1B murmured, “In France it’s allowed, in France,” then awoke with a spastic, electrified kick. He levered himself up and out of his conch shell. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened one slightly at his watch, swore and produced his tube of vitamins. He rang the call button, yellow schematic of a stewardess producing a living one.
“You woke up for your vitamin?” Julian asked as the man gulped his boiling green potion from a plastic cup, like a witch at a child’s birthday party.
“How old are you?” 1B asked in reply. “Really? I would have said older. Either way, you’re in the zone for spinal stenosis and your first jumps of cholesterol. You cleared the first testicular cancer window, but another one’s still coming. You’re almost free and clear for MS, but pay close attention to any tingling in your extremities for a couple more years. You got to keep dodging bullets. But one of them will find you.” He switched off his light and re-reclined, fell asleep with such speed that Julian thought of his father’s story of the Japanese sleepers.
Julian would have told Carlton the same fairy tale, an heirloom by then. Carlton at six or seven would have liked it. Julian had liked it, hurried up to bed for the improvised fantasias, his father’s profile against the gray window, still some light behind him in summertime, the smell of liniments and beer, an inflatable brontosaurus on Julian’s dresser, and then a chapter of a favorite story, the endless stories his father just breathed: the good and bad kings of the chickens, the war for boys’ hearts, the abcoyotes of Defghijklistan, and the long serial about the sleepers of Japan, who sent Julian off to sleep every motherless night for more than a year.
In a secluded town nestled up against the Fugu Mountains, a peculiar history had led to an acquired condition, and then natural selection had cemented it into a population’s genetic code: the people of this village all slept for thirty seconds every ninety seconds, day and night, to the second. Individuals varied: everyone slept and woke according to his own unchangeable schedule, and so a perfect match was rare. But if a young man met a young woman who fell asleep when he did, they could spend far more time together—”three quarters of their life, better than we do here,” Julian’s father said, only some months after his wife’s death—and he would always wish to marry her. And yet parents always forbade such engagements: if the couple slept
together
, who would care for the children, likely to sleep on a different schedule? Who would protect them from bears?
“No, never, never,” grumbled one girl’s father to her suitor, come to ask for his blessing. The father twirled his long gray beard between his fingers and fell asleep just as his old wife awoke beside him. “What did my husband say to your proposal, child?” she asked.
The young suitor, Toshiro, was heartbroken and could not resist the dishonorable opportunity life had presented him. He replied, “Mrs. Yakamoto, your husband sees how much I love your daughter, how good a husband I will make. He has given his blessing.” Mrs. Yakamoto smiled and whisked the tea for a celebratory cup.
Soon, Mr. Yakamoto snapped awake, refreshed, to see tea being poured. Toshiro, his eyelids fluttering, said, “Esteemed he-elder, your wife is happy for us, and has blessed our union. She wishes you to be happy for us as well.” And he fell asleep.
He awoke to Mr. Yakamoto, his wife asleep. “Boy you have forsaken your honor. Never will you wed our daughter, and I shall tell all the elders of your wickedness. Leave at once,” he said in a low voice, and fell fast asleep. Toshiro rose, bowed to the sleeping man, and walked out of the house. In the garden, he looked up to the second-story window where, behind the lace curtains, he saw his beloved, her eyelids beginning to droop, and he sat down on the stone path and fell asleep.
“Will he find a way to marry her?” Julian had asked his father, and later imagined Carlton asking him.
“There’s no reason to think so,” his father replied, for Julian’s own good. Julian had always intended to answer Carlton just so, with the same tone of weary wisdom. “More tomorrow, little man. You’ve had a busy day.”
In later episodes, banished Toshiro made his way out of the hamlet (haltingly) and wandered the Japanese countryside, being wickedly abused by the regular-sleeping people of the rest of Japan. He was beaten, robbed, stripped naked, tied to trees and covered with honey; he woke to endless predicaments he needed to escape in ninety seconds. Julian’s father was willing to torture his creation, to use him to prove life’s enduring and unquestionable awfulness—that was Aidan’s view of the matter. “He used to tell you this when you were a
motherless child”
Aidan later marveled. “Not a nice man.”
The exiled lover was taken in by a monk in a conical hat and blue rabbit-fur slippers, who taught him the secrets of his order, which allowed Toshiro to shift and consolidate his sleep until, after years of study, he was able to sleep like a normal Japanese. When, for the first time, he slept for eight hours and worked the monk’s fields for sixteen, the monk told him he must leave, there was nothing more for him to learn. “But I have at last forgotten my sorrow,” protested Toshiro. “That is always the time happiness must end,” said the monk. “But master, I am happy here,” Toshiro insisted. “No, you have only learned to hide your unhappiness and form dreams from it instead.”
Toshiro, his face much changed by his new sleeping habits, returned to his village under a false name, feigning sleep for thirty seconds every ninety. He learned of his beloved’s marriage to a nasty butcher, a loveless match, though with fully unsynchronized sleep, pleasing the traditionalist parents. The butcher was also a thief. Having weighed out an order, he would, when his customers fell asleep, wrap up a lighter package, charging them for the amount they saw before losing consciousness. (Although–Julian’s father had to give him his due—some of his customers often took meat off the scale themselves, hiding it in their bags when the butcher fell asleep.)
The vengeful hero spied from the shadows as the butcher scolded his miserable wife, beat her until he fell asleep, then, waking, waited for her to wake up so he could continue the beating where he’d left off. Watching from behind a hanging pig carcass, Toshiro waited until the villain nodded off. Then he revealed himself, kissed the beloved hand, and hung his rival by his coat from a meat hook, leaving before the butcher awoke, letting the cur feel the presence of a devil, before returning to his hiding place in the forest where he caught his requisite eight hours of
z
‘s.
“He’s going to win her back and teach her to sleep like him,” Julian recalled sleepily predicting, as he now fell asleep in 1A.
One night, in the woods, in the midst of his long slumber, Toshiro awoke to find his beloved standing over him, sobbing silently. She had, with great difficulty, over several nights, followed him discreetly to his nesting area, one leg of the journey each night, since he was able to move so much more steadily. “I thought you were dead,” she moaned.
“No, only wandering the countryside, learning, planning to return for you, and now I have.”
“No! Not then,
now
. You have been asleep for
hours.”
She spoke this last word with disgust and finality, and then she fell asleep. Thirty seconds later she spat it again: “Hours!”
She began her slow return to the village and her butcher. She awoke ninety times en route, forest and stream, moon and sand, and each time Toshiro declared his love, entreated her to elope, vowed to teach her the long sleep. But her repulsion was too strong, and the ninety-first time, she awoke alone, and she praised her father’s wisdom in having prevented this nightmarish match.
“She preferred the
butcher?”
young Julian had demanded.
“Other people are not like you,” his father explained from the bedside. “Look, Julian: love is not sufficient. It never has been. Stories that claim otherwise are lies,” kindly instructed the man still weaving from his losses. “There’s always
something
after happily ever after.” (“He used to tell you that? When you were a kid?” Aidan later asked. “And you think that guy was not a sick, sad bastard?” “Of course he was,” Julian had said. “That’s easy. But you refuse to see the rest of what he was.”)
As with all childhood nighttime serials, this one had no end. It fizzled out, Julian reading to himself, or his father seeing him off to sleep with bedtime chat about jazz or baseball, or just a good night called up the stairs from beside the stereo, amidst liniment and beer and drawings of inflatable women.
The sleepers, Julian’s father confirmed years later in a hospital in Ohio, had been born in the Japanese hospital where he had swum in and out of morphine slumber, unable to hold on to consciousness for long, unable to drop very deeply into the turbulent narcotic sleep, while actual Japanese people kept themselves at a strange distance, visible only through soap-smeared windows, behind rakes and leaves, murmuring to one another beyond the iron fence, on the dirt path under the bare branches of the reticulated plane trees.
Julian awoke in darkness, not at first certain where he was, unsure how long he’d been asleep. His iPod was dead, so he plugged his headphones in to the armrest. He listened to the audio channels and soon heard Cait, singing for him even as she slept forty rows behind him. The corporate parody of a DJ called her “an Irish angel trapped in the body of your best dreams” and played “Bleaker and Obliquer,” their song, savored in star-eyed darkness, a red strobe on a wing somewhere behind him keeping the beat against the velour sky and the passing time zones, and she sang him back to sleep.
He woke again to the unnatural morning and the sizzle of a vitamin tablet hitting water. “You have some serious sinus clutter,” 1B reported. “You should get that looked at.” Outside, glassy river deltas, like cardiac vessels in a green cadaver, displayed shadows of clouds and the plane. The reflection in the window of Julian’s book stained ponds and fields of green squares with translucent murder victims and the Paris mosque. Lower, the plane’s shadow skewered Dublin’s cars and fleeing birds. Ribbons of cloud still stuck to the plane and streamed behind the wings as, with a squeal and hydraulic barking, the world was made real again. Julian donned his hood and super-fly eyewear, hurried to the door, and hid behind baggage carousels like Toshiro behind hanging pigs, watching her and waiting for their perfect moment.
THEY LANDED EARLY IN THE MORNING
, but already distant objects had begun to ripple. He raced her to the hotel.
Surprise me
.
Surprise me. He couldn’t go to her before her tour had even begun, he decided, so in Dublin he posted to her website, just after she left them, the address of every shop and pub and old friend she visited; the cathedral where she sat in late-afternoon half-light listening to the organist rehearse and animate the statues and pillars and glass; even the police station from which she extracted her drummer late at night—a still life of her in motion, a fond hello, wish-we-were-here, a breath of inspiration blown into her ear by an invisible muse. He traced the stations of her journey on a map of the city, drew her final path as an ornately twisting snake with her face, added a high-sheen apple in the serpent-Cait’s open jaws and a self-portrait, as dubious Adam, J.D. on his fig leaf, reaching hesitantly for the tempting fruit, his own Adam’s apple high in his throat. He scanned and e mailed it to her from the Morgan le Fay business center, but when it came time for her tour’s opening notes, her triumphant return to Ireland, he couldn’t walk into the club. He paced outside because the bar was too crowded, too ordinary, and the Adam and Eve drawing already seemed stale. He had wanted to do something to replenish them before they met, the perfect last step before they touched, something to replace the lost poem and postcard, snatched by Rachel, but the new drawing was embarrassing now, just an old gag. There was no point to any more delay, but he went back to his hotel room, and while she sang across town, he sat there like the painting of tree-wrapped Merlin above the TV or the wood-mounted marlin above his bed, listened, on his iPod’s travel throne, to her demo, felt he was a serious contender for the most ridiculous man on earth, effortlessly the most ridiculous in Ireland.
Six hours later, the Smiths’ “London,” the Clash’s “London Calling,” and Lenny Kravitz’s “Mr. Cab Driver” played on his iPod until he fell asleep on the London cab’s hard leather. He dreamt of Carlton, casually conversational, dispensing wise advice, snapping his little fingers to something on his own mini, scarlet iPod. When Julian awoke, it was all he could do to avoid her. She was on the radio in the cab. The details of her London gig were on the posters lining the walls of a motorway sound barrier, where she peeped out at him again and again from behind a lowered Greek fisherman’s cap covering one eye. Her fame was expanding like a boiling ocean.
And then she was standing at Reception with Ian and the rhythm section and a manager of some sort, a boisterous bald Cockney translating from band to concierge with urgent unnecessity, drum and guitar cases piled high on the crimson velour of the brass-arched luggage cart, the groovy bellboy all in black, service fashions trying to keep up with Bohemia. No, not here, not in a group, not in the morning, not in a lobby, not with this lighting, not until he’d showered, not without a blast of pure desire animating him like an organ in an empty church, not unless she just came to him like his mother came to his father in the hospital, indifferent to his leg.
Julian retreated as far as he could within the sleek and barren lobby, couldn’t find a traditional potted plant and so squatted instead behind a transparent divan to fish out his hat and hood and glasses, then hid behind a mirrored pillar and looked hopelessly at the lobby’s three mirrored walls, its mirrored elevator bank, the mirrors of the reception desk, trying to find some angle by which he would not be projected onto the surfaces in front of her. He despaired at the infinite reversed and double-reversed and triple-reversed versions of himself, multiplying in all directions.