The Nineteenth Hour

They had been awake since six in the morning, and Maya had a plan to stay awake until the meteor shower hit its peak at two.

"Status check," said Soren. He had a flashlight with a red filter and a clipboard, because if they were going to do this properly they were going to do it properly. "It is one in the morning. We have been awake for nineteen hours. How do you feel?"

"Fine," said Maya. "Completely fine. Sharp as anything."

"Write that down," said Soren. He wrote it down. One a.m. Maya reports: completely fine.

"Why are we doing the status checks again?"

"Because my mom said something weird before she went to bed," said Soren. "She said being really tired is like being a little bit drunk, and that the dangerous part is you can't tell."

"That doesn't make sense," said Maya. "If you can't tell, how does anybody know?"

"That," said Soren, "is the experiment."

He had set it up at the picnic table. A deck of cards. A piece of paper with a simple maze he had drawn at noon. A list of words to remember. They had both done all three at noon, fresh, and written down their times.

"Okay," said Maya. "The maze. I did it in eleven seconds at lunch. Watch this."

She took the pencil. The red light made everything the color of a bad dream. She started at the entrance.

Her hand went the wrong way at the first turn.

"Hang on," she said. She backed up. Went wrong again. "The light is bad."

"The light was bad at noon too," said Soren. "It was the sun. That's a different problem."

"Twenty seconds," said Maya when she finished. "Roughly. The light, though."

Soren wrote it down. He did not say anything about the light.

"Your turn," said Maya. "Words. I'll read them, you remember them. Comet. Orbit. Dust. Silver. River. Granite."

Soren closed his eyes. "Comet. Orbit. Dust." A long pause. "Silver." A longer pause. "There was a rock one. Granite. And. There was one more."

"River," said Maya.

"River," said Soren. "I knew it was a water one." He frowned. "At noon I got all six. I remember getting all six."

"You're tired," said Maya. "I'm not tired."

"Do the words then."

Maya did the words. She got four. She was very surprised that she got four. She had been certain, the whole time he was reading them, that she was getting all of them.

"That's the weird part," she said slowly. "It didn't feel like forgetting. It felt like I had them. Right up until I didn't say them."

Soren was writing fast now. "That's it. That's the exact thing. With the maze you felt fine. With the words you felt fine. The feeling fine isn't going away."

"Because I am fine," said Maya, and then heard herself, and stopped.

The night went quiet around them. Somewhere a meteor streaked across the sky and neither of them saw it because they were both looking at the clipboard.

"Read me the noon numbers," Maya said.

Soren read them. Maze, eleven seconds. Cards sorted into suits, forty seconds. Six words, six words.

"Now the one a.m. numbers."

Maze, twenty seconds. Cards, they hadn't even done the cards yet, but Maya picked up the deck and started, and her hands were clumsy, dropping a four of clubs, putting a heart in with the spades and not noticing until Soren pointed.

"A whole minute," said Soren. "On the cards."

"And I feel," said Maya, very carefully, like she was setting down something fragile, "exactly as fine as I felt at noon. That's the thing. My feeling didn't change. Only my numbers changed."

Soren put the pencil down.

"My mom said with drinking, you can sort of tell. You feel different. You feel slow. So you know to be careful." He looked at the maze with its wrong turns penciled in. "But this doesn't feel like anything. The tired part hides itself. You lose the thing that would tell you you're losing things."

Maya looked up at the sky, which was enormous and full of slow stars and the occasional fast one.

"So right now," she said, "there could be a whole list of stuff I'm getting wrong, and the only way I'd ever know is if I wrote down what I could do before, and checked."

"Yes."

"And without the clipboard."

"Without the clipboard you'd just feel fine," said Soren. "All the way down. People drive like this. People decide things like this. Feeling fine."

Maya was quiet. Then she laughed, but not a happy laugh, more like the laugh you do when the floor tilts.

"I've spent my whole life trusting that I can tell how my own brain is doing," she said. "From the inside. And it turns out the inside is the one part that lies."

"Not lies exactly," said Soren, and reached for his notebook. He wrote a single line and turned it so the red light caught it. The brain checking the brain is using the broken thing to test the broken thing.

"That's worse," said Maya. "That's so much worse and I love it."

They sat with that. The peak was still an hour off. Maya knew, now, that the version of her who would watch the peak was going to be a slower, clumsier, more forgetful version than the one who had set the alarm at noon, and that this version would feel identical from the inside, and would have no idea.

"Do another status check," she said. "At two. And three. Write all of it down. I don't trust me. I want a record of me from outside me."

Soren clicked his pen and looked at the time and started a new line.

Above them, the first real meteor of the peak tore a bright scratch across the whole sky, and Maya's head turned toward it half a second slower than it would have at noon, and she never felt the difference at all.