Placebo

On Saturday, Biggs went down to the small park between the tall buildings. He looked both ways before pushing into the shrubbery and found the place where, only two days earlier, he had created a nest of twigs and grass. Curling up inside, it wasn’t long before his thoughts took on the lawlessness of sleep. Images and ideas now drifted, unmoored by reason. A heavier sleep soon fell over him like a rug and he saw nothing. Two hours later, he had a dream about his wife, Carolyn, shining light into his eyes from clusters of crystalline fractals she cradled in her hands. He returned to the world blinking up at shards of the sun through the weave of saplings.

So he had slept again, and dreamt! It’s true: I’m immune, he acknowledged.

At this point, he was the only sleeper he knew of in the vast city. Certainly there were others, but they, too, were most likely keeping their abilities secret. Sleepers had been harassed, held away from sleep by resentful pot-banging neighbors. One man had his head shaved while he slept on a commercial flight. And a woman who had climbed up into a tree to sleep fell to her death. She had been discovered by her sleepless husband who, in a rage of exhaustion, brought the tree down with a chainsaw, then claimed he only meant to wake her.

Each day there were more incidents, reported with diminishing sympathy by media outlets rapidly losing their commitment to unbiased journalism, since the people of the media were also becoming sleepless. This colored the coverage, fanning the embers of resentment. A tipping point would soon be reached, Biggs sensed, and then the witch hunt would begin. Unless he too lost his ability to sleep, it was inevitable that he would be hunted. Biggs felt he could postpone it by being discrete, deceptive. He would pretend to be sleepless and steal naps when he could. Now, however, despite his efforts to assume a frazzled appearance, he emerged from the shrubbery looking glaringly rested. This was noticed immediately by a man who, down on all fours, was frantically tearing at the grass on the parkway.

Hey! What were you doing in there? the man asked, jumping to his feet.

Biggs tried to walk past him, but the man, in the new manner of the sleepless, violated his personal space and stood in his way.

I did-didn’t I?-ask you a question, the man said. He was large, porcine, swaying like a drunk with the telltale bloodshot eyes set deeply within tunnels of dark rings. His hands were shaking and his shirt was stained. Biggs could see, in the darting of eyes and fits of flinches, that the man now lived in a world layered with hallucinations. Poor Carolyn had entered this stage a few days ago. It was the stage that rendered people, businesses, industries, and empires useless and obsolete. When dream stuff is allowed to seep into the landscape, the collective contract with reality is broken. Nothing human, Biggs had seen, can function in this endless shuffling of rivaling realities. How bizarre that the by-product of an insomnia epidemic is the rise of dreams.

Indeed, the standardized world was now being replaced with millions of personalized universes, authored by the shattered minds of the sleepless. And while the resulting clash of narratives probably meant the expiration of humanity, Biggs was prolonging his well-being with his own fictions. It was easy to fool the sleepless, he had discovered. They were, in their erratic mental state, as gullible as children. A week or so without sleep-less for some-and their bullshit detectors were knocked out of commission. The first thing they lost was their capacity for irony and sarcasm. After that, it was a short slide to an unnatural naïveté. Biggs had learned this in his dealings with Carolyn, who had stopped sleeping ten days ago.

I said I want to say that the what I want to know is what you were doing, the man insisted, speaking in the slurred and circular way of the sleepless. It was as though they were intoxicated with exhaustion.

I took a shortcut through, Biggs tried. The potential for violence hung in the air. Who knows how desperate people had become? He considered running. He had to get back to Carolyn.

But I can see it all over you and yourself it’s there and there and there!

See what?

Don’t you know what’s so clear to me in my eyes? the man said, incredulous. You’re covered with sleep all over you! Do you mind?

The man picked up Biggs’s arm and licked it.

Biggs pulled his arm away. No! he ordered, like commanding a dog. He rubbed his arm against his side, drying it. Don’t do that.

But where did you get it and how can I get it? Even as he said this, the man reached for Biggs and extended his tongue. Biggs had observed this in others: the sleepless now seeking sleep as a physical object or substance that they feverishly had to obtain. Earlier in the week, a family had identified sleep as a particular sparrow darting from tree to tree with its flock. They chased the birds down the parkway. Just yesterday, he watched a man tearing apart the engine of his car, under the impression that certain obscure hoses were high in sleep content. They could be melted down, he explained to onlookers, and poured over pancakes. Many ran off to deconstruct their own cars. Their desperation terrified Biggs, who wondered how long it would be before someone suggested the pancreas or tongue of sleepers could cure you if eaten raw.

Listen, he told the man, thinking up a story. I haven’t slept in days, but I heard wild lettuce is a natural soporific. Where had he learned this? Reading Beatrix Potter to the kids at the Center?

Lettuce you’re saying? Is a what again?
Soporific. Induces sleep.

Lettuce like lettuce in a lettuce salad? In a lettuce soup or sandwich?

Keep it down, all right? Because you know what? There’s a ton of it growing right over there. Wild lettuce. That’s what I was doing-eating it. That’s why it’s all over me. And I’m feeling like I could fall asleep any second now.

Show me where because I want to eat some!

Right there, Biggs pointed. In the middle of those bushes. Go on. While no one’s watching.

The man lumbered towards the island of shrubs in the lawn. He seemed to be sniffing at the air, letting his nose guide him to the mythical lettuce. He looked back and Biggs gave him the all-clear, sending him a few steps into the snapping foliage.

Biggs ran. He darted around the corner, between the buildings, through the cold corridor of shade. The city streets were empty around him except for haphazardly parked cars. Most of the shops were closed, some had already been looted-windows smashed, the shelves inside empty. From the apartments overhead, he could hear distant wailing and the occasional shout or scream. Half a block ahead, a TV exploded on the sidewalk. Someone had tossed it from several stories up. Biggs could sense that a storm was gathering behind dark windows and closed doors. He ran two blocks before slowing to a walk. His thoughts turned to Carolyn, to curing her. It’s true that their marriage was in a delicate place, but the events of the last few weeks had brought them together, he thought. They needed each other now. He had feared that she was drifting away and now, he secretly appreciated the crisis and the opportunity it had brought. He had a plan to help her. Now that he was somewhat rested, it was time to give it a try.

Biggs believed-no, hoped-that Carolyn, and perhaps millions of others, was responding to the epidemic psychosomatically. Maybe people were so worried about being able to sleep that they couldn’t sleep from worrying about it. It was a chain reaction fed by fear. That isn’t to say that something real hadn’t happened: it appeared that a core population had inexplicably lost its ability to sleep. The cause remained as mysterious as the die-off of honeybees, the absence of acorns. But Biggs rejected the notion that the epidemic was sudden. He had seen many of his family and friends lose their ability to sleep over the years. Carolyn had always struggled with it. It was her mind, she had always claimed, that kept her up. She couldn’t turn off her head. She had always been a bit of a hypochondriac, too. All this added up to the perfect profile of someone likely to buy into the epidemic.

Biggs thought he could cure her with nothing more than some aspirin, or maybe even some kind of generic-looking vitamin. Whatever. As long as Carolyn couldn’t identify it. He was banking on the climate of heightened susceptibility. It was a great time for storytellers, he thought, for magicians and advertisers. It was the ideal era for fictions and placebos-well-intended, white lies that produce the truth in spite of themselves. He had seen it work in pharm tests at the Children’s Center, where supposedly terminally ill kids with the same symptoms were as effectively “cured” by sugar pills as those administered the actual drug. He didn’t know the science behind it; he was only the in-house tutor, teaching kids to read. Maybe it wasn’t science that was behind it, he allowed.

He needed to swing by the CVS before going upstairs. It was unofficially open in the sense that many of the windows had been shattered when, earlier that week, a mob demanding sleeping pills had formed. They broke in and overpowered the few unfortunate employees that had reported for duty. They looted until the police arrived, themselves wild-eyed and frothing, some naked and others bristling with guns and knives, and chased off the mob. Then it was the cops who shot out the surveillance cameras and aisle mirrors before eating pills off the floor and chugging cough syrups. The store personnel fled, never to return. Biggs assumed corporate would send in reinforcements, but they never arrived.

Now he stepped through the jagged window frame into the dim cavern of ransacked space. The hall, stripped of its commercial order, was chilling in its silence and disarray. Pills and glass crunched underfoot. There were others there in the poor lighting, picking through the shelves, throwing unwanted items on the floor. He could hear them sniffling, mumbling, an occasional cough. He almost tripped over an elderly woman crawling along the edge of the store. She grabbed at his pants suddenly. He yelped and jerked himself free. Goddamn it!

I’m looking and needing tea, she said. Can you point me to the tea that I’m wanting?

It’s all gone, Biggs said, annoyed that she had startled him. They threw it in the harbor.

They threw it in the harbor did they really? Now why would they do that to the tea throw it in the harbor like that to what make the harbor tea?

Yeah, the harbor is tea, Biggs called back to her as he felt his way down the aisle. Sun tea. Better go get your share.

He continued towards the back of the store where he remembered the painkillers to be. He had been here many times before for the usual items and, twice, for pregnancy tests. The shelves were empty but the floor was littered with capsules and tablets. He picked through the empty plastic jars and smashed boxes. The ground was fluffy with the cotton stuffing, looking like snowfall in the dimness. He knelt and picked out a handful of pills. He carried them outside and quickly crossed to the sunny side of the street, like a kid who just made a grab at a candy store. Opening his fist, he saw the pills were a variety of shapes and colors. Some say this is what started it, he noted. All these drugs we take. These could be the seeds, he thought, to our apocalypse.

He picked out five simple white pills that had no discernable branding and put them in his left pocket. He shoved the rest into his right, thinking they could come in handy. You never know. I’m like Jack, he thought. Coming home with five magic beans.

He started for home, but circled back to the CVS. He went inside and was able to find two bags of tea, which he gave to the old woman crawling on the floor.

Biggs took the stairs up to their sixth floor loft. The elevator still worked, but he was wary of being trapped, knowing no one would come to his rescue. Because he didn’t want to encounter any of his neighbors, he took off his shoes and silently passed down the hall. Inside, the loft was dim. It was a tiny, book-filled space-a Murphy bed, table and chairs, a stylish leather sofa. The windows on the far wall opened to a building identical to theirs: a converted wool warehouse now crammed with dimly lit, book-filled lofts. He went to Carolyn’s office, the only closed-off space in the otherwise open plan. When he saw that Carolyn was still tied to the chair, but that she had toppled over and was not moving, his first thought was that she had finally fallen asleep. His second, which sent him bounding over the desk, was that someone had come in and killed her.

CAROLYN? he yelled.

Before he could reach her, he saw that his voice caused her to flinch.

She started growling through the gag and he told her to shush. She thrashed wildly and screamed at him from somewhere deep in her chest. There was a bruise on her shoulder from hitting the floor. She was ancient around the eyes.

When he finally had her upright and the ropes loosened, he pleaded with her to relax. She settled, spent after a few more muffled outbursts.

He took off the gag.

Where did you what? she asked angrily. You don’t go for so long all around and around if you’re who you said you are.

I’ll tell you all about it. You just settle down, okay, baby? He rubbed her arms and hands. He stroked her hair, saying, Easy, easy, easy. She seemed to relax again, even letting her eyelids, puffy with weight, come down for a prolonged beat. She was still, silent with eyes closed long enough for Biggs to think, Maybe? Finally? But she looked up at him suddenly and asked, Where’s my mother?

Your mother?

Mom was here earlier, she said lucidly, matter-of-factly. It would have passed for a normal, pre-epidemic utterance if not for the fact that her mother had been dead for almost three years.

She was here and she told me that you must lift the floor if you think this is ever going to work so you can kill the earwigs there.

What was this-some echo of old resentments, filtered and mutated as it passed through the screen of dreams? He undid the knots, thinking that if her mother had visited from beyond the grave she would say, Still no baby?

Of course not. Not with the all the earwigs under the floor. He rubbed the places where the ropes had made red marks on Carolyn’s flesh. The way she said thank you was distant and professional. It got to him, but he pushed back on it and kept his machinery turning by staying focused. She was changing, slipping away with every hour. No one knew where all this was heading, but he didn’t want her going there.

He wouldn’t leave her. Even if it got bad, he wouldn’t leave. He told himself this as he combed the hair off her face and tucked it behind her ear.

He was trying to solve this goddamn problem. He had a plan and that kept him going. It had always been his strength and his gift-having a plan, having confidence about his plans. The key, he had realized, was making sure others depended upon your plan-the children of the Center, the wife he loved, his own family and friends that were somewhere out in the mounting chaos. Fear of letting them down kept him going. It was a simple, clean way to live. It grounded him in the face of inexplicable loss. It had made him impervious to slights and indignities and, maybe now, it made him immune to this thing that was in the heads of everyone else, churning angrily in the current of their thoughts.

Carolyn found it difficult to stand. Her legs had cramped. He rubbed them down, feeling her warmth through the flannel pajama pants. He had dressed her for sleep, hoping the suggestion of her costume would help matters. Why tie me that way, she asked, annoyed at the soreness in her legs, the bruise on her shoulder. He explained again that she was a little confused lately and he didn’t want her wandering off. What he really feared was that she would fall out the sixth floor window or let someone in.

But we won’t have to do that anymore, he told her. You know why? Because I managed to score some of these.

He showed her the pills in his hand.

Hey, she brightened, what are those for doing? She looked at them with sweet wonder. He was moved to hug her.

Big squeeze, she said in his ear.

He told the story he had been working on in his head. That the government hadn’t completely disappeared as everyone was thinking. That representatives were in the city distributing experimental pills. They’re wearing such soothing blue suits. I mean just seeing them makes you want to sleep. You should see the lines, he told her. They wind all around the park. The whole city practically! And the pills work. He was sure of it. The government had people in a glass bus, sleeping in bunks. Just people off the street who volunteered to take the pills. You can see them sleeping in there, snoring away. Slobbering on those government-issue pillows. Someone had figured this thing out. Science was going to beat this thing. That’s what happens when we get our back to the wall, right? The answers come. They’re probably right in front of us all along, it just takes a crisis to open our eyes.

This was wishful speculation now. Somehow, perhaps because here he was immune, he had come to believe that the epidemic was merely a sticky little story of demise that moved like spores in the breeze and attached itself to the side of people’s minds. His hope, with Carolyn at least, was to replace that story with another.

Carolyn listened, wincing as she stared at the pills in his hand. She somehow managed to frown and smile at the same time, pained but believing. I want to want to sleep so terribly terribly bad, she told him.

He grabbed her, pulled her close, and kissed the top of her head. She squeezed his arm with both hands. She wanted to wring answers out of his flesh.
You will. You take one of these pills and you will.

I want to take one of those pills, she said, awestruck by what it offered.

She was buying it, Biggs could tell. This just might work and he hadn’t even played the ace up his sleeve: he would show her that they work.

He would sleep for her.

They took their pills and went to bed. Biggs was on his side, next to Carolyn, watching her face. His plan was to see if she would drift off, then follow her down into the clouds. He wanted to make sure she didn’t get up and start pacing around, as she had been doing lately, passing the night by walking around the apartment or standing in corners mumbling an indiscernible litany of regrets. He would get out of bed, too, and sit at the table in the middle of their studio, urging her to at least lie down on the couch. Sometimes they watched TV, but there was now no live news and they were left with syndicated reruns that offensively carried on with their absurdly petty concerns.

He wanted very badly to sleep on these nights, but fought it off for the sake of convincing Carolyn that he was also afflicted. The decision to deceive her had been made after her second attack on his ability to sleep. She was appalled at his indifference. Was he so self-absorbed that even this-a global crisis-didn’t reach him? And how could he flaunt his capacity to achieve sleep with his snores? His sleepy lip smacking and sighs of contentment were insulting, he was told. He had always been able to sleep-anywhere at anytime-and this had offended her before, since she struggled to get there every night, and since her sleep was so precariously held. The slightest noise or change in the light could wake her. Her mind, roaring in the chassis of her skull, pounced on painful memories or worries about the future, batting them around for hours as she tossed and turned. But the annoyance she had expressed before now took the form of contempt and rage. She, in her erratic and weary state, had threatened to wake him with boiling water if he fell asleep in front of her again.

She turned on her side, with her back to him. He felt her rubbing her feet together-a kinetic mantra, a physical focal point that she sometimes employed. She was trying and he loved her for it. He wanted to tell her to quiet her mind, to let the pill do its job, but he knew that would only cause her to think too much about it. The best thing to do was keep still and quiet. No touching, no singing, no counting of sheep. Just let the story, the setup do its job. Let it work its way in.

Should he allow himself to fall asleep? He felt that he could on command since, though he had been stealing naps, he had a severe deficit. He was exhausted, too. Not to the point of debilitation, but more so than he could recall. It was bone deep. His skeleton was tired. Would falling asleep convince her that the pills work? Would it be the evidence she needed? Or would it set her off? He decided to wait more, as long as he could. Instead, he listened to the sounds in the apartment-the occasional shout or scream from outside, the distant sound of shattering glass.

Despite his efforts, he may have dozed off. He wasn’t sure, but he was suddenly confused by the tremors. The bed was shaking. He looked at Carolyn’s back. She was shuddering with sobs and talking to herself deliriously. The words flowed in jags and tears, sometimes spooling out smoothly, other times spat. It was dispatched from a remote location, like the transmission from a distant radio. It was hard to make out the words. The thought occurred to him that the pill he had given her wasn’t an aspirin after all, but some heavier drug that had migrated to that aisle in the chaos. Her voice spooked him. He listened, though he suspected he shouldn’t. She was conversing to the cosmos and he was eavesdropping.

Don’t ask me why, he thought he heard her say. Don’t ask me don’t ask me don’t ask me. You already know. You are on the inside and you are connected to what knows and by asking you are being false, so false because you know already. Stop acting like you don’t know.

Was the you me? Biggs wondered. Was she talking to me now?

He reached for her, but then drew back his hand. Maybe she was sleeping, he thought. Maybe she was talking in her sleep. The manic quality of her words suggested that she didn’t entirely own them. He let them come and in the tangle of language, in the stops and starts, the loops and overlaps. She said, You told me to meet you there and I didn’t. I didn’t go because I was afraid so afraid but not of you. I couldn’t hear you with the waves hitting and I know you waited in that room for me but I never came. I think about how you waited, looking out the window at the rain, watching the light of cars thinking there she is there there there but no it wasn’t me and what did you do then? On the street you looked for my yellow umbrella. You saw it for the rest of your short life just like I see your stupid car parked all over the city, the one we were in so much with the dirty windshield no matter how much you cleaned it and every time I see it I can’t believe I live on and on when I promised you I would not.

What was this? Biggs sat up, trying to piece the story together, matching it at those places where it broke through the membrane of her internal world and jutted into his own memory. She did have a yellow umbrella a few years back, he recalled. It was clear that she wasn’t talking about him. But who? No one in her family. It was some other intimacy that he knew nothing about. It rattled him. It was the sleeplessness talking, mostly, he tried to tell himself. She was reenacting a dream, a movie, a book she had read. It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t really be about someone else, some other person, a man, waiting for her? Some life she had denied herself. What would that make this? What would that make me to her?

Carolyn, he said, shaking her shoulder.

I have created my own cage, she said, pulling away.

Carolyn, you’re not making sense. You’re talking but you’re not saying things that are making sense to people.

This is where there’s a hole to go through, she said.

CAROLYN! he shouted, trying to break through. She went silent. He waited for her to say something but she remained silent. She was still, yet he knew she was awake. Was she waiting for him to fall asleep? Did she think she could fool him? He stared at the back of her head, thinking back, replaying the last few years, holding up events and incidents to her ramblings, her uninvited story. Looking for connections. What would that make this? A loop started and would not stop.

Someone far away was screaming an old song.

He was awake, thoughts churning in a tar pit of weariness, staring at the back of her head.