Sleeper Tee

The contradiction

She is the lead of a raft in which nobody leads. Sleeper Tee is the largest of the Sleepatees, the one at the front and the lowest in the picture, the shape your eye finds first, and she has done nothing whatsoever to earn it.

She does not rise sooner or sink later or breathe louder. She is simply the biggest soft grey loaf in the warm shallows, asleep like all the others, and being looked at.

Their personality

Awake, if she is ever awake, she is slow and entirely unbothered. Things happen near her and she lets them.

A flamingo lands at the edge of the water; she does not turn. The Still Heron stands over her for an hour; she does not know.

She is not lazy, because lazy is choosing not to, and she is not choosing anything. She is a large grey animal in warm water who has found the exact speed at which nothing is worth the bother, and she has stayed there.

Their sleep

She rises, breathes, and sinks, on the longest count in the raft, the slow one the others are out of step with, with her flippers folded on her chest and her eyes shut. She does nothing else.

She is not the pale one; the pale one is never named.

How they got so good at this

She was born knowing how to sleep under water and come up without waking; every Sleepatee is. What she got better at, over a long time in the Laguna, was the count.

When she was small she came up as often as the others. Then a little less often.

Then less often than that, until her count was the longest in the water, and the others, without noticing, had started to rise and sink around hers, like boats round a bigger boat. She never meant to lead.

She just got slower than everybody, and slower is what a raft follows.

Their method

She bores you to sleep, and she is very good at it. You look at her because she is the biggest thing in the water, and then she does nothing.

And then she does nothing. And then, after a very long while, she rises an inch, and breathes, and sinks, and does nothing again.

There is nothing to watch, and you keep watching, and somewhere in the third count you have started breathing on it too.

Their challenge

Her method is that nothing happens, and a picture in which nothing happens has to be held perfectly or it is simply a picture of a grey shape. If the water moves too much, or she moves at all between counts, the spell goes.

She has to be more still than anything, and stillness is the hardest thing to draw.

Their arc

Down already. She starts the night asleep and ends it asleep, and what descends is the count: a breath, then a longer gap, then a longer one, until the gap is so long a child stops waiting for the next rise and is asleep before it comes.

The true thing

A manatee rests under the water and comes up to breathe every fifteen or twenty minutes without properly waking; the body rises, the nostrils break the surface, and down it goes again, still asleep. It is the one thing about the Sleepatees that nobody had to invent, and it is the whole of what Sleeper Tee does.

Source: Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, "Manatee Facts".

What they like, and what they do not

She likes warm water, and the shallow end, and the sun on her back through the surface. She likes being the biggest.

She does not like being nudged into rising before her count is up, and she does not like cold water, which is a preference, and a strong one.

Tardy and them

They have never met. The far shallows of the Laguna are off his route, and she has never left the water.

If he ever sat on the bank, he would be asleep before her second breath, which is what she is for, and she would not know.

Their friends

The ease, the rest of the Sleepatees, in the water around her, rising and sinking on her count without knowing it is hers. At the water's edge, and never in it, the flamingos and the Still Heron.

The quiet detail

Every other Sleepatee rises a little before she does. She is always last up and last down, and nobody in the raft has noticed that they are following her.