Life Among the Terranauts Read online

  “Our food costs were way down,” he said at the Pointes one night the next spring. “The heat bills. Gas. For once, my daughter wasn’t pestering us for a new pair of jeans. I asked for a temporary leave. They said sales were down so far, I’d be doing them a favor.”

  A lot of us lived in houses our parents or grandparents had owned; mortgages weren’t usually our problem. Just the daily costs of living, and the closer those got to zero, the less we needed to work. John Deere lost three more salespeople before the winter was over. Other folks didn’t have any employers to apologize to. The families that still kept animals thought we were all a bunch of pansies, at least according to Nils, but then we imagined him slogging to the barn every morning at five for the feeding and the milking, his fingers stiff and snot frozen in his mustache, and we mostly just felt smart.

  Mrs. Drausmann, the town librarian, hated the sleep even more than Nils. She cornered Bobby and Dee after story time, near the shelves that once held skin creams and now held paperbacks, and threatened: “This will be like Narnia under the White Witch. Always winter and never Christmas.”

  “After Christmas,” Dee asked her, “what’s there to like? What do you do?”

  “I keep the library open,” she said. “So everyone has books. They come and use the computers and get their music and their movies.”

  “If you’re dreaming, you have your own movies,” Dee said gravely, and Mrs. Drausmann sighed. We tried to make it up to her, registered for her summer reading program and attended fall story time. But Dee was right. Sleeping folk needed almost nothing—a little food, a little water, air, and warmth. They definitely didn’t need DVDs.

  That second winter the road crews had noticed less traffic, and some of the plow drivers’ hours were cut. Several decided to say screw it and just sleep, and by the time the county and the drivers were done sniping at one another, the budget for next year’s salting and plowing was half what it had been. The harder leaving your driveway was, the easier it was to stay home.

  The third year a family died of carbon monoxide poisoning from an unventilated gas heater. An electric space heater started a fire at the Simmonses’. They got out, but the house burned. Al staggered into the snow bleary-eyed, called his neighbors dumbasses, and then invited them to pile on into his family room. When he woke up for real in March, he announced that if we were all going to do this thing, we should do it right. He didn’t have enough old grease for everyone, so he charged hourly for consultations about different compact heating systems, then for assembly and installation, and soon he was doing well enough to quit his fence-repair job.

  We were glad Al had the new business, because that October Reggie Lapham came home from the juvenile detention center. He’d been seventeen when he’d hit Jeannie three and a half years earlier, and as young as that was, as much as we remembered the ice on the road and the evenings we’d gotten behind the wheel when we shouldn’t have, we weren’t sure how to forgive him. Our hearts went out to Reggie and then to Jeannie and then to Al and Bobby and Dee and then back to Reggie until we couldn’t keep our hearts straight and peaceful in our chests. These people were ours—all of them, not just Al—and we were too much like each of them. We needed men like Al to lead us and we needed young people like Reggie to stay. We looked to Al for permission to take Reggie back.

  But Reggie seemed to know Al wasn’t going to give it, at least not that autumn, because he walked from his parents’ van into his house and wouldn’t come out again. We spoke to Mrs. Lapham at the Hop-In. “He’s looking forward to the sleep,” she said. “That’s really all he wants to do. I don’t think he would have come back if he had to—”

  She broke off and we wondered, Had to what? Leave the house? Talk to people? Get a job? The family went to bed a few days after Thanksgiving. Mrs. Lapham said that seemed like the easiest way to get through what had to be gotten through. Then we heard that Al had put his kids to bed early too, without Christmas, and then some of us started calculating the money we could save not buying presents. Those of us without small children or without extended families had to admit that the holidays were a downer as often as not. We knew that the Laphams and the Rasmussens weren’t sleeping for the healthiest of reasons, but we understood the urge.

  When everyone woke up the next spring, Mrs. Drausmann called into The Dr. Joe Show to ask whether sleeping through four months of strife was sanity or just denial. She talked her way past the show’s producers, but when she got on the air and explained the situation to Dr. Joe, he didn’t believe her. “Sure, excessive sleeping is a sign of depression,” he said. “But no one hibernates.” Then he hung up.

  Several of us heard the call and it prompted some soul-searching, both about why so many of us were listening to a radio psychologist to begin with and about what our town might look like to outsiders. We started to wonder if Reggie Lapham should maybe be talking to somebody. If Al and Reggie needed help, we weren’t giving it to them, because sleeping was easier for us too.

  A woman from the Piric Gazette heard The Dr. Joe Show that night and came to Bounty to ask some questions. We braced ourselves for the story, but the reporter apparently couldn’t figure out whom to believe or what the heck was going on, and before she hit on the answer, the Gannett Company shut down the paper. We saw Al’s old buddy Nils having a beer with him at the Pointes later that month, the first time they’d been social together in years.

  “She came to interview me,” Nils said. “I told her the hibernation business was bullshit.”

  “I know you think the sleeping’s bullshit,” Al said. “You don’t need to tell me.”

  “I told her Drausmann was bullshit. I told her nothing was going on in this town that was any of Dr. Joe’s business or the Piric Gazette’s. I told her to leave you alone.” Nils shook his head and clinked the neck of his bottle against Al’s. “I figure you’ve always known what you needed. Crazy fucker.”

  A few weeks later, as we prepared for the fourth winter of the sleep to bear down, we watched the grease heater leave the Rasmussen house in parts, the foam-taped exhaust pipe, the burger filter. The mattresses with Bobby’s and Dee’s sheets came out; they’d graduated from NASCAR and Disney to plain solids, navy and lavender. We worried Al was abandoning the cause until we found out he’d reassembled it all at Nils’s farm. With more people to take care of the animals, Al explained, Nils could get some sleep too.

  Others economized like this as well, throwing in their lots with friends, neighbors. The Simmonses rebuilt their burned house with a single large room on the ground floor, an energy-efficient heat stove in the center with nonflammable tile around the base. They went to ask Al’s permission and then invited the Laphams to spend the next winter. They knew what a chill felt like, they said, as well as what it was like to be given shelter when nothing but cold was around you.

  Mrs. Drausmann stayed awake. She had her books, her own kind of dreaming. She and Mrs. Pekola would walk up and down the streets, Mrs. Drausmann’s snow boots and Mrs. Pekola’s orthopedic shoes leaving the only prints for miles. Mrs. Pekola’s faith wouldn’t let her sleep. She walked to the Lutheran church every Christmas Eve to light the Christ candle. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to God. “They don’t mean anything by it. They don’t mean to disrespect You.” She tried to tell us in spring how lonely our church looked, a single candle alight in the empty sanctuary.

  In the first years, the reverend turned the electricity back on whenever the temperature reached forty-five, but then someone hit on the idea of Easter. We flipped the switch on the day of Christ arisen. “Alleluia, alleluia,” we sang, uttering the word we had denied ourselves for Lent, one of the first words to pass our lips since waking. The Rasmussens and the Laphams stood in their old pews, just across the aisle from each other. They didn’t embrace at the greeting-neighbors part of the service, didn’t say “Peace be with you” or “And also with you,” but they didn’t flee. Al stood between his children with an arm draped over each of them, an
d we realized with surprise that Bobby was fourteen now and nearly as tall as his father. He would have been good at basketball too, if he’d been awake for the season. Dee’s pale hair had darkened to a dirty blond, and her face was spotted with acne. The kids leaned into their father, facing forward, until Dee looked to her right and nodded at Mrs. Lapham. Just then, Reggie turned his head and peered anxiously over his mother, and Dee froze and then slowly nodded at him too. We all nodded our pale faces at each other, and that seemed like enough.

  In the end the Hop-In is what brought the outsiders. Corporate couldn’t understand why winter-quarter sales were down 95 percent from five years earlier. A regional manager came out, and then his supervisors, and finally news crews from Fargo. The satellite vans were hard to miss, and we stayed up that night for the eleven o’clock news. We hadn’t expected the story they chose to tell, which wasn’t a human-interest piece about ingenuity or survival. Our hibernation practice was horrible, anchors announced from up and down the state, then across the country. Horrifying. Another product of the recession. A new economic indicator: in addition to tumbling home prices and soaring unemployment, a town was going to sleep. A reporter in high heels and a pantsuit asked the Sandersons if they were making a statement.

  “We get tired,” they said. “Is that a statement?”

  We were annoyed at how the reporters had filmed only the shabbiest parts of our town until we flipped through the newscasts and realized that together, they’d filmed nearly all of our town and it all looked equally shabby. We were used to our potholes and tumbledown barns, and now alongside those were cracked sidewalks and collapsing houses. The gray bandstand in the park leaned heavily to one side; the flat roof of the old high school had caved in under last year’s snow. Raccoons and groundhogs hibernated in some of the downtown buildings and chased each other up Main Street in their spring excitement. A few had gotten into Mrs. Pekola’s antiques store, either for burrow bedding or just to be troublesome, and we were plagued by a video clip of skinny raccoons bursting out the store’s front door trailing gnawed-up christening dresses and crib quilts. A badger birthed a spring litter in the church basement on a pile of old Sunday-school workbooks. We told ourselves that none of this mattered. We weren’t using the buildings anyway—the barns, the high school, most of downtown. We reminded ourselves that Bounty had never been a pretty place. It was built for function, not ornament, and as long as it functioned the way we wanted, we shouldn’t be ashamed of it. We had never had any great architecture in Bounty, and the certainty that we would never have any didn’t seem a sacrifice.

  We might have become a tourist attraction except that getting to us when we were sleeping was so hard. The snow accumulated in giant drifts. We put a big stick out by the WELCOME TO BOUNTY sign and let it measure how deeply we were buried. People could come in on the highway as far as the county plowed it and then see a wall of snow taller than their cars greeting them at the entrance.

  That was the establishing shot—a tiny car next to a wall of snow—when the documentary was released. On the tenth anniversary of the sleep, a public television channel contacted us and said they planned to take a more balanced approach than the news crews had. We liked that they promised to hold the premiere in Bounty, projected after dark onto the wall of the farm-supply store, since the old movie theater had been condemned.

  They interviewed Bobby in his dorm room in the last weeks of the fall semester. The state university had offered him a small baseball scholarship. He was a one-sport kid. “I’m not sure where I’ll go for Christmas break,” he said. “I haven’t had Christmas in years. My dad and my sister won’t even be awake.” He was broad like his father, a young man there in his cramped college room, and we wondered if Jeannie would even have recognized him.

  The Lutven boys had already finished college; they’d worked for a year in St. Paul and then come home. They liked the pace of life here, they said. They liked the way winter gave you a chance to catch your breath. One of them married the Sanderson girl, who’d taken over the antiques store and chased the raccoons out. Even after having two Lutven babies, ten-pound Scandinavian boys, she could wear the shop’s old clothes, the slim, fitted dresses. She liked the quiet way her boys were growing up, she said, polite and calm and curled up for five months like warm puppies at her side.

  Mrs. Pekola had passed away, which we knew, but we hadn’t known her family blamed us until we saw the film. Her eldest daughter was living in Florida, and the filmmakers had gone down to interview her about how her mother had died alone in a church pew, frozen to death in a wool coat and orthopedic shoes. “No one found her till spring,” the woman said, her anger fresh and righteous.

  Mrs. Fiske had taught all the Pekola girls over the years. “Fractions,” she whispered in the audience. “That girl just hated fractions.”

  Dee had never left Bounty, never expressed any interest in going anywhere else. She was ours, like her father before her, despite her faraway look most days, her eyes the color of the ice that froze over the flooded quarry. Her dirty-blond hair had darkened to brown and her teenage acne had faded into a nearly translucent paleness. She volunteered at the library with Mrs. Drausmann and took over story time. The film showed her sitting in a rocking chair with books far too advanced for the children gathered cross-legged around her. “‘He heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead,’” she read as the children squirmed. She wasn’t very good at story time, but Mrs. Drausmann had grown hoarse and weary over the years.

  One by one we tried to explain for the cameras. Why stay? What is Bounty worth? Three months? Four? Half your life spent asleep? Our people had moved to Bounty because the land was there and it was empty, and now all we had was the emptiness and one another. We had a wide sky and tall grass and a sun that felt good when you’d waited for it half the year. We had our children, the ones we’d feared for, feared their boredom and their recklessness and their hunger for somewhere else. We’d feared becoming Jeannie Rasmussen, and we’d feared becoming Reggie Lapham. We’d feared wanting too much and ending up with less than what we already had. Now Al and Nils dreamed the sound of a basketball bouncing off the warped, snow-soaked floor of the high-school gymnasium. Al dreamed of nights asleep in Jeannie’s arms. Reggie Lapham probably dreamed his life differently too, but he seemed content with what he had; he was interviewed with his son on his lap, a boy who had never made a snowman, never opened a Christmas present. He spoke about that first year back, about how the sleep had saved him, and when his voice faltered, his wife, Nkauj Thao-Lapham, reached over to squeeze his hand.

  Dr. Joe, interviewed, said that the sleep was profoundly unhealthy, that legislation should be passed before the custom could spread. The documentary included interviews with American history professors at the state university, experts on westward expansion, on what had happened to our county over the past two centuries. Someone in a bow tie said he was dismayed that we had lost our immigrant spirit, our desire to press on and out to something better. Our congressman pointed out that the immigrant spirit might have pushed us all the way on out of the state, farther west or back east, but instead, we’d found a way to stay. The census didn’t ask if you were awake or asleep. It just asked where you lived, and now more than ever, we were proud to say we lived in Bounty.

  “Sisu,” old Mr. Kajaamaki grunted for the camera with his hand held in front of his mouth; his teeth had fallen out, but he’d never bothered with dentures, and we felt a bit guilty that no one had insisted on driving him to Piric to get some fitted. Our people were shabby, like our houses, our streets, our ancient coats and boots. But our ancestors had come, and they had stopped, and we persisted. “‘Persistence,’” Mr. Kajaamaki said, translating his old-world word for it. He looked annoyed at how lacking English was, how insufficient for the endurance of a people who had once starved and eaten bark and come across an ocean to a flat sea of snow to mak
e new ways of life when the old ones seemed insufficient.

  The film cut back to Dee and Al standing together on the shuttered main street of our town, the sky blue and endlessly wide. “But do you regret their decision? Your father’s?” the interviewer, off camera, prodded. Dee squinted in the light, and Al squinted at his daughter.

  He’d been quiet in front of the cameras, tentative to the point of taciturn, and as he watched the movie from a lawn chair in the farm-supply store’s parking lot along with the rest of us, he fidgeted, turning his head to check the expressions on his children’s faces, twisting around in his seat to look at the people he’d led into sleep.

  “I barely remember what our life was like before,” the on-screen Dee said. “I remember being cold.”

  “And now?”

  Dee looked baffled, not able to find words sufficient to explain half her life, the happier, more perfect half. The camera turned to Al, but his face was unreadable. “Now?” Dee said. “Now I guess we’re not.”

  Now we are the people of Bounty, the farmers of dust and cold, the harvesters of dreams. After the lumber, after the mines, after the railroad, after the interstate, after the crops, after the cows, after the jobs. We’re better neighbors asleep in warm beds than we ever were awake. The suckers of the last century, but not of this one.

  Norwegian for Troll

  The car arrived late, crunching into the gravel drive and jolting Annika awake on the couch. The small wooden house sat hunkered in a clearing, and outside she found the cousins posed like miniatures in an out-of-scale diorama, heads tilted back to admire the bright channel of stars above the encroaching trees. The air was cool but gentle, summer newly enough arrived to still feel like a gift.