Wake Up

The first time I see it up close, the woman in the bakery lifts the baguette like a sword and shouts that the bread is looping, that it has been freshly baked since last Thursday and also last Thursday of last year. She starts to cry because she can feel the crust cracking along the same fracture lines, the same little saffron dust of crumbs, and she points to the ceiling as if there are rafters above the drop panels. The morning crowd holds her with their eyes. The bakers keep working. The coffee machine sighs and hisses in its obliging way. Someone pays, pockets their change, says softly, “Blessings on your Wake.”

It is not anger. It is ceremony. The city has learned the posture. The managers dim the lights a little, just enough to suggest theater, and nobody thinks this is cruel. We have years of etiquette by now. You never argue during someone’s Wake. You do not contradict. You do not try to tether them with the string of your proof. You are supposed to listen like a shoreline: patient, reflective, wearing away. The woman speaks for five minutes about menus that never change, and if they change it is only by swapping two items like a puzzle that was solved once and since then has been replaying the solution. Then her husband arrives and holds her hands until her tide goes out and she remembers how to stand inside the day.

I log it because that is my job. I work in a little office on the ninth floor of Municipal Experiences, a department that did not exist before the Wake phenomenon and now commands a budget large enough to paint entire bus fleets. My title is Listener II. A title in a room. A desk with a fern that is either dying or pretending.

The city runs on a calendar no one admits to, and each district has statistics. Average age of Wake. Seasonal curves. Correlated spikes during heat waves and playoff runs. We track the chants and the symbols people latch onto. Repeating metaphors are coded in copper on a wall that looks like a museum of thunderheads. Over the years the phrases have changed from religious to technical. No more talk of angels with clipboards. More talk of frame rates. A lot of talk about the way pigeons feel like placeholder assets that resolve too quickly when you turn your head.

There is a darker curve as well, the one we keep quiet. Most people are given one Wake. A few get a second, and the city treats them like returning comets, rare enough to name. Then there are the outliers who never Wake at all. The never-Wakes are not celebrated. The never-Wakes are rumored to be the truly awake. It depends on which bar you prefer, which thread you pull at two in the morning when the screen is a pool.

At dinner my father says the bakery woman’s performance was derivative. He is half-smiling and I cannot tell how much he is joking. His Wake happened before I was born. He was seventeen, and he climbed a radio tower because he wanted to speak to someone who would not lie. By the time the fire department arrived, he had already decided it was a test designed to take his knees. He came down to wild applause, which he despised, and he never spoke publicly about it again. He wears his Wake like a scar under a shirt he never removes.

“You can tell when someone is copying,” he says, spooning beans into a blue bowl. “They try to argue with the air. The real thing argues with your bones.”

“How often did you see it when you were my age?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Less often. It spread like a laugh. Now it is a season.”

He likes to say things like that, oracular lines that sound like they belong to a bigger book. He does not read the forums and I suspect he has never searched for himself even once, which makes him a kind of saint, or a refusal.

At work the next week we host a training called Compassion Without Enshrinement. The city’s lawyers came up with the title. The presenter is a clinician with a gentle voice that never rises, no matter what slide is on the screen. She warns us not to mold Wakes into romance. The old myth was martyrdom. The new myth is protagonist syndrome. She wants us to hold people in simple ways and keep their drink glasses filled and remember that the novelty of a Wake can lead to harm if we turn our heads and pretend not to follow after.

The last slide is a picture of a door. “Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do,” she says, “is make it easy to leave a room.”

After the session, a colleague named Jinni hip-checks my cubicle wall and leans in. Jinni’s Wake was famous. She is still kind in the shadow of it. During her day she took over a city bus and requested complete silence for twelve minutes because she had discovered that every squeak and clatter formed a chord with the traffic lights and that the chord would resolve if and only if nobody spoke. Complete silence on a bus at rush hour is a medieval miracle. They did it anyway. The video is taught in high school civics classes now as an example of civic goodwill. In the final seconds the traffic lights bloomed green all along the avenue, like a river unfreezing. No one has ever replicated the chord. People still try. There are bus drivers who let them, as a kindness and a superstition.

“You have that look,” she says.

“What look.”

“You want to know when yours will arrive.” She wags a finger. “That is the wrong fascination.”

“What is the right one?”

“The right one is how to treat the people near you on all the days when there is no Wake. The aftercare lasts longer. That is the part no one streams.”

“I do not watch the streams,” I say, and I mean it, though I have seen clips when they slosh into other places.

“Of course you do not,” she says. “And the fern waters itself.”

“It does,” I say. “It has a robust inner life.”

“Your father,” she says. “Is he peaceful with it?”

“He made a truce by building a routine thick enough to sit on.”

“That sounds like furniture.”

“It is.”

We are interrupted by a chime from the wall. New incidents. A map of the city lights up with little gold moths.

In our work you learn the signs. The script of a Wake is infinitely various and also numbly familiar. The repeating moves are almost cozy until they are not. Step one: the interruption. Step two: the theory. Step three: the test. The test might be a refusal to eat or a refusal to stop eating. It might be a willingness to be struck or an insistence that no one is allowed to touch anyone else, not now, not ever, because touch is the lever by which the scene advances. A common variant includes the request that the clocks be turned to face the wall, which never helps and often makes the person more unhappy. No one is angry at the clocks. They are just mirrors that will not confess.

I volunteer for the one at the museum because the location is an ocean I like to swim. A school group has come to stare at the old machine that prints money as a demonstration of national trust, and one of the chaperones is on her knees with her palms raised, telling the students that the machine is a lie and that the real printing happens inside their desire. She explains herself with gravitas and careful grammar, as if she had prepared her lines years ago and had only now found the correct stage. The security guards are doing everything the manual recommends. They do not laugh. They do not place a hand on her shoulder. They do not ask questions whose answers are known to cause spinning.

I sit beside her on the tile. The machine stands there with its mouth open. The docent frowns with love because she knows better than to make enemies of the peak moments of strangers.

“You are the Listener,” the woman says to me. “I recognize your face from a bus ad.”

“I am one Listener among many,” I say.

“You have a line they trained you to use,” she says. “Say it.”

I have a few; we all do. I choose one that feels like rain on a forehead. “You are not wrong for seeing it.”

The woman smiles. “I know that one. It is one of the good ones. Do another.”

“Your breath does not belong to anyone else.”

“That is one of the excellent ones,” she says. “Now the one about water.”

“Do you have water,” I say, “or can I bring you some.”

“The one about water that is not about water.”

Ah. “This is a fresh stream, and we are still deciding if it is drinkable.”

She nods. “I wish to drink it anyway.”

We sit for a while. Outside the children pour through their own stream. The machine is quiet in a sickroom way. I want to ask her for her theory, but I can tell she is protecting it like a candle. I wait until she offers it.

“I believe there is an audience,” she says. “I do not know what would convince me, and I do not know what would convince you. My fear is that proof will be given in a way that cannot be held without breaking.” She rests her hands on the floor. “I want to meet them and I am afraid to meet them. I want to honor a thing that might be terrible.”

I do not answer, because I have filed the same sentence in the drawer of my chest with the tax receipts and the other documents kept for emergencies. The chaperone breathes through her mouth and then through her nose. She stands up slowly as if she is lifting something large and invisible.

“Thank you,” she says.

“You brought a good theory,” I say. “It suits you.”

She laughs once, and I am surprised by how ordinary it sounds.

On the train home I play a game I play when my head is heavy. I imagine the city seen from above, and I mark on the map little bursts of ultraviolet. The day’s Wakes look like spores. They appear across parks and stoops and shops, and when they fade the residue remains on the floor like the shadow of a stain someone tried very hard to scrub.

In my kitchen the light is pebbled and enthusiastic. My father has left a note that says soccer tonight and lists the channel and the time. He will sit in his chair and make the room a shelter for a game that does not know he exists. I try to read. The book is a novel about a family that refuses to speak the word wolf, and when the wolf arrives they are forced to speak around it using shapes of mouth that hurt. I fall asleep on the couch with the plot lodged in my throat.

At 3:09 in the morning I wake to the sound of the refrigerator compressor vibrato and I realize the ceiling has a pattern I have never seen. The plaster repeats a scallop every nine inches, not the way a craftsman would repeat, not the way a stencil would repeat, but with an algorithm that has stopped maturing and become a habit. I watch it for twenty minutes. I begin to calculate the comings and goings of the scallops. I realize the lightbulb over the stove is dimmer than the lightbulb in the bedroom in a ratio that could not be by chance if one were allowed to form a suspicion about light.

I am not standing and I am not climbing a tower, but the room is rising like a slow elevator. A tiny part of me waits for a musical cue that does not arrive, which is a relief and also not a relief. I sit up. I put my feet on the floor. The tile recognizes them. I whisper to the house that I am with it and that I will not leave before I have thanked it for the shelter and the knives and the loose drawer that snags.

I say it quietly at first. Then I say it the way you say a name you love when there is no one else around to make it silly. It is embarrassing to call your own Wake. It is more embarrassing to pretend it is happening to someone else.

I walk to my father’s room. He is sitting on the edge of the bed with the game paused. The ball hovers mid-sprint. He looks at me like he did when I was small and feverish.

“You got up,” he says.

“I did not climb anything,” I say.

“You do not need to. You are tall enough.”

I sit beside him. The room holds its breath. He reaches for my hand and places it in his palm like a coin.

“If I asked you a stupid question,” he says, “would you forgive me.”

“Yes,” I say.

“What is real,” he asks.

“Your voice on my skin,” I say. I can feel the blood in my own fingers. “And the way your socks never match.”

He nods. “Good. That should be enough. It is not, but it should be.”

The game unfreezes without either of us touching a button. The score changes to a number I have never seen on a soccer scoreboard. The camera angle shifts into a vantage point that no stadium camera could manage. It is a position in the air that belongs to nothing that has ever carried a person. The players move not like men who have trained since childhood, but like actors who have been told to invent what the trained men might do.

“Do you see,” my father says.

“I do.”

He smiles in a way that is almost wicked. “Then do not be fooled by the next part.”

“What is the next part.”

“The part where they prove it,” he says. “The proof is built from things you already fear and hope for. That is how they make it glow.”

The walls shift in an honest way. They do not ripple or weep. They do not melt into another shape. They become something like a tight focus, as if a giant slid a finger and thumb along a ring and brought us to clarity. In the living room the lamp hums in a tone I have heard all my life without hearing, and then the lamp is a mouth. The mouth is not medical or monstrous. It is a shape intended to be tolerated in a family room. The mouth says, in the voice of an old neighbor, Hello again.

I say hello because I was raised properly.

The mouth becomes a glass screen. Through the screen there is another room. The other room contains a couch. Two figures lounge on the couch. Their skin hums with static light, their bodies lit by the glow of the glass. They are eating something that looks like a fruit or an egg. Their faces are not faces, more like the sketch of faces simplified for speed, placeholders given authority. One of them points with a stubby finger and speaks in a language that is not a language. The other one laughs in a way that shakes their contours, as if they are wrapped in clothes made of jelly.

What the fuck is going on.

This is how the proof arrives. It is crude and perfect. It is crude on purpose, like an instruction manual with diagrams drawn for a child. It is perfect because my father warned me. The figures on the couch toggle something and the camera settles. Their room expands a fraction. Our room compresses to compensate. I become aware of a frame within the frame in which we have been living. It is not a trick box. It is the size of the world. The frame is so large it was the weather.

The couch creatures look pleased. A sign shows up in a corner, on which symbols appear and vanish. The symbols reorganize themselves into our alphabet. The sign reads WELCOME TO WAKE UP SEASON FOUR. Then the symbols shuffle and the sign reads BLESSINGS ON YOUR WAKE!

My father exhales. He says, not quietly, “You will not clap.”

I do not clap. I do not scream. I hold the coin of my hand inside his and let the heat bleed both ways. The creatures on the couch adopt a posture that is universal across the galaxy. They lean forward. They want to see the moment of me.

My father laughs, soft and rude. “There is no moment,” he tells them. “There is dinner.”

He stands up. He walks to the kitchen. He pulls out a pan and places it on the burner with the faith of a man who believes in combustion. He cracks eggs. He salts them from the height he has always used. He flips them with the same little twitch that carries memory through a muscle. He does not do this for the audience. He does this for the ordinary god of hunger. He brings the plates to the table and I sit with him and we eat. The window stays open. The creatures on the couch begin to talk among themselves in a pattern that reads very clearly as boredom. They are watching the wrong part of us. That is the joke. That is the terror, too.

When I am done eating, I wipe my plate with bread, and then I stand and face the window and speak as calmly as I can.

“You will not hurt us” I say. “You are welcome to watch. You are not welcome to poke. If you poke, I will close the window, and if I cannot close it I will paint it, and if I cannot paint it I will plant a tree in front of it and let the leaves do the mathematics for me.”

On the couch, the creatures watch. One chews the fruit-egg without interest, the other taps a remote that hums and flickers. Their voices are not human, yet when they speak the sounds fall twisted, as if it were the automatic translation of an impossible language.

“¿Viste cómo limpió el plato con pan? Siempre hacen eso,” says the first, with a bubbling rasp.

“Sí, pero escucha lo que dice,” replies the other, eyes flashing in icons of surprise. “Habla de árboles haciendo matemáticas. ¿Qué carajo significa eso?

The creatures stir. Their faces bloom with emojis that must be their version of poker tells. One looks offended. One looks interested. One looks like it is trying to understand what a tree is. The sign appears again. The symbols shuffle. The sign reads INTERACTIVE FEATURE ENABLED.

The lamp noise deepens. The room temperature drops a degree. The refrigerator clicks. The figures extend a tool into our room that looks like a microphone with a tongue. They hover it near my face to taste my breath. I taste it for them first.

“Eggs,” I say. “And sleep. And old fear.”

They laugh, but the laugh cracks like glass. “El público querrá más acción. Este show es lento,” complains the first.

My father clears his throat with intention. He pulls his chair so that it sits between me and the window. He is not heroic. He is precise. He arranges himself in the exact geometry that says no without performing a speech about boundaries.

The second tilts its gelatinous head. “Calla. Mira cómo se planta firme el padre.”

A viscous silence fills their room. On the screen, our world, the lamp hums, the temperature falls, and the microphone-tongue retracts. From the couch, the two murmur: “Huevos… sueño… miedo.”

“Anótalo,” says one, scribbling luminous symbols in the air. “El sabor del aliento. Puede servir para el próximo episodio.”

The other shrugs. “Quizás. O quizás no entienden que ya están en la temporada cuatro.”

The lamp returns to its regular hum, which was a secret sermon all along. The screen becomes a mouth and says Thank you for your honesty in the voice of our old neighbor. Then the mouth folds into a lamp, then into a lamp that is only a lamp, which is probably a disguise, which is also probably a kindness.

We watch the soccer game in silence with the volume low because it is safer to absorb a ritual than to invent one at midnight. The score returns to something believable. The camera angles remain plausible. On the other side of the blank, a couch exists. It is probably not alone. We are probably one tile in a mosaic. There is no suffering in that sentence unless I decide to add it as a garnish.

I lie down on the couch in our living room. I do not close my eyes immediately. The scallops on the ceiling are still there, still repeating with their tired devotion, and if I look long enough they suggest a larger pattern that may or may not be waiting for a cue. My father clicks off the game. The house breathes the way houses breathe at the end of a day. I hear the old elevator cable in the building shaft giving one long sigh that could be a word.

Morning arrives like it always does, through the window and the nose. The city spins up its spectrum. School buses turn corners with their familiar grace. On my walk to work I pass a coffee shop where a barista is drawing a smiley face in foam with a skill that would make a sculptor jealous. A child in a stroller drops a toy, and a stranger picks it up, and the child says thank you in a voice that belongs in a cathedral that does not need us. The stranger says, “Blessings on your Wake,” as a reflex, and then blushes and laughs and says, “I mean your day.”

At Municipal Experiences the elevators are already crowded. Jinni waves from a corner and mouths the word eggs. I nod. She gives me a thumbs up as if I had completed a heist. The copper wall with its archive of metaphors gleams. Someone has polished it. In the conference room a printed agenda sits under a paperweight shaped like a lighthouse. The title of today’s meeting is Season Readiness, which is either a joke or a line item. There are clipboards. There are expensive pens. There is a tray of miniature muffins, each one round and complete, like a planet insisting on the dignity of being small.

The chime on the wall sings for new incidents. Gold moths bloom across the map. They would bloom whether or not the couch creatures stared. They bloomed before, when my father was a boy climbing a tower to audition for a god he could not believe in. They would bloom even if the proof never arrived, because the proof was never the point. The point was the listening and the aftercare and the eggs and the way your socks tell on you when you think no one will notice.

I find a seat. The fern that may be dying is not dead. It has grown a new frond that curls like handwriting. I bend close to see the little map of veins that run through it. I tell the fern that it will be watered. It does not respond, which is polite. Jinni sits beside me, and I tell her about the window, and she closes her eyes and shakes her head like she is ridding herself of a song that nearly sticks.

“Of course,” she says after a moment. “Of course there is a room where we are framed. But I am not giving them the chord.”

She means the chord from the bus. I do not ask for it. It is good that some things are never replayed.

The director of our department walks in. He is wearing a tie he wears during budget season, which means he is about to ask us to be better people. He places his hands on the table and leans into his speech.

“Friends,” he says, “we are entering a stretch of days when the familiar is fragile. We will be kind without mythologizing. We will be practical without mocking. If you have had your Wake, teach gently, never as a banner. If you have not, do not hurry toward it. Help someone carry a box down the stairs. That act has the correct scale.”

He looks out the window and seems to hear something no one else can hear. His voice drops into a register made for bedtime stories and hard truths.

“Also,” he says, “I have received confirmation that our feed has been renewed. We do not get to choose that. We do get to choose how we perform being watched.”

There it is. He has said it in a sentence that refuses drama. He will be good at this year of our lives. He will not be perfect.

Outside the room, outside the city, a couch is occupied. Someone reaches for a piece of their fruit-egg and fumbles it and swears in a language I want to learn only by osmosis. Inside the room, inside us, the coffee is poured. The muffins are halved with childish greed. We pass them to one another as if this is what the gods thirst for when they remember us. I can feel the door in the air. It is the kind from the training slide. It opens, and a woman from the museum walks in with the calm of someone who survived meeting her own theory.

I do not know if this is the last quiet morning before it all leaps a rail. I do not know if this is the episode that changes the tone forever. I do know how to hand a person a glass of water without turning them into a small religion. I do know how to touch my father’s hand with coins in it and let both of us be foolish for living. I do know how to look up at a lamp that once was a mouth and say, with an accent that belongs to this block and this decade, that we will not ruin ourselves for the sake of a better shot.

The meeting begins. The chime sounds again. The city flowers with ultraviolet spores. Someone somewhere is lifting a baguette like a sword and shouting about crust. Someone is climbing. Someone is choosing to descend. The season is underway. The pilot ends here, where pilots always end, in the moment after the reveal when nothing has actually changed and yet nothing can remain the same. We are still in the room, and the door is open, and the air on the other side smells like the rest of our lives.

Wake Up
written by Francietzsco Casillas