Hans Castorp did not know when he had fallen asleep.
That is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, the only reliable indication that one has slept: that one has not noticed the transition. As soon as one notices it, it is no longer a transition, but an achievement.
He woke up when it was still dark outside, and he lay still for a moment, listened inside himself, listened to the room, listened to the highway. It was there, yes – but farther away. Or he was farther away from it.
He turned around, saw that the handset was still lying face down, and felt a small, childlike satisfaction about it: He had, for a few hours, withdrawn its view from the machine.
Then he fell asleep again.
In the morning he reached, almost automatically, for the device. Not because he absolutely wanted to know how he had slept – he did not want to know –, but because knowledge had by now become his mode of existence.
The evaluation appeared.
It was friendly.
It said:
Sleep onset latency: 21 minutes.
Wake times: 1, total 12 minutes.
REM: 19 %.
Stress indicators: improved.
Hans Castorp stared at the numbers.
He did not feel like a new person. He did not even feel particularly rested. He felt… normal. And normality, in a program, seems like a miracle.
He put the handset away, looked at the ceiling and thought, very slowly, very clearly:
Did I really sleep better?
Or did I just… lie differently?
He thought of the fakir mat. He thought of how still he had lain, because every movement would have been sharp. He thought of the fact that the ring measures movement. And he thought – and that was the Mann‑style punch line that wrote itself – that the machine perhaps had not recognized that he was awake because, out of fear of the spikes, he had not twitched.
He smiled. It was a polite smile.
And a little unsatisfying.
For that is how it is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, in our modern cure: In the end one does not know whether one lives better – or is only recorded better.
