Glow Read Free

cycle, waking up at eight in the morning is easy; after four days, it’s like waking up at 4 a.m.; after eight days, 8 a.m. is about when he needs to go to bed for the ‘night’; after fifteen days, it’s towards the end of his ‘afternoon’; after twenty days, it’s towards the end of his ‘morning’; and after twenty-five days, he gets another normal day. His cycle isn’t precisely twenty-five hours, he’s not made of clockwork, but it happens to work out too close to make any difference. He would be more at home on Mars, where the length of a solar day is twenty-four hours and thirty-nine minutes, near enough to his own cycle that he could probably make up for the discrepancy with a lot of naps at the weekend under the dim glitter of Phobos. Last year, a woman at a letting agency, not quite following an explanation that he already regretted attempting, said to him, ‘Wow, twenty-five hours – you must get so much done!’
    And non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome has no known cure. He’s tried light boxes, hypnotherapy, and vitamin B12 injections, but nothing works. For a few months he took melatonin tablets, and that did help a little bit, but a doctor told him that the longer you kept taking melatonin, the more you’d have to take to get the same effect, just like MDMA, and that after a while the melatonin would start to shrink your pineal gland in the same way that testosterone supplements could shrink your balls. The pineal gland, he’s read, was once a blush of photosensitive cells on the forehead of an eyeless fish, but since then evolution has yanked it inside the skull. He doesn’t want to lose his antique monocle, his shuttered window.
    Raf had once hoped to become the first person in his family to go to university, but in the end he left school before his A levels because for about two weeks out of every four he couldn’t stay awake in lessons. He’s never had a real job. And he doesn’t think he’ll ever get married. Isaac says he should just trawl the sleep disorder support messageboards for a girlfriend who has the same syndrome. But the problem is that nobody else is likely to have his exact cycle. And, perversely, the closer his cycle was to that of a hypothetical lover, the more it would drive them apart. If hers was twenty-six hours against his twenty-five hours, they would synchronise every six hundred and fifty hours (by which time he would have lived through twenty-six subjective days and she would have lived through twenty-five). But if she had a cycle of about twenty-five hours and fifteen minutes against his cycle of about twenty-five hours, they would synchronise only every 2,525 hours (by which time he would have lived through a hundred and one subjective days and she would have lived through a hundred) which made his basic estrangement from the normal circadian rhythm look trifling in comparison.
    In other words, their cycles would be mutually inverse for weeks at a time before they lumbered back together, as if each were going away on long business trips into the other’s night. And their mutual synchrony would itself only synchronise with Greenwich Mean Time – making them indistinguishable from a normal couple for long enough to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner together at the correct times – every 60,600 hours, or about every seven years, or about every two and a half blue moons. What if one of them had flu that week? Plus all this is to disregard the gravitational pull that each would exert on the other’s cycle. Raf can make these calculations easily because back when he was trying to teach himself programming he adapted an open-source biorhythm generator into a new application to graph where he’ll be in his cycle at any given time and date in the future. He’d planned to use it to schedule important appointments. But the life of a guy with non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome is not exactly bursting with those.
    That’s not to say he’s been single and friendless all