Caldwell heard the familiar sound of his screams from deep within his nightmare. Long before it jolted him awake, he saw interlaced between the horrific images, fragments of the decision he had made. The fragments coalesced, fusing into something cold, dark and chillingly absolute. He opened his eyes, allowing his tacts and irises the milliseds they o adjust to the semi-darkness. He grunted and turned over on the memory foam futon. It was quiet in his enclosed capsule, quiet, except for the discordant sounds of men in various states of sleep.
Caldwell had long learo block out the obligatory rumbling snores of the other octs, the rasping sounds of heavy breathing underscored by the distant noise of traffic outside. In his mind, the sonic summary of recurring nightmares still echoed back from deep within the plastic walls of his capsule.
Screams were nothi the Angel Capsule Hotel. They came, in all their harrowing variety, in the middle of the night or in broad daylight. The octs had learo read meaning in the discordant sounds and to block them out. Over the course of his uionally proloay, Caldwell had heard them all. The cries of desperation, howls of pai-rending sounds of grown men g in their sleep and the depraved shrieking of deranged men brought to the end of their tether. Sometimes the onslaught was relentless, the decibels seeping through the pores of the plastic walls. He had lain awake listening to the nonsensical mutterings of men talking in their sleep, the grunts and exhalations of alcoholics relieving themselves withiifling cos of their osules. He found it hard to decipher the meaning of his own screams amidst all the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Today, Caldwell felt a strange hypersensitivity. He was acutely aware of the sweat-soaked sheets ging to his naked perspiring torso like a shroud, the minute movements of the thermulating fabric systematically adjusting its weave. Caldwell wondered whether this sensitivity to external stimuli was a side effect of him having made the most cowardly of personal choices. He still hadn』t brought himself to plate the finality of his decision but the clusion was iable. Eventually, in a matter of minutes, he thought, he was going to kill himself.
Soon, the end would be in sight for his heavily punctuated sleep patterns. The nightmares that stretched into infinity, ghostly apparitions of fear reag deep into his psyche. He was trapped in a living hell and there was only one way out. Soon, he would have that which he craved more than anything else, a sleep that stretched undisturbed into infinity. He would have peace.
Caldwell gla the time projected in pale green pixels by the cheap Taiwanese clock built into the ceiling. Through burned out eyes, tormented mind moribund in that fuzzy area between sleep and wakefulness, he watched the pulsating digits of the clock tig over. It was that hour of dawn. Outside, the shadows of the night had started to recede, exposing the gray wet reality of a winter m. He lay i on the memory foam futon and watched the time spin on its invisible axis, sweeping through its three hundred and sixty-degree ar precisely sixty seds. It was 5.30AM.
Time had bee a meaningless cept to Caldwell, reduced to a simple biological ting down, the unstoppable approach of an impending expiry date. He found sleep elusive, his existence reduced to untold hours of wakefulness followed by annoying stretches of insomnia. Sometimes he would go days