The Sleep Experiment Read online

  Silence—but not the bored kind found too often in lectures halls across academia. Rather, this silence was wound tight as catgut, ready to be plucked with a deafening revelation.

  Dr. Wallis did not plan to disappoint. He said, “As amazing as Randy Gardner’s eleven days of wakefulness is, it pales in comparison to several other cases of people who have defied sleep. During the First World War, a Hungarian soldier named Paul Kern was shot in the head. After recovering from the frontal lobe injury, he was no longer able to fall asleep or become drowsy. Despite doctors telling him he would not live long, he survived without sleep for another forty years, when he died from natural causes in 1955. More recently, in 2006, a few months into a new laboratory job, a man named John Alan Jordan spilled industrial-strength detergent on his skin, which contaminated his cerebral spinal fluid. Soon after, he stopped sleeping and has not been able to sleep a wink since. Likewise, a man named Al Herpin developed a similarly rare case of insomnia, though for unknown reasons. When medical professionals inspected his house, they found no bed or other sleep-related furniture, only a single rocking chair in which Herpin said he read the newspaper when he wanted to rest. To this day he remains in perfect health and doesn’t seem to suffer any discomfort from his remarkable condition. There are other cases too: a woman named Ines Fernandez who hasn’t slept for decades despite consulting dozens of doctors and taking thousands of different narcotics and sedatives; a Vietnamese gentleman named Thái Ngọc who hasn’t slept since suffering a fever in 1973. And so on and so forth. What’s most amazing is that in every case the subjects remain perfectly healthy. Ines Fernandez is still alive and ticking. Same with Thái Ngọc, who boasts of carrying two one-hundred-plus pound sacks of rice more than two miles to his house every day.”

  Dr. Wallis retrieved his glass of water, beaded with condensation, from the podium. He took a sip. The warm water soothed his throat.

  He set it back down and said, “Call these folks evolutionary freaks, if you want, call them anything you like, if that will help you accept their extraordinary stories. But one thing they make perfectly clear is that humans don’t need sleep to survive. We sleep because we have always slept. Because of that mysterious thing inside us all called sleep pressure…sleep pressure that perhaps one day we will be able to isolate and negate…” In the distance the sixty-one-bell carillon in Sather Tower began to chime. Wallis glanced at his wristwatch: class was finished. “Good luck on your exams everybody!” he said over the clamor of students packing their bags and making a general exodus toward the doors. Then, cheekily: “Don’t stay up too late cramming!”

  ◆◆◆

  When Dr. Roy Wallis finished transferring his notes from the podium to his leather messenger bag, he discovered he was not alone in the auditorium. A woman remained seated in the front row of seats. With almond eyes, high cheekbones, a prominent jawline, and straight and glossy black hair, she was beautiful in a classical Asian sense. Her brown eyes sparkled when they met his. She smiled, her cheeks dimpling.

  She clapped her hands lightly. “Great lecture, professor,” she said. “I really enjoyed it.” She stood and ascended the stairs to the stage. She was dressed cute-tomboyish in an oversized plaid shirt, loose blue jean overalls rolled up at the cuffs, and powder-blue sneakers. She stopped on the other side of the podium. “But I think you might have overlooked something.”

  Dr. Wallis zipped his messenger bag closed. “Oh?” he said. Penny Park was one of his brightest students. She was also one of two researchers he’d selected to assist him with the Sleep Experiment in ten days’ time. She was from a low-income family in South Korea and was currently receiving a full academic scholarship. Despite having only lived in the States for three years, her English was impressively fluent. Her accent, however, needed some work, especially her pronunciation of Rs and Ls, which she consistently mixed up.

  “Predators,” Penny said. “You mentioned prehistoric humans needed to hide from predators during the night, and sleep resulted from hiding, something to pass the time.”

  “I did say that, Penny. I’m glad you were paying attention.”

  “Don’t patronize me, professor. You know I always listen when you’re speaking. But I was saying…okay, our ancestors, they had to hide during the night. But what about predators? The ones at the top of the food chain? They just hunt. They don’t need to hide. So they don’t need to pass the time and, according to you, they don’t need to sleep. But they do sleep. So what you say, it doesn’t make total sense. Why don’t they just hunt all the time? Never go hungry?”

  “You raise an excellent point, Penny,” Dr. Wallis told her, impressed with her astuteness. “Predators do indeed also experience sleep pressure. Why is this? I believe for the same reason prey animals experience it. Boredom.”

  “Boredom?”

  “They evolved to do one thing: hunt. But hunting 24/7 would grow tiresome, for lack of a better word. Sleep provides a break from this routine. Keeps them…sane, I suppose you might say. Anyway,” he added, motioning Penny toward the exit doors and falling into step beside her, “perhaps the Sleep Experiment in ten days’ time will shed some much-needed light on the subject?”

  “I’m so excited to be participating in the experiment. I think about it all the time.”

  “Me too, Penny. Me too.”

  She pushed through one of the double doors. Wallis flicked off the stage lights, then gave a final, nostalgic glance around the empty lecture hall, knowing he would not be back until the new fall semester in September.

  “Professor?” Penny was holding one door open for him.

  “Coming,” he said, and joined her.

  Day 1

  Monday, May 28, 2018

  It’s like a ghost town, Dr. Roy Wallis thought as he stood at his office window, looking out onto Shattuck Avenue. Across the street, the alehouse and Thai restaurant, which were usually crowded with professors and students alike, appeared closed. The street was deserted. There were still some people around the historic campus, of course, many of them international and migrant students studying language courses, but for the most part it was…like a ghost town. Gone was the rambunctious noise of the shuffling mobs, the optimistic energy that embodied the next generation of young Americans. In its place the nearly thirteen hundred acres were unfamiliarly yet beautifully peaceful—allowing Wallis to see it almost as he had all those years ago when he was a bright-eyed tenure-track professor.

  Clouds drifted in front of the sun, and Wallis caught his reflection in the glass of the window. With his slicked back undercut and his long, groomed beard, he had been compared to everyone from a lumberjack to a circus ringmaster to a hot Abe Lincoln. The latter was from a female graduate student. Admittedly, he had a lot of admirers amongst his female students. He was both embarrassed and flattered by this, given he had recently turned forty-one. Still, he wasn’t trying to be some sort of “hipster professor” with the haircut and the beard. Both simply suited his face. He’d worn medium-length hair and stubble for a while, and whilst he’d liked the subtle sophistication of the stubble, he’d eventually decided a real beard had to be thick and strong and, well, manly. Consequently, he’d grown the stubble out five years back, kept his beard in meticulous condition with regular visits to his barber and daily moisturizing and oiling, and he hadn’t looked back since.

  Wallis turned away from the window. All tenured professors had their own office to decorate as they so pleased. Given he was now the psychology department head, he not only had his own office, but a spacious one to boot. Although not technically allowed, he’d had the institutional white walls repainted Wedgewood blue and the gray carpet replaced with a high-pile black one three years ago. The furniture was all campus surplus stuff, but he’d brought the abstract acrylic artwork—as well as a watercolor of an intense-looking Sigmund Freud smoking a cigar—and other miscellaneous items from his home. Some of his colleagues praised the personal touches; some became so inspired they spruced up their offic
es with their own lamps and area rugs; some never commented at all; and some openly told him they were gaudy and unacademic. Wallis didn’t care what any of them thought. The space, for him, was welcoming and comforting, maximizing his productivity.

  Dr. Wallis went to the mini-fridge and retrieved a bottle of water. He contemplated a beer from the six-pack of Coors Light he kept in there, but decided it was too early in the day for that. Hanging on the wall above the fridge were his medical degree from the University of Arizona and his Ph.D. summa cum laude from UCLA; a few awards he’d received in recognition of his research into circadian rhythms and narcolepsy; and two framed photographs. The first was of him posing with the great and late father of sleep medicine, Dr. William C. Dement. The second was of him and a colleague one hundred and fifty feet underground in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, where they’d spent two days charting their fluctuations in wakefulness and body temperature when freed from the regulating influence of sunlight and daily schedules—

  A knock at the door startled him. Wallis frowned. Classes and exams had finished the previous week. Who would even know he was in his office?

  He opened the door. “Penny?” he said. She was wearing a pair of heavy black-framed eyeglasses today that sat precariously on her button nose. A long, loose purple sweater reached farther down her thighs than her shorts. Her long hair was woven into a single braid that hung forward over her shoulder. “Didn’t we agree to meet at Tolman Hall?”

  “I know,” she said, her cheeks dimpling beneath the glasses, “but I got here early, so I thought I would walk over with you?” She pointed to one of the psychology-related cartoons taped to the door. “I like this one best. So funny.” The comic depicted Goldilocks reclining on a psychiatrist’s couch and telling him: “Alice is in Wonderland, Dorothy is somewhere over the rainbow, but I get trapped in a cabin with bears.”

  “She has it easy compared to Rapunzel.”

  “The girl with the long hair?”

  He nodded. “I like your hair. I don’t think you’ve worn it like that before?”

  “Because when I pull it back from my face like this it makes my head look too big. Many Koreans have too large heads, did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Anyway, in Korean society, a single braid means a single lady.” She held up her left hand and wiggled her ring finger. “And I’m single! Thought I’d try a braid for luck.”

  “Well, good luck,” he said. “Give me a sec and we’ll head off.” He collected his blazer and messenger bag from his desk, then locked up the office behind them. They took the stairs to the ground floor and exited through the main doors. The day was humid yet overcast, with dark clouds in the distance threatening rain.

  Penny Park was smiling. “Do you remember the quote you began your Sleep and Dreams course this year with, professor?” she asked.

  He thought back. “No, not off the top of my head.”

  “‘Do one thing every day that scares you,’” she said proudly.

  He nodded. “Right—Eleanor Roosevelt. Thinking about getting those words of wisdom tattooed on your forehead?”

  Penny laughed. “No! I was thinking about the experiment today.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  “Are you scared at all, professor?”

  “There’s nothing to be scared of, Penny.”

  “You’re not even a teeny tiny bit nervous?”

  Wallis hesitated. Then shrugged. “Maybe a teeny tiny bit.”

  ◆◆◆

  Dr. Roy Wallis wasn’t sure how well the Penny Park situation was going to work out.

  Last month, when Wallis made the general announcement to his senior Sleep and Dreams class that he wanted to hire two students to assist him with a sleep experiment for three weeks during the summer break, ten students applied. During the first round of informal interviews he remained coy about what the experiment entailed, explaining little more than the successful applicants would need to be available eight hours a day on a rotational schedule to provide 24/7 shift coverage. This dissuaded half the students, who promptly withdrew their names from consideration. Wallis re-interviewed the remaining five applicants, explaining in more detail what their roles would involve, namely observing and recording the actions of two subjects under the influence of a stimulant gas. Two more applicants bowed out. The remaining three included Penny Park, another international student from India named Guru Rampal, and a member of the school’s rowing team named Trevor Upton. Trevor was intelligent, focused, and sociable, and he would have been Wallis’ first choice had his class attendance last semester been better. Two necessary qualities Wallis required of his assistants were punctuality and reliability. Which left Penny Park and Guru Rampal as the last woman/man standing.

  Dr. Wallis had been confident they would both perform exceptionally, and he still believed it. The problem with Penny Park was that she was revealing herself to be a flirt. Over the last two years she’d paid him a visit during office hours a handful of times, and though she’d always demonstrated a sharp, sardonic sense of humor—you might almost call it teasing—he’d thought nothing of it until three weeks ago. After selecting Penny and Guru as his assistants, he’d taken them across the street from the psychology building to the alehouse for pizza and beers. Guru, it turned out, didn’t eat pizza or drink alcohol and insisted he was fine sipping a glass of Coca-Cola. Penny, on the other hand, finished off most of the pitcher of regular-strength beer Wallis ordered. There are two types of drinkers. Those who can handle their booze well enough it would be difficult to tell whether they were drunk or not, and those who cannot. Penny most definitely fell into the latter category. At first her compliments were flattering: “You’re actually one of the only professors that dresses well!” and “I know how this sounds, but you work out, right? You must work out?” But then came the blasé touches. Eventually Wallis excused himself under the pretense of using the restroom so he could sit on the other side of the table from Penny when he returned. Guru was not blind to Penny’s advances and wore a big, goofy smile on his face for the next twenty minutes or so until Wallis—ignoring Penny’s appeals for another pitcher of beer—requested the bill from the wait staff.

  Since then Wallis had communicated with Penny via phone and email about the experiment a few times, but he’d only seen her face-to-face on the last day of classes when she’d remained after his lecture in the auditorium.

  She had seemed like the old Penny Park then, as she did today…but the problem was, Wallis had had a peek behind the curtain. He knew how she felt about him. And that made him uncomfortable—and concerned.

  Wallis wasn’t averse to professor-student romances. Although frowned upon by some amongst academia’s establishment, dating a student above the age of consent was legal and permitted in most universities. In fact, Wallis was in an off-and-on-again relationship with a former student right now.

  No, what concerned him with Penny’s solicitous behavior was how it might affect the Sleep Experiment. They would be working together closely on it for the next three weeks, and he would need her attention focused on the experiment, not him.

  I’ll play it by ear, he decided. After all, I’m probably blowing what happened at the alehouse out of proportion. She was drunk, having a bit of fun. Nothing more to it than that.

  ◆◆◆

  To say Penny Park had a crush on Dr. Wallis was a gross understatement. She was in total freaking love. And who could blame her? He was sexy, in shape, and fashionable. And not only all of this, he was her professor which, in a kinky kind of way, made him even sexier.

  If asked, Penny would probably say it had been a case of love at first sight. She often sat in the front row of her classes because then you didn’t have to deal with all the goofing around from the jocks, stoners, and “cool girls.” And this was where she was sitting for the first day of Dr. Wallis’ first-year psychology course. For the duration of the fifty minutes she could barely look away from him, smiling pleasantly wheneve
r he made brief eye contact with her.

  Later that week, she stopped by his office during his office hours to ask him about some of the homework questions he’d assigned. She remembered how nervous she’d been to be alone in his presence, which was odd for her. She was an extrovert, and a pretty one at that. She’d learned from an early age that she could get together with any of the boys in her grade simply by singling one out and showing him a little bit of interest. By the age of sixteen, she’d probably had close to two dozen boyfriends, most of whom she’d bored of after a week or two. She’d simply never found herself attracted to any of them in the first place.

  Not like she was attracted to older men.

  She’d learned why she had this fetish a year earlier from, ironically, Dr. Wallis himself. In his Developmental Psychology course, he explained that when financial and social status gains were ruled out, a young woman’s interest in a mature man often came down to her relationship with her father while she’d advanced through puberty. According to Dr. Wallis, when a father is unable to deal with his daughter’s burgeoning sexuality because it makes him feel uncomfortable or unsafe, he avoids her the best he can, and when this is not possible, he derides her for wearing makeup or promiscuous outfits. Unable to win his benign attention during this important stage of her development, she is forced to look elsewhere for that attention.

  Indeed, this scenario described Penny Park’s rocky relationship with her father to a tee. And in her case, during her teenage years, the only adults she knew well aside from her parents were her teachers—which might explain what happened in her senior year.

  One evening after school, Penny had stayed late at the library to study for an upcoming test. While leaving the building, she passed her biology classroom and saw her teacher, Mr. Cho, seated at his desk, marking papers. She’d been having erotic dreams about him for nearly a year at that point, and when she’d met his wife at a school festival the week before, she found herself instantly jealous of the woman. The hag was old—older than Mr. Cho, by the looks of it—but she’d been all prim and proper with perfectly coiffed auburn-dyed hair, big doll eyes (double eyelid surgery anyone?), two-inch pumps, and an immaculate Louis Vuitton handbag. The perfect little housewife who shopped all day and whose only responsibilities in life were limited to tidying up the house and cooking for her husband.