The Wakers

He liked this bench on the 6:12 train. He left work early to get it, despite the looks. The third bench from the front, Hudson side.

One evening, he faced a new advertisement: WAKE UP: tomorrow is now. He opened his notebook, and sketched what he saw: A couple, deep in conversation, ignore a vista of a futuristic city. Seattle or Hong Kong, cities on the waterfront with sharp hills rising on the horizon. Gherkin and pyramidal buildings mixed in with housing blocks and office towers. The couple were seated close, but not touching, on a donut-shaped couch suspended above the city. The white male model wore a supervisory expression—furrowed brow, looking down his nose at her, his hands clasped and slightly raised. She wore a black wig, pulled back in a thick ponytail. She leaned heavily on her elbow, which did not dent the couch cushions at all. These future humans were uncomfortable and weightless in a photograph that had been tinged bluish yellow.

John noticed ads. He designed them. His style leaned toward immediacy. He was interested in neither the past nor the future. He kept two pairs of shoes, one black and one brown, in the same style from the Shoe Carnival in Wappinger Falls. The brown ones wore out their color faster.

Monday on the 6:12 pm to Beacon, WAKE UP: tomorrow is now

Tuesday on the 6:04 am to GCT, WAKE UP: tomorrow is now

Tuesday on the 6:12 pm to Beacon, WAKE UP : tomorrow is now

On Wednesday, he shifted forward on his bench to study the ad’s copy and found the font too small to read. He got up, and dropped himself into the jump seat near the exit, facing away from the ad. He craned around to find the company logo: Entemps. Below the uncomfortable couple was a tagline:

“It’s time to wake up to a new world full of exponential experiences. www.wakeup.entemps.com”

He typed in the link when he got three bars of cell service at Cold Spring. Big Pharma, new offering: a sleeping pill that offered a state of rest that lasted not for one night but for years. When he arrived at work, he downloaded the website’s video of a man waking up in a hospital bed, disoriented. Subtitles announced that he had been asleep for 10 years. A kind-eyed doctor spoke to him, a young man with a Mexico City accent. “Don’t move too quickly, allow yourself to acclimate first.” The man’s fingers located a sensor on his neck. At his touch, a woman began to narrate whatever he focused his eyes on. Montage: cars that hovered, screens that floated. The man’s daughter, a young woman now. She is waiting outside, the narrator explains.

John watched the video from a professional distance, noting its pitch and execution. Was it believable that a man of health and means would sleep away his daughter’s childhood?

##

This was how Cara imagined his thought process went. John was silent on the subject, and had remained so for about fourteen hours.

That morning, John had stayed asleep in their bed, which was unusual. Most mornings, he did not sleep deeply after dawn. At around 10:00am, Cara had put on cartoons for Liam, and picked up her phone. There was notification of an email from John. She had run back to their bedroom, but John, who had appeared to be enjoying a Saturday lie in, would not be roused.

Cara had sat down on the bed next to him to read the scheduled email. In it, John explained that he had taken a pill to make him sleep until the future. There was the link to the ad, the video. The pill had come in a small case, which she found on his bedside table next to his journal. Entemps ad copy was the next to last entry in his small black notebook. She would never have opened his journal, if his email had not instructed her to do so. Tucked inside his notebook was a pamphlet with instructions on how to prepare your body and your things, and a number for your family members to call if they wish your body picked up. Circled in highlighter on the last page Cara found the passcode for his brokerage account. She logged on and checked the balance: $20,000.

So this was why he had gone to bed later than her the night before, after a lovely night out and comfortable sex. She frantically replayed the evening over in her mind, looking for clues, while the video looped on her phone. He must have taken the dose after she went to sleep. She called their doctor, leaving a shaky message with the answering service. “Hello, this is Cara Plane. My husband John has taken a sleeping pill that he says lasts for a year or more. Please let me know what to do.”

She laid her head on John’s chest. Did John commit suicide? No, there it was, a heartbeat. Ten minutes later, the doctor returned her call. Told her to check for a heartbeat. Still steady. Steadier than usual. The gentle rise and fall of his body intaking breath mesmerized her. John had fallen into the total trust of the deepest sleep.

Her doctor told Cara what she already knew from Entemps website, and said something about the recommended annual re-injection of nanotech. She’d send a care plan to her email. She hung up the phone, and the silence closed in around Cara and John.

Liam wandered in when the phone call ended, trailing his blanket. Cara gave herself a day of cover. “Daddy is sick, and we’ll need to let him get his rest.” Liam climbed up on the pillows and took his dad’s temperature with the back of his hand. “Yep, sleeping,” Liam concurred. They made librarians’ shhh gestures at each other and snuck out of the room. She quietly closed the door to the bedroom behind her and the Saturday went ahead as planned.

At midnight, she poured a whiskey for herself and set one for John on the nightstand. He looked comfortable. With certainty, John had counted on her to figure this out. He had believed that no harm or neglect would have come to him, no matter how long he stayed vulnerable and unconscious.

Cara realized at that moment that she would comply with this story of their marriage. She would react to this new frustration later. She emptied both glasses and went to sleep in her son’s bed.

##

On Sunday morning, she called a wake, like her father had held for his brothers. Her sister Jenny arrived first. Cara shaved John and set his salt and pepper hair the way he liked it. They dressed him in white clothes, and made the bed around him. Candles were lit at head and feet. Jenny opened the window for his spirit to leave. Cara exclaimed and slammed it shut, out of superstition.

The ritual completed, Cara went through the house offering strong drinks to everyone who came through. The Plane family’s wake was the first of its kind held in Beacon. A curious neighborhood came around to offer condolences to the not-widow, backed up with fresh backyard produce and hand-me-down toys to distract Liam. Neighbors joined well into the night, as word spread, first taking over the backyard and then, when the booze ran out, the wake migrated to the local. Jenny brought Liam home to sleep over with his older cousins.

The next afternoon, Cara asked her neighbors for help in moving John to the couch, so that she could sleep in their bed without freaking out. As they flopped him down on his bier, Cara positioned his head until it stabilized against a pillow. The lolling stopped.

“Well, what an unexpected blessing could be found in rigor mortis,” she said. No one else laughed.

Their lives resumed around the body of the father. Liam sat on his father’s stomach, and painted his face with jammy fingerprints. Nothing seemed to distinguish him from the furniture, and before long, furniture is what he became.

Their primary mode of conversation had been debate. What a loud man he had been. An ambitious artist with frustrated dreams, John would demand of her that she account for herself and her time, in his stead. Do not let a day pass without creating something was his motto. This was his expectation for himself and for her days. He said that he wanted her to be happy and insisted that he was right about how that happiness could be won. She heard her voice straining to be heard, like a cricket on the side of a freeway. It was a strange requirement to account for the day when her list filled up with the three Cs: childcare, cooking, and cleaning.

Until Liam could walk, she would frequently lay on the carpet and absorb the universe while he rolled back and forth next to her on the floor. This was, of course, bliss, but it did not come to account later with John. She would write “lay on carpet until the stars align” on the honey do list, and then, she would check it off.

Cara knew that anger was the season of her grief. He had played her for her constancy and quiet. He chose to lie still while she worked. Her resilience was used against her, to tie her to a project she had not signed up for, a new dependent to care for an unspecified amount of time. From the point of view of the life insurance company he was considered alive. From the point of view of his employer, he was considered dead. She could finish him off, neglect to feed him, wash him, or water him until he died like a houseplant. She clipped his toenails and wondered aloud how long she could hold out.

During one of these moments, her interior monologue caught hold of a line that she distantly remembered. Soon she was saying it aloud whenever anyone asked her how she was doing:

“The world has no room for cowards.”*

##

Most people who entered her home studiously avoided looking at John, whose hair inexplicably had turned white. Guests had to sit in the old armchair, with their knees at his head, like Freudians. John appeared to be absorbing their exhalations. His eyes continuously bounced around behind his lids, looking this way and that across what she assumed was a wild, endless dreamscape. Would he be the same husband when he awoke?

It was Liam’s sitter that noticed John was getting paler, thinner, and more ghoulish. It became too much for her to be expected to work around him, a silent, sleeping man. She quit, but it was a blessing. Cara couldn’t afford her.

Liam grew, and gave up distracting his mother. Every day he became more wrapped up in his imaginary worlds, evacuations and lego ships that soared despite setbacks and rescue missions that always succeeded at the last minute. When he was 8 years old, he grew tall enough to pull down the cord that led to the attic. She didn’t stop him. They all needed room.

People all over the world became wakers that year that John did, but since no one had emerged yet to explain what it was like, there was no telling what John was experiencing or if he would actually wake up. Liam believed wholeheartedly that his father would wake one day, but Cara was less sure. The only indicator that the pill was doing what it had promised to do was that John did not age. Like all wakers, his hair turned white, but his face stayed exactly the same. They skipped birthdays and anniversaries in favor of resuming the count when he woke up.

She joined an online community of caregivers, a feed with subheadings like “too soon for assisted living?” or “enema, or no?” The term “waker” emerged in the dialogue, but there wasn’t a sticky term for the caregivers. “Wakers” was pharmaceutical lingo, to make real the promise of waking up, despite the contrary evidence. Carers posted good-bye notes, complaints, and ruminations on what had caused the wake to visit their homes. Cara posted the story in the notebook about the ad on the train. Her reason: John was ambitious and bored, and he noticed ads.

Dormant bodies were piling up everywhere.

Along the sidebar of one website ran ads offering to take John’s body and care for it, at a cost comparable with assisted living. The DIY community felt more suited to her situation, and if she had to guess at John’s desire, it would be for her to care for him. She grew vegetables and sold them. She emptied his brokerage account.

She read about a young family in Ohio who chose a wake for mom at her diagnosis of ALS, in the hopes that she would wake up to a cure. A group of young investors in Singapore set up managed accounts, maids’ levies, and a well-supervised homestay condominium prior to dosing, in a play to awaken to wealth. A member of the British Royal family chooses to wake, and it is rumored that he wished to improve his position in the line of succession. These wakers shared a wish to not be now, but not to not be ever. Annihilation was not the goal; instead they bargained for more fertile ground in another time. Their gamble rested on the belief that they were “ahead of their time.” A compliment turned into a promise.

In her darker moments, Cara wondered if John was avoiding Liam’s childhood. He was not a natural parent. Fatherhood was not one of his many ambitions. He had often talked about a future time, when Liam was older and their adult lives regained their flexibility. He did not need to be around Liam with the same fibrous wanting that Cara did. Whether intended or not, the effect was the same. Liam grew up without a father.

Often Liam tried to focus his brainwaves on his father’s mind. He was willing his eyes to open like a touch screen responding from sleep. The father remained asleep.

“Come on Dad.” he said, and pressed her three fingers into his forehead again. His eyes closed, he found the groove above his brow and rubbed his smooth skin back and forth. With the other hand, he did the same to himself, to see what it felt like.

Entemps and the drug exploded, and with it a new market for the lifestyle around “wake centers,” established to manage care while their “patients” were suspended in sleep. The wake expanded into new markets: prisons, hospice care centers, NASA.

##

When the first waker woke, Cara and Liam sat on the floor, and watched the video of his statement with John on the couch behind them. In the center of the screen sat a single, tattooed man in a t-shirt and jeans, with long white hair tied up in a bun. The news ticker labeled him: “Early adopter of Entemps... Took the pill on his thirtieth birthday… Woke up after 7 years… No physical damage or aging effects detected.” He did not read from notes. What could be discerned from his circular statement was that the waker’s mind continued its regular course through time.

A ceaseless migration from thought to thought to thought, sound to sound to sound, smell to smell to smell. The parasympathetic mind, forever hopeful, followed its circadian rhythms. The conscious mind awoke to each new day, as if this was any other day, as if this might be the day the wake stopped and the body rose from the bed, as if the day might amount to something more than stillness.

This is what he said:

“The suspension of the corpus, does not entail the suspension of animus

To reconsider. That was what I wanted.

To meditate, silently, without the power to breathe, to count breaths that are the same length, moment after moment after moment.

The body waiting, dormant, while the mind catches up

Human consciousness is contiguous.

When we consider our own consciousness as endless, what gift of understanding does that give us?

The reason that the body ages is to give direction. Mortality grants us a sense of urgency.

Deadlines.

Beginning middle end.

Without structure, consciousness absorbs every note, smell, word dropped into its orbit. Consciousness savors all time, even time that has been thrown away to Entemps.

“I wander all night in my vision.

Wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory…”

Tomorrow will be different, I told myself, I will exercise, make love, get the analysis report finished, and read another story to my son. No, every tomorrow is the same: I wake up to an impotent stillness that mocks my good intentions.

I craved the ability to move, to reassert myself through action. I heard crying, I felt your ear on my chest. I felt when someone was sitting on the couch, seemingly alone, but also beside me. I registered the thin sounds of data passing beneath their fingers. I noticed the change in my son’s smell as he aged. I knew that my loved ones were lonely in the same room as me. My family ages without me, my disappearance in plain sight, a daily wound.

“We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die.”

I woke ready. Please allow me toil. Please allow me to suffer. Please allow me to age.”

Cara turned around to see that John’s eyes had opened.