THE INSOMNIAC

THE INSOMNIAC
A modern mythology of the Sleep God.

The nights grew longer and longer until there was no day in between them.

Even the oldest among us have no idea what the word Sleep even means.

In the dark charcoal cityscapes of this ancient Gotham, very few do.

Perpetual darkness has ruled the black ruins for hundreds of years. It isn't letting up.

No one Sleeps because no one knows what it is.

The groovy god of Sleep departed in a flash of Technicolor dreams, never again to grace the mind of his unconscious worshippers. Most gods will never leave earth, at least not while there are disciples around to make them feel like the gods they are, for without worship, a god is a purposeless thing. A god is a security blanket to the one who devises it. Not a supernatural being. Sleep was different. Sleep's worshippers never knew that they were worshipping, thus without the conscious intent of a prayer, there was no actual faith in the power of Sleep.
So when the Big Righteous in the Sky asked him to come party with him in the land of endless summer and the occasional rainy nostalgia, who was Sleep to say no? Did it matter to him that the people of earth would miss him? Probably not.

Ever since he left, the populace has become a communal brainless organism, the entire whole of society watching "The Late Show".
Reading expired Vanity Fairs.
Drinking a Bottomless glass of Dunken' Doughnut's coffee in the ten millionth polystyrene cup.
"Congratulations, you're a winner. Click here to claim prize"

People watch the skies, sometimes, hoping for a glimpse of early dawn sunlight meaning that maybe this curse was over. The whole race doomed to a painful exile from the necessary mental nutrition of subconscious indulgence.
You think they would've stopped being hopeful by now.
Zombies.
In watching the sky, they notice with dull dissent: the moon frozen forever in it's last inch of wane, smiling down on the dark planet like a scornful Cheshire, mocking the human inability to change the fundamental environment in which they had been placed by a cruel twist of fate.

In the dank streets of this twisted global capital, sleep propaganda is prosecuted to only the most extreme measures. Torture is a word that makes light work of the things the military industry will do to you if you find a Lunesta brochure in the abandoned basement of some ancient townhouse along with the skeletons of it's senior inhabitants and a shitload of dust, the sad confetti of last millenia's party. It doesn't matter to them what you do with these things, it's just bad enough that you know.
We put people to sleep. The project was birthed from the womb of a man named Jack, five months ago in an attic in a bad neighborhood. After all the mystery, after Jack convinced all of us to meet there without telling us why. What he showed us frightened most of us to the point of indefinite insanity, and yet it set our brains afire with the paralle sickness of all the possibilities of standards of mental health, known by no one in this age of sleeplessness.

Everything became so simple and manageable with the promise of sleep at the end of every twelve hours.
Jack had unearthed an ancient Pharmacy in the soil of a forgotten metropolitan coastline on one of his personally funded digs; rooting around in the dirt like a highly sophisticated swine, Jack had found his truffle.
With an attic full of sleeping pills in an abandoned factory, there was no limit to the peace of mind we could acquire. So we built a shrine and we prayed. We prayed for Sleep.

We sat there looking at each other apprehensively; none of us had ever been this excited. It was like waiting for a bomb to go off in a crowded tenement. Then it hit us, and we knew that Sleep was present.
He was standing in dim glow of the single shrouded window up there, garbed in cargo shorts, a used car salesman button up shirt that was too big, a beat pair of sandals. Adorning his head were three distinct things: a shiny yellow vinyl weather cap, a tremendous bushy-white beard, and a pair of slick and expensive von-zipper sunglasses.
The dramatic backlight and his choice of apparel made him look like a casual messiah.
He coughed as his lungs rejected the attic dust and he said: "Yeah. Whaddaya want?"
I felt like I had been punched with an extremely soft and slow acting fist, whacked with the slo-mo pillo, my tongue was heavy in my mouth and my eyes wouldn't stay open. My breathing grew heavier. "You're Sleep?" said Pete from the other side of the room. He was blinking erratically. Sleep’s head, out of focus, swung around to face him "Name's Dan, and I’m havin' a good day, thanks for asking. Did your manners die with your subconscious mind? Fuck you, I'm giving you nightmares you ungrateful little jerkoff." Pete was struggling to stay upright "Hey, man, I'm sorry, I just expected something, y'know, grander." He looked at each of us in turn, I was having a hard time focusing... Then he said, as my vision was fading to black: "Oh it's grand all right." out of the corner of my eye, Alexander's bulky figure make it's slow descent down the wall, the rest of the crew already defeated by the holy substance in their collective system. He surveyed us again with a Willy Wonka twinkle in his eye. "Once you close your eyes for that last time and you really drift off... well then you'll really know what you've been missing." In a matter of seconds I was lost in a dream.

It was thirteen hours later.

Jack was awake. He was holding one of the huge metal crates that I knew was full of thousands of the little pale capsules like the one I had eagerly ingested the previous night. He looked at me for a second and then continued his diligent routine. He was bringing them downstairs.
I had slid down the wall, almost parallel with the floor. The skewed angle of things made me feel like retching all over. In the corner of my eye i noticed a small drool spot, poised like an afterthought on the bench beside me.
"What are you doing?" Pete croaked from the opposite corner, rubbing his eyes and stirring. "Moving this." Jack's ghostly voice drifted through the floorboards like vapors from a manhole. "Give me a hand." Everyone was stirring now. I looked around groggily; Sleep was nowhere to be seen. "What?" Pete shouted, "Moving where? Hey, no way, wait a minute, do you have any idea what they'll do to us if they find out we have these?" He was rising. "No way, man, I can't let you do that." I followed him down the stairs after Jack.
Jack threw the crate he was holding into the back of a huge graffitied box van. "No." Said Pete. He was standing a degree or two to my right and twenty feet ahead. "I can't let you, man, I'm sorry. I... I got my family to look after and..." He was shaking like a blender set to "liquefy". "Look, it was bad enough when it was just us, but this... I can’t let this..." He trailed off as he recognized the compact nine-millimeter repeating pistol in Jack's left hand.
'Jesse', Jack called it.

The shot was remarkably quiet, but the meaty sound the bullet made when it slammed into Pete's face traveling 4,700 feet per second rang in my ears for hours to come. The warm spray that was once Peter’s pumping liquid life force splattered onto my upturned face and dripped down my cheek with the tears.
I saw a man die, once.
Three months after my fourteenth birthday, my father and I were sitting in traffic. There was a hold-up in the diner on the side of the road and something went wrong. Someone tried to play hero, didn’t keep their head down. Their head ended up all over a plate glass window of an all-night diner on Main Street. It had glistened the deep shimmering crimson of one million roses in the light of an exploding sun.
I never ever forgot the color.
I watched the smoke from Jack’s gun rise up towards the rafters; my ears were ringing. “What the fuck was that?” came a voice from upstairs. “Oh god…” Alex came running down the stairs in a hazy slow motion daze. His blank expression reflected the eyes of so many slaughterhouse bovines, walking the bloodstained ramp to the brutal fate they never suspected.
I’d seen it all through the yellow windows of my grandfather’s truck. I would sit there for hours in the cab, outside the hallowed shack, and read. I did everything I could to tune out the primal squeals of the dying animals in their final seconds.
I would watch the traffic go by on the horizon. The ghostly apparitions of headlights drifting by on that lonely stretch of highway produced a sad beauty that registered as some nostalgic serpent in the depths of my mind. I would read an entire novel as I sat there; in the background dozens of heifers walked up the slippery crimson plank. I would read an entire novel, and realize that I didn’t read it at all. At the end of the day, we drove away with the only object in my memory being of the look in the eyes of those hapless beasts.
“Oh my god, Jack…” He slid down the stairs like a specter, his shaggy black mess of a hairdo swinging round his head as he shook it vigorously. “What the fuck did you do, Jack! You shot... oh god you killed Pete…” He knelt by Pete’s destroyed features and looked up at him with that sad vacant look in his eyes that still makes me flinch. “What did you do, Jack?” smoke was still rising from the barrel of Jack’s gun. “I did what was necessary. For the good of all of us.” He said.
Jack sighed and rolled the body face down with his foot. Alex rose and watched him nervously. Jack shoved the gun back into his shoulder holster. Gently, he said: “Now will you please give me a hand with this?” Everyone else was on the stairs, staring at Jack with burning eyes, staring through Jack. Staring with fear and distrust, but ultimately with loyalty. What I didn’t know then was that this was part of a grand stratagem. Jack anticipated everything. Even if Pete hadn’t spoken up like he had, he would have turned the gun on one of us. Pete was a convenient sacrifice to achieve supreme loyalty. Alex had obtained a dumb obedient look. He helped Jack with the crate while the ten or so others sat on the stairs and stared at them. I just stood there and was silent; Pete’s blood was in my shoes.
In a few months, we had distributed pills hundreds of miles all over the city. We had turned the basement of an old street-side saloon Jack had purchased, along with a dozen other buildings scattered throughout the metropolis, into a shrine.
Sleep ruled these unseemly establishments.
Sleep ruled the underworld.
We had turned abandoned apartments, bars, and coffee shops into the ultimate guerilla machine. This dark conceptual device was out of our hands the second the first customer walked into the barber shop on thirty-third. The next day there was four more. The day after that, there were twenty. There were more and more every passing hour. This wasn’t enough for Jack. We were sitting on the couch in the flat above the shop he managed. The church, the headquarters of the semi religious underworld revolution that moved in the shadows on the city’s underbelly and worked more silent and more efficient every single second. It was perpetual motion and perfect design; it had the power to evolve itself and adapt to the demands of the populace.
Jack had called all of us to the headquarters: a diner in the heart of the industrial district. The room was painted a thin yellow color that barely held together under the weight of a glance. There was a pale stained line across the wall, near the ceiling. A result of hundreds of torched tobacco byproducts. There was a low wooden table in the center of the room, a torn tweed hide-a-bed couch, a ragged armchair, and countless perriwinkle floor cushions.

Everyone was there. The whole crew waiting eagerly for jack's word. We had ordered burgers from a fast food joint down the boulevard. Jack was sitting on the couch smiling calmly while the rest of us dug in. He waited for us to finish and said “This has been the most powerful underground movement in the history of this world, thousands of disciples… I am thankful to you all for helping bring about this ultimate retribution.” He looked around. “I hate to have to tell it like it is, but this organization doesn’t have long left. They are cracking down all over. We’ve lost two temples in the last month alone; they're gettin' closer. Someone from within is feeding them information.” At this there was the general uproar and death threats, characteristic reactions to this comment.
He rose his hand and they quieted. “This is a matter of little importance, though, it has succeeded only in showing me the true mortality of our efforts. We have mere days left. I brought you together to thank you for joining me in this obscure endeavor. You can all go home, now. Goodnight.”
The group departed with heavy spirits and a feeling that, as one man quoth: The dream is over.

Eight days later.

Jack had called me and told me to come to the diner to meet him. He said he had something to show me.

Jack stared at my soul for an hour at least before confiding, in his beatnik tone, “We found another sunken pharmacy in the old district.”

Not the bold testament I was expecting after the psychological build up, but anything to void the black crevasse of Jack’s silence. “That’s good,” I said, popping one of the divine capsules, somewhat distracted by the fish screensaver emanting from the monitor in the corner. “We could set up another dozen temples.” He barked a laugh and shook his head slowly. “No. Not good enough.” What then? What more could we do? The fact that we had avoided suspicion this whole time was remarkable enough, what we were doing was impossible. “Look,” he said. “Look, I’ve been working, and I think I have it.”
He showed me.
The apparatus was big, you could tell it was heavy just by looking, a cuboid aluminum monument with tubes of all kinds flying out in all directions and thin black wire attached to a transmitter dish. “What…?” I whispered to him. “It’s the Sandman.” He said. “This is going to put Sleep on a level of global availability. He rotated it so the control panel faced me. A radar monitor and a big shiny clown’s nose button. “You dial in an area, and it puts every living thing in that area to sleep.” He grinned and absently scratched his nose. “If I can attach it to the reactor up on the hill, we could do the whole city.”
A knock on the door.
Alex.
“I just tucked in another batch of nappers. There are too many of us Insomniacs these days.” He dropped into a vacant armchair. “What’s that atrocious looking thing?”
Jack told him.
Alex looked nervous.
“This is big…” he was fidgeting with his bracelet. “No… this is…” the frightened rabbit look vanished and he snapped back, composing himself. “Look, I gotta go take inventory over at the temple on 33rd. stay safe.” He walked towards the door and halted awkwardly. He looked back on us one last time, his face wearing the same expressive mask it was when he held Peter’s bloody body in his arms. “I’m sorry.” He said.
He slammed the door.
We could hear him jogging down the stairs. Jack hung his head in his hands “Fuck, Alex… dammit, god dammit…” Spot lights were blasting through the windows and below a man with a megaphone was telling us it was over, come out with our hands up, don’t struggle.
We heard the melancholy drone of the helicopter hovering outside. Jack dropped to his knees and I followed him. We rolled the coffee table sideways over the window.

Outside, Alex was blending with the shadows, disappearing into the bottomless pit of the city forever.

Jack Peeked through the blinds and withdrew right as a sniper shell whipped through the air where his skull had been, leaving a gaping bullet hole in the far wall of the apartment.
“There are forty men outside, at least. Heavily armed.” Said Jack as he handed me a bulky silenced pistol. “Take the sandman and get out of here, I’ll take as many as I can with me.” I studied him for a moment then, his cool demeanor, his calm disposition. I knew then how predetermined everything was. He knew that there would be betrayal, he knew that this would be the outcome, some dramatic standoff, he knew it all from the very beginning, but how? Was he the messiah? Everything felt so scripted. We each just played our role, unknowingly.
We heard the splintering of the downstairs door as it was ripped from it’s hinges by a pneumatic battering ram. We heard dozens of pairs of footsteps cross the floor of the diner, into the kitchen, down the stairs into the storage cellar.
The shots echoed up as they began to execute the sleeping masses beneath, smashing sounds as they destroyed the shrine. Jack had opened the attic door and proceeded to climb onto the roof. The Sandman in tow, I followed. I was trying to fight the pills in my system, they were taking over, I was losing focus and coordination. Sleep was in the attic with us. “You’re in deep shit now, boys.” He said this gravely, all of the old humor gone from his calming voice, such a calming voice…
Jack stopped and looked at him and then me. “What is he doing here?” he asked. He was losing his cool, which was more alarming to me than the armed cavalry in my kitchen could ever be. “You took pills.” He was breathing heavy, thinking fast. “Lets go, come on.” I nodded very slowly; it was all I could do.
We were on the roof now, crouched below the lip so the sharpshooters couldn’t hit us. The river passed behind the building, there was a footbridge that ran across it and to a train stop. The train pulled in and the doors opened.
“Go!” He shouted, the panicked look in his eyes motivated me more than anything, but sleep was in the corner of my eye, my greatest ally for so long, he was now a crippling handicap in this makeshift race for the soul of humanity.
Jack kicked me towards the fire escape with all of his strength; I flew towards the edge. The box flew out of my arms and slid down the shingles in front of me; for a split second we felt a shared horror as we watched the machine careen towards the edge; it struck the fire escape rail and slid to a stop on the ladder.
I collided with the rail as well, rolling bodily onto the cold metal struts of the platform. I groped upwards with my fingers, searching for the lever that I knew would drop the ladder below me. I slowly wrapped my arm around the sandman. A shot rang from above and I heard the bullet whine off of the lever two feet from where my hand was searching for it drunkenly. I slipped my arm through the bars of the rusty steel skeleton. Just in time. I glimpsed Jack. He was holding the smoking gun, his face contorted, his frenzied expression frozen in a flash of light as the helicopter rose above the roof, an eerie sentinel in the sky. Then I dropped.
The ladder swung through the floor and slid fourteen stories to the ground below, I dropped into a dumpster, the impact would have killed me if I had landed on the hard cobbles ten feet to the right.
Stars and searchlights were swimming through my shattered vision, consciousness creeping away… And then Sleep was there; Lifting me out and pushing me towards the train station. I stumbled across the walkway; my mind in discordia, my thoughts had turned to pure unintelligible chaos.

The train was closing its doors as I stumbled up; the holy portal was denying my very existence in this moment of ultimate gravity. Everything was so futile. In a moment of frustration now trumping every other feeling and emotion, with the bitter tears of anger streaming down my face, I cocked my arm back and slammed my fist into the unwholesome thing that was deserting me. The shock ran up to my shoulder and the glass beneath shattered, the door flopped open when I kicked out at it; the train was pulling out. I stared up at the parapets of the buildings once more, and saw Jack, perched on a spire high on the neighboring roof, throw his gun down to the soldiers below, he raised his hands out to his sides in a gesture of defeat, surrender.
Every weapon on the ground took aim and fired, one million government issue caseless projectiles hurtled through the air and through Jack’s body, the air was thick with flying lead and the maroon spray of Jack’s body. He tumbled to the ground below, taking his final bow as stagemaster of his grand scheme.
The train was farther down the platform now, and I was closer to unconsciousness, it was now or never.
I jogged to keep up and then flung myself into the car.
I was asleep before I hit the ground.

I was at a party, Sleep was there sipping an enormous martini and winking at me with his slow deliberate grin containing at least a thousand teeth, each the size of a boulder. Colors were swimming unnaturally; they all ran in and out of each other. Everything was lit by an eerie orange glow. A wolfish looking man in a tuxedo dug into a blood orange with savage passion; the vivid neon juices spurt all across his chest, he didn’t seem to notice.
The Big Righteous was perched upon his throne at the back of the room, massive studio headphones, one on each side of his vague, smiling face. He was bobbing his head to some tune unheard by the rest of us.
He noticed me and beckoned, Sleep was busy courting a girl that appeared young enough to be his granddaughter. He didn’t look at me again. I walked towards the throne and peered up at his face, I could see my juvenile look of wonder in the corner of my eye, reflected and distorted in the shiny black ‘phones. “You gotta wake up now kid”, he said with a look of sad kindness in his pale blue eyes. He didn’t remove the speakers, nor did he cease his rhythmic grooving. His shabby brown wool sweater was so vivid and intense that I could feel the rough texture, through the thick air, from where I stood: At the foot of his reclining armchair.
The things he had just said to me registered bluntly. Tears of longing and despair sprang to my eyes as easily as switching on a faucet. “But why…?” I sobbed and sank to my knees in front of the whole room, down onto the stained carpet. Every being there was staring now, their expressions were misplaced and confusing, looks of soft adoration, every pair of eyes, or every eye in the case of the well dressed cyclopean family in the corner, was upon me, I could feel their weight.
“I’m sorry man,” he spoke softly, his words resonating in my mind. He reached down and stroked my check with the back of his hand, his skin soft and translucent. “There’s so much more to do. You gotta bring this thing all the fucken’ way to the reactor up on depot hill and send these bastards into the Sleep age!” He spoke with rising passion and the room erupted in a delayed cheer, many of the cries weren’t human.
He turned his face back down towards me and testified, gently, “When you’re done, you can come back here to party. Now go, wake up.”

With a rush, reality slammed it’s dead weight back into the center of my brain and the walls of the train reeled, I vomited all over the car, I realized for the first time that I had it to myself.
Fortunate.
I stumbled through the ruined doors and down the misty alleyway, west, the direction of the depot reactor. The rest of the Insomniacs crew must be dead or in some subterranean torture facility, I had nothing to live for, which was why I moved with such abandon.
Jack’s plan must be carried out at all costs, I had staked all of my humanity in it.
There was a truck stopped at the gate, I climbed into the back silently, in a handful of minutes it had taken me into the facility’s loading area. I cruised up the chipped steps of the giant metal monolith, I felt it’s primal hum in the earth below, it’s warmth brushed my skin tentatively. Through the bay doors, down the hall, into the lab. I used Jack’s gun and killed all the scientists inside without a second thought. Up the stairs, more vomit. Into the control room, no locked doors. I plugged the Sandman directly into the panel and spun the knob the way jack had shown me to include the entire city’s footprint.

There were alarms, now, and lots of yelling.
With a last look around the room and out of the window overlooking the lights of the city, the metropolis seemed to quiver like a junkie, jonesing for it’s fix. Soft smile on my face, I gave the city the fix it had always dreamt of and hit the shiny red button.

Silence, swimming black dreamscapes of undefined shapes swimming through a dark desert of thought and a vast abandoned mind. This was a sleep I would never return from, I knew now. No one would ever wake again. This was all there was left.
Suddenly, a scene materialized in front of me, and I awoke, not in a reactor control room or on a dark urban alley populated with stray cats and a dumpster near a freeway overpass, but in a brightly lit room full of people I had only ever seen in a dream.
A roar rose up and the feeling of rushing wind in my hair, the sense that everything was moving very fast. The crowd was wearing party hats, applauding cheering, whistling.
Jack was there, he embraced me and then passed me to the crowd, then a phantasmagoria of splattered images. The Cyclops family patting me on the back. A very drunk Sleep planting a heavy bearded kiss on my cheek. The Big Righteous telling me: “You’re with us now.” And smiling.

But behind all of the whimsical joviality, behind the sunshine and blue skies, behind the promise of a full moon every now and again instead of the sinister grin that hung in the sky forever, behind the fabric of everything was the firm nagging uncertainty.
What is real? Is nothing tethered into the known reality of car manufactures and strip malls? Were not truck stop oasis material locations, but perhaps constructs of some elaborate misdirection? The most important doubt, I felt, was a question that hung in my mind as I left the party some hours later: is this a good dream that my world once had, or was it the nightmare of this one?