Sleep returned to us all, of course, and our week of “civil unrest” became a story that faded, like those of so many unexplained events. The hysteria in LeRoy, New York, for instance, gets mentioned in the same obscure books and articles and websites about “phenomena,” with the same questions always lingering: what caused, and then what stopped, the spread of it, and will it reoccur? Yet in the end, dependably, it seems, newer mysteries—the crater in Siberia, the Marfa Lights, the Taos Hum—capture the public’s fickle imagination before those stories, too, largely disappear.

There were deaths on the island, to be sure, but in each individual case, medical experts, police, and reporters fixed on personal animus—depression, delusions fueled by alcohol or drugs, excessive heat, insects, or yes, even extended insomnia—as causes, and in the end shrugged off the confluence of these factors as coincidence, or yet another exacerbating factor.

Later, since the story continued to be of personal interest to me, I read that psychologists had finally agreed to call the Carratuck Island Incident, as it came to be known, a case of Mass Psychogenic Illness, which by all accounts was the initial diagnosis by Dr. Samuel Carlson, attending physician at Pines Beach Urgent Care. Further study revealed that a phone company lineman, my classmate Cynthia (“Cinder,” who created the #sleepless43 hashtag), an unnamed fisherman, and others all visited Dr. Carlson (whom I met too) for various individual, unrelated complaints before the onset of their insomnia. Consequently, interviewers asked others, as well, and discovered the same common link to Dr. Carlson, perhaps causal, some theorized—in the sense of a “patient zero,” as every sociogenic illness begins somewhere.

I recall his face as a kind man’s, evincing weary good humor. By all accounts, his self-sacrifice and heroism remain beyond dispute. And so my eyes, my throat, my heart aches at the sad, innocent guilt of his true role as origin of all that occurred on Carratuck.

Nevertheless, the Boy chose to rename himself after Doctor Carlson, “Sam,” long before I finished my studies and Tay and I married and applied for and were granted custody.

These years later, in this modest mainland home we share with him, late when the drone of a far-off plane, or a dog faintly barking, or the creak of the house settling into itself lulls me into drowsiness, I still sometimes startle from remembering too much, or from the quick thought: somewhere, in some exotic tropic or snowy latitude, or perhaps just some bland, temperate suburb, is someone opening their eyes, woman, man, or child, waking from the very last of their sleep?

I hold this against it, the same vision that closed my eyes, finally, lying in that makeshift dorm with the Boy in Tay’s loose arms: running along the beach with Tay, the sun flashing rainbows in our eyelashes, feet slapping the warm backwash until we bent, out of breath, laughing, over the Boy playing with his toy pail and shovel in the damp sand. His hair is stiff with dried salt and funny, his jams are wet and the skin on his hip is pink where the waistband sags, and his eyes are bluer than the ocean. And then we all look up to see his mother coming down a dune toward us in a bright cover-up with a beach towel over her shoulder, pausing to shield her eyes with a glad thoughtless smile as she lifts her hand in the air to wave.