Mark Jacobs
The University of Sleep
Normally Conrad considered a session with Serena’s sock puppets a good use of company bandwidth. Serena worked at home. Home was Zaragoza. She was a talented digital princess who required neither sleep nor positive reinforcement, and senior management at Primum Datum loved her. It didn’t hurt that she was super sexy, and telegenic, and spoke precise English with a pale fur of accent on the back end of her words. Looking at an image of Serena on his screen did something to Conrad he was not proud of, and certainly not in control of. At home, alone, she overwhelmed his fantasy life.
There was wonderful sexual tension between the two sock puppets, although Bajardo (who was red) was a blustering fool, and Belicia (who was blue) more often than not got the better of him. Conrad watched the performance with delight, as he always did, until Serena signaled it was over.
“Enough for today, hombre.”
He accepted the verdict with regret. “Okay, Serena.” He waited a moment before adding, “Hasta la proxima.”
On the talented Spaniard’s left hand, Bajardo had the last word. “I’ll be back.”
Quitting the application Conrad felt, as always, abandoned. Then, a funny thing. He felt a prickle of suspicion. That was all it was. It had no subject, and no object. It was a tenth of a premature thought: something was off, or might be.
More than likely it was the new assignment, even thinking about which funked him out. He had clocked it. Seventy three minutes after his TS-3 compartmented information clearance came through, Harris blasted an email at him. Cease and desist all work on other projects. You are herewith assigned to Eternal Snow.
Harris was a reptile. His eyes were lizardy, and his skinny tongue had the habit of darting out mid-sentence to spear invisible flies. If Primum Datum was a desert, and it was, Harris had survived twenty years under a hostile sun hiding under rocks and snagging whatever edibles came his way. Fair enough. In corporate America dogs ate dogs. But the man took way too much pleasure in toying with his prey.
Thinking about Eternal Snow made Conrad tired. He had been putting in killer hours for a year, eighteen months, who could remember? He got out of bed in the morning exhausted, rode the Metro to the office in a daze, worked in a condition of zonkedness for more hours than he cared to count. Nights, he collapsed at home, the slave of a looping algorithm with too few instructions. If tired, work. If not work, sleep and/or desire sleep.
That evening, on the Metro riding home, he glanced at the book a placid woman four seats down was reading. The University of Sleep. Nah. Couldn’t be. The instant he noticed it, she closed the cover. Did she catch his rude stare? He looked down. When he looked up again she was tucking the book into a straw bag. Interesting how being tired had made him misread the title. She got up and left the train at L’Enfant Plaza, and that was that.
Next day Conrad’s anxiety quotient spiked off the chart when Harris called him to his office. Harris wasn’t into human interaction. He worked his evil electronically. It didn’t help that, just before Harris summoned him, Conrad experienced the same twinge of bodiless suspicion he’d felt when Serena’s puppet told him goodbye. As though they were watching him. Well, they were, of course. They made no secret of it. To keep up his security clearance he had to consent, passively, to their intrusions. He accepted the rules of their road because he needed the job, and Primum Datum needed its federal contracts, and the vast superstructure of organized fear the government had erected needed continuous infusions of data. Washington, where PD had its headquarters and Conrad worked, was the epicenter of official dread.
“We’re not seeing any social media activity,” Harris began.
Getting up from his desk he pointed Conrad to a chair, a magnanimous gesture by his standards. Harris had the bearing of a military man, though he had never worn a uniform. His graying mustache saluted all comers. His face was rugby-ruddy. His belly, though sizable, was subject to a certain discipline.
“You mean me?”
“Of course I mean you. Division management is concerned. Anybody who works on Eternal Snow has got to be, what’s that expression? More Catholic than Caesar’s wife.”
Whenever anybody said ‘division management,’ Conrad saw tanks, row upon row of them, as in those grainy old war newsreels. The bosses did not believe in management by walking around, and he did not have access to the floors on which they burned sacrifices to propitiate the gods of success.
The truth was, he had been too tired, mentally and physically, to want to connect with anybody even virtually. But he couldn’t say that to Harris.
“I’ve been reading a book. I mean, a real book. Physical. With covers, you know?”
Harris’ eyebrows signaled disbelief. “If you’re out there on the Net with an avatar, or pseudonyms, or some other cute subterfuge, doing something they don’t approve of, they’ll find you. You know that, Conrad. You absolutely know they will find you. And when they do, they’ll drive a stake through your heart.”
Conrad nodded. Yes, he knew. At the moment, though, he didn’t want to think about the invasion of what little remained of his privacy. He wanted a nap. Wasn’t going to happen.
Harris dismissed him. “Go think about architecture, how elegant a well designed information system looks to the informed eye. Think about what Eternal Snow can be. For the company, for national security.” A pause, and then, “For you.”
Conrad yawned, caught himself, let his guard down and yawned again. He went back to work.
It didn’t bother him to leave his other projects. Forget the lost investment of his dwindling self. Supposedly, if they put you on Eternal Snow you were considered competent. And Snow was open-ended in a way no other federal contract was. Uncle Sam bought the concept and agreed to finance development just to see where it went. The money to pay for all this semi-structured speculation, Conrad had heard, was spread across the intelligence agencies’ budgets disguised as innocuous line items. Rumors. There was no shortage of them at Primum Datum.
The Snow concept was simple, and impossible. Real-time data-mining of the entire bowl of Jell-O, which was how Conrad imagined the Internet. The virtual world was a quivering bowl of gelatin dessert whose atoms and their offspring were in constant motion, zipping in and out of this or that molecule, changing the flavor and the texture and the color an infinite number of ways an infinite number of times. If Snow could be made to work, instants would be sliced into so many conductive time fragments as to eliminate even a nominal lag in data transmission. There would be no constraints on what you could know.
Of course the hardware requirements, even for certain failure, were massive.
Part of him – Conrad hoped it was a sizable chunk – wanted the project not just to fail but to fail miserably.
He was thirty three. The thought of turning thirty four in a few months really bugged him, although hitting thirty had been no big deal. He had been aware, lately, of infrastructure degradation, the flaws in his own architecture. For example, his formerly unlimited capacity for caffeine was a thing of the past. Now, if he drank espresso at night the buzz stretched him on a rack of sleeplessness. When that happened, his fretting mind cycled and recycled the same cheesy thoughts: sex with Serena, followed by declarations of love. Armies of relentless code lines forming and reforming on a field so thickly white he almost didn’t recognize the stuff as snow. Belicia fucking Bajardo fucking Belicia.
Of course none of that stopped him from drinking coffee when he felt like it. Leaving the office a few nights later he stopped at the Ethiopian woman’s cart on the way to the Metro. He was obsessed with Abeba’s Yirgachefe, though the woman herself made him uncomfortable. People said she had walked a thousand miles to escape a trifecta of personal disaster: war, famine, and the murder of her children. He always overtipped her but seldom made eye contact.
He was halfway down the block with his coffee before he noticed the heat sleeve on the cup. The University of Sleep. No address, no URL, no phone number. Apart from the words there was only a logo. A broad-bottomed U served as the hammock for an S reclining on its side, conforming to the hammock’s shape as it slept. A restful image.
Anxiety prevented him from going back to the cart to ask Abeba about it. Anyway what could she tell him? She didn’t choose the heat sleeves, she took what was available from a supplier. He slipped the sleeve from the cup and tossed it in a trash can.
The next three days he worked twelve, fifteen, and then seventeen hours. Too much of that time was eaten up with meetings, which he generally left more confused about Eternal Snow than when he entered the room. Harris took great pleasure in seeing the people who worked for him push themselves past all reasonable limits. Work ethic, he called it, but really it was only schedule. The night of the fifth day in which Conrad had not heard a word from Serena, he went out.
The Slick Stick was a club on U Street that featured retro bands: Go-Go, mostly, but once in a while thrash metal or acid rock. It was spring, and he had forgotten about weather. It was too early for the music so he walked. Where did all the little brown birds come from? Had they ever left? He had no idea, and his ignorance appalled him. Inhaling as he went, he remembered that outdoor air had a smell unlike that of office buildings.
Approaching the U Street Corridor he got confused about where he was, and then his phone didn’t recognize the street. That didn’t make sense. Dickinson looked like any other North West street of smug row houses. Heading for the intersection to get his bearings, he stopped mid-way down the block. A sign on a pole hung from the porch of a gray brick house. The University of Sleep. Next to the words, a sleeping S reclined inside a hammock U.
How could he not go up the steps and ring the bell? The woman who led him to her office was young, composed, and androgynously attractive, her sexuality sealed behind plastic.
The office had the feel of a concept, as though someone in authority had said, Bring me an office: eggshell walls, flowers too real looking to be real arranged in arrogant vases, an abstract painting Conrad thought he should recognize but did not. They sat on a blue leather sofa. The woman brushed her hair with her hand, weakening any resistance he might have felt with a smile no less powerful for being anodyne. “I’m Diana. How can I help you?”
Instead of any of the dozen questions he should have asked, Conrad heard himself blurt, “I’d like to take a course.”
Diana nodded. “Our student population is self-selecting, for the most part. Not everyone… How shall I put this? They don’t all gravitate in our direction. But here you are.”
He had forgotten to introduce himself. “My name is Conrad.”
“I wonder if you’d mind taking our aptitude test, Conrad.”
“Sure.”
He followed her down a hallway to a room with a bed. The bed looked comfortable. A cold-looking machine with a complicated LED face rested in a rack alongside the bed. On a small nameplate of stamped metal Conrad read, ‘Reve Solutions.’ His docility astounded him. He lay on the bed and let Diana attach the suction-cup ends of rubber-coated leads to his temples.
“Any discomfort?”
He shook his head.
“Can you sleep?”
“I’m not sure.”
Another imperturbable smile. “You’ll do fine.”
When she left the room he noticed an image on the ceiling, meant to be studied by whoever lay in the bed. A cloudhead, perhaps, majestic and ambiguous. He closed his eyes.
When he opened them he knew it was late. A single bulb burned in a lamp. Someone had covered him with a pale yellow sheet. He threw it off and got to his feet. Everything was delicious: the room, the hairs on the back of his neck, the invisible thundering heavens. By the time he reached the office he understood the deliciousness was due to the sleep he’d just had. Not for as long as he could remember had he experienced such restful, such rejuvenating sleep. No dreams, or none that he retained, just a profound, blissful blankness. He felt so good he didn’t care that Diana was gone. There was no one else around, either. He left the building with a bounce in his step. On U Street, the clubs were closed. He hailed a late cab and rode listening to a jazz horn on the cabbie’s radio find its blue way home.
The rest paid off in productivity the next day. He was an engineer on the Eternal Snow Line, the big locomotive responsive to his coding commands. He didn’t even think about Serena until she pinged him. When he opened the application she shook her head glumly.
“I’m sad.”
“How come?”
“You tell me, Conrad,” she said with resentment that might or might not be real.
As though it followed, he told her, “I’m taking a course.”
“What is the subject matter?”
“Sleep.”
She nodded. Already he was boring her. That was a risk with people like Serena. At your best you had a hard time keeping up with them. She said a distracted Adios. This time he was ready for the little tremor of suspicion that came. He swatted it down.
Oddly, or maybe it wasn’t, Conrad’s deep sleep made him less anxious about the university than he ought to be. He accepted that it was no ordinary institution of higher learning, and waited with equanimity to learn whether he had been accepted as a student. On the screen in his mind, the snow fell thick.
It was fitting that, two days later, he had to fish the notice from the spam file in his Gmail account. This will confirm your enrollment in Sleep Theory: An Introduction. That was it. Below the words, a QR code. It led him, that evening, to another row house in North West. No sign, this time, but he knocked confidently and told the man who answered, “I’m here for the class. My name is Conrad.”
Pitt was a male variation on the Diana theme: young, androgynous, insulated by self-regard, and respectful of the university policy requiring employees to wear black. He led Conrad to a room similar to the one in which he had taken the aptitude test.
Conrad told him, “The email you sent me didn’t say how much the course costs.”
“Sorry?”
“I haven’t registered. Don’t you want my credit card?”
Pitt had the voice of a college sophomore, doing his best to leaven enthusiasm with irony. “We’re a non-profit.”
“What about the other students?”
“We’re not that kind of university.”
“What does that mean?”
“Our course of study is individualized.”
“I looked you up on the Internet. Didn’t find anything.”
“Well you wouldn’t, would you?”
Conrad’s free-form anxiety was finally crystallizing. It was simple. Somebody – either Homeland Security or Primum Data or possibly both – was trying to entrap him. The timing could not be coincidence. As soon as he’d moved to Eternal Snow, his life started getting strange. This was a test of his stability. If something as ridiculous as a sleep school could seduce him, they would tag him as a security risk, unworthy of corporate trust. Did he care if they took him off the project? He wasn’t sure.
He expected to be told to lie down, but Pitt pointed to a chair, and took one across from him.
“This class combines theory with practice,” he said.
Good, thought Conrad, that means a nap.
“I want you to think of me not so much as a teacher but as a facilitator. The goal we’re working toward is clarity. Let’s talk about your dreams.”
“Do we have to?”
The facilitator barely concealed his annoyance. “Do you want to take the course or not?”
“Sorry. Yes. I do.”
Mollified, Pitt told him, “I should have expressed myself better. I don’t mean the content of your dreams. Save that for your therapist. What interests the university, from a pedagogic point of view, is your attitude toward the dreams, the psychic weight you give them.”
“They scare the shit out of me, sometimes.”
“Go on.”
Conrad didn’t know what he thought until he said it. “My dreams are where I send my children.”
Pitt nodded as though he’d been expecting that.
“I’m talking about the children I don’t have,” Conrad added.
“I know.”
“Some of them are lucky. They get across the minefield.”
“But not all of them.”
“No,” Conrad agreed, bereft thinking of the ones he had lost. “Not all of them.”
“Who do you miss the most?”
“Serena.”
“Tell me about her.”
“I named her after a friend.”
Pitt seemed to realize he would not be pushed to say more. He gestured Conrad to the bed, and when the student lay stretched on his back attached the suction cups of the Reve Solutions machine to his temples. On the ceiling, Conrad noticed, an image of what might be a bull charged what could be a matador’s cape.
Waking, hours later, he was at peace with the loss of the dream children who had not survived. At another time he might beat himself up for that. Now, the same sense of wellbeing he had felt the first time enveloped him again, penetrated him, danced him around the floor. He went home to his apartment feeling strong and sane, capable of handling whatever they threw his way.
Conrad thought of himself as a digital native, but he didn’t much like being commanded by email to report to Dr. Saroyan’s office at ten the next morning. Saroyan worked in the upper echelon of the PD building, on one of the floors reserved for “specialized services.” As a denizen of the application development echelon, Conrad had to get a pass to ride the restricted elevator. The steadiness of the night before had pretty much crumbled by the time the doctor smirked at him from his chair in an office so correctly institutional it made Conrad want to tag the walls scatological red. It was his resentment that made him ask, “What am I doing here?”
Saroyan was feline and sleekly dark. Too many women had told him how beautiful he was. He had a firm grasp of his professional prerogatives. Making a tent of his fingers he told Conrad, “You are an intelligent man. I’ll be straight with you. Your behavior has become a concern.”
“What behavior is that?”
Cat’s eyes sparkling, Saroyan batted away the question. “You may not believe this, but management recognizes the pressures facing those of you who work on Eternal Snow. A hermetic environment, terribly long hours, a never-ending series of what must seem like arbitrary deadlines. And, in your case, a supervisor born without the nurturing gene.”
Conrad shrugged. With no warning he felt drained, which was probably why Saroyan’s next comment hit him so hard.
“I’m wondering how you feel about Serena.”
“She’s a colleague,” Conrad said reflexively. “A friend.”
“What if,” Saroyan began. But stopped. Stopping was a tactic. “Never mind. That will do for today. We’ll be in touch.”
An unaccustomed feeling of belligerence flooded Conrad. “You’re joking, right?”
“Sorry?”
“You’re jerking me around.”
Flawless and unflappable, Dr. Aaron Saroyan shook his head with sympathy that infuriated Conrad, repeating softly, “We’ll be in touch.”
Later that morning, back in his own echelon, Conrad made a point of casually asking two or three workmates if they had heard anything from specialized services. If they had, they were not willing to admit it. As artfully as he knew how, he followed up with a question about Serena. From the little bits they reluctantly fed him, she seemed to be all things to all of them. An empathetic friend, a playful colleague, an irreverent social commentator. At his desk in the cube farm, when Conrad pinged her he was half glad she did not respond. He coded halfheartedly for a while. He drank a Gatorade. He drank a Red Bull. A thought he could not successfully repress kept troubling him. She’s on their side.
He could not force events. He had to wait to learn whether he had earned another class at sleep school. No point looking for clues. If and when they decided he was entitled, they would let him know. He threw himself at Eternal Snow, concentrating so hard this time that Serena’s ping barely registered. When she filled his screen an instant later it was hard not to abase himself in gratitude. Why, then, did he say what he said?
“You work for them, don’t you?”
“Who? Are you talking about PD?”
“They’re after me. They want me to make a mistake I can’t recover from.”
Her eyes narrowed to slits of incredulity. “Why would they do that?”
He felt silly, and smiled ineptly. “I don’t know.”
“Go see a movie,” she suggested.
“Right. They’d love that, wouldn’t they?”
“You’re losing perspective, Conrad.”
“What have you told them?”
“About what?”
“About me.”
She frowned as if trying to recall a specific conversation. “I don’t believe they’ve ever asked me anything about you. You know, you’re starting to worry me.”
She was in complete control. Anything he might say, she had already considered. It wasn’t fair. He was not in the same league she was. He gave up. He yawned. Didn’t even try to hide it. That cracked her up.
“Get some sleep, hombre. Te llamo luego.”
He waited. For Serena to ping him. For someone from the university to get in touch. For Harris to drag him into his lair and maul him. For an agent from Homeland Security to flash a badge and bundle him into a government sedan. But none of those things happened. His life was Eternal Snow, Eternal Snow was he.
He seldom emptied his mail box at the apartment. He paid his bills online, so all he got was garbage. One Friday afternoon the letter carrier shoved a note under his door telling him the box was jammed. If he wanted service to continue he had to clean it out. He did, but could not face the stack of worthless paper he found there. He left it on the kitchen table.
He was expected to work Saturdays, but the next morning he registered a symbolic act of defiance by drinking coffee at home watching spring light come through the kitchen window. It crashed loudly on the floor in the exact spot where his dog would be lying, if he had one. How pathetic was that, imagining the favored sleeping spot of a pet he didn’t own? Without thinking, he reached for the stack of junk mail and began going through it. The heavy, cream-colored envelope arrested him. In the top left-hand corner he recognized the U of S logo. He got up for coffee. He got up again for a knife to slit the envelope. He opened it.
This is to advise you that your enrollment at the University of Sleep has been terminated, effective this date. That was it. No explanation, no pro-forma expression of regret. Nothing.
Nothing.
He may have cried. He certainly did not go to work.
On Monday, Harris sniped at him by email. So sorry to learn of the death of your hamster. As you know, Primum Datum offers grief counseling services for all full-time employees. Feel free to avail yourself of said services. In this difficult moment, the Eternal Snow phase deadline may have slipped your mind. This Thursday, opening of business. Do you need another reminder?
Conrad was confused, and knew he was confused. He was exhausted, and knew it. His resentment was so big and sloppy he could not fail to be aware of it. But he did not know how angry he was until he stormed into Harris’ office and told him he was an asshole.
Rising to his feet, Harris looked like the martinet he was. “Say that again.”
“You’re an asshole.”
Harris surprised him then. A grin of delight contorted his face. And he laughed. He looked, suddenly, like a man at peace, at home in slippers and robe enjoying a hot toddy and a bit of Brahms before bed. Conrad assumed he was hallucinating.
“You’re trying to get yourself fired, aren’t you?”
Incapable of forming words, let alone speaking them, Conrad sputtered.
Harris shook his head. “It won’t work. You’re tired. Give yourself a holiday. Go get laid or something.”
Conrad looked doubtful because he felt doubtful.
“Get some sleep, Conrad. You can go back at Snow tomorrow. It’ll be there. Trust me, it will be there.”
Some things may have happened between the moment Conrad left Harris’ office and the one in which he found himself, that mild evening, in a park on Capitol Hill. But he had no memory of anything that wasn’t dread. They were setting him up. Maybe they did that to everybody they gave a TS-3 clearance, or everybody assigned to Eternal Snow. But even if it were that simple, he wanted no part of their rite of peculiar passage. He watched two girls with bright multicolored nails toss arch looks back and forth with the same dexterity their mothers had once tossed a beach ball. An internal goad told him it was time to move on.
Standing, he saw her. She was turning a corner. Tight jeans, a white T-shirt, sandals with dangerous heels. He called “Serena!” but she did not stop or turn around. He took off running after her, but by the time he rounded the corner she had made, there was no sign of her. He called her name again. It came out like a curse. He had no doubt it was Serena. She was on their side.
He went down the block hopelessly. A need for sleep threatened to overpower him. It took everything he had not to sit down on the curb and close his eyes. It was the urge to break something that kept him going. This thing – whatever it was that was happening to him – had an architecture of its own, and Serena’s disappearance obeyed its structural dictate as a robust chunk of code would.
At the next corner he was ready to pack it in. He could not quite remember who he was, or why he felt so frustrated. In a blur of muddy feeling he blew past a man squatting by a blue tarp on a patch of grass.
“What’s your hurry?” the man said to his back.
Conrad stopped. The man’s T-shirt was tie-dyed in traditional colors. His flip flops were purple. His hair was red spikes. He said, “Now’s your chance.”
“My chance for what?”
The man pointed to the tarp where he had displayed his wares in uneven rows. Nationals baseball caps, dinner plates printed with an image of the President’s family, an army surplus cartridge belt with pink plastic bullets, knockoff DVDs of popular movies.
He squinted as though expecting a blow. “If you’re going to buy, now’s the time. I don’t have a permit. Cop comes along, my whole business model gets called into question.”
“Why would I want any of that junk?”
The man sized him up patiently. “I don’t know. Maybe you wouldn’t.”
But he realized that Conrad had already fixed on the snow globe.
Conrad picked it up. Inside the globe, a tiny White House was surrounded by a green lawn. ‘Celebrate Our Democracy’ ran the legend on the base of the globe. He shook it. The immediate little snowstorm was insanely gratifying.
“How much?”
“Seven fifty.”
Conrad gave him a ten and pocketed the globe. Not until ten minutes later did he think to turn it upside down and read Acme Novelties, Practical Products Industrial Park, Springfield VA. He shook the globe again. By the time the snow had settled on the White House lawn he was on his way to get a Zipcar.
The GPS in the car he rented was broken so he used his phone to find the Practical Products Industrial Park, which turned out to be a medium-sized islet in an archipelago of business complexes off I-95. On the Acme Novelties sign, the stylized outline of a satisfied customer was having a huge laugh thanks to a novelty item not visible to the beholder.
In the parking lot, behind the wheel, Conrad thought, I’m nuts. This is nuts. If I were them I’d lock me up. Still, he felt a kind of restful resolve. He was nuts, yes. And he was going to get out of the car, cross the lot, and ring the Acme bell.
He did.
A woman who reminded him of Diana answered. She was blonde and thick in the middle but had the same unsexed appeal, the chilly complacency.
“I’m Conrad.”
“So, you found us. That’s impressive.”
“Can I come in?”
“Your enrollment was terminated. You know that.”
“I think we should talk.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Please.”
“Emotion won’t help,” she warned him. “Emotion doesn’t enter into it. The committee met.”
“What committee?”
“The one that looks at these things.”
Conrad nodded, struggling to stay rational. “Of course. But I did want to bring them some information they might not have.”
That worked. It generated a cryogenic smile. “I’m Ashley.”
He followed her to a nondescript room that might be an office, or a storage area, a charmless anteroom; anything. He pointed out that there was no bed.
“Only the classrooms have beds.”
“I see.”
They sat on chairs designed to make sitters uncomfortable, and Conrad asked her, “Does Serena work for you?”
“I thought you said you had something for the committee.”
“She does, doesn’t she?”
Ashley smoothed the lap of her black skirt and flipped her hair. “To be on the committee, a person has to demonstrate judgment. Really awesome judgment, and original thought.”
“Meaning?”
“If they wanted to, one of the members could make the case that this is a bona fide version of the American dream.”
“Explain.”
“You’ve persevered. You worked really hard to find us. The story needs a happy ending.”
He nodded. She was making his case for him. Or else setting him up. It was discouraging, it was humiliating, to have no clue which. It was up to him to go positive.
“One thing I’ve learned,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Sleep is not the enemy.”
“No.”
“But it’s not a friend, either. Sleep is the cloud. No cloud, no rain. No rain, no corn in the fields.”
“That’s interesting,” she said in a tone of voice that suggested it wasn’t.
“I can make a contribution,” Conrad said. He did not know what he meant, but felt acutely the truth of the statement, its perfectly timed incisiveness.
“Come with me.”
The bed in the room to which she led him was different from the others. It was bigger, and appeared to be a perfect square. The coverlet was pale blue. The Reve Solutions machine next to it was more stylish, somehow, and more imposing than the model he was familiar with. There were no leads, no dangling suction cups. It made him think of an organ he had once seen in a cathedral in Vienna, although the shape was nothing like.
He lay down on the bed without being asked.
Ashley said, “I guess you’re okay with waiting a while. I have to do some checking.”
“With the committee.”
“If this works…”
“If they take me back as a student, you mean.”
“The technology is different, at your level.”
“I understand. No wires.”
“No wires is the least of it.”
“I’m looking forward to studying again.”
Hand on the doorknob, she stopped long enough to say, “Don’t get your hopes up, Conrad.”
Let her play out her little bit of drama. At your level, she had said. That meant he was in. More than likely he had never been out. If it pleased them to mess with him, telling him he had been booted from the program, well, he felt generous. What mattered was the essential fact: he was in.
The silence in the classroom, after a moment, was Atlantic deep. This time there was no picture on the ceiling. The room was bare to the point of sterility. It was possibly unhealthy to feel the sense of comradeship, of complicity, that Conrad felt with the Reve Solutions machine. But in its cool self-sufficiency, the thing was splendid.
He thought about Serena, and regretted everything. He thought about Harris, at his computer composing nastygrams. He thought, with an objectivity that normally eluded him, about Eternal Snow; the idea behind it. But already he was feeling drowsy. The machine evidently knew that. Good for the machine.
He did not find sleep, sleep found him. It embraced him. He had been tired for such a long time. In the succinct interval in which he held onto consciousness, it seemed to Conrad that he was learning. Yes, he was still learning. There was just enough of him left above the waterline for a feeling of pity to snag on, as the river flowed past. So many. There were so many people at Primum Datum – in the city, across the world – and so few of them had matriculated at the University of Sleep.
The University of Sleep
Normally Conrad considered a session with Serena’s sock puppets a good use of company bandwidth. Serena worked at home. Home was Zaragoza. She was a talented digital princess who required neither sleep nor positive reinforcement, and senior management at Primum Datum loved her. It didn’t hurt that she was super sexy, and telegenic, and spoke precise English with a pale fur of accent on the back end of her words. Looking at an image of Serena on his screen did something to Conrad he was not proud of, and certainly not in control of. At home, alone, she overwhelmed his fantasy life.
There was wonderful sexual tension between the two sock puppets, although Bajardo (who was red) was a blustering fool, and Belicia (who was blue) more often than not got the better of him. Conrad watched the performance with delight, as he always did, until Serena signaled it was over.
“Enough for today, hombre.”
He accepted the verdict with regret. “Okay, Serena.” He waited a moment before adding, “Hasta la proxima.”
On the talented Spaniard’s left hand, Bajardo had the last word. “I’ll be back.”
Quitting the application Conrad felt, as always, abandoned. Then, a funny thing. He felt a prickle of suspicion. That was all it was. It had no subject, and no object. It was a tenth of a premature thought: something was off, or might be.
More than likely it was the new assignment, even thinking about which funked him out. He had clocked it. Seventy three minutes after his TS-3 compartmented information clearance came through, Harris blasted an email at him. Cease and desist all work on other projects. You are herewith assigned to Eternal Snow.
Harris was a reptile. His eyes were lizardy, and his skinny tongue had the habit of darting out mid-sentence to spear invisible flies. If Primum Datum was a desert, and it was, Harris had survived twenty years under a hostile sun hiding under rocks and snagging whatever edibles came his way. Fair enough. In corporate America dogs ate dogs. But the man took way too much pleasure in toying with his prey.
Thinking about Eternal Snow made Conrad tired. He had been putting in killer hours for a year, eighteen months, who could remember? He got out of bed in the morning exhausted, rode the Metro to the office in a daze, worked in a condition of zonkedness for more hours than he cared to count. Nights, he collapsed at home, the slave of a looping algorithm with too few instructions. If tired, work. If not work, sleep and/or desire sleep.
That evening, on the Metro riding home, he glanced at the book a placid woman four seats down was reading. The University of Sleep. Nah. Couldn’t be. The instant he noticed it, she closed the cover. Did she catch his rude stare? He looked down. When he looked up again she was tucking the book into a straw bag. Interesting how being tired had made him misread the title. She got up and left the train at L’Enfant Plaza, and that was that.
Next day Conrad’s anxiety quotient spiked off the chart when Harris called him to his office. Harris wasn’t into human interaction. He worked his evil electronically. It didn’t help that, just before Harris summoned him, Conrad experienced the same twinge of bodiless suspicion he’d felt when Serena’s puppet told him goodbye. As though they were watching him. Well, they were, of course. They made no secret of it. To keep up his security clearance he had to consent, passively, to their intrusions. He accepted the rules of their road because he needed the job, and Primum Datum needed its federal contracts, and the vast superstructure of organized fear the government had erected needed continuous infusions of data. Washington, where PD had its headquarters and Conrad worked, was the epicenter of official dread.
“We’re not seeing any social media activity,” Harris began.
Getting up from his desk he pointed Conrad to a chair, a magnanimous gesture by his standards. Harris had the bearing of a military man, though he had never worn a uniform. His graying mustache saluted all comers. His face was rugby-ruddy. His belly, though sizable, was subject to a certain discipline.
“You mean me?”
“Of course I mean you. Division management is concerned. Anybody who works on Eternal Snow has got to be, what’s that expression? More Catholic than Caesar’s wife.”
Whenever anybody said ‘division management,’ Conrad saw tanks, row upon row of them, as in those grainy old war newsreels. The bosses did not believe in management by walking around, and he did not have access to the floors on which they burned sacrifices to propitiate the gods of success.
The truth was, he had been too tired, mentally and physically, to want to connect with anybody even virtually. But he couldn’t say that to Harris.
“I’ve been reading a book. I mean, a real book. Physical. With covers, you know?”
Harris’ eyebrows signaled disbelief. “If you’re out there on the Net with an avatar, or pseudonyms, or some other cute subterfuge, doing something they don’t approve of, they’ll find you. You know that, Conrad. You absolutely know they will find you. And when they do, they’ll drive a stake through your heart.”
Conrad nodded. Yes, he knew. At the moment, though, he didn’t want to think about the invasion of what little remained of his privacy. He wanted a nap. Wasn’t going to happen.
Harris dismissed him. “Go think about architecture, how elegant a well designed information system looks to the informed eye. Think about what Eternal Snow can be. For the company, for national security.” A pause, and then, “For you.”
Conrad yawned, caught himself, let his guard down and yawned again. He went back to work.
It didn’t bother him to leave his other projects. Forget the lost investment of his dwindling self. Supposedly, if they put you on Eternal Snow you were considered competent. And Snow was open-ended in a way no other federal contract was. Uncle Sam bought the concept and agreed to finance development just to see where it went. The money to pay for all this semi-structured speculation, Conrad had heard, was spread across the intelligence agencies’ budgets disguised as innocuous line items. Rumors. There was no shortage of them at Primum Datum.
The Snow concept was simple, and impossible. Real-time data-mining of the entire bowl of Jell-O, which was how Conrad imagined the Internet. The virtual world was a quivering bowl of gelatin dessert whose atoms and their offspring were in constant motion, zipping in and out of this or that molecule, changing the flavor and the texture and the color an infinite number of ways an infinite number of times. If Snow could be made to work, instants would be sliced into so many conductive time fragments as to eliminate even a nominal lag in data transmission. There would be no constraints on what you could know.
Of course the hardware requirements, even for certain failure, were massive.
Part of him – Conrad hoped it was a sizable chunk – wanted the project not just to fail but to fail miserably.
He was thirty three. The thought of turning thirty four in a few months really bugged him, although hitting thirty had been no big deal. He had been aware, lately, of infrastructure degradation, the flaws in his own architecture. For example, his formerly unlimited capacity for caffeine was a thing of the past. Now, if he drank espresso at night the buzz stretched him on a rack of sleeplessness. When that happened, his fretting mind cycled and recycled the same cheesy thoughts: sex with Serena, followed by declarations of love. Armies of relentless code lines forming and reforming on a field so thickly white he almost didn’t recognize the stuff as snow. Belicia fucking Bajardo fucking Belicia.
Of course none of that stopped him from drinking coffee when he felt like it. Leaving the office a few nights later he stopped at the Ethiopian woman’s cart on the way to the Metro. He was obsessed with Abeba’s Yirgachefe, though the woman herself made him uncomfortable. People said she had walked a thousand miles to escape a trifecta of personal disaster: war, famine, and the murder of her children. He always overtipped her but seldom made eye contact.
He was halfway down the block with his coffee before he noticed the heat sleeve on the cup. The University of Sleep. No address, no URL, no phone number. Apart from the words there was only a logo. A broad-bottomed U served as the hammock for an S reclining on its side, conforming to the hammock’s shape as it slept. A restful image.
Anxiety prevented him from going back to the cart to ask Abeba about it. Anyway what could she tell him? She didn’t choose the heat sleeves, she took what was available from a supplier. He slipped the sleeve from the cup and tossed it in a trash can.
The next three days he worked twelve, fifteen, and then seventeen hours. Too much of that time was eaten up with meetings, which he generally left more confused about Eternal Snow than when he entered the room. Harris took great pleasure in seeing the people who worked for him push themselves past all reasonable limits. Work ethic, he called it, but really it was only schedule. The night of the fifth day in which Conrad had not heard a word from Serena, he went out.
The Slick Stick was a club on U Street that featured retro bands: Go-Go, mostly, but once in a while thrash metal or acid rock. It was spring, and he had forgotten about weather. It was too early for the music so he walked. Where did all the little brown birds come from? Had they ever left? He had no idea, and his ignorance appalled him. Inhaling as he went, he remembered that outdoor air had a smell unlike that of office buildings.
Approaching the U Street Corridor he got confused about where he was, and then his phone didn’t recognize the street. That didn’t make sense. Dickinson looked like any other North West street of smug row houses. Heading for the intersection to get his bearings, he stopped mid-way down the block. A sign on a pole hung from the porch of a gray brick house. The University of Sleep. Next to the words, a sleeping S reclined inside a hammock U.
How could he not go up the steps and ring the bell? The woman who led him to her office was young, composed, and androgynously attractive, her sexuality sealed behind plastic.
The office had the feel of a concept, as though someone in authority had said, Bring me an office: eggshell walls, flowers too real looking to be real arranged in arrogant vases, an abstract painting Conrad thought he should recognize but did not. They sat on a blue leather sofa. The woman brushed her hair with her hand, weakening any resistance he might have felt with a smile no less powerful for being anodyne. “I’m Diana. How can I help you?”
Instead of any of the dozen questions he should have asked, Conrad heard himself blurt, “I’d like to take a course.”
Diana nodded. “Our student population is self-selecting, for the most part. Not everyone… How shall I put this? They don’t all gravitate in our direction. But here you are.”
He had forgotten to introduce himself. “My name is Conrad.”
“I wonder if you’d mind taking our aptitude test, Conrad.”
“Sure.”
He followed her down a hallway to a room with a bed. The bed looked comfortable. A cold-looking machine with a complicated LED face rested in a rack alongside the bed. On a small nameplate of stamped metal Conrad read, ‘Reve Solutions.’ His docility astounded him. He lay on the bed and let Diana attach the suction-cup ends of rubber-coated leads to his temples.
“Any discomfort?”
He shook his head.
“Can you sleep?”
“I’m not sure.”
Another imperturbable smile. “You’ll do fine.”
When she left the room he noticed an image on the ceiling, meant to be studied by whoever lay in the bed. A cloudhead, perhaps, majestic and ambiguous. He closed his eyes.
When he opened them he knew it was late. A single bulb burned in a lamp. Someone had covered him with a pale yellow sheet. He threw it off and got to his feet. Everything was delicious: the room, the hairs on the back of his neck, the invisible thundering heavens. By the time he reached the office he understood the deliciousness was due to the sleep he’d just had. Not for as long as he could remember had he experienced such restful, such rejuvenating sleep. No dreams, or none that he retained, just a profound, blissful blankness. He felt so good he didn’t care that Diana was gone. There was no one else around, either. He left the building with a bounce in his step. On U Street, the clubs were closed. He hailed a late cab and rode listening to a jazz horn on the cabbie’s radio find its blue way home.
The rest paid off in productivity the next day. He was an engineer on the Eternal Snow Line, the big locomotive responsive to his coding commands. He didn’t even think about Serena until she pinged him. When he opened the application she shook her head glumly.
“I’m sad.”
“How come?”
“You tell me, Conrad,” she said with resentment that might or might not be real.
As though it followed, he told her, “I’m taking a course.”
“What is the subject matter?”
“Sleep.”
She nodded. Already he was boring her. That was a risk with people like Serena. At your best you had a hard time keeping up with them. She said a distracted Adios. This time he was ready for the little tremor of suspicion that came. He swatted it down.
Oddly, or maybe it wasn’t, Conrad’s deep sleep made him less anxious about the university than he ought to be. He accepted that it was no ordinary institution of higher learning, and waited with equanimity to learn whether he had been accepted as a student. On the screen in his mind, the snow fell thick.
It was fitting that, two days later, he had to fish the notice from the spam file in his Gmail account. This will confirm your enrollment in Sleep Theory: An Introduction. That was it. Below the words, a QR code. It led him, that evening, to another row house in North West. No sign, this time, but he knocked confidently and told the man who answered, “I’m here for the class. My name is Conrad.”
Pitt was a male variation on the Diana theme: young, androgynous, insulated by self-regard, and respectful of the university policy requiring employees to wear black. He led Conrad to a room similar to the one in which he had taken the aptitude test.
Conrad told him, “The email you sent me didn’t say how much the course costs.”
“Sorry?”
“I haven’t registered. Don’t you want my credit card?”
Pitt had the voice of a college sophomore, doing his best to leaven enthusiasm with irony. “We’re a non-profit.”
“What about the other students?”
“We’re not that kind of university.”
“What does that mean?”
“Our course of study is individualized.”
“I looked you up on the Internet. Didn’t find anything.”
“Well you wouldn’t, would you?”
Conrad’s free-form anxiety was finally crystallizing. It was simple. Somebody – either Homeland Security or Primum Data or possibly both – was trying to entrap him. The timing could not be coincidence. As soon as he’d moved to Eternal Snow, his life started getting strange. This was a test of his stability. If something as ridiculous as a sleep school could seduce him, they would tag him as a security risk, unworthy of corporate trust. Did he care if they took him off the project? He wasn’t sure.
He expected to be told to lie down, but Pitt pointed to a chair, and took one across from him.
“This class combines theory with practice,” he said.
Good, thought Conrad, that means a nap.
“I want you to think of me not so much as a teacher but as a facilitator. The goal we’re working toward is clarity. Let’s talk about your dreams.”
“Do we have to?”
The facilitator barely concealed his annoyance. “Do you want to take the course or not?”
“Sorry. Yes. I do.”
Mollified, Pitt told him, “I should have expressed myself better. I don’t mean the content of your dreams. Save that for your therapist. What interests the university, from a pedagogic point of view, is your attitude toward the dreams, the psychic weight you give them.”
“They scare the shit out of me, sometimes.”
“Go on.”
Conrad didn’t know what he thought until he said it. “My dreams are where I send my children.”
Pitt nodded as though he’d been expecting that.
“I’m talking about the children I don’t have,” Conrad added.
“I know.”
“Some of them are lucky. They get across the minefield.”
“But not all of them.”
“No,” Conrad agreed, bereft thinking of the ones he had lost. “Not all of them.”
“Who do you miss the most?”
“Serena.”
“Tell me about her.”
“I named her after a friend.”
Pitt seemed to realize he would not be pushed to say more. He gestured Conrad to the bed, and when the student lay stretched on his back attached the suction cups of the Reve Solutions machine to his temples. On the ceiling, Conrad noticed, an image of what might be a bull charged what could be a matador’s cape.
Waking, hours later, he was at peace with the loss of the dream children who had not survived. At another time he might beat himself up for that. Now, the same sense of wellbeing he had felt the first time enveloped him again, penetrated him, danced him around the floor. He went home to his apartment feeling strong and sane, capable of handling whatever they threw his way.
Conrad thought of himself as a digital native, but he didn’t much like being commanded by email to report to Dr. Saroyan’s office at ten the next morning. Saroyan worked in the upper echelon of the PD building, on one of the floors reserved for “specialized services.” As a denizen of the application development echelon, Conrad had to get a pass to ride the restricted elevator. The steadiness of the night before had pretty much crumbled by the time the doctor smirked at him from his chair in an office so correctly institutional it made Conrad want to tag the walls scatological red. It was his resentment that made him ask, “What am I doing here?”
Saroyan was feline and sleekly dark. Too many women had told him how beautiful he was. He had a firm grasp of his professional prerogatives. Making a tent of his fingers he told Conrad, “You are an intelligent man. I’ll be straight with you. Your behavior has become a concern.”
“What behavior is that?”
Cat’s eyes sparkling, Saroyan batted away the question. “You may not believe this, but management recognizes the pressures facing those of you who work on Eternal Snow. A hermetic environment, terribly long hours, a never-ending series of what must seem like arbitrary deadlines. And, in your case, a supervisor born without the nurturing gene.”
Conrad shrugged. With no warning he felt drained, which was probably why Saroyan’s next comment hit him so hard.
“I’m wondering how you feel about Serena.”
“She’s a colleague,” Conrad said reflexively. “A friend.”
“What if,” Saroyan began. But stopped. Stopping was a tactic. “Never mind. That will do for today. We’ll be in touch.”
An unaccustomed feeling of belligerence flooded Conrad. “You’re joking, right?”
“Sorry?”
“You’re jerking me around.”
Flawless and unflappable, Dr. Aaron Saroyan shook his head with sympathy that infuriated Conrad, repeating softly, “We’ll be in touch.”
Later that morning, back in his own echelon, Conrad made a point of casually asking two or three workmates if they had heard anything from specialized services. If they had, they were not willing to admit it. As artfully as he knew how, he followed up with a question about Serena. From the little bits they reluctantly fed him, she seemed to be all things to all of them. An empathetic friend, a playful colleague, an irreverent social commentator. At his desk in the cube farm, when Conrad pinged her he was half glad she did not respond. He coded halfheartedly for a while. He drank a Gatorade. He drank a Red Bull. A thought he could not successfully repress kept troubling him. She’s on their side.
He could not force events. He had to wait to learn whether he had earned another class at sleep school. No point looking for clues. If and when they decided he was entitled, they would let him know. He threw himself at Eternal Snow, concentrating so hard this time that Serena’s ping barely registered. When she filled his screen an instant later it was hard not to abase himself in gratitude. Why, then, did he say what he said?
“You work for them, don’t you?”
“Who? Are you talking about PD?”
“They’re after me. They want me to make a mistake I can’t recover from.”
Her eyes narrowed to slits of incredulity. “Why would they do that?”
He felt silly, and smiled ineptly. “I don’t know.”
“Go see a movie,” she suggested.
“Right. They’d love that, wouldn’t they?”
“You’re losing perspective, Conrad.”
“What have you told them?”
“About what?”
“About me.”
She frowned as if trying to recall a specific conversation. “I don’t believe they’ve ever asked me anything about you. You know, you’re starting to worry me.”
She was in complete control. Anything he might say, she had already considered. It wasn’t fair. He was not in the same league she was. He gave up. He yawned. Didn’t even try to hide it. That cracked her up.
“Get some sleep, hombre. Te llamo luego.”
He waited. For Serena to ping him. For someone from the university to get in touch. For Harris to drag him into his lair and maul him. For an agent from Homeland Security to flash a badge and bundle him into a government sedan. But none of those things happened. His life was Eternal Snow, Eternal Snow was he.
He seldom emptied his mail box at the apartment. He paid his bills online, so all he got was garbage. One Friday afternoon the letter carrier shoved a note under his door telling him the box was jammed. If he wanted service to continue he had to clean it out. He did, but could not face the stack of worthless paper he found there. He left it on the kitchen table.
He was expected to work Saturdays, but the next morning he registered a symbolic act of defiance by drinking coffee at home watching spring light come through the kitchen window. It crashed loudly on the floor in the exact spot where his dog would be lying, if he had one. How pathetic was that, imagining the favored sleeping spot of a pet he didn’t own? Without thinking, he reached for the stack of junk mail and began going through it. The heavy, cream-colored envelope arrested him. In the top left-hand corner he recognized the U of S logo. He got up for coffee. He got up again for a knife to slit the envelope. He opened it.
This is to advise you that your enrollment at the University of Sleep has been terminated, effective this date. That was it. No explanation, no pro-forma expression of regret. Nothing.
Nothing.
He may have cried. He certainly did not go to work.
On Monday, Harris sniped at him by email. So sorry to learn of the death of your hamster. As you know, Primum Datum offers grief counseling services for all full-time employees. Feel free to avail yourself of said services. In this difficult moment, the Eternal Snow phase deadline may have slipped your mind. This Thursday, opening of business. Do you need another reminder?
Conrad was confused, and knew he was confused. He was exhausted, and knew it. His resentment was so big and sloppy he could not fail to be aware of it. But he did not know how angry he was until he stormed into Harris’ office and told him he was an asshole.
Rising to his feet, Harris looked like the martinet he was. “Say that again.”
“You’re an asshole.”
Harris surprised him then. A grin of delight contorted his face. And he laughed. He looked, suddenly, like a man at peace, at home in slippers and robe enjoying a hot toddy and a bit of Brahms before bed. Conrad assumed he was hallucinating.
“You’re trying to get yourself fired, aren’t you?”
Incapable of forming words, let alone speaking them, Conrad sputtered.
Harris shook his head. “It won’t work. You’re tired. Give yourself a holiday. Go get laid or something.”
Conrad looked doubtful because he felt doubtful.
“Get some sleep, Conrad. You can go back at Snow tomorrow. It’ll be there. Trust me, it will be there.”
Some things may have happened between the moment Conrad left Harris’ office and the one in which he found himself, that mild evening, in a park on Capitol Hill. But he had no memory of anything that wasn’t dread. They were setting him up. Maybe they did that to everybody they gave a TS-3 clearance, or everybody assigned to Eternal Snow. But even if it were that simple, he wanted no part of their rite of peculiar passage. He watched two girls with bright multicolored nails toss arch looks back and forth with the same dexterity their mothers had once tossed a beach ball. An internal goad told him it was time to move on.
Standing, he saw her. She was turning a corner. Tight jeans, a white T-shirt, sandals with dangerous heels. He called “Serena!” but she did not stop or turn around. He took off running after her, but by the time he rounded the corner she had made, there was no sign of her. He called her name again. It came out like a curse. He had no doubt it was Serena. She was on their side.
He went down the block hopelessly. A need for sleep threatened to overpower him. It took everything he had not to sit down on the curb and close his eyes. It was the urge to break something that kept him going. This thing – whatever it was that was happening to him – had an architecture of its own, and Serena’s disappearance obeyed its structural dictate as a robust chunk of code would.
At the next corner he was ready to pack it in. He could not quite remember who he was, or why he felt so frustrated. In a blur of muddy feeling he blew past a man squatting by a blue tarp on a patch of grass.
“What’s your hurry?” the man said to his back.
Conrad stopped. The man’s T-shirt was tie-dyed in traditional colors. His flip flops were purple. His hair was red spikes. He said, “Now’s your chance.”
“My chance for what?”
The man pointed to the tarp where he had displayed his wares in uneven rows. Nationals baseball caps, dinner plates printed with an image of the President’s family, an army surplus cartridge belt with pink plastic bullets, knockoff DVDs of popular movies.
He squinted as though expecting a blow. “If you’re going to buy, now’s the time. I don’t have a permit. Cop comes along, my whole business model gets called into question.”
“Why would I want any of that junk?”
The man sized him up patiently. “I don’t know. Maybe you wouldn’t.”
But he realized that Conrad had already fixed on the snow globe.
Conrad picked it up. Inside the globe, a tiny White House was surrounded by a green lawn. ‘Celebrate Our Democracy’ ran the legend on the base of the globe. He shook it. The immediate little snowstorm was insanely gratifying.
“How much?”
“Seven fifty.”
Conrad gave him a ten and pocketed the globe. Not until ten minutes later did he think to turn it upside down and read Acme Novelties, Practical Products Industrial Park, Springfield VA. He shook the globe again. By the time the snow had settled on the White House lawn he was on his way to get a Zipcar.
The GPS in the car he rented was broken so he used his phone to find the Practical Products Industrial Park, which turned out to be a medium-sized islet in an archipelago of business complexes off I-95. On the Acme Novelties sign, the stylized outline of a satisfied customer was having a huge laugh thanks to a novelty item not visible to the beholder.
In the parking lot, behind the wheel, Conrad thought, I’m nuts. This is nuts. If I were them I’d lock me up. Still, he felt a kind of restful resolve. He was nuts, yes. And he was going to get out of the car, cross the lot, and ring the Acme bell.
He did.
A woman who reminded him of Diana answered. She was blonde and thick in the middle but had the same unsexed appeal, the chilly complacency.
“I’m Conrad.”
“So, you found us. That’s impressive.”
“Can I come in?”
“Your enrollment was terminated. You know that.”
“I think we should talk.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Please.”
“Emotion won’t help,” she warned him. “Emotion doesn’t enter into it. The committee met.”
“What committee?”
“The one that looks at these things.”
Conrad nodded, struggling to stay rational. “Of course. But I did want to bring them some information they might not have.”
That worked. It generated a cryogenic smile. “I’m Ashley.”
He followed her to a nondescript room that might be an office, or a storage area, a charmless anteroom; anything. He pointed out that there was no bed.
“Only the classrooms have beds.”
“I see.”
They sat on chairs designed to make sitters uncomfortable, and Conrad asked her, “Does Serena work for you?”
“I thought you said you had something for the committee.”
“She does, doesn’t she?”
Ashley smoothed the lap of her black skirt and flipped her hair. “To be on the committee, a person has to demonstrate judgment. Really awesome judgment, and original thought.”
“Meaning?”
“If they wanted to, one of the members could make the case that this is a bona fide version of the American dream.”
“Explain.”
“You’ve persevered. You worked really hard to find us. The story needs a happy ending.”
He nodded. She was making his case for him. Or else setting him up. It was discouraging, it was humiliating, to have no clue which. It was up to him to go positive.
“One thing I’ve learned,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Sleep is not the enemy.”
“No.”
“But it’s not a friend, either. Sleep is the cloud. No cloud, no rain. No rain, no corn in the fields.”
“That’s interesting,” she said in a tone of voice that suggested it wasn’t.
“I can make a contribution,” Conrad said. He did not know what he meant, but felt acutely the truth of the statement, its perfectly timed incisiveness.
“Come with me.”
The bed in the room to which she led him was different from the others. It was bigger, and appeared to be a perfect square. The coverlet was pale blue. The Reve Solutions machine next to it was more stylish, somehow, and more imposing than the model he was familiar with. There were no leads, no dangling suction cups. It made him think of an organ he had once seen in a cathedral in Vienna, although the shape was nothing like.
He lay down on the bed without being asked.
Ashley said, “I guess you’re okay with waiting a while. I have to do some checking.”
“With the committee.”
“If this works…”
“If they take me back as a student, you mean.”
“The technology is different, at your level.”
“I understand. No wires.”
“No wires is the least of it.”
“I’m looking forward to studying again.”
Hand on the doorknob, she stopped long enough to say, “Don’t get your hopes up, Conrad.”
Let her play out her little bit of drama. At your level, she had said. That meant he was in. More than likely he had never been out. If it pleased them to mess with him, telling him he had been booted from the program, well, he felt generous. What mattered was the essential fact: he was in.
The silence in the classroom, after a moment, was Atlantic deep. This time there was no picture on the ceiling. The room was bare to the point of sterility. It was possibly unhealthy to feel the sense of comradeship, of complicity, that Conrad felt with the Reve Solutions machine. But in its cool self-sufficiency, the thing was splendid.
He thought about Serena, and regretted everything. He thought about Harris, at his computer composing nastygrams. He thought, with an objectivity that normally eluded him, about Eternal Snow; the idea behind it. But already he was feeling drowsy. The machine evidently knew that. Good for the machine.
He did not find sleep, sleep found him. It embraced him. He had been tired for such a long time. In the succinct interval in which he held onto consciousness, it seemed to Conrad that he was learning. Yes, he was still learning. There was just enough of him left above the waterline for a feeling of pity to snag on, as the river flowed past. So many. There were so many people at Primum Datum – in the city, across the world – and so few of them had matriculated at the University of Sleep.