Black Moon

10

FELICIA WAS SEEING THINGS – CHASE, FOR example. First, out on the deck, staring at the indifferent ocean, shirtless and skinny. Then a glimpse of him sitting at the edge of her bed, head bowed as if reading something in his lap. Or she could just hear him peeing in the bathroom, his little allergy cough revealing his identity and disrupting the noisy stream.

She saw her mother and her orthodontist down on the beach, peering into the tide pools and strolling at the edge of the water, their footprints fading behind them in the silvery gloss. A pelican too, with a laugh identical to the horsy guffaw of her childhood piano teacher. It sat on the railing no more than three feet away, winking at her as if they shared a scandalous secret.

It was worse for some, since they all had succumbed to the symptoms and progressed through the phenomenon, as the researchers insisted on calling it, at different rates. There were people in the Sleep Research Center talking to shadows and others who were only now starting to slur their words. The doctors—Kitov, Lee, Porter—were showing signs but not publicly admitting to it. Porter appeared to be the furthest gone, but maybe that was just because Kitov and Lee were generally harder to read. Even before the sleeplessness hit, the old goat-faced genius Kitov had rambled nearly incoherently, peppering his speech with Russian and shuffling down the laminated corridors not unlike the insomniacs on the streets.

Meanwhile Lee had largely persisted with his robotic demeanor, at least in public, though Felicia thought she had heard him scrambling his grammar at the last morning meeting. Then again, she was also hearing strains of music emanating from the ocean, as though a sea monster were playing a giant cello just beyond the continental shelf.

Whatever they were going to do, these researchers, they had better do it quick. This implant scheme of theirs. They had briefed everyone. A wire in the head. It sounded like a workable plan, until the Q&A, when Warren—one of several grad students who had gravitated to the lab to work with the famous Soviet-era exile—pointed out that none of them were surgeons, let alone neurosurgeons.

“Is not exactly brain surgery,” Dr. Kitov tried—the joke being that it was. “But serious,” he insisted, “is not so complicated. Two holes drilled in skull, electrode leads threaded into brain, then wired up to stimulator that is put under skin, here in chest.”

Dr. Porter, now like an angry drunk from lack of sleep, took a swipe at the principal investigator. “Maybe when we’re in there, we should go ahead and stimulate the place where fucking articles are stored.”

Felicia, and the handful of others still operating within a framework of cultural norms, felt obligated to laugh in an attempt to undermine Porter’s weird venom. But it was a losing battle, this effort to uphold manners—let alone common decency—in the face of the ravaging epidemic. Emotions were raw, nerves exposed by exhaustion, and the morning meetings, lunches, gatherings of any kind were becoming increasingly hostile and unpredictable.

The irony of their situation inflamed matters. After all, here they were, the staff of one of the world’s most famous sleep research facilities, and they were just as clueless as anyone else. Much of the anger and disappointment was directed at Kitov, since he was the world-renowned expert in the field of sleep and insomnia who had drawn millions in grants to the university over the years yet claimed to be completely blindsided by the phenomenon.

“It is,” he proclaimed, “attack on cathedral of human mind, perhaps of alien origin.”

His eccentricities were no longer endearing quirks in the eyes of the sleep center inhabitants—a group of two dozen researchers, lab techs, undergrad assistants, and a small security team. Instead, his slightly askew worldview, along with his attempts at humor, was seen as a diversion, drawing the eye away from his incompetence. People had begun to look to Dr. Lee, but he deferred to his master, publicly supporting Kitov’s implant scheme. Indeed, he had indicated to Felicia that he thought this mechanical fix was their only hope at this point.

FOR a while, before the meds stopped working, they had had to separate the sleepers from the sleepless and security was an issue. Now no one was sleeping so there was no need for lockdown. People strolled the hallways at all hours, some verbalizing their delusions in mangled sentences or crashing into the walls on wobbly legs. Felicia felt compelled to guide her fellow residents safely through the labyrinth of corridors, to be useful while she still possessed the presence of mind to navigate the center. They, in return, projected their visions upon her.

Some were subtle, but telling, mix-ups, such as when Porter addressed her as Felina. In his confusion, a tech named Miles called her Terry—the name of his sister, she knew. She gently corrected him as she nursed a cut on his nose, after he had walked into one of the glass doors. He peered into her face as if trying to make sense of the details.

When her friend Francine emerged naked from her room, Felicia took her by the arm and reversed her course. Francine called her Mommy as she helped her step into a skirt. They both laughed about it, before Francine collapsed into sobs.

She had taken to cooking the food after Claudio, their cook, nearly burned down the center after attempting to cook a pot of rags, which he believed to be salted cod fillets. By helming each meal, providing the small crowd of delusional diners with plates of pasta and hunks of bread, or salads made from whatever vegetables were foraged from the grad student apartment gardens, she secured her place as the small community’s mothering presence. An odd position given that she was, in fact, the youngest resident.

They were drawn to her not only because she was still mentally sound, at least comparatively, but also because many assumed she had the inside scoop on the doctors, particularly Lee. Even before the phenomenon, many believed that she and Dr. Lee were having an affair, regardless of her vigorous denials. Yes, there was some small measure of smoke, but no fire. She was a student, after all, and Lee carried himself with a relentlessly uptight professionalism. If he had been harboring any interest, let alone something resembling desire, she had seen little evidence. Maybe a lingering gaze, a hint of uncharacteristic warmth, but nothing more. Her friends claimed he treated her differently.

Whether or not they were intimate, they insisted, surely she must know what the doctors were up to, since she was around them so much. Assisting with their procedures and lab work, privy to their schemes. They can sleep, some insisted. “They cooked up a cure that they’re keeping to themselves,” Davis, a security officer, proclaimed. “They’re just letting the rest of us fall apart so they can study what happens to us. Pretty soon they’ll start giving us God-knows-what and say it’s a cure and we’ll grow fucking asparagus out of our foreheads.”

With increasing frequency, she felt compelled to defend the doctors. “Look at them. They’re suffering just like us,” she told them. “They want a cure just as badly as everyone else.” It wasn’t hard to quell their suspicions, since sleeplessness had made her fellow residents unusually open to suggestion. The fact that she was already held in high regard, mostly due to her ongoing attempts to care for them as they unraveled, gave more weight to her appeal for reason.

“They’re trying to fix this,” she would tell them.

And, at least for now, they would believe her.

THOUGH she no longer slept, she retreated to bed out of habit. She was fortunate to have her own room, assigned when Kitov urged everyone—those who hadn’t already fled to their families—to stay. It was his promise of a cure that held her. She could very well be in the right place at the right time, she told her parents during their last phone call. She would come for them when it was clear they could be helped. But that moment had yet to arrive, and she could feel the margin of possibility rapidly narrowing. The tide of sleeplessness was advancing, consuming all the sand castles of coherency and logic as it crept forward. Even now, sitting on her bed, she sensed dark figures standing in the periphery of her vision. They seemed to be watchers from another dimension, now somehow visible due to a tear in the veil. Always present unless looked at directly, pressing in on her.

She quickly turned her head, hoping to catch a glimpse of her observers before they slipped behind the blind of dark matter, and was startled to find Dr. Lee standing in her room instead. He looked terrible, with heavy bags under his eyes, a washed-out complexion. His cheeks and chin were peppered with stubble and his black hair was uncharacteristically tousled. He persisted in wearing his white smock, though it was unbuttoned to reveal a T-shirt and olive cargo pants. He was falling apart just like everyone else, yet he continued to make his self-imposed rounds.

“Hanging in there?” he asked.

She stared at him, her heavy eyelids slowly dropping, then snapping wide open. She nodded, afraid to speak, not wanting to reveal the distance she had descended by providing a sample of eroded language.

“Do this,” he said. He performed a minor feat with his fingers, a roadside sobriety test that he had asked her to do before. Counting one through four and back again as he touched each finger to his thumb. He had no trouble with it. Maybe the others are right, she considered. Maybe the doctors had come up with an effective cocktail of serotonin and glycerin and they were keeping it for themselves. A part of her hoped this was true. Maybe they were just testing it before going public.

She did as he asked, running through the drill, fingertips to thumb. She was relieved to see—as if watching from outside herself—that she did it well despite her burden of exhaustion. Lee was pleased too, faintly nodding encouragement. He took her by the wrist and she felt the spark of his touch. She couldn’t tell if he was taking her pulse or finally making some kind of pass at her.

Now he was looking intently into her eyes, leaning forward.

Here it comes—the kiss that she had been told was inevitable. Or had she? She suspected she was having a false memory. Remembering a dream, maybe, as though it were real.

“Settle down. He’s just checking your eyes,” Chase said. “The dilation.”

She turned her head to the right, where her former boyfriend’s voice hung in the air. But Dr. Lee reached up and gently nudged her chin so that she was looking at him again. He pushed in close, his breath on her lips. She waited. Nothing. It appeared that he was indeed checking her eyes, the dilation.

“You’re not so bad,” Lee said. “Probably still of all them the best.”

There it was. The messed-up syntax.

He quickly corrected himself: “The best of all of them, I meant.”

As if he had heard her thoughts.

“We’re going to need your help,” he said.

“What with?” she dared to say, when he stood back and stared for a long silent moment, blinking and swaying slightly on his feet.

“The procedure. With Kitov. He is insisting on it for the implant. That it’s him.”

She understood. The old man was going to go under the knife—or actually the drill—first. There had been talk of this. Some thought it was a brave and noble thing to do, given that it was untested. Others thought it was like the captain of a sinking liner being first into the lifeboat. It was hard to tell how Kitov saw it. He seemed capable of both motivations, possibly at the same time.

“When?”

“Tomorrow at eleven. Get some rest.”

She could not tell if this was meant to be a joke.

SHE had gotten in the habit of watching the sunrise from the deck. Though, looking west, what she saw was the flat plain of the leaden ocean slowly separate from the sky as it took on color. The sun rose behind her, behind the compound on the bluff and the university towers above. In the evening, it lowered itself slowly into the Pacific without a sound, igniting both sea and sky with pink and orange.

When they first arrived at the university, she and Chase had become participants in a daily ritual, sometimes driving down from the school and joining others who parked along the coastal roads at dusk. It delighted these two inland kids—refugees from the smoggy suburbs—that the locals would do this: gather at the edge of the earth, go still and quiet to watch the sun die its daily death. They would witness it together, everyone sitting in the padded pews of their cars. Then, as if a service had ended, turn their ignitions, check their rearviews, and drive off into their lives.

“It is religious,” she had once said.

“It’s better,” Chase responded, though minutes later, after driving in silence back up the bluff and into the dorm parking lot. She recalled sensing his growing disdain for the place. It had killed her that she was partly responsible for his increasing detachment at school. But there were forces, like the shifting plates of the earth, pulling them apart, however typical and predictable: his need for insulation and control, her desire to have new experiences, to live beyond their plastic past. There were other problems. His—she didn’t know what to call it—sexual hang-ups? She could so easily recall the dark weight of him in the bed next to her, sinking deeper into shame as his body failed him yet again. “You don’t understand,” he said in the darkness, “how much I want you in here.” She heard the thud of his fist against his bare chest.

Where is he now? she wondered, as the sparrows in the coral trees began their dawn chorus. Last she heard from him was a voice message from Idaho. He was on his way up to Montana with Jordan, their friend from high school, insisting that she see him on her birthday, back at her parents’ house. She had agreed, but wondered if she should have. Maybe it was best to make a clean break. Or maybe he was changing, as he said. These are the kinds of things she used to worry about. That was only a week or so before the insomnia story became the only story, before she learned that her dad hadn’t been sleeping. Before survival became everyone’s occupation.

She stood at the railing and looked down the bluff at the rocky beach below. Her eyes scanned the water’s edge and she realized she was looking for the body of an administrator—a Swede named Annika—who had thrown herself over the edge a week earlier. A refugee from the main campus, she had become increasingly distressed at being away from her homeland as the crisis escalated. As sleeplessness overwhelmed her, she began insisting that she was being held in America against her will. Her leap, Felicia assumed, was her idea of an escape.

The body had been spotted on the rocks far below. Kitov had sent out members of the security team to retrieve it. But somehow, between sealing the corpse in a body bag and returning to the center, they had lost it. Their rambling and conflicting explanations could not be sorted out, and Franklin, the security chief, refused to risk sending anyone down to search for it, fearing they wouldn’t be capable of finding their way back.

Felicia kept the black body bag in mind as she studied the shoreline. Would she, in her state of mind, be able to distinguish the bagged administrator from the seals sunning on the rocks? She became absorbed in scrutinizing the dark formations below.

BY the time she made it to the meeting, Kitov had already announced that he would be first to have the electrodes implanted. The procedure would take place within hours. Only a dozen people had been clearheaded enough to remember the meeting time and place. They were alternately slumped over with apathy or aggressively challenging the plan.

“Why Kitov?”

“Because the research that he is researching must be going on,” Lee explained.

Felicia winced at his delivery.

“But why take the risk of being first? Isn’t it dangerous?”

“Is not dangerous. We have planned very much,” Kitov answered.

“Why not just try it out on someone else’s brain first?” Phil, a lab tech, wanted to know. The bags under his eyes like wasp stings. “Someone more expendable why not?”

At this Kitov’s face reddened. “Who is this, this expendable someone? You would like that we just grab one of you and tie you to table and open your head?”

“Not us,” Phil said. “Someone we find. Out there.”

Kitov cast an angry glare at the tech. Only weeks ago, such a withering look would have cut like a laser through flesh and bone and triggered the tendering of resignations. Now it was met with the blank stares of people too exhausted to fear.

Porter filled the silence, saying, “There’s no time for that. Every day we wait we lose the faculty to do this kind of procedure because, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re losing our goddamn minds.”

“I am not a Mengele,” Kitov finally said, reminding everyone present that he had seen the end of the world before—that everything he knew as home had been burned to the ground when he was a boy, or stood against a wall and shot. Yet here he was, attempting to stare down yet another Armageddon.

TO gear up for the procedure, they had been looting equipment from the university’s abandoned hospital, cobbling together an operating room in the main lab of the research facility. They were concerned about electricity, even though all the research facilities were powered by an experimental system that tapped wave movement and riptides. The turbines, which sat just under the surface among the kelp beds, were revealed every day by the receding tide. The elegant electromagnetic system had earned its inventor a Nobel Prize, even though it had never been adopted as a viable alternative energy solution anywhere beyond the research wing of the campus. Kitov had very publicly despised the late Frenchman who created the wave-powered plant and had abused his famous colleague at every opportunity. Now, as they shaved the back of his head, he joked that the plant would fail during the procedure. “This bastard Cloutier will have last laugh,” he grumbled, his words slurred.

They enclosed Kitov’s large head inside a metal frame, locking it into position with pins that bored into his skull. Felicia, who had mastered the use of a syringe when injecting countless rats and dogs for Lee’s research, was recruited to administer the local anesthetic at the four points where the pins penetrated the scientist’s papery skin. He winced when the needle went in, telling her that she was queen bee, who, unlike the drones, can sting repeatedly with no fear of death. The moment had summoned enough adrenaline to override her exhaustion and steady her hand. She numbed the top of his head too, at the drill points, then stood back. There would be no more anesthesia, local or general, since the brain itself does not feel pain.

Lee and Porter moved in, locking the electrode driver onto the frame. The driver would ease in the electrodes with the precision and steadiness of a machine. Normally, its movements would be largely automated—informed by calculations made from computer analysis of MRI and tomography scans. But no one remaining at the center knew how to get the driver and the computer to talk to each other, not in real time, so the task fell upon Lee, whose machinelike comportment seemed a good fit. For guidance, he would listen to the firing of nerve cells, which were picked up by the electrode and amplified. He would also ask Kitov to count, or list animals, or raise his arms, in order to determine the location of the implant as it traveled to its destination.

There was some blood when they drilled, even though they had flapped the scalp. Felicia was ready with gauze, quickly sponging off the area. The drill’s high-pitched whine filled the room. A wisp rose from the contact point and Felicia couldn’t tell whether it was mist from the liquid coolant the drill expelled or bone dust. Before long, there were two nickel-sized pieces of skull in the tray and two openings, like a peephole for each eye, in Kitov’s skull. They could all see his brain under the lights—a slick, pale coil of fat worms, thinly stained red.

“And so,” Kitov asked sportingly, “what do you see? My childhood is there? My Vera there on bench by river? See how we found so many mushrooms? I hurt my shoulder falling on the ice in front of the institute.”

“It’s your head,” Porter said, “not a View-Master.”

Lee, from behind his surgical mask, glanced at Porter, then Felicia. Was Kitov delirious from lack of sleep or just giddily rhapsodic over clearing the first hurdle? he seemed to ask with his raised eyebrows, with his questioning pause.

They did not answer. Instead, Porter asked Kitov if he was comfortable. The older man laughed. “My face has before been trapped in tighter places! But, yes, soft places.”

Lee sat and studied the driver monitor. With a small joystick, he lowered the recorder electrode lead so that it sat only millimeters above the brain tissue. Then, with a nod to Porter, he edged the joystick forward and the thin, stiff tendril of wire slid slowly between the wet convolutions with a faint electric hum. He paused.

“All good?” he asked his patient.

“Yes, of course,” Kitov growled. “Start it already!”

“We have,” Porter said with annoyance.

Now the hard, slow work began. Lee advanced the lead in micrometer increments, listening for the firing of nerve cells, which crackled like static until Felicia helped move Kitov’s legs and arms. Then the waveform on the monitor spread across the screen like a dark stain, and the resulting firing of nerve cells was voiced with a loud, sustained creaking—a cathedral door slowly swinging open. Because they did not have the live scans of Kitov’s brain, Porter cross-checked the coordinates against a generic model of a 3-D brain—a preset from the application’s library. When they decided on an exact location, they swapped out the recording electrode for an actual pulse lead and again slowly advanced as Felicia monitored the EKG and observed Kitov’s response to Lee’s tests: extend the index finger of your right hand, tap your feet together five times, look to the left, to the right.

This went on for three hours, until by all available calculations they believed they had arrived at proper placement of the electrode.

“You ready for some downtime?” Lee asked Kitov.

“When I see Hypnos,” Kitov responded, “I will persuade him not to abandon us.”

Then, when Lee gave the nod and Porter manually triggered the sleep pulse, they watched as Kitov’s eyes dropped shut.

They checked the EKG. The heart marched on.

All three looked at one another, eyebrows raised. It seemed as though it had worked. They were removing their surgical masks when Felicia noticed the tremor in Kitov’s legs. They watched it move up his body, into his hands, into his chest, where it caused a flutter in his breathing. Then spasms hit, the body convulsing. Lee threw himself over his mentor, trying to prevent him from tearing out the pins on the stereotactic frame that caged his head. But Kitov’s body kicked and bucked, knocking over bedside machinery, the rolling tray of tools. Felicia screamed as Porter pushed her out of the way and tried to wrangle their patient’s scissoring legs. The pins tore into Kitov’s head as he twisted. Minutes later, the celebrated scientist died behind a veil of blood.

AT first they hid, staying in the lab long after the projected duration of the procedure. There were knocks at the outer door, then banging. The others. They wanted to know what was happening. When Morales, one of the security officers, used his keys to open the door, Porter yelled, “Get the fuck out!”

The officer retreated.

They sat. Felicia would not look in the direction of Kitov’s body, even though they had covered it with a blanket. She had cried, but quickly found herself too tired for emotion.

Lee could only stare into space, or down at his hands.

“If we tell them,” Felicia said, “they will lose hope.”

After no one responded, she said, “Annika I mean.”

Time passed, marked by the whirring of hard drives, the beep of monitors. The sporadic flurries of pounding on the door.

In the dead space between them, a question floated. Should they lie? If so, what would the lie be? No one said this, but Porter responded as if it had been spoken. “We say Kitov was an epileptic. He told us never and this made it unsafe.”

Felicia looked up from where she sat on the floor. “Was he?”

“Maybe,” Porter said. “It’s possible he was. How else can it be explained to anyone? All the math was right. It was fucking elephant math. Elegant.”

“It wasn’t the math,” Lee said sullenly. “An epileptic no not he.”

“Well then, what?”

“The generic model was wrong. Too young for Kitov, undeveloped, unaged. Possibly I don’t know.”

“The model was wrong,” Porter repeated sarcastically. His sleep-deprived venom surged. “Or maybe you had your girl dose him so the alpha is you now?”

Lee would not be baited. “Listen to us,” he said, slurring. “We’re too far deep to do this, just too tired. But we have to try now again. Stories won’t help.”

Porter disagreed. “You spill the truth and no one’s going sit in that chair.”

There was more pounding at the door.

Lee went to it, with Porter charging after him. He grabbed at Lee’s shoulder, but Lee shook him off. Felicia came up behind Porter, rested her hand his arm. It was her power, this touch. He looked at her, shaking his head, yet standing down.

Outside, everyone was waiting, a red-eyed, blinking mob, stooped and warped by exhaustion. Francine, now in her Smurf scrubs. Warren and the other grad students, bearded, ragged, sitting on the floor of the corridor. There were a few security men, some of the others that had come to them and were not turned away: students, university employees, Miguel from plant operations, Maritza from the neighboring institute. Some of them now three weeks without sleep. They looked past them, scanning for Kitov—for proof that there was a door in the black wall before them.

“It was not successful,” Lee said flatly. “The procedure. A mishap happened.”

THIS was a first. Relief that sleep was impossible. She feared reliving Kitov’s death in her dreams. The white, thick spittle gathering in the corners of his mouth, quickly churned into foam by the gnashing of his teeth. His eyes had rolled back when the spasm hit, so that he looked blind. So that it looked as if the inside of his head was lined with white plastic and pressure was causing the membrane to bulge out the sockets. His body jerked electrically, a marionette manipulated by an angry child. It was one thing to recall this. The horror was somewhat subdued. To dream it would be devastating all over again. To dream it is to feel it.

She had never seen someone die before, and this was a gruesome introduction to life’s departure from the body. She knew, from stories the security team had brought back from the outside, that human death littered the cities, suburbs, open fields and forests, the side of the road. Corpses scattered throughout the landscape like scarecrows blown from their stakes. Annika’s body, rising and falling on the waves. Had she actually seen this? The vision of it, real or imagined, was a quieter horror. So distant and in some ways resonating with a suggestion of release and the possibility of return. A metaphor—there in the arms of the wide blue expanse—that, yes, was like the promise of religion, not the threat. Kitov’s death bespoke a torment that persisted beyond an extinguished pulse. His posture in death, the agony of his lines, suggested that it would continue forever. That he was born into a new realm of unceasing suffering.

“That’s kind of a weird thought,” she heard Chase say from the bathroom.

“You didn’t see it,” she said.

“Is that why you won’t do it? Because you’re afraid of dying a horrible death again and again?”

“Do what?”

“You know. The thing he wants you to do, your boss—Dr. Dreamy.”

Felicia looked through the bathroom door. She could see the edge of the sink, the rim of the mirror. If she turned her head away, looking forward at the wall but concentrating—not focusing—on the margins of her field of vision, she saw his shadow on the wall. She knew Chase was talking about Lee. She knew the thing he meant was volunteering for the procedure. She felt the gravity of it, pulling at marrow in her bones, even before Lee went into the corridor and asked for someone to step forward. She dared not move, frozen with fear. Having seen what she had seen, no. She couldn’t.

“You need to do it,” Chase said. “For one thing, you promised you would see me on your birthday. If you don’t do this, you aren’t going to make it.”

She decided to ignore him.

“And if you do it, everyone will like you. And isn’t that what matters the most?”

“Shut up, Chase.”

She lay back in bed and closed her eyes. He came in closer. She felt him standing at the foot of her bed. He told her a story.

“Your parents,” he said, “are sleepers. Both of them. The sleeplessness your father mentioned during that last call was nothing more than his usual nighttime restlessness. He thought he was really in the grip of this thing, but he fell asleep in front of the TV one night, as the stories of the epidemic droned on in the dark. Your mother has never had the slightest problem sleeping, though she hid this from him at first—knowing what was happening when sleepers were discovered by insomniacs. But when she found him sleeping on the couch, she curled up next to him and the two of them slept through the night. In the morning, they tried to understand why the two of them could sleep while their neighbors and friends were succumbing to insomnia one after another. They spent three days going through everything in their environment, and everything they did throughout the day, to try to figure out the thing that had made them immune. They weren’t on any special medications. They didn’t have health conditions that would be unusual or rare. They thought about their diet, but it was the same stuff everyone else eats—lots of meat from the grill, bread and tortillas, diet soda and beer, produce and dairy from the supermarket. They started considering the less obvious—maybe it was the new carpet they had installed when you started school. Some chemical in the shag, maybe. Your mother’s religious nature kicked in, deciding it was God’s way of rewarding them for living a good life. ‘Maybe,’ your father said. Or maybe it was because they had uttered some rare combination of syllables at some point in their lives, or eaten some weird combination of foods. They have no way of knowing, no way of tracing all the unexpected combinations they might have created. So they go on sleeping, not knowing how or why, keeping it a secret from everyone else.”

“If it’s a secret,” she asked, “how do you know about it?”

“Because I have moved to a place where I can see it happening. I’m there, just like I’m here, standing in the corner of their eyes, a shadow just at the edge of the frame. Watching and listening like an observing animal. Sleeplessness is a portal. But only for a little while. It’s just a phase of the phenomenon—one that occurs right before things, well, get worse.”

She thought about his story. “If you can see everything,” she said, “what is it that makes them able to sleep?”

“If you look closely at your house,” he explained, “you will see tiny, dark particles drawn from the air into a hole in the rafters. Stand closer and you will see that these particles are bees. Press your ear to the wall and you’ll hear a deep, constant drone, like the sound of a giant drill. Push into the hole and you will see that the entire house is functioning as a giant hive. The walls are filled with bees and honey, all living in the waxy, brainy folds of honeycomb. It’s the drone, reverberating through the frame of the structure, that creates a deep sound that is felt, not heard. Those cheap suburban houses, the way they’re made. They are very similar to musical instruments, with a thin shell or skin stretched over a wooden frame. The vibration—a one-note lullaby—carries sleep in it just like the pulse Lee wants to wire into your brain.”

“So they are fine,” she said. “My parents are fine.”

“For now,” he said. “But it isn’t going to last. I’m sure you’ve seen the reports. The bees are dying and no one knows why. Soon the walls will be filled with husks, just dry shells of the dead. And the drone will go silent.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

He paused and she thought maybe he was gone.

“Besides,” Chase said suddenly, startling her, “you promised to meet me on your birthday.”

She sat in silence for the remainder of the night. Earlier, when they had emerged from the operating room, Lee was visibly disgusted that no one stepped forward. He ordered them to select someone by the morning meeting, which was now only hours away. Otherwise they would do a random drawing. By sunrise, standing at the railing, she had decided Chase was right, even if it wasn’t the real Chase. Her mind was the sharpest, though her fear probably the greatest. She was the one.

She found Lee in the lunchroom and began trembling as she offered herself up. She somewhat expected him to refuse, to insist that someone else would volunteer. Or point to the random drawing as the only fair way. She had maybe even hoped he would insist it was out of the question, that she was needed to help with the procedure. Only she could do what was needed, only she had the experience, having witnessed their failure.

He looked at her blankly, as all her anticipated responses seemed to scroll past his eyes. As each point was possibly considered, then trumped by the unequivocal fact that they were simply out of time. Instead of saying these things, he leaned forward and kissed her softly on the mouth.