by Jeremy Bates
At the same time, however, Sharon had had a total blast on her trip so far. She’d made some great friends she’d keep in touch with on social media, she’d had some wild experiences she’d likely never forget, and she knew in her heart the day she boarded the flight to Perth would be a sad one indeed.
She’d told Chad she had a boyfriend waiting for her back home, which wasn’t true. But he’d been so damn hot to get in her pants those first few days they’d met in the park in Pamplona, she’d needed to say something to get him to cool off. It wasn’t that he wasn’t cute or nice. He was both. He was just too much surfy testosterone dude and not enough mellow thoughtful dude, which appealed more to the book nerd inside her. Anyway, the lie worked…for a while at least. Because when she tired of Portugal and decided to check out France, and he insisted on joining her, he got all hot again…and she gave in, and they’d been making out ever since.
Well, at least until the Sleep Experiment had commenced. She understood why Dr. Wallis hadn’t wanted his test subjects to be romantically involved, given how relationships can really fuck with people’s heads sometimes.
Sharon didn’t have to worry about this, though, because she no longer had any feelings for Chad whatsoever. Whatever attraction she’d developed for him over the last year had evaporated during their time stuck together in the sleep laboratory. In fact, he was beginning to drive her nuts. Just about everything about him now pissed her off. Like how he grunted like an ape during his workouts. Or mumbled to himself like a homeless person while he paced the room incessantly. Or bragged about his cooking, when all he did was follow a recipe in a book. The last time he fished for a compliment (“How good are the enchiladas, Shaz? Made ’em from scratch, hey!”), she wanted to throw her enchilada in his face. And she wasn’t even going to get into all the TV he watched. Seriously, what a fucking couch potato! Hadn’t he ever picked up a book in his life? She’d yet to see him do so.
Nevertheless, Sharon knew that as much as she was becoming fed up with Chad, her real gripe was with the Sleep Experiment itself. Because with each day that passed (or perceived day that passed, given there were no damn clocks or calendars anywhere), she was finding it harder and harder to cope with the mind-numbing boredom; the around-the-clock observation and the lack of privacy this entailed; and the relentless questions and tests, both physical and mental, that Dr. Wallis and his cronies put her through. Like, what was with that fucking EEG machine? Seriously, with all the electrodes stuck to her head she’d felt like a patient in an insane asylum.
Yes, she really was beginning to feel like a guinea pig.
Doesn’t matter, Shaz, she told herself. Can’t be much longer until you’re done with this shit. Another week maybe. Then you’re home-free. You can ditch Chad and go visit Canada. Whistler-Blackcomb, mountain air, raw nature. Then home. Blue skies, the beach, Mom’s lasagna and Dad’s steaks on the barbie. Just a little bit longer—
Someone was talking to her. Not Dr. Wallis or the Indian. The Asian. What was her name again? Jesus, how could she not remember her name?
The Asian—Penny, that was it!—kept talking in her stupid accent, pretending to be her friend in order to pick her brain…
Shut up and leave me alone! Sharon thought, refusing to look up from the book clenched tightly in her hands. Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!
◆◆◆
“Morning, Penny,” Dr. Roy Wallis said, setting the pulp-paper tray holding the vanilla latte and green tea on the table.
Penny, today dressed completely in white, took the green tea and said, “Thank you again, professor. You are very kind to bring me a drink each day. You’re definitely the most chivalrous professor I know.”
“No problem, Penny,” he said. “And I should compliment you on the fantastic job you’ve been doing this last week. I know it can’t be fun waking up at whatever time you do to get here so early.”
“Five o’clock, because I always shower in the morning.”
Although this was an innocuous remark, the curl of Penny’s lips and her inexplicable emphasis on “always” made it sound prurient, as though she’d wanted him to conjure a naked image of her in his mind.
Which, for a brief moment, he did.
Focusing his attention on twisting his coffee cup free from the tray, Dr. Wallis said. “I’ve been reading your notes, of course. They’re well done.”
“Thank you, professor,” she said. “I’ve been doing my best—”
Something crashed into the viewing window.
Penny yelped. Wallis flinched, raising a forearm before his face in an instinctual gesture of defense. The reinforced glass remained undamaged. Beyond, in the middle of the sleep laboratory, Sharon was shaking a finger at Chad, her face flushed with emotion.
Dr. Wallis reached an arm across Penny—brushing the front of her chest—and jabbed the touch panel controller’s Listen button.
“—disgusting!” Sharon was saying. “We have to share it for the next however long, so show a little consideration!”
“Take a chill pill, Shaz,” Chad said. “It’s just a little piss.”
“Can’t you lift the goddamn seat?”
“I never lifted the seat in the house.”
“And I put up with sitting down on your piss in the middle on the night! Just because I didn’t say anything then doesn’t mean it was okay.”
“Just wipe the seat down if it bothers you so much.”
“How hard is it to aim your dick? Or is it too small to aim?”
Chad stepped toward her threateningly. “I swear, Shaz…”
While this exchange had been playing out, Dr. Wallis and Penny had swapped seats. Now Wallis pressed the Talk button and said, “Why don’t you two give each other a little space?”
The Australians looked at the two-way mirror. Both were stormy-eyed and grimacing. Throwing up his hands, Chad skulked off to the lounge. He turned on the TV and clapped a set of headphones over his ears.
Sharon approached the mirror. “He’s gross, doc! I mean, come on! Can you talk to him or something?”
Wallis pressed the Talk button again. “I think you made your position on the matter quite clear, Sharon,” he said. “Let’s first see how he responds going forward?”
“I swear,” she said, fists clenching and unclenching at her sides, “if he doesn’t start lifting the seat, or at least improving his aim, I’m going to start peeing all over the seat too!” She spun on her heels and went to her bed and picked up her book. She settled into her usual spot leaning against the headboard, facing the viewing window. After a moment she stood and pushed the bed in a counterclockwise direction. She maneuvered the headboard to about seven o’clock, then pulled the footboard until she’d turned the bed one hundred eighty degrees. She settled back into her spot leaning against the headboard—only now facing the rear of the sleep laboratory so Dr. Wallis and Penny could no longer see her face.
“Yikes…” Penny said. “She doesn’t seem too happy, does she? What did she throw at us?”
“I’m not sure,” Wallis said. “But it wasn’t at us. It was at Chad. She missed him. Did they argue about anything else during your shift?”
“No, they didn’t say anything. No, wait. Shaz spoke to me. She asked me how long they had been in the room for. Don’t worry, professor, I didn’t tell her.”
“Was she upset?”
“More like—indifferent. It was a very brief exchange.”
“Still, I wonder whether this withholding of information contributed to her outburst? She has been severely limited in what she can do each day. Limiting what she can know too is no doubt a very frustrating situation.”
“Should we tell her she has only been in there for a week?”
“Absolutely not. I am simply musing out loud, Penny.”
Penny nodded, then said, “She’s slurring her words. Did you hear when she was talking? It wasn’t super noticeable, but…is that to be expected, professor?”
“It’s one of the symptoms
of cerebellar ataxia, which is also responsible for the deterioration in her coordination and balance that we’ve been witnessing, as well as the abnormalities in her eye movement.”
Penny seemed contemplative. “That teenager you mentioned in the final class of the semester,” she said, “the one who stayed awake for eleven days—”
“Randy Gardner,” Wallis said.
“Yeah, him—you said he showed no side effects from lack of sleep. But Shaz and Chad, they’re falling all over the place, not eating, their eyes are going crazy, now they’re slurring their speech—”
“I know what you’re getting at, Penny,” Wallis said, “and you have a right to be concerned, so let me clarify. I never said Randy Gardner showed no side effects from sleep deprivation. I merely praised his motor skills and clarity of thinking at the conclusion of his experiment. Verbal sleight of hand, I admit. But Randy Gardner most certainly experienced side effects associated with tiredness. Yet it is important to remember that all his symptoms disappeared after a good night’s rest, and he suffered no long-term physical or psychological repercussions.”
“Was he also a grumpybum like these two? Fighting and yelling with everybody?”
“Admittedly, no,” Wallis said. “But unlike Chad and Sharon, Randy Gardner was not confined to a single room. He was permitted to venture wherever he chose. He went bowling and dined in restaurants. He interacted with other people. This would have considerably improved his state of mind.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Anyway, Penny, it’s already ten past two. If you think you’re getting paid overtime for hanging around past the end of your shift, think again.”
“Okay, professor,” she said, standing, “I know when I’m not wanted. I’ll see you tomorrow!”
After Penny Park left, Dr. Wallis found himself thinking about her. Earlier, when his arm had accidentally brushed her chest, she didn’t make any effort to move back. In fact, he was quite sure she had leaned into his arm before he suggested they exchange seats. So what was her endgame? he wondered. Was she simply flirting with him for the sake of flirting, or did she have the more audacious goal of sleeping with him?
Smiling thinly to himself—he couldn’t deny it was a good feeling to know he was still attractive to twenty-something year olds—Wallis lit a cigarette and turned to his task of observing the Australians. Over the course of the next two hours little of interest occurred. Chad binge-watched an episodic series on Netflix, while Sharon read her book, paced the room, and showered. At one point Wallis put his feet up on the desk to get comfortable. Soon his eyelids grew heavy and he had to fight to keep them open—
He snapped awake, surprised he had allowed himself to nod off. He checked his watch and discovered it was already seven o’clock in the evening. Sharon, he observed, was now watching a movie, while Chad—Chad was nowhere in the sleep laboratory.
Alarmed, Wallis sat straight.
Did he slip out while I was asleep?
Goddammit!
He smacked the Talk button. “Chad? Where are you? Sharon, where did Chad go?”
“What, mate?” an irritated voice replied. A moment later Chad’s head rose above the far side of the island in the kitchen.
Dr. Wallis relaxed. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Lying down,” Chad grunted.
“On the floor?”
“What’s it to you?”
His head disappeared below the island.
Wallis made a note of the incident on the laptop, monitored Chad’s heartrate for the next fifteen minutes to make sure he was not somehow sleeping, then he stood and stretched, cracking his back in the process. He went to the bathroom, but afterward, instead of returning to the observation room, he decided to visit his former office for old times’ sake.
When he reached the fourth floor of the old cement building, he went left, passing empty office spaces that had served the faculty and graduate students, to his corner office at the end of the corridor. Stepping inside the twilit space, nostalgia bloomed in his gut. There was nothing to look at now, but he was seeing the office in his mind’s eye as it had once been. Remembering some of the students he had counseled here, the faculty with whom he had debated and socialized. The nights he had worked late, composing lectures, grading essays and exams, writing papers. This little room had been his life—and now it was a soulless husk waiting to be demolished.
Dr. Wallis went to the north-facing window and drew a finger along the ledge, leaving a line in the dust. He looked out onto rain-soaked Hearst Avenue. The traffic lights glistened wetly. Puddles reflected the sinking sun in their pockmarked surfaces.
“Why do we get old?” he mused out loud. “Why does everything have to change? Why can’t we just be?”
Somebody was down on the sidewalk.
Wallis leaned forward until his head touched the windowpane, but the person had angled toward Tolman Hall and out of his line of sight.
He backtracked down the corridor and descended the stairs to the main floor. He looked through the glass doors that opened to the breezeway. The person wasn’t out there.
And what would it matter if he or she was? he thought.
Although the campus might feel like a ghost town, it wasn’t off limits by any means. Anyone was free to come and go as they pleased.
Dr. Wallis returned to the building’s basement, and his ongoing experiment.
◆◆◆
Penny and her friend Jimmy Su sat in the inky shadows at the base of a large pine tree, the inverted cone of boughs shielding them from the light rain.
“Another one!” Penny said, using a twig to poke a beetle doing its best to move through the wet grass. “This tree must be infested with them.”
“It’s a pine tree,” Jimmy said, “and the beetles are pine bark beetles, so your deduction is spot on, Sherlock.”
Jimmy was of Taiwanese descent, but he had lived in California since he was a kid, and he was about as Californian as you could get, with the gym body, the blond streak through his otherwise black hair, and the nose and tongue and helix piercings.
He and Penny had been friends since orientation week, and given he’d never once hit on her, she suspected he was gay, though he never admitted to this and she never asked. Because whether he was or not didn’t matter to her. She simply liked having a guy friend she could hang out with every now and then.
Ever since he’d started his part-time summer job as an assistant to an arborist, however, he’d been acting a little weird. He would stop before random trees, for instance, place his hands against their trunks and close his eyes, like he was speaking telepathically to them. He would also bombard her with all sorts of stupid tree facts. Not five minutes ago he told her the pine sheltering them from the rain was one of more than a hundred different species in the genus Pinus, which were divvied up based upon their types of leaves, cones, and seeds, and—hold onto your hats, people!—they had once been the favorite snack of duckbilled dinosaurs.
Needless to say, she was looking forward to getting the old Jimmy back at the end of the summer.
Poking the beetle with the twig again, Penny said, “How do you know this thing’s a pine bark beetle? It looks like any other beetle to me.”
“It’s a pine bark beetle,” Jimmy assured her.
She squashed it beneath her heel.
“Hey! What the hell did you do that for?”
“I hate beetles. Besides, they’re killing this tree.”
“We don’t know that for certain. Most pine beetles live in dead or dying hosts, which means there’s a good chance the tree is already rotting.”
Penny looked up at the towering pine. “Looks pretty healthy to me.”
“You can’t tell if it’s sick just by looking at it. Bet if we peeled off a bit of its bark, the cambium layer would be brown and dry—”
“Holy God,” she said, slapping her forehead. “Is this what my life has become?”
Jimmy frowned. “What’s wrong with being knowledgeable about t
rees? You do realize that without them animal life would cease to exist?”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “And I also realize it’s time I get some more friends.”
“Great! I wish you had more friends too. Then maybe it would be someone else other than me sitting out here cold and wet. What are we doing anyway?”
“I told you. Waiting for Dr. Wallis.”
“Yeah, you want to jump his bones. But do you really think stalking him like this is the best way to go about it?”
“I’m not stalking him!” she said indignantly.
“You’re sitting under a tree at night, drunk, waiting for him to stroll past unaware. That sounds like stalking to me. Why can’t you just go into Tolman Hall and meet him? You two work together, after all.”
“Because Guru’s going to be arriving any minute to do the handover.”
“So?”
“So, I don’t want him around when I make another—”
She cut herself off. She had been about to say make another move, but she hadn’t told Jimmy Dr. Wallis had already rejected her this morning. She was too embarrassed. The rebuff had stung, and it had continued stinging all day.
Even so, the more she’d thought about what had occurred, the more she became certain the only reason Dr. Wallis turned her down was because he was her professor. He was trying to keep to some moral high ground. But of course he secretly wanted her. He was forty-one. She was hot and young. No way he would say no again if she ditched the talking and simply presented herself to him, ready and willing.
Which was why she’d invited Jimmy up to her apartment earlier (he lived on the second floor in the same building) for a few drinks. The plan was to make it look as though she had been out partying all evening with a bunch of friends and had decided spur-of-the-moment to stop by Tolman Hall on her way home to say hi.
Penny took another swill of the vodka and orange juice from Jimmy’s little silver flask, and she almost barfed it back up.
