Sleep Over

by H. G. Bells

  “You think we should just tell them,” said the PR guy. “It would incite panic,” he added shaking his head.

  “People are already panicking,” said my engineer. “If they know the plan—people love plans. They’ll follow it,” she finished, looking at me eagerly to continue.

  “I agree,” I said. “So let’s get crackin’. We need the CBC in here to film our message, and we need a script. We need a slogan. We cut the power in twelve hours,” I said. They dispersed as if I had banged a gavel on the table. Maybe I slammed my hand down, I don’t remember now. If I had, it didn’t hurt, didn’t even feel like anything. I remember seeing some comic of a dinosaur, a long-necked one, and it’s only two panels: it steps on a sharp rock, and then in the next panel it’s walked quite a ways away from the rock, and it says OW! That’s what it was like then. Things took longer to feel. My neck getting longer and longer, the signals having to travel farther and farther from my hands to my brain.

  Not that that’s what dinosaurs were like. Will you have any other amateur paleontologists in your volume though I wonder? I wonder how many of us are left. I also wonder if fatal insomnia had ever been considered as a cause of mass extinction before this. Sorry for the digression . . . I know what you wanted me here for, so I’ll stick to that.

  My plan to keep the power on. Everyone went to do their job and more—getting the press release video together was harder than I imagined it would be. The CBC sent a skeleton crew over to make a tape, and we were still struggling to come up with a punchy slogan to get our message across.

  We also realized at the last minute that we’d have to make it work for both the Canadian and the American viewer; we added a local art decorator to the team and she hurried to get the necessary props together: hockey things, eagles, American flags, maple leaves—visual shibboleths for both nations. We’d wanted to make two videos, but man, there just wasn’t enough time. We tried to dress the set in as much dual-nation background stuff as possible, hoping each nation would see their own things there and make it theirs.

  But before we shot we had to finish the script. The boom mic operator watched over our shoulders as a writer worked with me on a white board, various words and phrases circled, scribbled out, surrounded by words that rhymed with them.

  Seeing people work under pressure is amazing, but when your work relies on your mind, it is a frustrating thing; creative genius under the strain of that fog of looking through a long lens, seeing only a small circle of horizon, I have no idea how anyone creative was still able to put ideas to paper. Perhaps it wasn’t done as effectively as he’d been able to before, but he got it done. Well, he was getting there.

  If we’d had more time, or maybe an ad agency helping us, we could have come up with something better. But as it was, we only had to come up with something good. Something clear and honest.

  “Look,” said the boom mic operator, clearly getting frustrated at seeing our dysfunctional creative process at work before him. He snatched a white board marker out of my hand and used his broad fist to wipe off a section of the board to work on.

  “Lights Off, Power On,” I read. “Not bad.” The writer’s eyes went wide as he saw the slogan, then narrowed as he glared at the unlikely man who’d contributed it. Robert, if you’re still out there, don’t worry man, you did the important work. Those videos, your writing, saved a shitload of lives, man.

  “Thanks,” said my engineer to the CBC crew man, visibly relieved, perhaps not noticing the daggers being stared at him by the writer.

  “No problem, buddy,” said the boom mic operator. “Hey Felix, we’re good to go here,” he called to the rest of his crew.

  I know the audience for this collection is international, and not everyone will have seen the message we broadcast. If you happen to meet a Canadian though, ask them, and I’d be surprised if they didn’t know our little advert line for line, mistakes in diction and all. If they don’t, then they’re part of the population that their country let down, left in the dark, and had it way harder than anyone who can recite our message. Anyone with a New Yawk accent should know it.

  We recorded it, and watched as one of the crew of the CBC edited it on the fly. We had a satisfactory bit of propaganda when she was through, and we sent them off with it to get approval from higher up.

  The next day, we cut the power.

  Sixty million people. Ontario, Québec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, on the Canadian side of the 49th, and Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island to the south. Northeast Power Coordinating Council don’t fuck around.

  Hospitals had backup generators that kept them going, or at least, kept them going enough.

  But everyone else was in the dark. Twenty-four hours of dark, cold, boring, terrifying, powerless existence. And I don’t think I’m conflating the reality of it. Before the fall, if you’d lost power for any length of time, you probably remember it, right? Mostly it meant that your devices couldn’t charge and you’d be running your laptop off its battery for a while, reduced to eating cold food for a meal.

  Well I wanted to make us realize what we were doing, the hell we were inflicting upon people. I didn’t think we had a right to be making the choices we were without going through the consequences too, so we tried to emulate the experience of the public by limiting ourselves to what we thought they had on hand. No special treatment for the power grid gods, no sir. I sat in the dark like everyone else. Had to leave the control room (what kind of power control center would cut the power to itself? I had to find a room to have to myself and manually flick off the lights).

  I had a flashlight; certainly most of the houses that went dark had flashlights. I had a blanket. I had an energy bar. I turned off my flashlight to sit in the quiet dark. I used my other senses for a while; I felt the raspy fibers of the blanket against my fingertips, unwrapped the energy bar and listened to the way the wrapper crinkled as I moved it, and held the pressed bar up to my nose. It smelled like wet cardboard, and peanut butter. It tasted only like the peanut butter though, thank goodness.

  My ears were ringing. In the quiet I could hear them clearly—an E flat, not an unpleasant tone. I experimented with humming along to it for a few minutes, the ringing my drone while I toyed with a melody around it, like bagpipes.

  I stood and played with my sense of balance. Standing on one foot for a while, or rather, trying to, made it abundantly clear that my motor skills were taking a hit. I sat back on the ground and looked at my watch.

  I did a double take at its face. Had it only been an hour? Jesus, what had we done?

  I wish I could say I stayed in that quiet, dark room for the whole time, but I couldn’t. I got a taste of what my plan had visited upon people, my people, my charges who I was supposed to be protecting; any longer and I would have gone fully insane from the guilt.

  Instead, I went and micromanaged the engineers as they recalibrated the system during the down time.

  Cut the power for twenty-four hours, during what was already a crisis, and we punctuated our point quite well. There were a few minor riots, but both governments had our back. Good thing we did it that early, when there was still a semblance of a police and military system remaining, with the warm bodies to back it up.

  When their lights came back on, when they rushed back to their televisions and radios, we were on every channel, every wavelength, AM and FM. Everywhere the NPCC reached, there was our video or the audio from it.

  We chose a woman’s voice for the message, friendly and warm, but with commanding notes of stern tut-tuttery in it, to strike a balance between friend and boss. On top of it, we gave her a British accent, a surefire way to add credibility to someone and make them seem more intelligent. Using stereotypes could be helpful. Maybe it wasn’t as good for the American viewer, but their culture still put the Brits up on a pedestal, would still listen to anything in that accent. Documentary narrators, car enthusiasts, villains . . .

>   “Lights off, power on. Lights off, power on.” She said it rather flatly those first two times. But then there was a sincerity in the next repetition, a longing, an urgency there that demanded attention. “Lights off, power on.” She paused for a moment, then continued on in a friendly tone. “If we keep our power usage to a minimum, we’ll have access to electricity for longer. Do your part. Turn out your lights. If you’re able, you may help by going into empty houses and turning off all the switches in the fuse box. Turn off every switch you can find. Wear more clothes to keep warm. Conserving power now will save lives later. Lights off, power on. Lights off, power on. Lights off, power on.”

  It ran on repeat for a solid hour. Step one of our propaganda plan.

  And then it was back to business as usual. Everything that discussed the message elaborated on it. There was carefully crafted opposition, so it didn’t seem so biased, but every channel and frequency tried to hammer home that it would be best if everyone could do their part and turn off as many electrical devices as possible. A lot of the discussion conflated the idea, equating turning off your lights and bundling up with being a hero. Saving lives, just by turning off the heater? Who wouldn’t be into that?

  We ran the message every twelve hours, and each time after the first, we followed it with a little fluff piece that the CBC skeleton crew helped us put together.

  The first was inspiring: “Mr. Johnson of Washington Street turned off the lights of more than two dozen empty houses today. It’s because of him that now two dozen houses with families in them will have electricity for light if they need it.”

  Cut to three adorable young children, two young boys and a girl, huddled around a single nightstand lamp with a shade printed with a pattern of hockey sticks, snowmen, and red maple leaves. Their smiles shone and they waved at the camera and said in unison, “Thank you, Mr. Johnson!” It was so sweet it almost made me barf.

  But people ate it up.

  “YOU can be like Mr. Johnson: turn out lights and save lives!” Cut to a row of suburban houses with all their lights on. This segment we managed to film twice—in one version, American flags flew, and in the other, there were no flags, but a hockey net and two sticks outside of one garage. One by one the lights wink out until there’s only a single room lit in each of them. Cut back to the three adorable children. They laugh and wave at the camera.

  It made my heart glow a little, even though I knew what a contrived piece of bullshit it was. Goddamn, we were good.

  We saw an immediate dip in demand. Across the board, people were using less power for everything, all the time. As soon as we saw it start to rise again, as soon as we saw the complacency begin to creep in as we knew it would, we began phase two of the plan.

  We cut the power again. Another twenty-four hours in the dark. Another beating to teach them a lesson in their animal brains; brutal punishment would have to suffice instead of gentle niceties. We just didn’t have the time.

  That time, I didn’t sit in the dark. I couldn’t. My posture was becoming reminiscent of a caricatured laboratory assistant, my legs were feeling heavy and weak, and the ringing in my ears was getting worse. I tried to keep busy with maintenance, helping where I could, getting my hands dirty.

  When the power came back on, every TV channel was on our new ad.

  The three children huddle alone in the dark; there is an infrared filter on the camera to capture the images in the dark, showing them only in tones of grey against the blackness, bright, washed-out grey in the center of their pleading faces. Their oh-so-Canadian night-light is out. They shiver and rub their hands together. One of them is crying.

  “Mr. Johnson, why did our light go out?” asks the youngest, looking balefully up at the camera. A high angle, looking down on the little boy, makes him seem weak and vulnerable.

  “We’re so scared!” says his only-slightly older brother.

  “Please turn off your lights and heat and only use what you need,” says the older sister sternly, chastising us in the audience. “We only need this one little light, but it’s not working. Can you help us?” she asks, this time with the exact right amount of childhood innocence and vulnerability.

  “Please,” says the youngest, tears spilling down his tiny face in the grey glow of the infrared filter.

  There was a goddamned riot in Montreal after that aired. Their sorrow was brought to a head and there was no other release valve for such an awful epiphany as the children made real their worst fears.

  But then, after the violence died down, people were on power conservation like flies on shit. Neighborhood patrols were organized to check all houses for occupancy, so that the fuses could be switched off if no one was home.

  Thousands of hot water tanks were turned off. Thousands of power suckers, all the electronic devices that use power even when they’re not on, were suddenly removed from the grid. We saw usage fall dramatically again. Whole blocks of New York City organized patrols to ensure compliance.

  Our ads returned to offering the carrot instead of the stick, showing the three little children laughing around a book, playing a game of Go Fish, coloring in a coloring book, smiling and waving at the camera.

  We did feature pieces on people that had turned off houses’ fuseboxes. Most were shy and humble, but we also showed footage of interviews of people expressing their appreciation for their efforts.

  “Marjorie and Jack are heroes,” says a burly bearded man in a plaid flannel shirt, suspenders holding up tan work pants. “They came by to see if we were home, and asked us to turn off one of the extra lights we had on.” He gives a gruff grunt, as if to say that he’d never been confronted before in his life. “Well, she was right. We didn’t need as much light as we were taking, and they reminded us of that fact. It takes courage to confront people, but Marjorie and Jack did. And because of them, the power will stay on that much longer.” He looks at the camera, deep brown eyes stern and commanding. He points at the viewer. “It’s not too late to turn off a light.”

  Every twelve hours we tried to add to the narrative we were crafting for the country. Making ordinary people out to be heroes for turning off fuse boxes and living with very little light and heat. And always that oft repeated, “Lights off, power on,” slogan before and after everything we shoveled onto the program.

  Eventually the population began to dwindle and the power usage began to fall even further. People were still doing their duties at the end though, going into houses with bodies in them and flipping fuses to conserve power.

  “Wear a face mask to avoid the smell,” we had the British-accented lady add with concern. “And put something on the door to let everyone know you’ve already done your duty in that home.” Cue shot after shot of front doors marked with everything from a duct-tape X to a spray painted lightning bolt.

  When we realized that we were in a better position than we’d hoped for (because how could we have anticipated such a horrifying mortality rate into our calculations), we used our propaganda machine for another purpose.

  Cut to the three little children reading around their night lamp.

  Into frame floats Mr. Johnson, a ghostly apparition, blue and grey wisps floating languidly off of his semitransparent skin. It was a crude effect, and sometimes Ghost Mr. Johnson didn’t quite interact with the scenery as he should, but we got the idea across.

  “Hello children,” he says in a friendly tone, voice in a reverb chamber to give it even more ghost-cred.

  “Mr. Johnson!” they say with glee, rushing up to hug him. Their hands pass right through him.

  “Oh no Mr. Johnson, did you die?” asks the little girl. Mr. Johnson answers with a somber nod.

  “But don’t be too sad,” he says, “because you know what? Now I know you can have another light. Or a video game or something. Is there a treat that you’ve been missing that takes more electricity?” he asks, a twinkle in his eye as he glances at a shelf of DVDs behind them.

  Cut to the children, backs to the camera, arms
around each other, as they sit silhouetted in front of the glow of a television, DVD player beside it busily scanning the disc so they can watch a cartoon. Winnie the Pooh.

  Cue Ghost Mr. Johnson putting his unearthly hand on the youngest boy’s shoulder lovingly as he watches with them.

  Cut to a splash screen of text which reads “Treat Yourself, Canada!” or “Treat Yourself, America!”

  Of course we had another video prepared, one of Ghost Mr. Johnson with the children, turning off their cartoons and returning to using only the single light, back to conserving power—I’m sad to say that it never aired. It would have meant we were using more power than the grid could handle, and that we had to ask the public to end their excess usage. But so many of us died that the extra demand for power during the splurge didn’t cause us to go past the threshold that would have necessitated urging conservation again.

  We kept running footage of the three children watching their cartoons. Near the end, we had clips of them on the hour. A lot of repeats, but some new stuff interspersed. Even the clips from the cutting room floor were used; ones of them laughing, picking something out of their teeth, adjusting a shoe.

  I say it was new footage, but of course it had been recorded weeks before. All of it had been recorded weeks before, over the course of only two days of shooting. We tried to get as many little vignettes captured as we could think to craft. I think we got it mostly right. There were some we didn’t use, but we still managed to scavenge shots from them to add to other things.

  Those three children didn’t know each other before filming, and I doubt they knew each other afterwards, taken back by their families who began the long haul of surviving the apocalypse.