by Jeremy Bates
“We talking winter-level storms here?” he asked her.
“Not that heavy, but it will be raining nearly nonstop.”
“Good thing I’ll be cooped up inside Tolman Hall.”
“I’d love to see it.”
“Better be quick. It’s going to be torn down later this summer.”
“I mean your experiment.”
Wallis blinked in surprise. “Really?”
“Sure. Can I?”
“There’s nothing to see. It’s just two people sequestered in a room.”
“I know you don’t like talking about it much, Roy, but I really would like to see it. I’m a mess if I don’t get my eight hours of sleep each night. And your guinea pigs have gone two weeks?”
Wallis hedged. “I don’t know, Brook…I’m not exactly running a freak show, a penny a peek.”
“I won’t interfere or anything, I promise. Didn’t you say there was a two-way mirror? So they won’t even see me.”
“When did you want to come by?”
“We’re not doing anything right now.”
Wallis contemplated this as he chugged what remained of the sake.
“All right then,” he decided, dabbing his bearded lips with a serviette. “Let’s do it.”
◆◆◆
“Jesus H. Christ!” Dr. Wallis exclaimed as soon as they stepped inside the observation room.
“Oh my God… Is that?” Brook spun away and made a retching sound.
Wallis couldn’t take his eyes away from the viewing window. One or both of the Australians had torn hundreds of pages from the books in the library and plastered them to the two-way glass with their feces. Their work was so thorough he couldn’t see into the sleep laboratory at all.
He hit the Talk button on the touch panel controller. “Hey, guys…?” he said, a singsong intonation to the question.
They didn’t answer.
Brook came to stand beside him. She didn’t speak
“Chad?” he tried again. “Sharon? What’s going on in there?”
He heard susurrate whispers and witchy laughter.
“Roy…?” Brook said, her voice careful.
“This is absolutely unprecedented,” he told her.
“Is it a joke? Why would they…do this?”
“They’ve been experiencing mild hallucinations. This must be some sort of extension of their distorted perception.”
“Like they saw something in their reflections they didn’t like so they covered up the mirror?”
Wallis thought of Chad’s hallucination that mushrooms were growing from his head and nodded.
“I don’t like it, Roy,” she added. “Should we…I don’t know…should we get them help?”
“No,” he said harshly as he experienced a sickening sense of déjà vu. Nevertheless, he quickly dismissed any notion that he would have to serve Brook the same fate as Penny. Brook wasn’t impulsive or disloyal or motivated by self-interest. She would never go behind his back to the Board of Trustees. “I mean, not right away,” he added. “I’ll keep watch on them for a bit, let them outside to get some fresh air, give them some time to clear their heads.”
“You think that’s all they need? What they’ve done is…”
“I’m ninety-five percent sure it’s all they need, Brook. Maybe I’ll even take them for ice cream?” He smiled. “Anyway, if for whatever reason they don’t shape up, I’ll drive them over to Alta Bates Summit myself. Their health, of course, is of the utmost importance.”
“You don’t want me to stick around with you until you know for sure that everything is okay…?”
“Everything is okay, Brook.” He smiled again, only this time it was a little tighter. “Trust me. I’ve been spending eight hours a day with these guys for the last two weeks. I know them inside out. They just need to be let out of the room for a while. Now why don’t I drive you home? It’s late, and you have work tomorrow morning, don’t you?”
“Well, okay then. I guess…well, I won’t be seeing you for another week, will I?”
Dr. Wallis kissed her on the cheek and led her from the observation room. “Hopefully we can find time before that. Maybe you could even come back in a couple of days to see the Australians when they’re back to their boring old selves reading books and watching TV?”
“Yes, I would like that.” They started up the stairs to the main floor. “Thank you for the lovely evening, Roy.” She glanced over her shoulder the way they had come, laughing. “I mean, it was really lovely…up until that.”
“You’re getting off easy,” he said, laughing too. “I’m the one who’s going to have to figure out how to clean it all up.”
Day 13
Saturday, June 9
Sharon was happy they could no longer see her. All their spying had been driving her crazy. Her hands smelled like crap, the entire sleep observatory smelled like crap, but the privacy was worth it. She felt giddy with the success of what she and Chad had done…giddy and free.
They can’t see me! They can’t see me! They can’t see me!
A series of giggles escaped her mouth.
Chad, across the room, looked at her. She thought he was going to start yelling like he always did, but instead he giggled too.
She scampered toward him on all fours.
“They can’t see us!” she whispered.
“Fuck them!” he said.
They both broke into titters.
“Chad…?” she said quietly.
“Yeah…?” he said.
“Can you hear the voices…?”
“Yeah…”
“But they’re not coming from the speakers…”
“No…”
“They’re coming from inside me…”
“Me too…”
“They want me to…do stuff…”
“Me too…”
“They want…out…”
“I know…”
“Should we let them…?”
He began laughing then, his fouled hands clamped over his mouth, and after a moment of watching him, she joined in.
◆◆◆
Chad and Sharon refused to communicate with Dr. Wallis, and all he could hear via the microphones in the ceiling of the sleep laboratory was shuffled movement and the occasional rustle of secretive laughter.
He didn’t know if they still wore the smartwatches he’d given them, but the devices were either turned off or out of batteries because the touch panel controller was no longer displaying their heartrates or blood pressure.
He pressed Talk once again, but this time he said, “Guys? I’m coming in, okay? Just to make sure everything is okay.”
Laughter.
Dr. Wallis went to the door to the sleep laboratory.
It didn’t budge.
He tried the handle again, realized the door was blocked from the other side, and threw his shoulder into it.
No good.
What the hell had they moved in front of it?
He returned to the desk and sat down. Although frustrated he could no longer visually observe what was going on in there, he was also brimming with excitement.
The Sleep Experiment had entered the next phase.
◆◆◆
At 1:43 that morning, Sharon began to scream.
◆◆◆
By 3:00 a.m., her screaming and crying had stopped.
◆◆◆
Half an hour later, after repeated attempts at communication with the two Australians, Dr. Wallis made a call.
“Professor?” Guru Rampal said, sounding sleepy.
“I need you come to Tolman Hall. Right now.”
◆◆◆
As soon as Guru Rampal stepped into the observation room, he stopped flat-footed as if he’d run smack into a wall. “Yikes!” he said, staring at the violated viewing window. “What have they done?”
Dr. Wallis stood and offered Guru the chair. “Sit down, Guru. We need to have a talk.”
He sat down, frowning. “H
ave I done something wrong, professor?”
“No, this concerns the Sleep Experiment. Details that you don’t know, and that you need to know, if you are to help me.”
“What would you like me to do?”
“You are a bright young man, Guru. You must understand that no great progress is ever made without sacrifice.”
“Yes, I do understand that, professor. I myself made a great sacrifice to leave India and my family to study in America.”
Wallis nodded. “I too have sacrificed much—a social life, marriage, children—all in the name of my work. The last ten years I’ve been consumed with a theory that, if proven correct, will change the world forever. Success is tantalizingly close. But it all hangs on the success of the Sleep Experiment.”
“But you said you ended the experiment, professor?”
Wallis stroked his beard. “When I was a child, Guru, my parents took me to church every Sunday morning. I remember the services well. They always began with a procession down the aisle. The big old Hammond organ would blast out rusty notes while the altar boy, carrying a giant cross, would lead the slow-moving line. Following him came the candle bearers and the priest and finally the deacon with the Gospel Book. The congregation would join them in a hymn. Although it was played in the upbeat major key, and meant to be joyous, and everybody gave it their best falsetto, I was always confused by the verses. They implied that Satan wasn’t trapped in a fiery lake in the middle of the earth like I’d believed up until that point in my young life. He was, in fact, loose upon the world, leading an invisible army of demons. When I asked my mother about this, she quoted the Scriptures, telling me, ‘Satan has desired to have you.’ This is what Jesus told his apostle Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane, because Peter was prepared to fight bravely for Jesus against flesh and blood enemies, but he was unprepared to meet Satan on the battlefield of the heart and mind. And that’s where Satan and his minions will get you, I learned that day, where he will always get you, wherever and whenever he wants, perhaps without you ever even knowing. In the heart and mind.” Wallis lit up a cigarette. “Growing up, the inexorableness of this concept terrified me. In fact, to this day, I still have dreams that play to these fears. My point here? It was this simple statement—‘Satan has desired to have you’—that set the course of my life. It’s what got me interested in psychology.” He pondered this for a long moment. “You see, Guru, my parents died when I was only a little younger than you,” he continued. “They were sailing in the Bahamas when pirates attacked them, if you can believe that. Fucking pirates. The swine boarded my parents’ yacht, stole everything of value, then sent my parents overboard. That’s what the local police believe happened, at any rate, and I don’t have any reason to doubt them. I went to a dark place after that, I won’t lie. A very dark place. I didn’t care if I lived or died. I had suicidal thoughts. Once, when I was driving down the freeway, I had a nearly irresistible urge to swerve my car into oncoming traffic with no thought for the others I would kill in the process of killing myself—and it was that moment I realized Satan had already gotten me.” Wallis took a long, hard drag, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. “I turned my life around then. I did my best to banish the darkness inside me. I changed my major to psychology to understand better why people did some of the awful things they did, to help them if I could. Nevertheless, it was the science of sleep that proved to be my true calling. I joined the wave of researchers endeavoring to uncover what went on in our brains when we slept. Before the 1950s, everyone thought sleep was a passive activity, but then electroencephalographs changed the game, revealing that our brains have a clear four-stage routine that repeats over and over until we wake at the end of a bout of REM, our minds full of melting clocks and impossible places and faces we can’t remember.”
“Here is an interesting fact, professor,” Guru said. “One of the first researchers to study REM found that he could predict when an infant would wake by watching the movements of its eyes beneath its eyelids.”
Dr. Wallis nodded, twisting his cigarette out in the ashtray. “A party trick to liven up any Tupperware party, no doubt. Now, here’s an equally interesting fact: every single creature you can strap electrodes to and keep up past their bedtimes—birds, seals, cats, hamsters, dolphins, you name it—all experience this four-stage routine when they sleep.”
“Hamsters dream when they sleep?”
“Dream and a lot more, brother. Golden hamsters wake from hibernation—just to nap. So something pretty damn significant—essential, I would say—goes on when the lights are out. The question is, what? What the hell is going on during sleep that is so vital to every creature’s survival?”
“May I remind you, professor, that in your Sleep and Dream class, you argued that we sleep out of habit. We sleep, to paraphrase you, because we have always slept.”
“That certainly makes an interesting talking point, doesn’t it? Not to mention packs my lecture halls with inquisitive young minds. But do I believe this?” Wallis began to pace in the small observation room, his hands clasped behind his back. “Ten years ago—during the summer of 2008—I conducted my first sleep deprivation experiments on mice. At the time, most of this research was being conducted on fruit flies due to the fact they’re much cheaper and easier to maintain. But the benefit of mice is that they can be hooked up to an EEG machine. In the experiments, I stimulated the mice just as they were about to enter a bout of REM, causing an escalation of sleep pressure. Later, when I let the mice sleep undisturbed, I isolated any that were displaying odd behavior and dug into their genomes. Eventually I discovered they all shared a mutation in a specific gene. Their EEGs revealed an unusual number of high-amplitude sleep waves, suggesting they were unable to rid themselves of their sleep pressure and were consequently living a life of snoozy exhaustion. Although I have never been able to understand the full relationship between the mutated gene and sleep pressure, my research ultimately allowed me to engineer a preliminary version of the stimulant gas—which changed everything.”
◆◆◆
Guru was leaning forward in his chair. “What do you mean it changed everything, professor?”
“Control mice exposed to traditional sleep deprivation lived for anywhere between eleven and thirty-two days. No anatomical cause of death was ever identified; they simply dropped dead, which I speculate was due to stress or organ failure. The mice exposed to the stimulant gas, however, all died within fourteen days, and they didn’t merely drop dead. They died extremely horrible deaths.”
“I must ask how a mouse can die horribly, professor?”
“During the initial five or six days of the experiment, they behaved similarly to the control mice. They experienced a loss of appetite while their energy expenditures doubled baseline values, which resulted in rapid weight loss and a debilitated appearance. All to be expected. But then, between ten and fourteen days, they began spontaneously attacking one another with tooth and nail. These were not minor skirmishes due to tiredness, Guru. They were fights to the death—fights beyond death. Because whenever one mouse died, the survivors would attack its corpse for no apparent reason. Chew out its eyes, gnaw off its feet and tail, eviscerate its gut and remove its innards. Behavior antithetical to mice, and indeed to all animals, save for perhaps the most depraved of our species. And then when only a final mouse remained, it would turn on itself, performing acts of self-mutation until it was incapacitated by mortal injury.” Dr. Wallis paused theatrically. “That, my friend, is how a mouse can die horribly.”
◆◆◆
“But if the control mice behaved normally until they died of natural causes,” Guru said, “why would the mice under the influence of the stimulant gas act so bizarrely?”
“I asked myself that same question on a daily basis for months on end,” Wallis said. “Until one morning the answer stumbled onto my lap. I had been out for breakfast when a priest sat down at the table next to mine. Soon he was joined by another man, a friend perhaps, or another
priest not wearing his collar. In any event, they engaged in a theological discussion I had no interest in overhearing but could not help but listen to given their close proximity to me. I did not stick around for my usual second cup of coffee, and as I returned home, I began thinking about all the Sundays I had spent in church as a child. The song the congregation used to sing came to me. My mother quoting the Scriptures, warning me that Satan has desired to have us, and that the way he would get us was in our hearts—”
“And minds,” Guru said meaningfully. “Do not tell me you believe the mice under the stimulant gas were possessed, professor?”
“Possessed?” Dr. Wallis shrugged. “I am no longer a religious person, Guru, but I suppose ‘possessed’ is an adequate description of what happened to those mice, because what is possession other than the expression of a chaotic mind? And this is my point, my young friend. Every living organism—from tiny multicellular bacteria and viruses to mammals and human beings—we’re all chaos wrapped in order. In other words, we’ve all been born with madness inside us, though it’s kept in check by innate, fixed-pattern behavior.”
“You mean instinct?” he said.
“Exactly, Guru. Instinct—the instruction booklet on how to act sane, if you will. Because imagine if a lioness had no maternal instinct to raise her cubs? Or if a newly hatched sea turtle had no instinct to run to the ocean and relative safety? Or if a marsupial, upon being born, had no instinct to climb into its mother’s pouch? Indeed, without instinct a spider would never know how to spin a web. A bird would not know how to build a nest or hunt for worms. A bear would not hibernate during winter and likely starve to death. A dog would not shake water from its coat and likely fall ill. Without instinct, you see, existence would be chaos.”
“But what of us? Humans? We are not puppets of instinct—”
“Of course we are, Guru!” Wallis said. “Fear, anger, love. Instinct rules almost every moment of our lives. But you are right in one regard. With our complex brains, and our capacity for reason and free-will, we’re in the rare position in the animal kingdom to sneak a peek behind Mother Nature’s curtain to get a taste of the madness bubbling inside us. Because let me tell you, buddy, instinct has never told someone to jump off a bridge, or drive a van into a group of shoppers, or kidnap and torture a child. That’s the crazy inside us talking, the madness, unfettered by instinct.”
