The morning, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, is, as we know, the administration of the night. It comes, checks up, takes inventory. And if today it possesses an additional cruelty, then it is that it no longer takes inventory alone, but has devices take inventory.
Hans Castorp reached – not greedily, rather hesitantly – for the handset and saw what the ring had to say to him.
The evaluation was friendly, and precisely for that reason it was unsatisfying.
It said, in numbers, what read like a verdict:
Sleep onset latency: 47 minutes.
Wake times: 3 episodes, totaling 58 minutes.
REM: 12 %.
In addition, in a subordinate clause that felt like a polite rebuke: Stress indicators elevated.
Hans Castorp stared at the numbers as if a stranger were sitting in his bed and had recited his night to him by heart.
He did not feel shame – shame is a social feeling – but a kind of offended bewilderment. After all, he had done everything. He had even sweated. He had even taken notes. He had, if one is strict, “performed”. And yet the night, this incorruptible remainder, was not in order.
“REM,” he said softly, and the word sounded like an abbreviation for something one should not know. It sounded like AuDHS. It sounded like Porsche. It sounded like a world in which even dreams are administered with letters.
He put the handset away and looked at the ceiling.
A part of him thought: One could take off the ring. One could switch off the handset. One could once again leave the night to itself.
But this part was weak. For Hans Castorp, who had once left the great order of the world in his biography, had in this small order by now become astonishingly docile. Perhaps, he thought, because in it he could not be shot. Perhaps because it gave him a form of justification: If I optimize, I may stay.
And so he did what one does in such houses when a value is not right:
He began to conduct sleep.
