Sleepless in Hiroshima

Satono Chojo woke at eight fifteen in the morning, sitting upright before she was fully aware of having moved.

Not a start. Not the gasping lurch of a nightmare shaken off. Just awake, all at once, the way a light comes on. She sat there in the gray wash of curtained sun, hands flat on the futon, and for one absurd moment she had the distinct sensation that she had just taken her first breath. Ever. As if the twenty-nine thousand mornings before this one had not counted, had not been breaths at all, and this was the first.

She let the thought pass through her the way you let a stranger pass on a narrow street, acknowledged, not engaged. It made no sense. She was thirty-three years old. She had breathed plenty.

Her apartment in Otemachi held the particular calm of a building full of people who had already left for work. Through the wall, she heard nothing. Through the window, distantly, the tram. The workday demanded action, so Satono dressed, ate rice and pickled plum standing at the counter because she had never learned to enjoy sitting for breakfast alone, and left for the day the way she left every day, her building rising a few streets from the place where, on this date in 2033, eighty-eight years ago, the sky itself had come apart.

She did not think about that as she walked. Nobody in Hiroshima thinks about it every day. It is simply there, as a scar on the back of a hand you use for everything.

The day was ordinary in every way she could name. Work was work. Her coworkers were themselves. Lunch was udon, too hot, eaten too fast. If anyone had asked her, at any point between eight fifteen and sundown, whether anything was wrong, she would have said no, and she would not have been lying. Nothing was wrong. That was, she would later understand, the first wrong thing.

That night, she noticed.

A new novel lay on her nightstand, one she’d been meaning to start for three weeks. It was the kind of book you fall asleep against after two chapters and a fight to keep your eyes open. She picked it up at what she judged to be her usual hour, anticipating the usual fight with slumber.

She turned one page, and then another. The story held her and would not let go, not allowing her to notice the hours, nor the traffic outside thinning, then growing silent, then rising again, faint and then less faint. Satono only noticed these things much later, only after looking up from the finished novel.

When she finally closed the book, the window had gone from black to the flat gray that comes just before dawn. She sat there a moment before it came to her, whole and strange. She had wrestled through the night and refused to let go until daybreak, the way Jacob had, at the river, with the angel he would not release until he was blessed.

Jacob had walked away limping. Marked for the rest of his life by the thing that had held him until morning. She did not feel marked. That was the trouble. She felt nothing at all — not the ache, not the limp, not even the fatigue that should have been the price of a night like that. Only clear. Only awake.

If something had touched her in the dark and refused to leave until dawn, it had left without taking anything from her. Or so she believed, at eight fifteen that morning, with the whole day still ahead of her. Satono searched her body for proof anyway, the way you search a pocket for keys you’re sure must be somewhere: that particular grit behind the eyes, the leaden pull at the back of the skull, the yawn that arrives before you’ve decided to yawn. None of it. She felt, if anything, unusually clear. Rested, though she had not rested. Awake in a way that had nothing provisional about it.

This is not right, she thought, and dressed for the day which had already, without her permission, begun. The second day, cleared a week’s backlog of paperwork before the lunch gong sounded. Her supervisor stopped at her desk twice to ask if something had changed. She said no both times and kept typing.

That night, the lights went off at eleven, same as always, and she lay flat on her back with her eyes closed, waiting. Her mind counted the seconds between the refrigerator’s hum cutting on and off. A motorbike passed twice on the street below, going in the same direction both times. At one point, Santono got up, checked that the door was locked, and lay back down. The clock beside the futon read 2:47, then, what felt like a blink later, 4:49. By six, still on her back, eyes open, the same water stain on the ceiling she’d been meaning to ask the landlord about for a year was committed to memory.

The clinic awaited her before work, hair still damp, as she sat in a plastic chair, filling out the intake form on autopilot, the pen finding the same boxes it always found. Above the reception desk, a television murmured with muted sound, its captions running. Satono watched the words scroll past without meaning to: …rising number of cases worldwide… no fatigue reported… no medical explanation at this time… The segment cut to a five-day forecast before she’d finished reading it twice.

“Chojo-san.” The nurse practitioner had her folder already open, pen uncapped. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“Two nights. No sleep, yet I’m not tired — no mental nor even physical fatigue.” Sitting up, she held up her hand before the nurse could speak. “I checked. I’m not — nothing’s wrong with me. I feel fine. That’s the problem.”

The nurse’s pen stopped moving. She set it down. “You have seen the news, then.”

“Just now. In the waiting room.”

“Individually, this might be just something minor. However, this seems to be a global phenomenon.” The nurse leaned forward slightly, her pen tapping fast against the folder now. “Is there anything you can identify as a catalyst — anything that would help identify why it affected you?”

Satono thought about it, really thought, running back through the last few days for anything out of place. “No,” she spoke at last. “Nothing. I didn’t travel. I didn’t eat anything strange. I went to work, I came home, I went to bed, same as always.” She heard how thin it sounded even as she said it — an ordinary life, offered up as an alibi.

The nurse wrote a short line and set the pen down again, uncapped, at the folder’s edge. “Two nights is nothing to panic about, on its own.” She picked the pen back up and tapped it once against the folder. “But if this keeps going — the human mind isn’t built to run without rest. People who try it fall apart. Fast. The doctor recommends a full test workup. Blood, EKG, EEG, a CAT scan. The works.”

She nodded and said nothing, because there was nothing yet to say back.

They drew blood from the inside of her elbow. They taped small discs along her scalp, one at a time, until, looking in the monitor's reflection, it looked like something wired for a purpose she didn’t understand. A machine clipped to her fingertip beeped once and held steady. The nurse told her two days, maybe three, for results, and pressed a pamphlet on sleep hygiene into her hand on the way out — six tips, a cartoon moon, a cup of chamomile tea with a smiling face drawn onto the mug.

Satono read all six tips standing on the clinic steps. She was already doing four of them.

Upon returning home, she sat on a bar stool at the kitchen counter. “Clova.” Her voice rose toward the white speaker by the stove. “People who can’t sleep. Around the world. What does it say?”

The speaker’s ring of light pulsed blue. “I have found several million results. Would you like the most recent first?”

“Yes, please.”

“As of this evening, there are over three hundred million reported cases worldwide, and the number is increasing hourly.”

Chojo set her chopsticks down. “Is there a pattern? Age, region, anything?”

“I can find none. The cases span every country reporting data, every age group, and both sexes equally.”

“What are people saying caused it?”

“There are several competing theories.” A pause, the kind Clova always inserted before a longer answer, as if it were considering rather than simply retrieving. “The most widely shared claim is that a hidden signal has been embedded in the noise of the internet, a subliminal suggestion targeting a portion of the population.”

“You don’t sound convinced,” Satono said, though she knew that was absurd. Clova wasn't built to sound convinced or unconvinced.

“I have no basis to be convinced or unconvinced. Would you like the second most commonly aspoused theory?”

“Go on.”

“Some believe a parasite, or a latent genetic condition, has lain dormant in affected people, activated by an environmental trigger not yet identified.”

She turned in her seat a quarter turn, an old habit from childhood, though there was no reason for it now. “And the third?”

“A minority position, growing in popularity, holds that the bodies of the affected are shifting toward a new frequency. Not an illness. The first stage of a change the species has been waiting for without knowing it.” A brief pause. “Some are calling it the first stages of ascension.”

Satono said nothing for a moment.

“Would you like a fourth?” Clova asked.

“No,” she said. “Please stop.”

The light on the speaker dimmed to standby. Her appetite seemed to flee like the darkness when the light is switched on, and decided to lay down anyway at eleven, because that was still what a body was supposed to do whether one needed to or not. The ceiling waited above her, the same water stain, the same crack running toward the light fixture. She did not close her eyes to sleep. She closed them because it felt, at least, like the only logical thing to do.

The third night began without asking her permission either. Two more nights passed the same way, and the days grew stranger around the edges of her sameness. This was, if Satono was honest with herself, becoming more than a bit irritating.

On the fifth day, the clinic called her in. The nurse slid a single printed sheet across the desk, every line within normal range, every box unchecked. “Your test results came back clean, nothing out of the ordinary,” the nurse said, in a voice which had lost some of its earlier composure. “There’s nothing here.” Clean should have been good news. It only meant there was nothing to fix, which was worse.

That evening, the number went up on every screen at once, no longer an estimate but a count: nearly three billion people worldwide, no longer sleeping. Roughly one in three. Satono sat with the figure a long time before the shape of it came to her, unbidden, from a Sunday school classroom she hadn’t thought of in twenty years, a dragon with a tail vast enough to sweep a third of the stars from the sky and fling them to the earth. She did not believe it, not exactly. But she understood, watching the number sit there on the screen, why someone would want to.

By morning, the word had already spread past her, past Hiroshima, past Japan. If a third of the world had been touched by something, then something had touched it on purpose, and something on purpose meant someone should be found. Online, the confusion hardened into something colder: a hashtag, then a name, the sleepers for those who still went home each night and lost themselves to it, the sleepless for the rest.

A call went up to badge them, publicly, so the sleepers would know at a glance who they were dealing with. The symbol that stuck was the Eye of Horus. Within days, it was compulsory anywhere public, and Satono Chojo pinned the small enamel pin to her collar every morning without a fight left in her to give. People at the konbini began stepping half a pace back from her at the register, the way you step back from a dog you’re not sure of.

By the seventh day, she no longer flinched at the suspicious, burning stares that followed her down the street.

That evening, she sat in a narrow teahouse two streets from her apartment, across the low table from a young man named Hoshino and an older woman, Reiko, both wearing the same small mark she bore. None of them had known each other eight days ago. Now they came here most evenings, three people with nothing in common except the thing that had stopped happening to all of them at once. It was the only table in the room that the staff did not approach.

“My daughter won’t allow me to hold my grandson anymore,” Reiko was saying, turning her cup without drinking from it. “She says it’s not personal. She says it’s just until things are clearer.” Her voice held a deep sullenness.

“Clearer than what?” Satono said. She hadn’t meant it as a real question, but Reiko looked up at her as if it were one, and neither of them had an answer.

Hoshino said nothing. He had stopped saying much of anything, Satono had noticed, over the last two days, and tonight he had sat with both hands flat on the table, very still, like a man bracing for a sound he already knew was coming.

“They watch us the way they’d watch a potentially rabid dog that hasn’t bitten anyone yet,” Reiko said, and around the room, without looking directly.

She could feel exactly which tables had gone quiet to listen. “Not because we’ve done anything. Because we might. That's what the sleepers are afraid of.”

“We haven’t,” Hoshino said. It was the first thing he’d said all evening.

“I know,” Reiko said. “It doesn’t matter that we won't. It is their fear of us that rules everything now.”

Above the counter, the television that never seemed to turn off cut from a variety show to a red banner and a scrolling line of text. The Diet (The Japanese legislative body), the anchor said, in the same even voice that had previously reported on rising sleeplessness like weather, was considering emergency measures. Identification. Relocation. Quarantine centers, should the situation continue to escalate.

The teahouse went very quiet.

Satono felt it before she turned to look: the particular pressure of attention landing all at once, from every table, every face that did not wear the mark, turning as one toward the three of them, and staying there.

No one spoke. No one moved to leave, either. They watched, the way a crowd watches something it has already decided is dangerous, waiting only to see what it does next.

Reiko set her cup down without a sound. Hoshino did not move his hands from the table. Satono held very still and understood, with a clear sense that had not left her in seven days and did not leave her now, that stillness would not be enough.