to be pretending to worship gods, we can just be a group. You’re my only family left, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let us disperse because we don’t have a thing to do.”

  Archie slapped his hands together.

  “Right! So what now? What shall the Magnificent Old God Worshippers become instead?”

  “The Magnificent Cunts!” shouted someone enthusiastically in my face.

  “There’s destruction enough as it is!” countered Archie with a harsh glare of finality. “We need a better path than that.”

  “I still think it’s a good idea. What if it helps somehow?” I asked. “Worshipping the old ones, I mean,” I said, softer, feeling an uncomfortable silence settling on those gathered.

  “If it makes you feel better, d
o it,” said Archie. “Let’s keep the fires going. In the darkness of the nighttime, let’s pretend. But let’s also do something useful!”

  “We’re too out of it to do anything useful.”

  “Then stay here and worship your lies!” shouted Archie. He’d had it, they could see. But we’d grown to form a bond with that crazy group, and we wouldn’t just leave it behind, not when it became apparent that we might never sleep again, and the end was nigh. So there was a compromise.

  I followed Archie. The WOGAI and associated clone groups continued on in the fields, but Archie and I fled back into the cities, on motorbikes that we kept fueled by syphoning out of the abundant cars abandoned on the sides of roads.

  We alternated activities. In the light of day, Archie screamed at now-dwindling church congregations, an AK in his hands to ensure he got to speak his piece. He called them liars, hypocrites, sheep, every name he could think of. He tried to get them to wake up and get out of the ineffectual system they were a part of to do something useful. He would always have a project, and he would always challenge them to do it. Sometimes it was gathering food supplies together at the church, or, probably about 50 percent of the time, it was to organize a clean-up brigade to take the garbage away from the town. Mostly they ignored him, but I saw at least a few times when he managed to spur them into action, to do something. So there was that, at least.

  And when it got dark, it was my time to shine. I took over giving the orders, and Archie would follow me, just as I had followed him in the day. He helped me design and trace out the pictograms to awaken the old gods. In backyards, school soccer fields, in parks, wherever we were when it got dark, we would make the symbols and shout to the heavens, our faces licked with the glow of flickering flames and the smoke of petrol and whatever we’d found to burn.

  We gained quite a following with this method. Anyone who’d had it with the church, or just wanted an adventure, as I had, followed us. They joined us either as Archie screamed at a church or even in the street, or as I chanted some Latin nonsense up at the old gods, the fires of the made-up symbols lighting up whatever field we’d settled on for the night.