Asimov's Science Fiction 02/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  “That’s because he’s in classes most of the day, or off studying in the library. He doesn’t have so much free time.”

  “Look at him,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The red spots on his face. I wonder if they hurt.”

  “Huh? Oh, that’s just from sleeping. If he sleeps on his hand, or something, it might leave a mark.”

  “Weird. Like maybe the circulation doesn’t work right, when his body is slowed down.”

  Increase opened his eyes, and after a bit opened them a bit wider as he noticed Sky.

  “Were we too loud?” I asked. “Sorry.”

  “No, no, no problem.” He seemed a little confused. He looked strange, too. His eyes were puffy, like he was having an allergic reaction to something, or like he’d been crying.

  “Increase, this is Sky.”

  “Hi.”

  Sky nodded.

  Increase closed his eyes again, and opened his mouth wide. After that he lay back down again. Then he began to stretch. Finally he sat up and rubbed his face.

  “Guess I’ll get up,” he said.

  Sky laughed. “After such a long sleep, you should sure be ready to!”

  He got out of bed, and stumbled a little, as if he had forgotten how to use his feet after such a long time in bed.

  “Hey, I saw you the other night. You had a dream, didn’t you?” Sky said.

  “I guess I did. But I don’t remember it now.” He sat on the edge of his bed facing us.

  “You know, a dream about eating something.”

  “Eating something?” Increase rubbed his face again.

  “Yeah. Hey, you still seem a little groggy. How can a person sleep so much and still be tired? Anyway, there was some, you know, saliva coming out of your mouth. So I knew that you were probably dreaming about eating.” Sky hardly blinked, and her mouth was open in a smile. I fidgeted.

  He was embarrassed, yet he smiled at her like he knew a secret. “No, no, that just happens sometimes. It’s not because I was dreaming about food. At least, I don’t think so.”

  “Oh.”

  “You guys hungry now?” I asked. They ignored me.

  Suddenly I felt like the air-con had been turned way, way up. The thought came to me: Sky was playing around with someone else. I had no reason to think that, but watching her, the way she flicked her eyes all over Increase even though I was right there, I believed it.

  “Besides, you dream, too, when you sleep. Everyone does. That’s what the scientists say, at least,” said Increase.

  “I know that’s what they say, but I’ve never remembered a dream when I woke up. I don’t know anyone who does. None of my friends.”

  “Yeah. I don’t always remember them, either. I often remember just parts when I wake up. It’s like I’ve been channel-surfing.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Sometimes it is. But sometimes they just keep me from resting.”

  “But you’re already asleep when you have them!”

  “I know. But some dreams are so weird or tense, like dreaming about a test, or someone I know doing something weird, that when I wake up I feel like I haven’t slept at all.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” said Sky. “What’s the point of a story that doesn’t make sense? I wonder if you have some kind of psychological problem, and these strange kinds of dream are a symptom. Maybe the same deficiency in your brain that didn’t allow you to be, you know, cured, is also causing that.”

  “Sky!”

  She looked at me. “What? Just trying to be helpful.”

  “I’m fine,” said Increase. He snagged his paokama from the floor next to the bed and went down the hall to the bathroom, wrapping it around his waist.

  Sky said, “It’s like a time machine. Everyone used to be like that.”

  “A lot of people still are. Probably most people.”

  “Yeah, but no one I’d want to know!”

  Still, she hung around our place a lot. She would watch Increase sometimes, kind of wary and kind of fascinated.

  Increase never seemed to have enough time to study, to keep up with the rest of us. He had developed ways to fight his sleepiness. He would take cold showers, or drink Red Bull, or exercise, or eat. I kept expecting to find some crazy medicine, but I never saw any pills around. One night in November, before midterms, he did all of the other things, trying to stay awake so he’d be ready for the tests. About four o’clock he stood up to get a picstik off a shelf, and he almost fell over. He had to grab the back of his chair to steady himself.

  My family just went to bed when they got tired, or when they got a chance. They knew where they belonged. Increase had too much money to know his place.

  I had to say something. “Go to sleep, already! You’re going to cause yourself some kind of damage.”

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. He couldn’t even enunciate all that clearly—the damage, I thought to myself, was already occurring. “I’ll sleep after the test.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” I said. I threw down my comic book. “You can’t sleep for a week and then stay awake for another week.”

  “How would you know anything about it? Anyway, for a day or two, you can.”

  “Right,” I said. “I think you’d better call your doctor. This is just not healthy. Look at yourself!”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  “You can’t do this.” I hunched over in my chair and looked at him. He looked back at me, but I don’t know how clearly he could see. I remembered once when my father got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. He’d walked right into a wall. “Listen, it may not be too pleasant to hear, but you have to accept reality. You’re just not like normal people. You just can’t keep up the way other people can. Sorry, Increase, but that’s just the way things are. Even if you fail a class, you can take it again.” He could afford that. Or his family could.

  He was angry. “I said I’d be fine, okay? Now just let me get back to work. I have to get a good grade. How am I going to get into grad school otherwise?”

  I was surprised. “You plan to go to grad school?”

  “Do you know any jobs for undergrad geology majors?”

  He was taking on too much, but what could I do? Then it came out of my mouth before I realized it.

  “Someone here needs a dose of reality.”

  Increase looked up. “Yeah, well, maybe I’m not the only one in here who does.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I said.

  “I mean about Sky.” He reached up again for the picstik.

  I was really starting to get angry now. “What about Sky?”

  “I mean you know that she’s going to dump you.”

  “No way. You have no clue how firm we are. So just be quiet.”

  By now Increase had given up pretending to study. “Oh, come on!” he said. “She flirts with every guy she comes across!”

  “I haven’t seen her flirting with you.” I touched him a little with that one.

  “I see her all over the place. And you’re blind if you can’t see that you’re just a stop along the road for her.”

  “Lizard!” I said. I’d never called anyone that name before, never used that kind of language.

  “A well-traveled road, too.”

  “Lizard!”

  “Whatever. It’s true, though.”

  “What would you know? It’s not like girls are lining up to be with a sleeper like you. They want someone like that, they can go for the handyman or the garbage collector—”

  “I know what I am!”

  “And I don’t? Is that what you mean?” Had he talked to my brother, my parents, somehow?

  “Huh?”

  I left the room, shaking.

  From the hallway I called Sky. She wasn’t in, so I left a message.

  “Sky, it’s Horse. Listen, I think it’s time for us to make some decisions. I can’t take living with the sleeper anymore. I think we should look f
or an apartment. Get back to me as soon as you can, and we can start looking. I don’t want to spend another day in that damn room.”

  I felt drained. The rage had leaked out of me. It had taken something else with it, and left me exhausted. I decided I’d better sleep. Not in my room, though. I crossed the campus to dorm 16 and went up to the third floor. I knocked at 1634.

  Bird opened the door. “Hey, Horse. Come on in.”

  “Hi, Horse,” said Fat, looking up from the computer. They were the only two in the room.

  “Hi, guys.” I pulled down a cot and sat on it. Bird sat at the desk and started writing something.

  “You ready for midterms?” asked Fat.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Fat looked at me more closely. “Something wrong?” he said. “Some problem with Sky?”

  Bird looked at me then, too. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Water was over here earlier, and she said that yesterday she saw Sky with—”

  I interrupted Bird as if I hadn’t noticed that he was speaking, and I ignored Fat’s question. “No problem, really,” I said. “I had a little fight, a bit of a misunderstanding, that’s all.”

  “You had a fight with her? Did you hit her?” Fat’s eyes went wide. “I can’t believe it!”

  “Lord, Horse,” said Bird. “I can see your getting pissed off, but hitting?”

  “No, I did not hit Sky!” I said. “What are you guys talking about? I had a fight with that damn sleeper. With Increase.”

  Both Bird and Fat took a moment as what I had said sunk in. “Oh,” Fat said, finally. “You hit Increase? I thought you guys were friends.”

  “Yeah, he’s just a great friend,” I said. I couldn’t even think about why they thought I would hit Sky. My mind veered off when it came too close. I waited for them to explain, but they didn’t say anything. Bird turned back to his desk, and began tapping his pen against the plastic, and then Fat swiveled back to the computer, trying to look both busy and casual.

  “Mind if I sleep here?” I said after a while. Fat looked up as if he had forgotten I was there or something. “Sure,” he said.

  So I stretched out on the cot and closed my eyes. For the first time I could remember, I had a little trouble falling asleep.

  When I woke up it was about seven; I’d been out nearly an hour and a half. Fat was sleeping, and Bird wasn’t in the room. I had to get ready for classes.

  I went back to my room. I paused outside the door, but it was quiet inside, so I opened it as quietly as I could and looked in. Increase was sleeping, mouth open and sheets tangled. I got my stuff, jamming my pad and memchips into my little yaam. Sky liked to say that carrying that traditional type of shoulder bag made me look like either a hick or an art student, but I’d told her I didn’t care. In fact I’d thought it made me look different, and so somehow stylish, cutting edge. Idiot.

  I slung the yaam over my shoulder and left the room. The door slammed shut behind me as I left, and there was a muffled “Uhhhnn?” from inside the room. It didn’t make me feel good, but I smiled as if it had.

  I sat through my classes that day, not paying attention. Afterwards I went to find Sky. Maybe my imagination was making this into something it wasn’t.

  But she wasn’t in her room, and none of her friends knew where she was. Maybe it was just as well. I was trying hard not to think about what Bird had begun to say. I scuffled my feet, and red dust rose up from the unpaved path. The rain the afternoon before had tamped it down a bit, but now the sun had dried it back to powder. The dust lay thick on the leaves of the banana trees along the path.

  I got back to my room about seventeen o’clock. Increase was there, sitting at his desk. I didn’t know what he was going to do. Start fighting? Tell me more about Sky? But I had no place else to go. I glanced at him and then plopped into a chair, sighing and taking some disks out of my bag. I tossed them on the floor with disgust.

  “A lot of homework for tonight, huh?” said Increase. He was mumbling his words.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Ajaan Tawatchai seems to think I have nothing better to do than run case studies.”

  I waited a moment. “Sorry, you know,” I said. “It was nothing.” If I made him mad, he might tell me too much.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Come with Bird and Fat and me for dinner tonight.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  I didn’t see Sky for the next couple of days. She didn’t reply to my messages, and she seemed never to be in her room. Finally I saw her coming down the steps of the Central Library, just as I was heading up, to return some tapes for Fat. She had put a yellow streak into her hair, like an old-time Japanese girl.

  “Hey, Sky!”

  She looked up and saw me, then glanced around. “Hey.”

  My mind had suddenly emptied. “Uh, I’ve been looking for you. Your roommates didn’t seem to know where you were.”

  “Yes, well, I’ve been kind of busy.” Her gaze moved past me, flicking from one thing to another. “You know how it gets around midterms. Actually, I really have to get going. But I’ll see you around, okay?”

  “Sky? What’s going on? You’ve been avoiding me. What’s going on?”

  Sky laughed. “Wow, so serious!”

  I stepped closer, and she took a step back.

  “You act like we’re married,” she said, giggling. “You know that I’ve never liked restrictions. Nothing personal.”

  “‘Restrictions’?” I heard a distant buzzing in my head. “You’re breaking up with me? Is that it? You want to break up? But we’ve been so . . . perfect!”

  She maintained her empty smile. “Oh, don’t be so theatrical, Horse. Sorry, but I have to go. See you around.”

  Then she was off down the stairs, and hurrying across the road to the central canteen.

  Later, I tried to put the best face I could on it. She wanted no restrictions—that could mean that she thought that we’d fallen into a rut, and she needed some time to herself. I could live with that. So I didn’t call her the next day, or the day after that. I’d allow her some time to relax, think things over. She’d appreciate my restraint. The third day, I just left her a message—“Hope everything is going okay with you. I hope you do well on your midterms!”—just to show her that I was thinking of her, but that I was comfortable with her having some time off.

  She didn’t answer, and a few days later I dropped by her room. She wasn’t there, but I talked to Cucumber. She was munching on fried bananas out of a greasy paper bag, dipping them into a cup of strawberry yogurt, in front of a video with the sound turned off.

  “Hi, Horse.”

  “Hi. Have you seen Sky?”

  “Not for a while. I saw her this morning, but I’m not sure where she is now.” She wiped some yogurt off her chin with the back of her hand.

  “Ah. Well, could you give this to her?” It was a little stuffed panda, like they used to have in China, with a note attached, saying, “Let’s talk. Call me, okay? I miss you.”

  “Oh, sure, yeah. It’s cute.” She wiped her hand on her skirt before taking the panda from me.

  Another week passed with no word from Sky, and I thought about leaving another message. Part of me knew why she hadn’t called, had known for a long time, but I couldn’t give up. I just knew that if I could talk to her, we could sort out whatever the problem might be. We’d been too close for her to shrug me off the way Increase shrugs off one of his bad dreams.

  So I sent another message to her computer. “I hope you liked the panda. I just thought of you when I saw it. I would really like us to talk. Don’t worry—I just want to talk. I’m sure we can work this thing out.”

  Still nothing the rest of that week, although I checked for messages several times a day.

  Then Increase and I were out at a Korean barbecue restaurant in downtown Khon Kaen, the open-air place in front of the Prince Theater, celebrating the fact that Increase had squeaked through the midterm that had been worrying him the most. We had already eaten,
and all that was left on the metal cone stove in front of us were sizzled dried scraps. I was on my third beer when I saw Sky come in, walking from the direction of the theater.

  I almost called to her, and then it registered that she was pulling a guy behind her, tugging on his hand. How could I have not seen him earlier? I just watched as they found a table. There were two seats at it, but they used only one, because she sat in his lap. The waiter acted like nothing was wrong.

  I was numb. I seemed to be watching myself from mid-air, or plastered against the ceiling, halfway across the room.

  “Let’s go,” I said finally. I signaled to the waiter and fumbled my debit card onto the screen he held out. “Let’s get out of here.” My throat was tight, and the words could hardly escape.

  Increase hadn’t seen Sky. His back was to her. But he seemed to understand that I wasn’t going to entertain any stupid questions. “Right,” he said, putting on his jacket. It was too hot to wear a jacket, and I almost told him so. But he wanted to keep his skin pale.

  That night, as Increase slept with a silly little smile on his face, I lay on my own cot. I kept replaying the scene in my head. Each time it was worse.

  I clenched my teeth. What an idiot I had been—continuing to chase after her when she had made it clear that she wanted me out. I sat up in the cot and hit my thigh with my fist, hard. It hurt, but not enough.

  Increase made a little noise and turned over in his bed. I had almost awakened him. I glared at him, and then got to my feet and left the room, closing the door loudly behind me.

  I walked all over campus, trying to outpace my thoughts. The night air was hot and still. I was seething and humiliated and I knew that I would throw myself at Sky’s feet, crying and begging, if I saw her, which made me even more furious.

  I walked past the Science faculty and the Humanities faculty and the pool and the tech center, and I couldn’t think of anywhere to go, so finally I returned to my room. Increase was still sleeping.

  I stood at the foot of his bed and watched him. A single dim light was burning in the corner, and I watched his slack, brown face. He was a Northeasterner, like me. What was he thinking? Nothing but dreams. Or nothing at all; there was just blankness, holes in experience. My own periods of sleep were just gaps in my awareness, dollops of unconsciousness doled out with a teaspoon. Increase had oblivion every night, for seven or eight or ten hours a time. Sometimes he could even sleep just because he was bored or hot, even in the middle of the day.