[Untitled] (Emma Kay)

[Untitled]

Emma Kay

Maybe you’ve caught the plague. You’re not sure, really. Since lunch your vision has been going fuzzy at the edges. You hammer on the up button, listening to your building’s elevator slowly descends. The grinding stops. You check the panel. Ninth floor. Ages before it’ll get to you. Sinking to the carpeted lobby floor, you let your head rest against your knees. No one is in the lobby to see, and you are too heavy. The elevator dings. You startle, stumbling to your feet. It must be only a few seconds since you sat down. It’s still dark outside. You slide into the elevator and huddle in the back corner. 

Getting out on your floor, you fumble with your keys. Your door key has a distinctive metal triangle at the end. You know what it looks like, but you can’t find it. The keys are on the floor. You pick them up. The door key glints in the dim incandescence of the hall. You let yourself in. 

As soon as you flip on the lights, you stumble into your bathroom and face yourself in the mirror, hands gripping the edges of the sink. Your eyes look sunken. What were the symptoms? Headache? Well, you’ve had a headache for months, since long before you first heard anything about the plague. Exhaustion? You’re always tired; this is nothing exceptional. Were there other symptoms? Something to tell you that this is the plague?

With all your work recently, you haven’t really been following the news. You’ve heard about the plague, of course. Reports spilling from earbuds on the Metro and TV monitors in storefronts, plague, plague, plague. That plane crash in Dallas, the derailment near Denver. Too many people believing they can power through the exhaustion and falling asleep at the wheel, crashing into other semi-conscious drivers too slow to react. It’s been spreading east, towards you. You think you remember a newscaster saying the president might declare a state of emergency. You’re pretty sure that hasn’t happened yet—you’d know if there were a state of emergency. Wouldn’t you? You can’t remember anything about a cure or a vaccine, and you can’t picture how one would work. The plague’s not a real plague, not a sickness, not really. How can you prevent chronic insomnia that spreads without a clear mechanism?

You focus back on your reflection. How long have you been standing here? Should you turn yourself in for quarantine? You’re not sure who you’d ask. The thought of having to figure it out and the fear of being told no, that’s not the plague, that’s just you are exhausting. 

Splashing water on your face, you check the time. The watch face glows. It’s 2 a.m. You left work at 8 p.m. Tracing back your time, you’re not sure where the hours between then and now went. Surely it couldn’t have taken you much more than an hour to get home. Your eyes burn. Swinging open the bathroom mirror, you start pulling pill bottles out. Allergy meds, more allergy meds, over-the-counter painkillers. Sleeping pills. You swallow two. Leaving the bathroom, you collapse onto your bed. Light from the opposing high rise shines in through the windows. You close your eyes. It’s too bright to sleep. You pull the shades shut, plunging your room into darkness. 

You lie awake in the shadows behind your eyes, mind racing full of emptiness. Your watch says 4:15. Then half past six. You think you managed to doze off in the last hour, but you don’t feel any less groggy. Early-morning light is seeping around the shades. There’s no chance of you going back to sleep. When you sit up and get out of bed, your body feels distant. You hover somewhere just outside. Well, if you’re going to be awake, you might as well get some work done. You check your emails, get some writing done, but you keep stopping to stare absently at the screen. 

For the first time in weeks, you sit in front of the TV and turn on the news. There’s a smoking pile-up of cars on I-495. “...several asleep at the wheel, including the driver of this tractor trailer...” The camera focuses on a truck flipped on its back like a dead bug. You think about insects for a bit, and when you tune back in the newscaster is saying, “Starting tomorrow, all commercial flights will be grounded. The CDC recommends minimizing travel and remaining at home if possible. If you feel unusually exhausted, down, irritable, slow, or scattered, please remain at home to avoid the possibility of contaminating others. The CDC has not released any information about the cause of the...” 

You think about going to work. You don’t feel unusually exhausted. You’ve certainly gone in on less sleep, feeling worse. You’re still not sure whether you have the plague, and you really need to get in your hours so you can bill for this period. You start to get dressed, but the buttons of your shirt are so small, and you can’t manage to get them through the holes. You give up and sit on your carpet, staring at the rim of light around your shade, and decide that if there’s a plague going on, your boss can handle seeing you in t-shirt. 

You get on the Red Line at Gallery Place, and half the seats in the car are empty. You check your watch. Rush hour. Surely there can’t be enough people sick to empty the Metro on a Tuesday morning. When you get to work, there are only three other people in the office. “We’re shutting down at the end of this week,” your boss tells you. “It’s too much of a risk, and people won’t come in anyway.” You ask about getting paid. “I wouldn’t count on it, but if you want to have any chance I’d suggest submitting your hours right now.” She looks tired. Everyone looks tired. You wonder if they have the plague. The man who sits across the aisle from you doses off every few minutes and finally leaves at noon. 

You go to work every day for the rest of the week, but every night you barely sleep. You chew gum to stay awake, drink lots of cold water, set a timer to get up and walk around at thirty minute intervals, write yourself sticky notes so you don’t forget what you were doing when you zone out. You ink a checklist of things you need to do on the back of your hand. You feel awful, but it’s a familiar sort of awful. You know how this goes. By Friday, you’re the only one in the office. Even the security guard isn’t at the desk. You turn down the AC and shut the building lights off when you leave. 

On your way home, you stop at the grocery store. There are two lonely packs of over-the-counter sleeping pills left on the shelves. You put them in your cart, along with bottles of vitamins, cereals, frozen meals, frozen fruits and vegetables. You know the drill. 

“We’re closing today at 10,” the cashier tells you. “I don’t know when we’re going to reopen.” If, his face says. You see a few people crying openly on the street. A man who lives down the hall from you is lying just inside the doors of your building, staring at the ceiling. You take your groceries up to your room, then come back down for him. He stares at you absently when you offer him your hand. You give him a stick of gum. It helps you feel more alert, you tell him. He chews it, and you think he looks a bit more focused. He finally grabs your hands, and you haul him to his feet. You both have to sit down to wait for the elevator. On your floor, you support each other down the hall to his flat. You hand him another piece of gum and go home. 

You crawl onto your couch and lie down, head hanging over the end. You wake up to the sound of breaking glass and tearing metal. Through your window you see a car crashed through the ground floor of the building across from yours. Shattered glass covers the street. No ambulance comes. You call 911. The dispatcher tells you she can’t tell you when help will arrive. Too many accidents and not enough people awake enough to drive, she explains. You gaze out at the city and at the city across the river, seeing fire reflected against the clouds. That’s the last time you open your shades. 

You barely sleep. Two or three hours a night is usual. Maybe a few scattered across the day. On a rare good day you get five. You’re always tired. Your life is a series of moments, floating in a hazy emptiness where other memories should be, strung together by a loose sense of progression and the sticky notes you leave for yourself. Time passes because the food in your fridge starts to spoil. You finish it off and move on to the frozen food that fills your freezer. The single long grey day that is everyday stretches forever but lasts no time at all. You get used to it again. 

You think you heard an explosion one night. After that, you don’t watch the news or check it online. No one knew anything important, anyway. Just “No cause found for mystery sleeping plague” and “Another massive pile-up on the interstate.” Your world contracts. The feeling is familiar. This is what your life has been, off and on for years. Worse than normal, you suppose, but nothing unique. You relearn how to function while sleep-deprived. You’re honestly a bit surprised your office hasn’t reopened. You went to work in a state like this for large chunks of the last two years. People hardly respond to your emails anymore. You need money, so you get a part-time job as a truck driver, delivering food from a warehouse an hour south to supermarkets in the city. It’s enough that you can drive and that you can stay awake enough not to crash. You have to pull over, sometimes, get off the road and take a nap for as long as your body will let you. Nowadays you see a lot more people walking. Or sitting in the street where they’ve stopped walking. You have to honk to get them to move. 

Most days that you’re not driving are the same. You eat a handful or two of cereal, lie on the sofa, read, watch movies, get some work done in case your office ever reopens. Maybe microwave a meal. You’re finally getting through the piles of books that litter your apartment. You feel wonderfully productive. Every week you go around the corner to the grocery store. These days, it’s open Monday-Wednesday-Friday, 12 to 3 p.m. It’s the only place you talk to other people. In the pre-made aisle you see people, too tired to make decisions, lying on the ground in front of frozen burritos. One day it’s the old man who lives across from you. You start buying him groceries when you go. 

Between one week and the next, someone spray-paints “THIS IS THE END” in huge red letters down the middle of the street. It makes you laugh. You take a photo and set it as your lock screen. What an apocalypse! Electricity still on, cars still running, trash still picked up, groceries still in stores! The essential people still going to work. And not even a single riot. It’s the end of whose world? This is what last year was! Better, even, because no one expects you to be able to function normally anymore. 

In between driving trucks, picking away at work, getting groceries, and reading, you spend a lot of hours in your head, listening to conversations between people who don’t exist. Your mind free-associates wildly, and you see water fill your flat, vines climb the walls, paint peel. You’re not sure if you’re hallucinating or just falling asleep and waking up half a second later as you begin to dream. Spindly, faceless figures start to move in with you. They’re familiar, and you vaguely remember seeing them that year you didn’t sleep more than three hours a night for a month. They watch from the dark corners of the room, their limbs folded back on themselves. The first few times, you went over to put your hand through them, but either they aren’t there or they aren’t corporeal. Maybe they are there. Maybe they are there and you only pay attention to them when you’re out of it enough to believe what you see. You get used to them, too. They never go away anymore. 

You’re isolated. It takes you time to realize it because it isn’t really a change. You haven’t been socially active for years. It was just too much to keep up with work and your family and an entirely different group of people as well. Too many moving pieces, too many quick responses. But people used to call. Your friends. You forgot you have friends. Maybe you don’t. Now that work is gone, you miss them. It’s lonely in your head. 

 The old man you bring groceries invites you to eat your frozen dinner with him. He sits in an armchair, fork in his microwaved lasagna. You sit on his sofa, eating the other half of the quiche you had for lunch. “Who am I, now?” he asks. You shrug. “I’m losing who I was,” he says, “before this heavy forgetful haze. I used to run in the mornings. I did glassblowing on weekends. And here I sit in my apartment and wait for my neighbor to bring me food. The plague has stolen me from myself.” You tell him you don’t know who he is now but that he doesn’t have to stop living. He just has to adapt. Move slowly. Plan better. Be outside in the middle of the day. You do understand what he means, though, losing yourself to exhaustion. Who you were years ago seems like a half-dreamt memory belonging to a different person. 

You take your own advice. You begin to go on walks when the sun is brightest. You hope it acts a zeitgeber, reminding your body that now is the time to be awake. You haven’t collapsed outside yet. You walk down the parkway to the small park that planes used to take off over. It’s peaceful, but you miss the shaking roar of the planes as they rose overhead. Thinking about the planes makes you think about the world. Did the plague ever leave the country? Boats (or maybe trucks?) must still be entering since you’re still getting fresh bananas. You wonder about quarantine. What does it mean for you to live in a country sedated by plague? Is there still a country? You consider walking across the river to ask, but it’s better not to think. You don’t go back to the airport. 

In early August (you wonder how it got to be August so quickly), you start seeing more people on the street. Still very few cars, but the roads begin to fill with people riding bicycles in the late mornings and early evenings. You suppose they’re less likely to cause a mass casualty event having a microsleep on a bike. Your phone squawks, scaring you. A Metro alert. It’s been so long. The Red Line is running again, restricted hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The next evening, you get an email from your boss. The office is reopening, three days a week in the middle of the day. You go in the first day it’s open. People are exhausted, but they’re here, drinking lots of coffee and energy drinks and getting up to walk around at intervals. People do yoga in the aisles between desks, and the outreach manager takes a nap on the couch in the break room. A couple more people trickle in each day. You stop driving trucks. They don’t need you anymore; enough of their employees have returned to work. The world begins to feel the way it did before the plague. People sleep more, speak less, zone out while waiting in line, get annoyed easily, drop their milk cartons in the dairy aisle, but they also go to work, eat at restaurants, watch plays, go on walks, work out at the gym. You go to a movie for the first time in months. It pauses every thirty minutes or so to give you a chance to walk around and wake yourself up. You’re all figuring it out. 

One Thursday, you doze off around 7 p.m. sitting on the sofa with your computer on your lap. You wake up with your chin tucked against your chest, your computer still on your lap, and your neck incredibly stiff. You set it aside and stand up, rolling your neck from side to side, arching your back and enjoying the pops as you crack your vertebrae. The light around the edges of the shades is golden. You feel disoriented, but you always feel disoriented. Your room seems wide and empty. You walk to the bathroom, wash your face, and brush your teeth. With shock, you notice your face in the mirror. You catch glimpses of yourself in glass all the time, but it must be months since you’ve seen yourself and your brain has said, that’s me. You stare. You’ve felt so detached for so long that you’d forgotten you have a body. You brush your reflection with your fingertips. The mirror is cold. It’s as if a switch has flipped in your brain. No, it’s like your reservoir of energy has refilled and some of the holes in it have been patched. You check your watch. It’s 7:10 p.m. You check your watch again. It’s Friday. 

You open the shades and look out at the street. The sun is beginning to set, light streaming between the high rises. You suddenly can’t breathe. Grabbing your keys, you rush out the door. In the elevator lobby on your floor, you hold the down button. The beige of the carpets, the walls, feels increasing restricting. You wheel around, shoving open the door to the stairs. The last time you tried to walk down, you had to pause every couple flights to stop your head from spinning. You accelerate, jogging. By the time you reach the ground floor, you’re panting but upright. The last light of the day spills in through the glass doors to the street. You pause in front of them, suddenly hesitant. The world seems too real to be real. Reality is heavy, a dull slog, a place where you cannot breathe and cannot feel. You check the corners of the lobby for the spindly figures, but they aren’t there. What does this mean? Is it over? (Were you ever sick with the plague, or was it just you all along?) Is this a momentary reprieve or a final end? Are other people waking up too? You’re too alive to think about the future. You push out into the street. 

Smears of pink and blue alternate across the western sky, the torn remnants of rain clouds. The high rises, caught by the last light, gleam golden. Streams of water run into the storm drains. You sit on the damp concrete steps of your building. The cold wind bites into your arms. You marvel at the sensation. Fall arrived when you weren’t watching, at some point between moments. An ambulance wails several blocks away, but otherwise the streets are quiet. Unmoving, you watch the sun set. You’re still, but it’s a different sort of stillness than the heaviness that held you in place, staring at a single point on a screen for hours, staring at the crack in the ceiling that you don’t have the energy to fix. In this stillness, you could move if you chose. You watch because the sunset is beautiful.

The door opens behind you. A middle-aged woman steps out. She stands on the top step for a moment, looking into the last light above the horizon. Then she sits on the far side of the steps. After a time, you look over at her. She’s staring at the sky, and at her hands. You raise your hand and wave hesitantly. She stares for a moment, and then her mouth curves slightly. Your face feels like wood, but you smile back. You look at each other and you understand. You’re not sure if you’ve felt this good in your life. 

Two-paragraph comment illustrating my choices with reference to materials in the course:
            I decided to leave out the motif of catastrophic physical destruction (like the destruction in 2012) because I was interested in focusing on an apocalypse that would be destructive to people on an individual basis rather than a dramatically physical one. I felt that large-scale catastrophic events would conflict with the quiet nature of the sleep deprivation-driven apocalypse and the internal focus of the main character. I was inspired to use second person by N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season. Jemisin’s use of second person makes the reader feel close to her characters, more personally present, but also highly aware of the distance between the “you” of the narration and “you” that is the reader. I chose to write the short story in second person because I wanted to make the reader feel initially disoriented and to highlight the internal nature of the apocalypse. The second person is less commonly used in fiction writing, so I hoped that its unfamiliarity would make the reader at first feel uncomfortable and then slowly adjust to the style, just like the people in the story who must adapt to the changes of the apocalypse in order to continue living their lives in a way they recognize. I was also inspired by the motif of a plague apocalypse, especially by “The Screwfly Solution” by Raccoona Sheldon. In that story, the plague alters how the male characters experience reality, in some ways changing how the world looks but in others maintaining a similar way of life. “The Screwfly Solution” inspired me to write an apocalypse that mentally affects people differentially and that does not fully destroy the structure of the society the main character lives in. However, my desire to focus on the personal and internal led me to leave out a search for the cause of the apocalypse, unlike the “The Screwfly Solution,” which is interested in where the responsibility for the apocalypse lies. 

Inspired by Melancholia, I also wanted to address the relativity and the personal nature of the apocalypse. In Melancholia, Justine is able to face the idea of the end of the world much more calmly than her sister because Justine has more difficulty moving through the ordinary world and has already experienced self-altering depression. On a personal level, everyday life can feel apocalyptic, each new day or disaster wearing away at one’s sense of self. For the main character of this story, and for others in the world of the story who are used to operating while sleep-deprived, the plague is not significantly different than everyday life—it only forces everyone else to experience what they have been experiencing for years. Once everyone else’s experience is similar to their experience of life with chronic insomnia, the main character’s daily life transforms in a way that allows them to be just as functional as (or more functional than) others. While the plague is a destructive apocalypse for many people, for some it causes a liberative type of transformation.