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conversation we said our goodbyes as lightly as we could, but the silences around those words were formal—airless and still.
    And yet.
    And yet, at the same time, the whole thing was also kind of exciting. Don’t be coy; you know what I mean. Tiny disasters—lost kittens, sobbing moppets—could rend our hearts, but the massive ones inevitably became popcorn-munching spectacles.
    Viva
, some part of our brain always cries,
calamity
. Which may be at least partly why calamity always seemed to find us.
    And here’s the worst part. Listening to Tanya’s conversations as she told friends and relatives about my sleeping, I actually felt myself puffing up a little. How pathetic was that? It turned out that no-one else we knew had slept. I was tempted to feel as though I’d done something
special
by dozing off. It’s shameful how we feed on our own scraps of press: the survivor of the mass shooting, the lottery winner, the reality show contestant, the writer of wildly unpopular books on words.
    It was almost midnight when we went and looked out the window to see what we feared to see: the blood in our world’s stool. All the city’s lights were blazing.
    We stood there holding hands, feeling each other’s poignant skeletons through layers of skin and fat, a nexus of warmth building up between our fingers and palms. We really
were
creatures of pure energy, I remember thinking, just like the hippies and the physicists had always claimed—beings made up of ‘energy’ and ‘wave lengths’ and ‘vibes’, so ephemeral that the swishing of a dryer sheet might neutralize our charges and erase us. Feeling so temporary and fragile was nice; the moment felt valuable.
    Tanya squeezed my hand then let go. ‘I’d better try to go to sleep. I’m nervous.’
    ‘Let’s both go to bed.’
    We headed off to the erstwhile big top of our bedroom, took off everything, and pressed our bodies together between the sheets, gerbils in a pet store cage trying to douse our minds and vanish beneath the gaze of incomprehensible giants.
    ‘You sleepy?’ I asked as the sheets warmed around us.
    Her voice was tiny. ‘No. Are you?’
    Compassion is—pretty often—omission. I pulled her close, placing my hand over one of her ears, and pressing the other into my chest. And then I yawned.
    I think now that if all eight billion of us had just shut off the lights and gone to bed that night and left it alone we’d have all slept and the chalice would have passed us by. But let’s be real. Whoever leaves
anything
alone? Life’s a scab, and it’s our nature to pick at it until it bleeds.

DAY 2
JOHN A’ DREAMS
    A begging imposter, naked vagabond.
    When I woke the next morning it was full daylight and Tanya’s side of the bed was a mortuary slab of absence. I found her in the living room. Where the previous morning she’d looked pregnant with unwanted knowledge, she now looked as though she’d given birth, misplaced the baby, and been up all night trying frantically to remember where she’d left it. Was it in the fridge? The laundry hamper? The microwave?
    The laptop was open on her blushing bare knees; her eyes were Google goggles.
    ‘How long have you been up?’ I asked. Then, ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘No. It’s good that one of us could sleep.’
    ‘Nothing?’ Nothing. ‘Listen, you’re just freaked out. You’ll sleep when you’re tired enough. Everybody will. It’s just a…’
    Tanya stared down at her laptop, thighs quaking. She pressed down on them, but her hands just started shaking too.
    ‘Do you know how long I have left, Paul? If I don’t sleep?’
    ‘I don’t want to go in that dir—’
    ‘Thirty two days. Or less. That’s what they’re saying. Five more days until something called ‘sleep deprivation psychosis’ sets in. Until I go
insane
, Paul.’
    ‘That’s ridiculous. Lots of people have insomnia and they don’t go crazy.’
    ‘No. They say even insomniacs doze a little, but this is different. For the