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“Take it out of my salary.”
“Not the point. What’s going on?”
Nothing new. Nothing I haven’t been dealing with for a decade. “Nothing a few nights in my own bed can’t fix. Speaking of—” I stand and wave toward the door. “I’ve got to be up at five to go over the notes for the day.”
Horse punches my arm on his way by. “Dinner. My place tomorrow. We’ll all be there.”
“Sounds good.”
He lets himself out, and I fall into my chair.
“Alexa. Time?”
“It’s eleven fifty-one p.m.”
“Alexa, call Joe.”
“Calling Joe,” the invisible voice replies, followed seconds later by the sound of a phone ringing.
“Hey, Will. You home?”
“Yeah, for a minute.”
“In bed? Ready?”
“Sadly, not. I’m amped. And I have to be up in five hours.”
Joe inhales long and loud, then sighs as he exhales. Being the good Pavlovian dog I am, I mimic him. Then Joe yawns. I open my mouth to copy him, but the trigger doesn’t work. “Fuck,” I moan.
“Not helping yourself, Will. You at least lying down?”
“Ish. There’s no point going to bed. I’ll nap in my recliner. Just do this thing, Joe. I am so done with today. Hey, Alexa, lights off.”
The room darkens, but it’s not pitch-black. City light pollution filters into the space. I close my eyes.
“Alexa, share cameras three and four,” Joe says. Tiny blue lights from the infrared cameras on either side of my TV come on so Joe, who’s somewhere in Texas, can see me.
I rarely go to bed without his company. He’s on call, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He stays with me until he can see I’m properly asleep. Sometimes it takes twenty minutes, sometimes two hours, to talk me into the space I need to be to shut off my brain.
Joe has been my live-albeit-virtual personalized sleep and meditation program for almost three years. I rely on him the same way I rely on one espresso an hour to keep me awake during the day.
“Squeeze your eyes closed,” he says, “and open your jaw as wide as you can. Now relax. Deep breath in and hold, two, three, four, five, six, and release.”
What Joe does could be recorded, or I could do it myself since it’s virtually the same script every night, except I’ve tried all the apps—even had some developed specifically for me—but they all fail once I hit REM sleep. This is where the real-time, human interaction is critical.
So critical that I pay him a hundred grand a year for his service. He’s worth every penny.
Once he decides I’m adequately relaxed, Joe reads from the sports page of a community newspaper in butt-fuck who-knows-where. It doesn’t matter. His job is to read until I fall asleep. Sports pages—because sports don’t interest me—and teams I know nothing about so I can tune out the details because I don’t want my brain filled with useless crap.
Our system works.
I don’t know how long he reads, but at some point a dream image replaces his voice. And this is why I pay him what is the equivalent of three hundred dollars an hour. Because unless that dream is redirected, I’ll be wide awake again in seconds with no hope of falling back under. The perils of parasomnia, a clinical sleep disorder that has no cure. But as long as I have Joe, I have relief.
The image of my dad dead in his hotel bed blurs and refocuses, this time with Dad lying on a beach blanket beside Mom while my three brothers splash in the ocean as I watch the scene unfold from above. And then Horse calls me, “Will, I need you!” and I join the beach scene, feel the water around my ankles, and the sand between my toes. I catch up to my twin, chasing our youngest brother Aiden, who laughs and hollers and swims toward seaweed, floating on the waves.
Alexa’s gentle voice prods, “Will, it’s time to wake up,” followed by the sound of running water, prompting an immediate need to urinate. The lightening sky tells me I’ve slept through the night—or at least, the very early morning.
I shower, dress, and down my first of a dozen daily espressos. Then I check messages on my phone before heading to my office to go over the notes for today’s Come Into Power seminar. I have a single text. No surprise, since everyone I know other than Joe is still asleep.
