In Tokyo, we worked on the demo­graphics thing for five months solid. After the report was done and the gov­ern­ment had accepted the most opti­mistic of our four sce­narios, the three of us walked to a jazz bar and drank for two days straight. We com­mis­er­ated and shared secrets. Jin-soo cried; a sweet surprise. Parting, we all expressed hope we might col­lab­o­rate again, in some combination, and per­haps for a wiser client next time.

Now I’m going to sleep, and my real work will begin.

As a uni­ver­sity student, I was a heavy sleeper, and though that’s not unique, none of my peers parsed their slumber as finely as I did. Even then, I was con­structing a taxonomy: dark, heavy dozes set against light, spring-loaded naps. Murky sur­ren­ders and sun-warmed floats. Of course, I hadn’t ever slept for any truly sig­nif­i­cant period of time, and I had no reason to expect I ever would.

Jin-soo loved her sleep. Tessa, by contrast, moaned about it: a third of her hours wasted in ses­sile uncon­scious­ness when she could instead be up, thinking and working! She took drugs for wakefulness, but every five or six days, she would crash, and Jin-soo and I would carry her to the long couch in the con­fer­ence room where she would lie shiv­ering for 36 hours, breathing in huge gulps, her ner­vous system on gen­eral strike. I’m not sure she came out ahead. For all the laws of nature that we humans have now broken or bent, sleep remains non-negotiable. Sleep, and the speed of light.

For my part, I slept when I could, a few hours every night. Now, I’m exhausted. Catching up on all the news I missed is only making it worse. The gov­ern­ment is wrong; there are no opti­mistic sce­narios. Thankfully, I’m set to begin my con­sulting con­tract with the Ace-Mandarin Tsukiji immediately. I feel grateful to my past self for arranging it well in advance. Did she pre­dict things would get this bad? I can’t remember. I’ve just walked out of my little rental in Nezu, with the deep, cedar-plank bathtub I didn’t use once. My life is folded into a sleek travel bag, and I will carry it now to the hotel.

Above, a for­ma­tion of inter­cep­tors whis­pers above the city, casting shadows almost leafy across side­walks and cafes. In a moment, they are gone, and I know they will soon be cruising low over the Sea of Japan, aiming to ren­dezvous with some­thing bound for here, some­thing moving just as fast, some­thing that has never arrived, must never arrive.

The Ace-Mandarin Tsukiji is a mono­lith of wood and glass built on the site of the old fish market, dis­tin­guished from the adja­cent mono­liths by the showy secu­rity cordon around its base. Guards in black visors wave me through, but too quickly. I sus­pect they know I am the sleep con­sul­tant, which is not appro­priate. Ace-Mandarin con­tacted me years ago; I sup­pose they are happy to have me here at last.

Inside, the hotel’s aes­thetic would be flat-footed heigge if not for a selec­tion of inter­esting tex­tiles deployed in sur­prising ways. Tall panels of muslin hang and billow in the lobby; nav­i­gating around them feels like maneu­vering through a kelp forest. The check-in desk is clad in some kind of burlap, and it chafes my wrist when I lower the pen to sign the sleep con­tract. It’s a good chafe. The staff per­mits me to find my room by myself. I think they are slightly afraid of me.

The hotel’s top­most floor is fully booked; I can tell from the warning lights set beside the doors. Nothing as harsh as a flashing red bulb, of course; the fat tubes shine colder by only a few degrees. They are very mean­ingful degrees. One of the doors has a guard sta­tioned out­side, wearing the same black visor as the con­tractors at the hotel’s base. As I pass, I nod hello, feeling sorry for her. What a slog.

The tube out­side my room, number six, glows warmer than the rest, and inside, the lights detect my pres­ence and acti­vate with an audible click. That’s a demerit, but I let it pass. I’m not here to eval­uate the hotel’s design. Only its sleep.

My job begins with bare legs.

---

Dis­robing in a hotel is special: the pud­dling of pants or skirt onto a floor unsul­lied by the rest of your life.

The wide window at my room’s far end is uncovered, and I leave it that way. I believe in the city dweller’s compact, and, as such, I must offer to the anony­mous world the same view that I myself have taken in. (To clarify: any use of magnification, optical or digital, vio­lates this compact, which exists between humans alone: slivers of pink, no taller than cres­cent moons, regarding each other across gulfs that are very impor­tantly unbridgeable. Once, in down­town Los Angeles, I saw the glint of a lens across Flower Street, and oh, how I glared. There is a man still crouched beside his window in a tower there, immobile, turned to stone.) Many years ago, in Milan, I rented an apart­ment that faced a plaza and, across it, a huge old hotel. I miss that apart­ment. Both build­ings are gone now — the one I lived in, and the one I watched with such amusement.

So: skirt, puddled. The room, I notice and appre­ciate, is the appro­priate tem­per­a­ture for this. Tem­per­a­ture mat­ters crit­i­cally to the sleep con­sul­tant. It’s one of the two or three most impor­tant things. The archi­tect whines to the sleep con­sul­tant over mar­tinis that “it’s incred­ibly dif­fi­cult to reg­u­late the tem­per­a­ture in build­ings of this size and complexity,” but the sleep con­sul­tant is not here for excuses. She has come for air across her legs and now her back, a cur­rent with no detectable source. The room should be a tem­per­a­ture such that con­tact with any surface — the bedding, the bath­room tile — offers a spark of cool­ness fading instantly to com­fort. The sleep con­sul­tant should travel the space in a sheath of her own warmth.

In hotels, I explode. I am only dig­ging for my pre­ferred soap, but somehow my clothes have formed a blast radius around my travel bag. I’d like to try my hand at making these bags; maybe go to school for indus­trial design, mate­rial science. In class, I could be the cool elder who’s seen it all. I’ll assess the state of the industry when I wake up.

The sleep con­sul­tant takes a bath.

Once, in Pyongyang, I spoke at length with a gas­tronome — at the extremes of connoisseurship, you find kin­ship in other disciplines, all paths con­verging at the tip of a great cone of sen­sual experience; or maybe it’s the bottom of a great pit — and this eater who orga­nized her life around meals explained to me that it was essen­tial to design your hunger. It’s obvious that if you’re not suf­fi­ciently hungry, you won’t be able to appre­ciate a ninety-six course meal, or, conversely, that if you’re too hungry you’ll be stuffing and slurping, not savoring. But the gas­tronome insisted you had to con­sider not only your hunger’s degree but its kind. There was, she explained, a des­ic­cated hunger that made water delicious, and, conversely, a sodden hunger that was the per­fect back­drop for salty things. She planned ahead. It was an ordeal. She was beau­tiful, with a sharp, beaky nose.

So, what kind of tired should a sleep con­sul­tant be?

Muscle weari­ness is too easy; it makes any bed sublime. As a con­sul­tant, my tired­ness must approx­i­mate the hotel guest for whom I am a sensitive, artic­u­late stand-in. This Ace-Mandarin is favored by burned-out bureaucrats, so the demo­graphics gig was my preparation, and I feel it now: the sour exhaus­tion of exper­tise unappre­ciated, warn­ings unheeded.

But, even so, when I pull the covers up to my chin, the wrung-out res­ig­na­tion yields to an upwelling of delight. I’m home. This is my turf. My strongest redoubt.

I am, it must be said, a very good sleeper.

I have theories.

PAJAMAS

The sleep con­sul­tant doesn’t under­stand why anyone would ever sleep naked. To do so for­goes the the first-derivative feeling of fabric against fabric, and some­times a second derivative, too, if the sheets and blan­kets are inter­estingly arrayed. The sleep con­sul­tant wears a linen shift. Maybe it’s a nightgown, technically, but she has always liked the word shift better. Shift, as in night. Shift, as in work.

DREAMS

Dreams are irrel­e­vant to the sleep con­sul­tant. This isn’t to say she is not inter­ested in them. When you sleep deeply, dreams can run long, like novels or net­flixen or small hells. Years ago, during a stay at the Wellesley in Knightsbridge, she had a dream of quasi-mermaids that remains one of the most mem­o­rably cosmic expe­ri­ences of her life. No, dreams are fucking cool — but to crit­i­cize a hotel for a bad dream, or praise it for a good one, gives it too much credit.

SECURITY

It’s crucial, as you drift away, to feel con­fi­dent nothing will breach your sleep. But, take note: the secu­rity cordon at the hotel’s base works in one dimen­sion only, a shallow one at that, and if you believe it is those black-visored guards who are pro­tecting you, you deserve what­ever rude awak­ening you get. The sleep con­sul­tant has scru­ti­nized Ace-Mandarin’s system of cor­po­rate governance, audited its debt ratio, and she is sat­is­fied it is secure, or secure enough.

A fresh for­ma­tion of inter­cep­tors zips across the city. From the sleep con­sul­tant’s new van­tage point on the hotel’s top­most floor, they look like the X-rayed ver­te­brae of some sin­uous dragon undu­lating in flight. She only half-under­stands why they move like that. She did a defense gig, years ago, but things have changed since then.

MASTURBATION

Generally, the sleep con­sul­tant tries not to mas­tur­bate before sleeping. In her theory, to do so invites some­thing from the out­side world into the room. There might be ways around this; a friend claims to mas­tur­bate to abstract geome­tries and gra­dient fields. The sleep con­sul­tant can only mas­tur­bate thinking about people she has known (including the gra­dient-lover) and this seems to break some impor­tant seal.

Maybe that’s the core of the sleep con­sul­tant’s theory: that her sleep can be self-contained and self-sufficient. A portable island. Which, she sup­poses, is also called a life raft.

But now her hand is slith­ering down­wards and she mas­tur­bates after all, thinking, to her surprise, of Jin-soo.

THOUGHTS BEFORE SLEEPING

The sleep con­sul­tant has a memory from child­hood of two bowls, one made of thin metal, the other rough ceramic; and how, when she scoured them under the faucet, the metal got so hot so quickly, while the ceramic remained impassive; and how she liked both feelings. She was eight years old, standing on a stool to reach the sink. Doing the dishes was her first job. She was complimented, which made her vol­un­teer to do it again, pre­saging many things to come.

Her whole life, she’s been rec­og­nized for her dili­gence and her sensitivity, which is why her one­time colleague, an ele­vator designer, told her about a client of his, a hotel in San Francisco, that was searching for a sleep con­sul­tant, and sug­gested that she would be a good fit. The pro­posal she ten­dered to that hotel was buoyed by a few ele­gant lies, but she doesn’t have to lie anymore. She has slept in hotels around the world. She could never afford to do so on her own, but as a con­sul­tant, the sleep is pro­vided free in exchange for her dili­gence and her sensitivity. Her friend the ele­vator designer is long dead, and she misses him.

Before she conks out completely, the sleep con­sul­tant is aware, briefly, of the room’s rising chill and the lemony change in the air. A miscalibration.

She’ll com­ment on that.

WAKING

The sleep con­sul­tant prefers to wake just once during the long night, and the Ace-Mandarin obliges. Con­scious­ness returns like a cat slinking out from under the bed. A glass of water, a peek out the window. It’s midday, but a gauzy screen has descended, so she’s not blinded. On the notepad beside the bed, the sleep con­sul­tant makes a mark, just one light slash. In the morning, she won’t remember this, but when she sees the slash, she will smile at the com­fort and soli­tude of that other person who was born, who died.

The sleep con­sul­tant is, of course, afraid of death, and there­fore fas­ci­nated by sleep.

Later, much later, there is another period of wakefulness, this one unscheduled. The sleep con­sul­tant becomes murkily aware of a great com­mo­tion in the hallway. An ampli­fied voice bleats instructions. Through eyes still half-lidded, she watches a hex-rotor swing into view, hov­ering very close to the hotel’s top­most floor, its belly yawning open, the black-visored crew inside aiming spot­lights and other instru­ments at some unseen target.

The sleep con­sul­tant sits up awkwardly. Her head lolls forward — she can’t seem to sup­port its weight — and she strains her eyes in their sockets to find the door. Sounds from the hallway: a clatter, a cry, a hollow brat-brat-brat. Technically, she is still asleep, her room chilled and gassed, and if anyone opens that door, she will die.

With great effort, she hoists her arms, uses one hand to wrap the other around the pencil, and makes a second mark on the notepad: a faint crossbar that turns her slash into an X. Slash for com­fort, X for danger — a code of her own instant devising. She fixes it in her mind. The hex-rotor’s spot­light washes into her room, licks the foot of her bed. Some­thing in the hallway thuds against her door. If her body wasn’t so heavy, she would … 

---

In the morning, I am greeted by that sparkling con­fig­u­ra­tion of the ner­vous system only available, I believe, to those who wake into a world exactly the right tem­per­a­ture: skin tingling, every sen­sa­tion delicious. The feeling somehow of being deeply seated in the socket of the world.

I want to revel, but curiosity beckons. I hop up to retrieve the news­paper that has been slipped under the door and carry it to the chair by the window where I will await the knock announcing the arrival of my coffee and breakfast. The staff knows I’m awake. Hours ago, they sucked the cold gas out of the room and replaced it with reg­ular air.

The news­paper sum­ma­rizes the past five years of events. Ace-Mandarin is par­tic­u­larly good at this, and it’s a per­sis­tent advan­tage for the brand. The macro overview con­firms the bleakest of our sce­narios from the demo­graphics project. Elsewhere: another new fever; rising nos­talgia for the 2030s; more inscrutable images from the Chi­nese probe. Pak­istan joined the NEU, thank goodness. The secret chairman of an AI con­trol com­mittee was assas­si­nated in his sleep. (The details of that last story are unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally vague.) There’s nothing about sports. They know I don’t care about sports.

Outside, the sky is glowing gray, the sun still below the horizon. Tokyo’s sil­hou­ette has changed.

On the last page of the news­paper are the obituaries, every one of them about a person I know or whose work I’ve followed. A shock: Tessa is there. Young, shiv­ering, impa­tient Tessa. Caught by that new fever. I thought I was inured to the obits, but this one set­tles heavily.

The knock comes, two light raps, and I rise to receive my breakfast. Passing the bed, I see my cus­tomary mark on the notepad — memento of the person who was born and died. A crooked X; inter­esting. She’s never drawn an X before. What does it represent? Maybe the city was beau­tiful from high above. Maybe she watched the sun rise behind those new build­ings when they were still just skeletons. Some­times I think I do this just for her, that other woman, and her moments of per­fect peace in a bubble of quiet darkness, safe out­side of history.

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