33

(Chapter One)


Have you ever started your day dreaming about work? You go to bed right on time most nights thinking you're being responsible for yourself. Seven hours at least. That's not too bad is it? Sleep well. All except for that last part where you drag yourself out of bed, to bathe, to transit, to work. Right as you get to the door, on time and clean, you snap out of slumber by the sound of your alarm nailing its way into your skull. It was a fucking dream. You now have to do this twice in a row on the same day. Its not even worth bitching out loud to yourself about it. You just fall from bed with a groan.

So that one could be at least two or three times in a lunar cycle. What about the others? Are there others? Times when you wake up late because seconds ago, some man in a business suit wearing his face upside down informs you that you accidentally shut off your snooze three hours ago. Just try to explain that when you finally get to work. How about the one where you come out of the subway to find everyone on the street floating along and dragging the tips of their toes? Or another when you were a teacher with a class of noisy disobedient children and they all had wheels instead of hands and feet. You order them for the last time to quite down before someone gets shot right as you get hit in the face with a spitball. Impatiently, you lower the barrel of a pistol grip shotgun and go to work causing the kids to scream far louder as their wheeled extremities clumsily roll, slip, slide and topple onto each other trying to escape the massacre.

There really are people out there like this. No rest. Like every dream you have ever had felt like a highly distorted state of full consciousness. Like your body literally cannot register that sleep and rest happened the night before. Technically never sleeping. Just slowly dwindling and fading that (usually) hard line between reality and subconscious fiction. It can drive one to desperate measures for sure. It can write volumes of terror for the one afflicted. This is just such a tale. Well, not a tale so much as an account of what took place in our subject's head. It isn't even fair to call it fiction. It is as real to him as the waking world. Jerome Trendt. That was his name. He moved in down the hall three moths ago. He was a virtually a drone in the customer service department of a large bank in the financial district. Six days a week. Fifteen smoke breaks per day, along with four hundred telephone calls and three thousand emails. It seemed ridiculously unfair to him to be expected to put up with the mundane life that awaited him at work after traveling the wildest corners of his imagination. You see, for him, it wasn't the subconscious he feared. It was his own imagination. Creativity for good but mostly ill ran rampant through Jerome's sleep and any attempts cause a change toward a healthier slumber were barely effective if at all.

How long would you give yourself? Months? Years?