The Gift of Vigil

From the Meridian Enrollment Brochure, First Edition:

Congratulations. You have been selected to receive the Gift of Vigil. Sleep was the tax your grandparents paid on the privilege of being alive — a third of every life surrendered to the dark, unearned, unremembered, unproductive. We have forgiven the debt. Welcome, at last, to the whole of your life.

I keep the brochure in a drawer, though we no longer put anything to bed, not even the children. I read it in the hour that used to be three in the morning and is now only an hour, lit like the rest, priced like the rest.

They did not take sleep by force. That is the part the histories will get wrong. They offered it, the way you offer a loan to a person who is drowning, and we signed. Thirty extra years of waking, the counselors said, folded back into a single life. Think what you could build. Think what you could become. No one in the enrollment office said the word dream, and so no one thought to ask where the dreams would go.

The Vigil is a small blue capsule, and then it is nothing — a habit, a citizenship. Within a month the body forgets the shape of lying down. Within a year the beds are gone, sold for the metal, and the word bedroom survives only on old floor plans, a room named for a thing it no longer holds.

At first we were magnificent. That is the truth they never have to lie about. The city did not dim. We wrote symphonies at what used to be midnight, poured foundations, learned second and third languages, watched our output climb like something devout. Meridian's stock split four times. The counselors had been right about everything they promised. It is only the things they did not promise that went missing.

Here is what I have learned in eleven years without darkness. Sleep was not idleness. It was the body's clemency. In the old world you could wound someone, or be wounded, and lie down, and rise with the edge of it dulled — the mind filing the day away into some deep cabinet you were not permitted to open. We called it sleeping on it. We did not know it was mercy. Now the days do not file. They stack. Every slight, every grief, every face of every person I have failed stays lit at the brightness of the hour I acquired it. I remember my mother's death the way I remember this morning. There is no cabinet anymore. There is only the desk, and everything on it, forever.

And the dreams. No one warned us about the dreams, because no enrollment office has a budget line for them. I used to fly, some nights, or speak with the dead, or arrive unprepared at an examination for a subject I had never studied and feel the sweet private terror of it. My daughter, born after, has never once been anywhere she did not walk to. She is a good citizen. She has never been frightened by anything that wasn't real, and so she has never been consoled, either, by waking to find that it wasn't. She asks me what flying felt like, and I cannot tell her, because the language for it lived on the far side of a door that no longer opens.

There is a market for it now, of course. There is always a market for what we abolish. In the low rooms under the transit arches you can buy an hour of the old dark: a booth, a cot, an antidote drawn from Meridian's own laboratories and sold back to us at the price of a week's wages. They call the people who go there sleepers, and they say it the way my grandmother said addict. I went. I am telling you that I went, and I would sign my name to it, except that names are how they find you.

The woman in the booth beside mine was ninety, or looked it; no one ages the way they used to, all those extra hours worn into the face. She lay down on the cot with the reverence of someone entering water. I want to lose something, she told me, before the dark took her. Just once more. I want to wake and not have it.

I lay down. It took the antidote the better part of an hour to find the old road. And then — I want to be precise, because precision is the only offering I have left — I forgot. Not everything. Only the day. Only the top layer of the desk, swept clean while I was somewhere I could not afterward describe. I woke with my mother's death still inside me, but softened, moved one drawer down, and I wept the way you weep at a funeral instead of the way you weep at a wound. It was the most human I had felt in eleven years.

Meridian's newest brochure has a line I have underlined. Studies confirm that unauthorized sleep degrades civic performance and should be reported. Beneath it, smaller: Remember what you were rescued from.

I remember. That is the whole of my complaint. I remember everything, all of it, at the same relentless noon — and the only thing I was ever rescued from was the mercy of forgetting.

I am writing this at the hour that used to be four in the morning. Somewhere in the lit city my daughter is awake, being magnificent. I am going to leave these pages where she will find them. Then I am going to the low rooms under the arches, and I am going to lie down, and I am going to lose something, on purpose — like a woman setting down at last a weight she was never told she had been carrying.

Welcome, at last, to the whole of your life.