The sleep lab breathed like a patient. Machines ticked softly, charting dreams into jagged green lines. The room smelled of disinfectant and old coffee; the ceiling tiles had faint gray freckles, like constellations someone tried to erase. Mira leaned toward the monitor, adjusting the electrodes on a woman named Lila who twitched and muttered. The air conditioner sighed. Her own eyes felt sanded raw from too many half-nights.
“Deep breath,” Mira murmured, even though Lila was asleep. The words were for herself. She pressed index finger and thumb together, then the middle finger and thumb, the way Dr. Arun had taught her when the days knotted. Count the edges. Name what you can see. She could see three pens, a crumpled candy wrapper, the blue dozen of electrodes on Lila’s scalp. She could hear the soft click of the hallway door and the faint whisper of elevator cables. She could smell mint toothpaste on her own breath, stale against caffeine.
Her phone lit on silent. A message from Leo: a photo of a diner pie, a thumb-up emoji, a sentence—“Tonight felt clear.” Mira smiled despite the grit in her chest. He changed jobs like shirts, took classes he never finished, called her at midnight to ask if geckos dream. He was her weather vane and, too often, her storm.
Outside, the city lay with its eyes half-open. Mira imagined it as she sat: the tram cables humming; a fox slipping between dumpsters; cup rims clinking in the all-night bakery two blocks away. The thought calmed her down to her shoulders. She watched Lila’s graph ripple, a river of sleep she could not enter. Mira had spent months building night rituals—shower, chamomile, stretches—but sleep still arrived like a nervous guest, apologizing, leaving early. When it stayed away, she’d lie awake and feel the old memory tap behind the wallpaper: her father, the stage lights hot on his face, the trapdoor that stuck.
He had been a quiet magician, more carpenter than showman, a man who could spend hours sanding a wooden box until it gleamed like a thought. He’d left them a studio door sealed with paint. Her mother called it history, then closed the hallway and filled it with potted plants. Sometimes the plants smelled like earth after rain, and Mira would stop and press her nose to a leaf and wait for her pulse to slow.
Lila turned, the polysomnogram spiked. Mira rose and adjusted a strap, her hands sure. When she sat back down, she typed a note: “REM onset 02:16, sleep talking: ‘house’ ‘quiet’?” The words made something inside her hinge and creak. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, told herself not to make shapes out of static. The white noise machine breathed. The clock ticked toward dawn with the confidence of machines that do not second-guess.