“Hey, Sheila just called. She’s not coming in today.”

“Oh…slacker.”

“No, some asshat in a pickup T-boned her car. She’s fine. Car’s totaled, though. But thought you should know. You can’t pawn Mister Happy Pants off on anyone. And he’s starting to bitch,” Humza makes a face and in that brief moment, Liz loves him, just a little bit. “That means we’re on sheet duty too!” and his head disappears.

Without the daytime lab assistant, the three must handle all of their end of shift duties plus all of the prep work that normally gets done long after they had finished their scoring and gone home, like sanitizing wires, sorting and replacing everything they had used during the night and stripping and remaking beds. Normally, their subjects are gone by 8 am and then they can devote a few hours to completing the polysomnogram scores, but they spend an hour looking for electrode cups, and then another fifteen minutes trying to find the D-clips (which are used with electrodes but inexplicably not stored anywhere near the electrode cups) and an extra twenty minutes griping about how they should have two lab rats anyway and how royally fucked they are.
By the time they are done with the tear down and set up, it is almost noon and they have been awake an average of 17.4 hours (Jasper does a quick Excel formula and then mentions that it would have been closer to 19 hours if Humza didn’t basically stumble out of bed and drive to work, throwing off the average). Humza and Jasper decide to brew some of the lab’s coffee (tasting of dirt and melancholy, the nose with just a hint of cat urine) and power through their scoring rather than going home to sleep and then coming all the way back to the lab for their next shift.

Liz weaves her way through the day shift workers on their way back from lunch and hates them, just a little bit, for all of their options, so many restaurants that cater just to them. The sun is drilling holes into her cornea and the thought of coming back in a handful of hours to score before the next subjects come in is unbearable.

She manages to makes it back to the lab by 6:30 pm. Humza and Jasper are sleeping in pods right next to each other, 3 and 5. She knows this because she can see them sleeping on the video monitors when she walks into the lab, although they have left her a note to wake them before 7 pm. Liz sips her venti triple shot mocha and watches them, waiting for the caffeine to wiggle its way through her brain juice and fire up the synapses. Jasper and Humza aren’t hooked up to machines, so it’s a bit like watching a foreign movie without subtitles. She can’t even tell something as basic as whether they are dreaming or not. Jasper sleeps on his back, arms at his side, in what is called the soldier position, a position favored by kings and presidents. Humza is a starfish, arms thrown up on his pillow as though in surrender, his legs sprawled. There is not a single spot on the plastic-covered mattress that could accommodate another person, not even if they curled up tightly against him.

Liz already knows that she sleeps on her side, although her own sleep study video from her orientation at the sleep lab confirmed this. Her arms are always outstretched, sometimes as though cupping an invisible fragile object. Maybe in her dreams, she is carrying baby birds or engaged in some kind of circus act involving crystal balls or snow globes. Sometimes she wakes up in this position, her fingers are outstretched, the sheets wrinkled, a white cotton zen garden of neat furrows. Maybe instead of highly structured plotlines, she just organizes and rearranges a very messy pantry during her entire dream cycle, labels all facing outward and when she awakens, she was just reaching for a box of cereal. Hardly worth remembering.

She opens the case files on Six, queues up the sleep video and plays it in triple fast speed, charting the times and circling notable trends to forward on to the subject’s sleep specialist. She plots Six’s graphs and statistics while playing Seven’s sleep video in double time, watching the patterns and listening to him do his somniloquy in a high-pitched Chipmunk voice. Then she pauses, backs up the replay and listens to it in real time. She goes back to Six’s scores and notes the initiation of delta waves, then queues Six’s video to 11:58, the same moment as Seven’s strange comment, and hits play.

Six says, very clearly, “The girl with the sheets should wear a seatbelt.”

Seven’s comment almost overlaps with Six’s. “Pick up truck does not stop.”