Sunday Story – Happy Underground
Theo was not the type who would normally sign up for bizarre medical experiments but he needed the money. It was surprising they even recruited him because he was almost sixty and out of shape. After too long teaching English in Saudi Arabia and sedately overindulging in local culinary delights, his gut was bigger than it ought to be.
Theo had been in shape back in the day, when he’d been a scuba diving instructor in Palawan. Swimming every dawn, living on fish and bananas, tepid nights spent hammering sweet young things. It paid next to nothing. But by God, that had been the life. He wished he could relive those years forever.
But now Theo was ready to retire and found that his savings were a bit light-on. It was either this experiment or go back to teaching in the Kingdom for a few more years.
He chose the experiment.
It would be preferable, he calculated, to sit in a hole for six months than to ever again suffer the indignity of being jostled and abused by the ill-mannered scions of minor Saudi royalty.
The university couldn’t give Theo full details because the study was supposed to be double-blind, but was informed that it was some kind of sleep experiment. They wanted to see how a person’s sleep patterns would alter if deprived of normal cues like sunlight, temperature changes, clocks and so on. They would put him in a comfortable room underground for six months with no connection to the outside world and observe how he slept.
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