10

After the first wave of the disease, everyone stopped being afraid and what we had once regarded as symptoms--the eternally runny nose, the loss of feeling in your lips--became mere side effects to the overall goal: the idea that you never needed to sleep.

Me, I was glad that I had that whatever-it-was twist in my genetics that kept me "unhealthy"--immune from catching the pandemic. I used sleep as a kind of medicine, the way God meant it to be used, to give my brain and emotions a rest.

Scientists were working quite literally night and day to "cure" people like me.

After the initial wave, they began to segregate the schools, claiming initially that they didn't want the disease to spread. This was nonsense, of course; the more the disease spread, the more capitalism thrived, the more hours existed in the day.



A worker who never got tired could keep twenty or thirty-hour shifts before he got angry and needed to go home to get happy again. No longer did you rest: you recharged your emotions like an old cell phone battery--less and less effectively each time. That is, I think, how the diseased slowly became so bland and automatic--their battery brains couldn't quite recharge all the way anymore, and so had to let some function go: it chose emotion.

Stock prices in tissues rose through the roof.

Those of us who could sleep, who did sleep, who must sleep had no real chance at "success". You could go to college, but none of the best ones.You could get a job, but none of the best ones. In fact, eventually you applied to a diseased school or a clean school. The sick ones had eight hours more every day to study, to work, to learn, to socialize, to play. It was quite impossible to keep up.

I had an hour's bus ride to school every morning--further cutting into the time we poor bastards had left. Every year fewer and fewer of us could sleep; and so a natural, normal function of life makes you a freak in a place where capitalism is king. We were a dying breed and on the level of pigs if able to close our eyes and dream.

I assure you, it's quite painful. I almost started the believe the hype myself, until I met Tony.

He, like me, was a sleeper. I was shamefully trying to keep my head low while buying some much-needed ChapStick. It had becomes something of a shameful thing. He was the cashier, which was the average job of a sleeper. I was lucky (but more than that, I had worked really hard my whole life) and had landed a secretarial position and actually received a salary instead of an hourly wage. I wasn't rich by any stretch of the imagination, but I made enough to rent a small apartment.

Anyway, I was just trying to quietly, quietly buy my ChapStick when dear Tony (known to be so by his name tag)said cheerfully, "Hi, what's your name?" There probably weren't any other words I wanted to hear less. They very last thing I wanted was to draw attention to myself.

"Yseult," I muttered.

"I'm Tony," he replied, happy and perky and too damn loud. "You shouldn't hide your face all embarrassed like that. You're pretty."

Well, who was I to ignore such point-blank flattery? It wasn't often people like me got compliments unmarred by comments such as "too bad you need to recharge" or "too bad you'll never amount to anything."

So we got to talking. After some talking I let him move in, as a roommate was economically convenient and this one especially so, as he got an employee's discount on food. And, slowly, he explained to me what he meant. He wasn't so stupid and brainlessly happy so as to uncover my tired status carelessly. Tony had been friend-hunting. We all needed a friend, he said, to remind us that we weren't stupid or useless or failures of any of the other hundred and one things we were accused of being just because we slept. We were normal. Admittedly an old normal, but not a bad normal. He was fiercely proud of his ability to sleep.

At first I thought he was crazy, but in a way I tolerated, because of the cheap food. Then it became an "Oh, don't mind him, that's just Tony" when he tried to preach to coworkers I may have brother home for dinner. Slowly, then, and by degrees, I began to agree with him.

I smacked my lips loudly in public, sighing as I put on some lip balm just how painful and irritating chapped lips could be. When a random somebody asked if I had a tissue they could use, I projected in my most far-reaching voice that I didn't carry tissues because I didn't need them. At the end of my shift I would proclaim now tiring work was and how I through I might take a nap before dinner when I got home.

Now, I realize there were people painfully embarrassed for me, as I had once been for Tony, but I didn't hardly care. I was blissfully and beautifully happy. When I didn't consider sleep to be something shameful, best kept hidden, I got the best sleep of my life. I woke up refreshed instead of anxious. When I was tired, I accepted that and knew the sensation was only temporary. I felt that if I could impart on one other person that sense of freedom, my life would not be the senseless doldrums I had been promised. And so I sang my new gospel loudly, publicly, and constantly.

Then the best was the day that Tony taught me that those of us who could chap, gnaw in anxiety, or burn our lips on a hot cup of soup--well, we could also kiss.