He quit sleeping because he’d noticed something suspicious about people, starting with his closest relatives. Starting with his mother, to take the most terrible example. He didn’t know why, but he was sure that she and all the others were out to get him. It wasn’t so much the manifestations of open hostility - like the coal Christmas present - that put him on the alert, but a sinister, indefinable essence. There was something wrong about people; they didn’t seem to be what they should have been. They hadn’t changed much since he had first begun to become aware of their existence. And yet, starting on a day that Homer couldn’t place precisely in the past, a day that wandered around in his memories like a child that’s lost its parents, they had seemed different. They hadn’t changed, yet they were different. If he’d been asked to explain what the difference consisted of, he would have been hard put to it. The difference that he had in mind was indefinable, baseless. It was difference per se. Difference in the most different sense of the word. It was the classic example of a situation that can only be explained in the absolute, what Homer called an absolute spectrum situation.
Besides, it wasn’t as if he could go and explain to anyone. Who could he explain to? There was nobody left. Everybody was different, from his mother to the garbage man. What was he supposed to do? Go up to his mother and say, ‘Mom, why are you so different?’
‘Different?’ she’d reply. ‘What on earth are you talking about, Home?’ That was what she called him, Home.
‘You seem different to me, Mom.’
‘How am I different?’
‘You seem like…’ He’d have to be careful how he put this. One false step and he’d give himself away.
‘Yes, Home?’
‘Like the garbage man,’ he’d say, at length. Which certainly wouldn’t be one of the smartest things to say. But he wouldn’t be able to stop himself, he’d blurt it out. And give himself away. Thereby ruining any chance he had of maintaining the status quo, of continuing to live without having to confront the difference that was spreading all around him.
The maintenance of the status quo was vital. What would happen to him when the others found out that he wasn’t different as they were? Then, one day, he understood. The difference was revealed to him in all its essence. He understood that, quite simply, his mother was not his mother and the garbage man was not the garbage man. Nobody was who they were, except him. Only he had remained the Homer he was.
It was the TV that revealed this to him. In 1967, toward the end of February, Homer B. Alienson saw documented on the small screen a situation alarmingly similar to the one in which he found himself. A little boy called Jimmy Grimaldi was dragged along by his grandmother to the office of one Dr Miles Bennell. The kid seemed to be having hysterics; he kept screaming that his mother wasn’t his mother and pleading with them not to take him home, or she’d get him. Dr Bennell, who for obvious filmic reasons had the fine features of a refined, well-mannered movie actor, prescribed some pills to be taken a certain number of times a day and advised the grandmother to keep the boy at her house for a while. Then, with a thoughtful look on his face, the doctor decided to pay a visit to Wilma Lentz, the cousin of an old flame of his, one Becky Driscoll, whose gentle charm found its own conventional personification in the beautiful Dana Wynter, a movie actress who bore a faint resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor.
Wilma, a woman in her thirties, is in a similar state to little Jimmy Grimaldi: she’s convinced her Uncle Ira is not her Uncle Ira.
The doctor watches the tranquil old man pushing the lawnmower up and down the lawn and doesn’t know what to think. The similarity to the case of the little boy is undoubtedly curious. But Miles Bennell is a man of science and as such can only draw one conclusion.
‘Obviously the boy’s mother was his mother, I’d seen her. And Uncle Ira was Uncle Ira, there was no doubt of that after I’d talked to him,’ he said off-screen, after advising Wilma to see a ‘doctor’ friend of his. This, he made quite clear, meant seeking psychiatric help.
If Homer confided in his mother, or in anybody else, as Jimmy and Wilma had done, the same would probably happen to him. They’d make him see a shrink. And although he didn’t know exactly what went on in such people’s offices, he had a pretty good idea that it wouldn’t be pleasant.
That piece of film showed him that ‘difference’ was not confined to the dreary township in the bleak Northwest where he’d had the misfortune to be born. The same kind of difference that Homer had observed in Aberdeen was present in all its disturbing virulence elsewhere in the world too. Such a universal and constantly spreading phenomenon certainly couldn’t be stopped by a nine-year-old boy.
It was impossible for him to get away. All he could do was devise techniques of passive defense, try not to do anything that might jeopardize the status quo, try to blend in with the ‘differents’ around him. Here the film evidence was a great help, for the director had not merely revealed to the world the invasion of the differents - conventionally described as ‘body snatchers’, a term that conveyed very well the appalling nature of the change that was taking place - but had also given two crucial pieces of practical advice. First: what you had to do to avoid being body-snatched - integrated into the change that was taking place. Second: how you could conceal your extraneousness to the replicants - your intention not to be changed.
As far as the second point was concerned, no great effort was required. You simply had to feign indifference to the differents’ hostility. Be impermeable. Not let them rile you. The differents always acted in a deliberately hostile manner, to provoke normal people into giving themselves away. Homer’s violent reaction to the provocation of the Christmas piece of coal, for instance, was something to be avoided. He had probably only gotten away with it because he was a kid. But who was to know how long the period of immunity would last, and when the time of integration would begin? He decided he’d better be careful, and immediately adopted the recommended behavior. Impermeability. Insensibility. He resolved to reduce communication with others to a minimum, and spent all the time on his own, concentrating on his collection of space toys.
But if the second point wasn’t much of a problem, the first - how to avoid being body-snatched - had a drastic solution. It was perfectly simple in theory, but in practice … in practice it meant giving up sleeping. Because that was how the change came about. You fell asleep and you woke up different.
In the film footage, Dr Bennell had spoken of how people often became dehumanized, losing their identity so gradually that they weren’t aware of any alteration in themselves.
Homer couldn’t agree more. That was exactly how it had happened. His mother, the garbage man and all the others. The change was imperceptibly slow until the final, irrevocable moment of palpable difference. But this didn’t make it any easier to accept the drawbacks of the solution. It’s all very well to talk, but how are you supposed to react when somebody comes along and tells you it’s quite easy, all you have to do is not sleep?
All you have to do, he says.
Homer Alienson’s voluntary insomnia continued for an extraordinary length of time. Nigh on eighteen years, give or take a month or two. This was not an easy period, nor was it devoid of consequences. It was an established scientific fact, even in those days, that the need for a periodic suspension of the activities of the will and the consciousness - a need sometimes referred to as ‘switching off - was necessary to the regeneration of physical and/or psychological efficiency. It had, moreover, been proven that a prolonged lack of sleep made you irritable, altered your metabolism, and led to feelings of nausea and states of hallucination. This knowledge, however, was based on studies that embraced a limited time span or at least a period below the critical threshold of ninety-six hours. Homer was unique. He was the only case of a higher living organism that had permanently succeeded in eliminating from its metabolism the physiological need to switch