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Dr. Churchill takes the clipboard and looks at it instead of at me. “Dolores says there was some kind of mix-up?”
I assume that Dolores is the unfriendly reception desk lady. “Mom told me that I had an appointment with you today.” The lie comes out easily; I even sound a little resentful. There’s a tipping point with lies, a point where you’ve said something so many times that it feels truer than the truth.
He looks at me then, and I feel like he sees more than I want him to. I think about the file sitting in my coat, so close that he could reach down and grab it before I could stop him. I hope he doesn’t have a stethoscope, because my heart is trying to beat its way out of my chest. “So why’d she make you an appointment with a sleep specialist? What kind of problems are you having?” he asks.
I hesitate. I want to tell him about waking up on the roof, about my sleepwalking and the dreams, but if I do, he might remember me. I know he’s not going to write the note I need—no doctor in his right mind would—but I can’t risk him writing Wallingford any other kind of letter.
“Let me guess,” he says, surprising me, because how could anyone guess why a patient came to a sleep clinic? “You’re here for the test.” I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“Right,” I say. “The test.”
“So, who canceled the appointment? Your father?”
I’m in over my head, with nothing to do but play along. “Probably my father.”
He nods like that makes sense, fishing around in a drawer until his gloved hand emerges holding a fistful of electrodes. He begins attaching them to my forehead, their sticky sides pulling at my skin. “Now we’re going to measure your gamma waves.” He switches on a machine and it jumps to life, needles skittering across paper in the pattern that’s mirrored on a screen to my left.
“Gamma waves,” I repeat. I’m not even asleep, so I don’t see the point in measuring my gamma waves. “Is this going to hurt?”
“Quick and painless.” The doctor peers down at the paper. “Any reason why you think you’re hyperbathygammic?”
Hyperbathygammic. That long medical term for worker. HBG. Heebeegeebies.
“Wh-what?” I stammer.
His eyes narrow. “I thought—”
I think of the woman I heard in the reception area. She was complaining about getting worked, and she sounded like they’d done a test on her to prove it. But he’s not asking me if I think I’ve been worked. He’s asking if I think I’m a worker.
This is the new test, the one that they keep talking about on the news, the one that conservative politicians want to make mandatory. Theoretically, compulsory testing will keep HBG kids from breaking the law by accident when using their powers for the first time. Theoretically, the results are supposed to stay private, so there’s no harm, right? But no one really thinks those results are going to stay private.
They’ll wind up with the government, which loves to draft workers for counterterrorism and other odd jobs. Or—legally or not—those results wind up in the hands of local authorities. If mandatory testing happens, the rest will be hard on its heels. Yeah, I know the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy, but occasionally a slope feels particularly greased.
Supporters of the proposition have urged nonworkers to go get tested. The idea is simple. Even if workers don’t get the test, they’ll be the only ones to refuse it. That way, even if compulsory testing doesn’t pass, it’ll still be easier to figure out who’s hyperbathygammic.
I hop off the table, ripping the electrodes off my skin. I might not get along with my family, but being part of some database of nonworkers used like a net to trap Philip and Barron and Grandad is horrible. “I have to go. I’m sorry.”
“Sit back down. We’ll be done in just a moment,” he says, grabbing for the wires. “Mr. Sharpe!”
This time when I head for the doors, I don’t stop until I’m through them. Keeping my head down, I ignore the nurse calling after me and the people in the waiting room staring. I ignore everything but my need to be somewhere other than here.
* * *
I keep telling myself to breathe as I drive. My foot pushes harder and harder on the gas pedal and my fingers fiddle with the radio just to have some sound to drown out the single thought: I screwed up.
I was supposed to be inconspicuous, but I’d become memorable. Plus, I used my own name. I know where I went wrong: when the doctor said he knew what I was there for. I have this problem. Sometimes I’m too in love with the con; even when it goes wrong, I’d rather let it turn on me than walk. I should have stopped the doctor and corrected him, but I was too curious, too eager to play along and see what he would say next.
I still have the stationery. I can still make the plan happen. With recrimination pounding in my ears louder than the music, I pull into the Target parking lot. The front displays are all pastel baskets with chocolate eggs in them, even though it seems like they’d get stale before Easter. I walk to electronics and pick up a disposable cell phone. My second stop is a copy shop, where I rent computer time. The steady hum of the copiers and the smell of printer ink remind me of school and calm, but when I take the file out of my bag, my heart starts racing all over again.
The other mistake I made. Stealing a file. Because I was memorable enough now that they might think of me when they consider all the ways the file could have gone missing.
All I need is the sleep center’s logo—the resolution on the one from the Internet is so bad I can’t use it for anything but a fax. I don’t need a file. A file could get me in real trouble. But when I saw the folder on that counter, I just grabbed.
And now, letting it fall open on this counter, I feel even more stupid. It’s just some woman’s name, her health insurance, a bunch of numbers and charts with jagged lines. None of it means anything to me. The only good thing is that Dr. Churchill signed one of the pages; at least I can copy his scrawl.
I flip though a few more pages, until I see a graph labeled “gamma waves” with red circles around the spikes in the jagged line. Gamma waves. A little Googling explains what I’m looking at. Apparently dream work puts someone into a sleep state that’s like deep sleep, except with gamma waves. Gamma waves—according to the article—are usually present only during waking or light REM sleep. On the chart, gamma waves are present during the deepest sleep stages, when there’s no eye movement and when both sleepwalking and night terrors occur. That’s what proves she was sleep worked.
Apparently, according to the same site, gamma waves are the key to determining if you’re a worker too. Worker gammas are higher than normal people’s, asleep or awake. Much higher.
