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ABOUT WORK: I run a clinic for my Aunt Thomasina’s company. A “Swiss-Style Weight-Loss Clinic,” to quote the promotional materials. This basically means that people come here for three days of drug-induced and -maintained deep sleep, during which they’re fed vitamins through a drip. This is a job I jumped at when it was my non-Ched-dependent ticket out of Bezin. It’s not as peaceful as I expected; most of the sleeping done here is the troubled kind. A lot of sleep talking and plaintive bleating. None of the sleepers are OK, not really. On the bright side the results are visually impressive: Most clients drop a clothing size over those seventy-two hours. Aunt Thomasina experienced this herself before she ever tried it out on anybody else. Something awful happened to her when she was young—she’s never even hinted at what that might be—and she took what she thought was a lethal dose of valerian and went to bed, only to wake up gorgeously slender three days later. “This will be popular,” she said to herself. And she was right. Most days the waiting room is full of clients happily shopping on their tablet devices; the whole new wardrobe they just ordered will be waiting for them at home after their beauty sleep. Of course weight loss that drastic is unsustainable, which makes the clinic a great business model. We send our monthly customers Christmas and birthday cards; they’re part of the family.
We have doctors who make sure that we’re not admitting anyone likely to suffer serious complications from our treatment, so my job is mainly monitoring and addressing complaints and unrealistic expectations. I can fake sympathy for days: Aunt Thomasina says I am a psychopath and that it’s a good thing I came under the right influences at a young age. I also do night shifts, since we can’t lock anybody into their rooms and I’m good with sleepwalkers. Last week we had two. One guy rose up pulling tubes out of his skin because he’s not used to sleeping indoors in summer. He grew up in an earthquake-prone region and his family hit upon the strategy of sleeping in a nearby field so as to avoid having their house fall down on them. My shift partner got him back into bed with warm assurances of safety, but when it was my turn I merely whispered: “You are interrupting the process, my friend. Do you want her to regret or not?” He sleep-ran back down the corridor and had to be restrained from re-attaching himself to the vitamin machine. That was what he’d written in his questionnaire beside “objective”: TO BE SEXY SO THAT SHE REGRETS.