IndianSF-Issue-5-Sep-Oct by IndianSF

Author:IndianSF [IndianSF]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: ContactART
Published: 2013-08-31T18:30:00+00:00

Sleeping... Waking... Being... by Russell Adams

~ 4900 Words

My grandfather called me at college three weeks before the summer semester ended to say he'd stopped sleeping. "No need to any more, Rob, my head's clear as ever, but maybe we should think about seeing each other before too long."

He didn't ask me to come right away, but by the following midmorning, I was creating a dust cloud on the long driveway to the dozen or so acres at the heart of the farm. On either side, fields leased to neighbors were high with corn having a good year.

Though my father grew up here, farm life never got into his blood. Manufacturing close-tolerance jet engine parts for the military and the money that brought appealed to him more. As for me, well, the road to my eventual future in neurological research was already mapped out in some detail.

I'd driven all night without sleep, but going sleepless wasn't anything new for me. With finals close, I habitually shambled around campus, bleary-eyed, grunting at friends and getting no better response back. We were a serious, career-fixated lot, little more than academic zombies by the end of a term, too obsessed with stuffing our own brains with the knowledge to think about eating anyone else's. Still, if knowledge were transferrable that way, who knows how safe our professors' brains would have been?

The barn, with cows and milking apparatus sold off and used now only for storage, was freshly painted. Gramps still kept a small flock of alert, intelligent brown-and-white goats who kept the grass cropped close and gave a milk rich with six-percent butterfat. As I crunched onto the gravel turnaround, laying hens in the poultry yard looked up and immediately lost interest in me. This all felt perfectly familiar, wonderfully warm, better even than going back to my parents' home.

Gramps was rocking in the porch swing.

I used the moments climbing the steps to size him up --posture, muscle tone, expression. His grey eyes were clear. He looked fit, healthy, tanned. A lifetime of hard work will do that for a man.

"You really don’t sleep?" I asked after our hug.

"Not a wink for eight days now. I don't get tired. I work in the gardens during the day, eat, then read all night. Occasionally, I'll close my eyes for a few minutes listening to music, usually recordings of your grandmother playing Bach. Before, the days were always too short. Now, I have time for things I never did before. I've even given up coffee."

That summer, I'd been studying my tail off trying to master the intricacies of cell biology and organic chemistry as I strove to graduate my premed program a year early. I was often so exhausted I hardly knew what I was reading, but so long as enough stuck, I couldn't let myself sleep. I could envy this man who didn't need to. Life without coffee was unimaginable.

"Everybody needs sleep, Gramps," I said. "You can’t stay awake forever. It’s got to catch up with you sometime.

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