“SIXTY DAYS IN BED FOR 400,000 YEN.” The second I saw the flyer at the station, I knew this job was made for me.

I’ve been perfecting my laziness for years. Lying down and running my mouth — nobody does it better than me.

The study was testing something about the body. Sixty days without getting up — eating, brushing my teeth, all of it flat on my back. Apparently the stiller you stayed, the better the data. Piece of cake.

There was just one problem I hadn’t counted on. Keeping my mouth shut is the one thing I absolutely cannot do.

The room had two beds, split down the middle by a curtain running floor to ceiling. Someone was apparently lying on the other side. But they never said a word — not even a breath I could hear.

“Hey. You awake over there?”

No answer. That takes some nerve. Whoever it was might be an even better sleeper than me.

From that day on, I talked at the curtain nonstop. The ramen I’d eaten yesterday. The girl who dumped me years ago. How the soles of my feet itched. Not a peep came back. If I stopped talking, I felt like I’d lose my mind.

About two weeks in, my legs started feeling strange. No matter how hard I tried, everything below my knees felt fuzzy and far away. So this was the muscle-wasting thing I’d heard about. A little spooked, I even complained about it to the curtain. “Hey, you doing okay down there? Your legs holding up?” Still no answer.

On the morning of day sixty, three staff members walked in, breezed right past my bed, and went around to the other side of the curtain.

“Heart rate’s stayed stable the whole way through.” ”…This one really held on, didn’t they.”

They weren’t talking about me. They meant the person on the other side.

“Um,” I said, sitting up. My legs worked better than I expected. “What about my numbers? Did my results come in?”

The staffer blinked, then laughed.

“Wait, did you think we were studying you? No. We were studying them.”

The curtain slid open.

Lying there was a thin woman. She was about to be loaded, still asleep, onto a ship bound for a star far, far away — a one-way trip lasting decades. By the time she woke up, no one she’d ever known would still be alive.

“We needed to know whether her heart could keep beating through that long sleep — whether having a total stranger nearby, talking nonsense every single day, would make a difference. That’s what we’ve been testing for sixty days. She wasn’t allowed to answer. But her heart only ever responded properly when it was your voice.”

They’d been looking for someone who physically couldn’t stop talking, the staffer said. That was me.

The woman’s bed began rolling quietly toward the bright doorway. For the first time, her face turned toward me — and the corner of her mouth lifted, just barely. Her first reply in sixty days. Her only one.

A staffer pressed a small recorder into my hand.

“We’ll play this for her the whole journey. We need decades’ worth of nonsense. …Could you handle that for us?”

Her bed disappeared down the hallway. I held the recorder up to my mouth and started talking — picking up right where the ramen story left off, pouring out every last bit of nonsense I had.