What happened next is a blurry jumble. I went somewhere with him, but the rest of my memories of that night are swirling light trails burnt into my retina. I can hear Chill’s easy voice saying, “Just relax, this will only take a moment.”
Then I was at home.
I laid awake in the half light of my apartment. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I just laid there. I got up when I normally would, did some push-ups, ate some breakfast, went to work.
He didn’t tell me I would feel so tired.
“Long night?” Kelly asked, handing her wastebasket over.
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“You need to wake up.”
“You’re telling me.”
I went to the diner after work. Chill didn’t show; he had said he might.
At home I tried to do more push-ups, but my muscles were sore. I sat on the couch and watched TV. Kept getting this feeling like an hour or two had passed in the space of a single commercial. I’d blink and it would be the same cat scratching at the litter box, animated odor waves rising from the sand. That’s all it was, a Blink. But, God, it seemed so long.
Outside, traffic waxed and waned. People went to their jobs. Children went to school. They all came home again.
God I was tired.
At work, hours passed in geological time. During a single foot fall, I dreamed I was an astronaut trapped in a space capsule with no windows or doors. I floated weightless for hours until the impact of my foot against the linoleum roused me. The void still hummed outside the capsule until I turned the vacuum off.
I took my lunch break early, went to the diner and sat in a booth.
Eventually, Chill arrived and sat down across from me. “You don’t look good.”
“I’m tired.”
“That’s what happens when you don’t sleep.”
“Why did you do this?”
“You know why. To help you. To give you more time to get your life on track.”
“I can’t — ”
“Yes. There are side effects. But I can help you with those. We can help each other.”
I blinked and for the first time saw him as he truly was. Radiant, beautiful, an angel of light.
“Do you know what I do?” he said, and his brilliant aura disappeared. “We talked about you last time, I never got a chance to tell you about me. It’s Okay. But now it’s my turn to talk. About me.”
I rubbed grains of sand into my eyes and tried to open them wider. He went on talking.
“What I do is help people. Not just people like you who need a little bit of a push to get their lives on track. I also help other people. Wealthy people. Sometimes they have complicated problems. Tricky, delicate situations. Sometimes, simple problems. They want something. For example, there’s this box, discovered in a shipwreck at the bottom of the Adriatic. It dates back to the Byzantine empire, the only one of it’s kind left in the world. And it can calculate the position of the stars with unimaginable precision. Have you heard of this?”
I nod. “Discovery Channel, I think.”
“My mind reels at the implications of such an invention. I think about it all the time. Can you imagine? A man, just a simple man, without the aid of computers — not even a calculator — built this device. And it still functions today. I think, ‘What have I done that compares?’ It makes me want to use every second I have to the very best of my ability. Because a second is infinite, really. Infinite potential. But then — and this is what really bends my noodle — when you think about the very cosmos the box represents, you realize what a lark the last thousand or so years are since that box was built. No one remembers the man who built it. He’s dead anyway, and the box is just a toy to be sold on the black market. Do you get what I’m saying?”
I was starting to.
“Right now,” he went on, “this priceless piece of antiquity is on public display at the Museum of Science and Industry. My client wants it on the private market. See? Simple problem.”
Then Mr. Chill leaned across the table. “But how are we going to get it for him?”
I took it for a rhetorical question, but Chill just stayed there, inclining toward me as if he expected an answer.
Finally, I said, “I don’t know.”
Chill pulled back, threw his arms over the back of the booth.
“Well you should think about it. Because how you answer that question will determine whether I will continue to help you.”
“I don’t want your help anymore, I just want to get some sleep.”
Mr. Chill sighed. “No, you do not need to sleep. You need to wake up.”
“No. No. I need to sleep.”
“Technically, you can still sleep. For very, very short periods. Seconds at most. Not enough to keep you sane. Do you know what will happen to you?”
I didn’t nod. I didn’t blink. I said nothing. Just looked across the table at him.
“You will, very quickly, begin to lose your mind. You will dream and not know it. Waking dreams that will come in waves. Your brain won’t be able to write new memories properly. Your metabolism will stop functioning properly. Your immune system will shut down. You will be a raving mad, human husk in a week, tops, living out a torturous hell as you die.”
To that, I said, “Go fuck yourself.”
