Storytime: Night Night.

March 2nd, 2016

It was a hard, grinding, ruthlessly uncompassionate sort of Monday. Long, too – the kind where minutes take hours and hours take days and the afternoon becomes something unspeakable. By the time she got home, Joan wanted three things in basically this order:
-a drink
-another drink and some food
-bed and also one more drink
and after some amount of effort, she succeeded at all of them. Plus a few extra drinks.
She lay back in her bed and listened to the snow fuss itself into drifts outside her window, felt the gentle hum of Dan failing to snore at her elbow, sank just a little deeper into her bedding and let herself slip away into staring wide-eyed at the ceiling for four hours while every single muscle in her body wound itself tighter than a can of tuna.
It was not the best time she’d ever had.

The next day was twice as long as the first. She lurched from place to place, missed half her breakfast aimed at her mouth, and spoke half in English and half in her own private language and mostly in sentence fragments, some of which were inside her head and the rest which weren’t. She drove to work backwards both ways and sped through the stop signs; she turned on her computer with her face and typed with her wrists; she brought a jar of pickles for lunch and ate the butter in the fridge by mistake.
“I’m awfully sorry,” she told her co-workers and boss and everyone. “I seem to have lost four hours of sleep.”
Unfortunately, all that came out was “Mmsneeery. Isheedeehuurrr. Beep.” Which was not the most informative thing in the world and made everyone a bit jumpier than usual – if possible – and prone to hitting the coffee pot.
Joan stared at the ceiling again that night, her and every other person she’d come in contact with that day. And so it spread.

By Thursday it was obvious there was a real problem. Half the town was on edge and dozing on the move; sliding through traffic lights and mumbling to themselves. Workers did no work. Junkies missed veins. Firemen put out fires by slumping over on top of them, stifling the blaze with their numbed mass. It was not much fun for anybody, particularly Joan, who went to work at the wrong building that day four times running until she gave up and spent six hours changing oil and testing emissions instead of filing budgets.
“This would never have happened if I hadn’t lost four hours,” she told Dan that night. Or something like that.
“Mmm-hmm,” he yawned at her. “Good night, honey.”

Friday, the brink of the weekend, and a national emergency was declared. The entire province was paralyzed and it was in danger of seeping past its borders – the snowploughs wouldn’t run; the policemen wouldn’t patrol; the legislature wouldn’t convene; the cashiers wouldn’t ask you to tap, chip, or swipe. All anyone could do was wander around in a daze and accidentally do the wrong jobs until someone told them to stop, or at least mumbled “uitt ooin thaathing. Goowai.”
“We believe this event began with a single, small shortfall of restfulness,” announced the prime minister. “A handful of lost hours, at least. Either that or we’re all the targets of some kind of super-villainous plot, but let’s be realistic here.”
And then the prime minister blinked.
“Hey, where’s parliament?”
The woman behind the till dragged herself upright with force of will and fingers of iron. There was a customer to be served, even if they’d just spent the last twenty minutes giving some kind of bleary-eyed speech to the kid’s menu.
“C’n takyerordurrrr,” she managed.
The prime minister thought about this, gave up, ordered something, left without paying, and drove into a lamp-post. Like everyone else.
Joan tried stronger coffee. Then she tried eating coffee. Neither helped.

On Saturday morning, a man yawned in Cairo. By evening his exhaustion was in Paris, Melbourne, Nome, Cape Town, Beijing, and a million other places whose inhabitants were too tired to remember their names. Chaos reigned in the streets, in the cities, in the fields and in the forests. Spontaneous mass nappings broke out; governments were sleepily overthrown as they dozed in office; entire industries ground to a halt as the machinery of the globe was turned down so its operators could futilely attempt to get some shut-eye.
Joan stayed up until 5 AM watching reruns of a remake of a prequel series to a show she’d never liked. It did not help.

Sometime Sunday, the global sleep-shortage crossed the species barrier in several places. Nobody was awake enough to make specific notes about where or what or who, but by the evening everything from aardvarks to microbes and on to zebras was nodding off. Flowers waited in agony as bees aimlessly bumped against their stems; falcons zoned out while diving and pancaked into the dirt; giant pandas wandered off to look for coffee mid-mating attempt. In the worst of it, the gut flora of three point eight billion humans forgot the difference between the stomach and the small intestine, with extremely unpleasant results.
Joan counted sheep, cows, pigs, cats, dogs, and the strange flashing lights and humming noises she could smell whenever she shut her eyes. She kept losing track and starting over at eleventeen.

Monday came again, but there was nobody to remember its name. The sun rose on a sleepless, aimless, exhausted world with no memory, no energy, and no point.
Joan would’ve resented it, if she’d had the fortitude. Instead she had her breakfast of coffee and used tea bags, walked into the wall eight times, wandered down the street, and for the first time in seven days remembered she’d forgotten her keys on her bedside table and went back for them.
The bedroom was dark, quiet, and peaceful, with only Dan’s breathing to mar the thick warmth of the air. Joan groped her way to the right side of the bed after four tries, found her keys on the eleventh try, and had nearly found the door again when she realized something important and actually managed to not forget it.
She shook her husband awake.
“Mmmm?”
“Dan,” said Joan, with great effort.
“Yeah, honey?”
“Hwwr you. Sleeping.”
He blinked in that self-satisfied sleepy way of someone who’s had a really long rest. “Well, I don’t quite know, sugar. I’ve been really lazy this week – called in sick for all of it, actually. Nobody’s called, so I’m sure it’s alright.”
Joan tried to line up her thoughts, failed, and commited herself to blurting the first question that popped into her mouth, which was “Wheeennyouget seepy?”
Dan’s brow half-furrowed, muscles too relaxed to manage more. “Hmmm. Well corn syrup, I think it was last Monday. I was a little tired in the afternoon, so I took a nap, and then-”
Dan was a fairly large man and Joan was a fairly small woman, so her hands didn’t quite fit around his neck, but she was powered by pure tension and muscles that hadn’t unclenched in a week and he was soft and limp. She hoisted him clear above her head before either of them knew it.
“TOOK it?!” she screamed. “You TOOK it. YOU took it! TOOK IT! I NEVER LOST IT AT ALL YOU BASTARD BASTARD BASTARD BASTARD BASTARD BASTARD BASTARD.”
“Woah there aspartame,” said Dan, “let’s just calm –” but by then he was in mid-air and the window muffled his mouth something fierce as he ploughed through it.

The window was open and the cold wind poured in, tinkling the broken glass on the floor. The sun was bright and harsh and there was the smell of something burning down the block.
But the sleep that Joan seized on that half-made bed was the very best in all the world at that moment, and she was so grateful for it that she almost didn’t mind having to rebuild global society afterwards.
Besides, it only took a few months. She had loads of energy after all that.

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