Sleepless Years

by Steven Utley

Mr. Utley was recently seen online inviting fans to pen blurbs for his latest story, but after some consideration, we here at F&SF decided the best way to introduce “Sleepless Years” is to say “Here’s a great story. Read it.”

Mr. Utley then hastened to add that his publishers would appreciate it if we were to mention his story collections, The Beasts of Love and Where or When, so after you finish this gem, you’ll know where to look for more stories from this great writer.

I would like to sleep now. I would. I’ve told them this, they’ve asked, they’re interested in how I’m feeling, every time they ask, I tell them, “I would like to sleep now.” I find myself emphasizing different words whenever I say it. I would like to sleep now. I would like to sleep now. They hang on everything I say. I would like to sleep now. I have little else to say to them any more, so I say it often. I would like to sleep now. They seem never to tire of hearing me say it. I would like to sleep now.

They listen attentively, but, then, every sound I make fascinates them, every move I make, every gesture. Each throb of cardiac muscle, each rippling contraction of intestine, is miraculous anyway. That the reanimated meat also possesses desires and can actually express them in words is almost more than they dared expect, though certainly not more than they hoped. That, after all, was the point. They may once have had their doubts, but now they have me.

So I keep them riveted to their monitoring devices. There must be monitoring devices everywhere within the walls of my quarters. Perhaps even within my own body, too. My own body, spying on me, getting even with me for the violence I did to it. Getting back at me and getting away with it, too. “Well,” it would say (ah, sweet dualism!), “you can’t be trusted, you know.”

But, this matter of sleep. Early on, I complained to my chief tormentor, Kawanishi. You should consider yourself lucky, Kawanishi said, the average person sleeps away a third of his life.

I have no life to sleep away, I said.

Well, in the event, you no longer require sleep.

Doctor, require has nothing to do with it. I want to sleep.

He said, The sleep center of your brain no longer functions. For all practical purposes, it was destroyed.

Much more of my brain than that was destroyed, in fact, but this man claimed to have rebuilt much with cultures. I told him, People have to dream. They go crazy if they don’t.

Do you feel, he asked me, as though (and he grimaced, he hates it when I force him to use unscientific terms) you are going crazy?

Going, I said, going, I told him, gone!

But you are doing so well.

Not bad for a zombie.

He shook his head and said, firmly, Your heart rate is excellent. Your stools are firm. Some of our subjects show strong reactions to cryoprotectants, but not you.

Kawanishi is and always has been primarily, almost exclusively, interested in the mechanical end of things, and so he lets on that, as far as he’s concerned, he’s done his job. I like to believe, have to believe, that the fact I may indeed be insane bothers him. After all, his process is useless if it drives its subject mad.

And if he doesn’t have his doubts, why would I spend so much time talking to his colleague Barnes? Barnes is the psychiatrist, and one effect of Kawanishi’s handiwork particularly fascinates her.

What scientist ever bothered to explain anything to his laboratory animals? How they found me, why they chose me, what they did to capture the I of me and thrust it back into the meticulously repaired and miraculously revitalized it of me—mysteries, mysteries all. I awoke cold and in the worst pain I’d ever known. I awoke to chaos. My subconscious self had emerged from its murky sea depths and cleanly fused itself to my conscious self. I was seamless ego from forebrain to pituitary gland. Everything was there, memories, shadows, ghosts. Who would have thought that resurrecting one person could call back so many others? Who would have thought that I of all people should be so lucky as to be reunited with my lost ones in the next life?

When I could speak (many months after my awakening, and after much therapy), I said, I want it to end. I want oblivion and darkness and silence.

I’m afraid that what you want, Kawanishi replied, is of no consequence to me. There are bigger issues at stake here than what you want. Much bigger ones.

You’ve got no right to do this to me. I have a right to die and be left alone.

Kawanishi shrugged that off, but later the same day I received an unexpected visit from a stranger who identified himself as a lawyer. He did not say whom he represented. He pulled papers from his briefcase, spread them on the table between us, and said, You had a right to die. You exercised it, and now your option has expired. We merely salvaged the wreckage and put it to our own good use. Here are the papers. See? All perfectly legal. You stipulated that your body be donated for scientific research.

My body. Not me.

Well, no one really imagined that you’d still inhabit it, though, of course, the whole object—

That was the whole object, wasn’t it? Not just to reanimate a corpse, but to bring back the dead. You bastards! I’m in here. I’m in here!

All perfectly legal.

Let me tell you about the afterlife. There’s a special pit in Hell for lawyers.

The lawyer merely smiled.

I know what Hell’s like, I told him. Oh, believe me, sonny, I know where you go!

He didn’t believe a word of what I said, of course. Being a lawyer, he’d heard it before, and worse.

I realized soon enough that this facility (wherever it is), these people, this project, must all cost a great deal of money. I am the center of attention, I suspect, not for my own sake, but for someone else’s. I imagine shadowy figures must lurk behind the doctors and technicians and peer over their shoulders at me. These shadowy folk probably do not possess any of the most brilliant minds of our age, but they have much of its wealth and power sewn up, and they see in me the possibility of their being permitted to retain their stranglehold on the world indefinitely. Possibly, as Kawanishi puts it, forever. If they can’t take it with them, they just won’t go. We’re talking the resurrection and the life everlasting here.

With immortality practically within reach, the shadowy folk must be getting impatient.

I have considered the form my revenge should take. At first I thought to convince Kawanishi and Barnes somehow that my sanity no longer was in question; I would keep up this pretense until Time overtook the shadowy folk and each of them in turn submitted to Kawanishi’s process, returned from the dead but returned insane, returned to suffer as I suffer….

But I believe the course I now pursue is better. Let them go on hoping that my madness can and will be cured in time. Let them go on fretting. My one pleasure in this place is the knowledge that in dying they stand to lose more than I did, because they must want to live.

Oh, they must want so very desperately to live.

Day comes, as day always does. Everyone awakens. I get my breakfast. I pull on a dressing gown over my pajamas, slip my feet into slippers, and am dressed for the day. Then comes Barnes, who, as usual, asks me questions about myself and encourages me to answer them at length. She’s always been careful not to call me by name, but apart from that, our relationship’s not bad, as relationships in this place go. Kawanishi is your basic overenthusiastic mad-doctor type, and the attendants speak to me only to ask the most basic questions, e.g., “Are you ready to go to bed?” or to give the most unsympathetic answers, e.g., “No, you may not go outside.”

(For me, going to bed is pointless, of course, and I have never been permitted to go outside.)

Very early on, soon after I found myself in this place, I told Barnes, The doctor gives me the creeps.

She asked, Which doctor? There’re several doctors working here. I’m a doctor, too, you know.

She knew exactly whom I meant, but she was into her routine. I said, The one who examines me every morning. The Chinese one.

Actually, she says, he’s Japanese. No, actually, he’s as American as you and me. He’s from Los Angeles.

Los Angeles isn’t America. It’s Mars.

Barnes looked at me in astonishment. You made a joke!

Not much of a joke.

Still, a joke. That’s good. That’s progress. That’s very good.

Another breakthrough, I said to myself, and to her, Why is that good?

It means you’re on your way back to mental as well as physical well-being.

I thought, I’m not on my way back to anything, but I said to her, Some well-being. I’m stiff and sore and weak.

She smiled. That’s normal.

Nothing about this situation is normal, Doctor, and we both know it. When I dived into the water, I knew I was going to die. The water was very cold. I knew I was going to die.

Well, she said, you have Doctor Kawanishi to thank for the fact that you didn’t die.

What do I have to thank you for, Doctor Barnes?

I try to help people like you adjust.

There are others like me?

She ignored that question.

Well, then, I said, what shall we talk about today?

What do you want to talk about?

God. Why don’t we talk about God?

Have you been thinking about God lately?

I’ve been thinking about God all my life. I come from a long line of Pentecostals and Southern Baptists. No wonder I’m screwed up in the head, right? Incidentally, true Southerners always pronounce it Bab-tist.

Duly noted, she said.

As for Pentecostals, they emphasize revivalist worship and baptism, faith healing, glossolalia, premillennial teaching. Between the ages of six and eleven, I spent part of every summer at my grandparents’ home. My visits always coincided with a weeklong series of nightly revival meetings at a cinder-block tabernacle built on land donated by my great-grandfather. I saw and heard people speak in tongues, I saw the faith healers. I can hear the music. Sister Blanche on piano, with her good strong left hand, and all the people singing as though it were salvation itself. “I’m going to have a little talk with Jesus, I’m going to tell him all about my troubles.” And, “When we all get to Heh-vun, what a day of rejoicing that will be!” Whatever else Pentecostals are, they’re exuberant singers.

What about you? Barnes said.

I can’t carry a tune in a bucket. Anyway, even as a child I started singing it, “When we all get to Ho-hum.”

No, I mean, what do you believe in?

I’m an agnostic. I have been most of my life. I’m not an atheist only because, one, I can’t prove there isn’t a God, and, two, it takes too much energy to go around actively believing there isn’t a God.

Still, if you think about God a lot, even though you say you’re not convinced God exists—

It means God’s always with me, in a way. Perverse, no?

Barnes clasped her hands in her lap. How do you see God? I mean, even if you reject God as a concept, describe the concept you reject?

Well, first of all, I don’t believe in this big omnipotent, omnipresent personality—the old man with the long white beard. But I do believe in other people’s belief in that, and in a strange way I guess that means I believe in it, too. I hold that God responsible for all the terrible things he allows to happen to his believers. Never mind nonbelievers. It seems to me that if you’re God and you tell people that they ought to have faith in you, you ought to keep faith with them. And the Christian God, this supposedly just, loving, caring, merciful deity, doesn’t.

Whom do you feel God broke faith with?

Let me tell you about that. Let me tell you about my sister Ann and God and me. One day when Ann and I were little kids, she introduced me to the story of the crucifixion of Jesus. It had obviously excited her imagination, though (here I essay a small joke to show Barnes that I am capable of being funny twice in a single afternoon) Heaven knows where she’d heard it. Our parents weren’t churchgoers then. Our maternal grandparents and great-grandparents, devout Pentecostals all, had thus far told us only what they apparently felt were the less grisly and more uplifting Biblical tales—the baby in the manger, Ruth and Naomi, the Deluge. My sister came to me as I sat reading a Superman comic book. Her concise account of the crucifixion went like this: “Once upon a time, God came down from the sky. Some people got mad at him, and they stuck him on a cross. Then he went back up to Heaven.” And as she told me this, she demonstrated just how God had been stuck on a cross. Otherwise, I’d have had no idea of what a cross was. She thrust straight pins through the hands and feet of Little Lulu, whom she’d carefully clipped from the cover of one of her own comic books, into a cross made with two strips of green construction paper.

Barnes laughs and shakes her head. I’m sorry, she says, that image is just so funny.

Yeah. Imagine cutting up a perfectly good comic book.

No, I mean—well, never mind. Go on.

I didn’t believe the crucifixion story for a second and said so. “God,” I told Ann, “stays up in the sky. Even if he did come down, he wouldn’t let people stick pins in his hands!” This sounded unassailably logical to me. Superman, who likewise spent a lot of time in the sky and, furthermore, could stop the moon in its orbit with one hand—well, Superman sure wouldn’t have put up with anybody trying to shove pins through his hands, and God was supposed to be at least as strong as Superman. I took the matter to the highest authority, my grandmother. “Is God big and strong?” Why, honey, he’s the most powerful thing there is. “Did he get stuck on a cross?” Yes, and he died for our sins, so we can go to Heaven. I went away more perplexed than ever. Something did not compute. And thus I ricocheted, not for the last time, off the whole concept of God. Throughout the rest of my childhood and into my early teens, I crossed God’s path, or he crossed mine, like Pluto straying across the orbit of Neptune, without my ever attaining more than a momentary belief in him. I wasn’t unwilling, not then, anyway, to have faith in his love, his power, his wisdom. I was just incapable.

How long? I once asked Barnes in Kawanishi’s presence. How soon before you’re through with me?

Through with you? (Barnes sometimes echoes like that.) What do you mean?

How long are you going to keep me alive?

Why, Doctor Kawanishi said, radiant with pride, we can probably keep you alive indefinitely. Forever. Why not?

That was when I tried to kill myself again. Everyone was quite angry about it. Everyone must have expected me to be grateful. After this attempt, my environment was rendered absolutely safe. Now there are no sharp corners, no hard edges, anywhere in my quarters. Kawanishi and his people have too much invested in me. We’re talking highly advanced technology here. We’re talking new frontiers of science and medicine, and one of the most brilliant, if twisted, minds of our age. Kawanishi can do almost anything. He can summon the dead. He can provide every comfort (but one) for a creature whose existence is his greatest achievement (so far). The one thing he cannot do is help me to sleep. You no longer require sleep, he keeps telling me. There’s no longer any need, because there’s no longer any line of demarcation through the middle of your head, separating the halves of your mind. You’ve no subconscious any more. Lying very still for a couple of hours suffices to rid your body of fatigue poisons. That’s all the rest you need or will ever need. Something in our process has seen to that.

Let’s talk again, says Barnes, about your sister.

Must we?

What did you accomplish by not talking about her all those years, those decades? The horror and grief piled up inside you until they weighed so much they destroyed your ability to distinguish between the things for which you ought to feel guilt and those over which you had no control whatever.

But I’ve already told you everything there is to tell about her.

No. Barnes smiles. She has a good smile. In life I probably would have found her attractive. Every time we discuss your sister, something new comes out.

Very well. My sister was fourteen years old when they told her she had bone cancer.

How did she react?

When they told her what the problem was, how they proposed to deal with it, she went through the usual stages of mind. Shock, disbelief, pathetic outrage. Finally, she came to a renewed faith in God, first in the hope that he would make it better—that vestigial Pentecostal belief in faith healing—then, as the disease continued to devour her, in the belief that he worked in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.

How did your parents react?

Our parents prayed and had nervous breakdowns.

And you? How did you react?

It shocked me to see my stable, omnicompetent mother and father, who’d always taken everything in stride, who’d always seemed in control of their lives—and suddenly they were so useless. Well, I was just a teenager. What did I know? When the true hopelessness of my sister’s situation dawned on me, I wouldn’t let myself cry. Doctor, that’s where you’re suppose to say, Ah hah, if only you had let yourself cry! The two most pathetic words in the English language are If Only. So, I wouldn’t cry, and I couldn’t pray. I’d already stopped trying to chase down God and declared myself an atheist.

So you had nothing to fall back on. Not parents, not faith.

Nothing. Bear these facts in mind. My sister and I, who should have been close, never were, except for a moment at the end. She was brave to the very end. She’d made her peace with Heaven. The Great Book had been opened to the page bearing her name. God was calling her to Him, and she could but answer. I have no use for her God, but I’m not mocking her faith when I use these terms, which are simply those her religion provided. She believed, and such was her belief that she perceived she had one earthly mission to perform, one duty in this life, before the pain could end and an eternity of bliss became hers. She said to me at the end, “Accept Jesus as your lord. Please don’t die a sinner and go to Hell. Promise me you’ll accept God’s love into your heart and be saved. Promise me that. Please.”

And?

I promised.

Ah. Dr. Barnes puts her pen down.

All of these years, I tell her, I have had to live with the terrible knowledge that I knew, even as I made that promise, I couldn’t keep it. When I left my sister in the intensive care unit, I did go to the small chapel on the first floor of the hospital, and I did get down on my knees, humbled myself in God’s holy place. But I was too sickened. Too angry. God, I said, my sister is fifteen years old, fifteen, she’s never harmed anybody in her life, she could be the best of us all. If you’re truly a just and loving and merciful Lord, the fount of all goodness, then prove it. Stop this horror, please stop it right now, don’t let her die this slow ugly obscene utterly undeserved death. Words to that effect, anyway. I wasn’t an especially eloquent teenager, only an outraged one trying to make sense of a phenomenon that was supposed to affect, that heretofore had affected, only distant relatives and total strangers.

What happened next?

My sister died that afternoon. I still wouldn’t let myself cry. I vowed I’d never, ever, trust God. Two weeks after her death, I scrawled a piece of doggerel on the wall of a public restroom in response to some idiot’s broadly penned message that Jesus loved me. I wrote,

When I’m gone, yes, when I die,

I’m going up beyond the sky;

Forget the wings and other things—

I’ll poke Jehovah in the eye!

Dr. Barnes consults her notes for a minute, then says, Now tell me about your son again.

My son was born shortly after midnight one November 12th. His birthday would have been impossible to forget. Ordinarily, which is to say, back when I could still forget things, back when things were ordinary, I’d never been able to remember even the seasons when family members marked the passing of their years. But I’d been born on November 10th, my wife on November 14th, and there was our first child, perfectly placed between us. It would’ve meant one big birthday party a year for the three of us if certain things were presumed.

Such as?

That my wife and I should remain together, which is to presume a great deal. We were woefully mismatched. It took us years to admit it, even after one of her idiot astrology-minded friends made something of the fact that both of us were Scorpios. We made very little money, hardly enough to keep ourselves going, much less to raise a child. My son was born a month ahead of schedule. There were problems with his lungs, so he went straight from the delivery room to the intensive care ward. As I looked through the glass at him, lying there all purply-red and amazingly hairy, I felt everything. Pride. Wonder. Fear. Resentment. Guilt. He died before dawn, November 12th. All of these years, I’ve had to live with the memory of the floodtide of relief that rushed over me when they told me he was dead. I never cried for him, either. Everything in my life went to pieces after that. I had finally seen the face and knew the name of the real enemy. I had finally grasped the awful secret, the great truth, the key principle, the primary fact, the essence, the immutable underpinning, of Time.

Time? says Barnes. Not God?

Never mind God. Remember, God never quite existed for me, even after my sister died and I declared war on him. But Time—it was Time who’s out to get you! Time would rob you blind. Time would punish you whether you deserved it or not. Time would take everything you had that was worth having and leave only sorrow, terror, scars, indignities of every sort—the crap, in short. Then Time would take even that, and take you, too, and in the interim, between the former kind of losses and the latter, ultimate loss, Time would give you just as many or as few hours, days, years as you needed to think about what had happened to you, and about what was going to happen. My wife and I at least had the good sense to go our own ways, though we couldn’t resist the urge to inflict a few last slow-healing wounds on each other. I spent the year after the divorce finding out the hard way that I didn’t have what it takes to be a successful alcoholic. That seemed to leave me little choice. One evening, an October 15th, I found out the hard way that I did have what it takes to be a successful suicide. I remember the date was January 6th. I remember the water was extremely cold.

Barnes has a strange expression on her handsome face. Perhaps I have at last moved her to pity. She takes out her cell phone and calls Kawanishi.

Nighttime is when the dead come out, and not only the dead. All my losses have been made good, not only the dead but also the misplaced, girls and women who went away, boys and men who dropped out of sight, places, pets, everybody, everything. Pride of place, however, goes to the dead, relatives, friends, acquaintances—even if I don’t count myself, it appalls me, the number of people I know who have passed away, shuffled off this mortal coil, gone to be with Sartre. I recognize my father’s youngest brother, who died of a heart attack, my grandparents and great-grandparents, a cousin of mine who one day picked up the pretty end of a fallen power line, friends, each of them dead too soon—even a guy from my high school. Woodland creatures had been at him for a while when a hunter stumbled upon his shallow unmarked grave.

Early on, I tried pleading with these phantoms to go away and leave me in peace. I tried threats and insults, even tried laying hands upon them, but, of course, you can’t reason with or intimidate or hurt shadows. Now I try to annihilate them and myself. I close my eyes and lie very, very still, waiting, hoping, even praying, for sleep.

For if the line separating my conscious and subconscious selves has been erased, if indeed everything is right up here on the surface now, then, below, back down in the depths, what can there be but oblivion?

So, at night, it’s crowded where I live, if you call this living, but it could be worse. Usually everyone just hovers at the extremes of my peripheral vision, though occasionally one or two of the other ghosts drift forward and past, cocked at some ludicrous angle in the air and evidently oblivious to me. No one ever speaks to me directly, their voices are barely audible, and I can never tell what they’re saying. Tonight I am visited by my grandmother, who undoubtedly has forgotten (undoubtedly she has forgotten, being beyond more forgetting, being in fact dead these many years past) how, when I was a child, she gave me my first instruction about religion by telling me about Heaven. Although I decided that there was a lot to be said for the possession of wings, Heaven didn’t fascinate me half so much as the means one used to get there, the thing death. What was death? What? What?

Then, one night, sometime soon after I had begun to hear of death, I lay me down to sleep and dreamed the dream. In the dream, as I stood outside my grandparents’ house (a big, warm, secure house, my favorite house during childhood, the center of my universe), great invisible hands suddenly seized me, snatched me high into the air, whizzed me away. I realized, somehow, that this was the thing death, that I had died and was on my way to Heaven. I flew high above the world at terrific speed and was not afraid. At last, I slowed in my flight, descended, alighted before a gate of metal bars, entered, found myself in a cobblestone-paved courtyard enclosed by decrepit buildings. A sluggish stream of dirty water bisected the courtyard and passed through the gate. I was alone, and wingless.

I awoke filled with tremendous disappointment and fury.

Not that I blamed my grandmother or thought ill of her in any way. Granny, I say as she drifts by, you were badly misinformed.

But as the night wears on and sleep never comes, my mood sours. My sister’s worst fears about the ultimate destination of my immortal soul have been realized. I scream at the walls and shake my fists at the ceiling and at the sky beyond the ceiling, for all the good it does me to shake my fists at either. It doesn’t matter whether God doesn’t exist or simply isn’t moved by my plight. As for Barnes and Kawanishi, when she called him on her cell phone, he arrived so quickly that he could have been waiting hidden, listening all the while, just outside the door.

Look, Barnes told him, still with that strange expression on her face, and he approached me, peered into my face.

Yes, he said happily, the tear ducts work perfectly.

For Nancy Ann Utley (1950-1966)

and

Jon Christopher Utley (1971).

Table of Contents

Start