Sleep Donation: A Novella (Kindle Single) (10 page)

“I will not let you down,” I tell Mr. Harkonnen. “I won’t
quit.”

He gives me a tight smile, a look I recognize from my own mirror
as the winched contentment of a recruiter; the pitch is finished,
the contract inked and under way.

“All right. Better get us home.”

Overhead, the sun is fully risen. A flock goes rowing over the
pines, and this species I do recognize: they are Pennsylvania
starlings. A hundred common gray-black birds, frequent visitors to
our childhood backyard. They go shirring through the goggled blues
of the May sky, the azure pools of air between the white clouds,
moving east, each bird uniformly lit by the round sun. We walk
under them, retracing our steps. Eventually Mr. Harkonnen drops my
hand, but the world we return through feels solid and good.

Mr. Harkonnen drops me off a block from
the Mobi-Office; I’m afraid my colleagues will recognize his brown
and turquoise sedan and get the wrong impression. We did spend the
night together, but that true statement is so misleading that I
think it’s worse than a lie. It’s
7:02
a.m.
But I see that as early as I am, I’m still not the first staffer to
punch in.

“Hey,” says Jim.

“Hello,” I say.

The Tuesday following my strange dawning
with Mr. Harkonnen, an alert calls every staffer into the trailer.
We fish-gape around Rudy’s computer. Headquarters does a live
broadcast from the D.C. offices, so that we learn
about the Chinese orexins and electives fractionally faster than
the rest of America.

Breaking news: several dozen patients suffering from the
orexin-disruption have sought treatment at the Sanya Hospital in
Hainan Province, China. This medical milestone delivers a quiet
shock to all of us in the Mobi-Van. Naively, we now realize, we
believed the dysfunction was bounded by our hemisphere, peculiar to
American sleepers. But here is proof that nobody is quarantined by
geography

—that anybody, anywhere,
might become an orexin.

It gets worse.

Fourteen Chinese insomniacs in Hainan Province have also tested
positive for the Donor Y nightmare. These people received sleep
transfusions from an unknown source. The Corps was unaware of the
existence of Chinese sleep clinics offering
REM-transfusions for cash. Initial reports suggest
that the fourteen Chinese men and women infected with the Donor
Y–prion now exhibit an “extreme sleep aversion” similar to what
we’ve seen with American elective insomniacs.

Presently, our doctors know so little about how the nightmare is
spreading that they can only describe symptoms, guess at causes.
But it’s clear that my assurances were wrong. His dream is
unchained, hopping bodies. The nightmare contagion is
uncontained.

Jim calls me into his office.

“Are you avoiding me, Trish?”

“Ha-ha. That would be a ninja-feat, wouldn’t it, Jim? Avoiding
you in this trailer.”

“We barely speak.”

I touch my throat, as if to suggest I have a common cold. At the
same time, I feel this to be an accusatory gesture; Jim must know,
of course, that his secret is the obstruction.

“Who are you talking to these days? I wonder.”

But then the door comes unhinged; Rudy steps in.

In the narrow trailer window, I watch our faces darken like
loaves in an oven.

“Huh,” he says mildly. “Am I interrupting something?”

“I’m talking to Trish. As per our discussion.”

“Oh. Right. We don’t think it’s a good idea for you to spend
quite so much time with Baby A’s family.”

“It’s just not professional . . .”

“Or it’s
too
professional. They don’t need that much
from you, Edgewater.”

“Your talents are now needed elsewhere.”

“With the insomnia appearing on every continent . . .”

“With the nightmare-infection spreading . . .”

“Globally, we’re going to have new initiatives, new
responsibilities . . .”

The happiness comes on me like a sickness I can’t stop. I feel
myself go fully automatic. A smile swarms onto my face, and somehow
I am nodding at the brothers, taking notes. For a second it feels
like old times to me, to stand under the headlamps of the brothers’
concern. Not just for me, but for the entire planet; listening to
them rant about the world in peril has always given me the most
unlikely sense of security, made me feel like I am safely in the
center of a rapidly enlarging family. And I think back to the night
three weeks ago when I stood between Justine and Felix Harkonnen,
staring through the glass into Ward Seven.

“I feel responsible for them,” I say, staring from Jim to Rudy.
“The Harkonnens.”

“You’d better get over that,” Rudy snarls. “You’re not.”

Baby, baby. We’re in a pickle now, aren’t
we, baby?

“Hush, hush,” I murmur, bouncing her around the Van.

It feels as if we’re orbiting the same black hole. Her sleep
will not stop flooding through her, shadowing her blood. My
sister’s ghost regenerates as one lean memory

—the final hospital scene keeps doubling back
on itself, repeating. So far, I’ve been diligent about making the
matching donations. Many nights now, Baby A and I are going under
sedation in tandem. Yesterday evening, for example, Nurse Carmen
drew five hours from Abby in the Sleep Van, and I gave five hours
at the Bank.

Mrs. Harkonnen now refuses to let anybody but me touch Abigail
before the procedure begins. Thank God, there’s not much to the
prep

—just rocking her to sleep, the
basic bob-and-shush, the lullaby-bounce-step, that Dori and I
perfected when we babysat in middle school. The nurses sterilize
the helmet, spin-dry the colorless lozenge of the face mask. We
hook the little bellows of her lungs to the larger bellows of our
need.

They really do trust me now, Mr. and Mrs. Harkonnen. Somehow I
passed their independent screenings. They think I am sincere.

Another influx of misplaced faith that I must queasily endure,
and assimilate into my body, for the greater good, says Rudy, who
does pay attention, and who has noticed how my cheeks flame around
Jim.

In a fairy tale, I would take Mrs. Harkonnen aside, suggest a
scheme to deliver her daughter from our gloved hands, some prudent
metamorphosis: We’ll smuggle her out as a bear cub, a red rose, an
eagle. We’ll find some magical pair of shears to free your girl,
I’d promise her. We’ll cut you loose from the messy rest of us.

Instead, I show them our latest promotional video. It’s
genuinely uplifting

—testimonials
from survivors who received their daughter’s sleep transfusion. You
can tell from the flat surf of each voice that a wave within them
has crested and broken, and they are now safe on some far
shore:

“The nightmare is over.”

“The nightmare is over.”

“It was a miracle: I slept through the night, and I woke
up.”

We three watch it together in the Harkonnens’ living room,
violin music swelling out of the speakers. Inside the Sleep Van,
the video’s hero, Baby A, snores lightly under the leaf-sized green
mask to replenish the black tanks of sleep.

Nurse Carmen knocks once and pops her head in: “She’s done! Did
a great job.”

We switch the TV off.

Baby A goes back to her mom. Now she’s awake and hungrily
nursing, her white-socked feet doodling on air. One day soon she’ll
wake up to what we’ve done, and what we’ve taken from her.

“See you next Wednesday night.”

“See you then,” the two adult Harkonnens echo.

“We will never overdraw your daughter,” I hear myself promise
them, responding to some fleeting shadow that crosses both
faces.

I make this promise at a moment when people are plunging their
straws into any available centimeter of shale and water, every
crude oil and uranium and mineral well on earth, with an
indiscriminate and borderless appetite. Fresh air, the sight of
trees

—these are birthrights and
pleasures that we seem bent on extinguishing. Some animals we’ve
turned out to be. We have never in our species’ history respected
Nature’s limits, the doomsday speculators announce, smacking their
lips, until it seems like some compensatory sucrose must flood into
their mouths every time they say the words “mass death.” According
to their estimates, our species will be extinct in another
generation, having exhausted every store of water and fuel on the
planet. But this baby is small enough, and our need is great
enough, that the nurses can be exquisitely precise, never
withdrawing from her fleshy aquifer more than the recharge rate. We
take, at most, six hours from her. We ration our greed.

The Sleep Van, that white pod, readies itself to pull away from
the mothership of the Harkonnen residence.

“How far away are we from . . . from synthesis?” Mrs. Harkonnen
wants to know.

“Oh, goodness. That’s the dream, isn’t it?”

Now we three give each other these faith-transfusions.

Later, alone in the trailer, I continue to make outreach calls
to donors with the narcotized zeal of all the other night-shifted
Corps recruiters: “Thanks to your generous support, eighteen
insomniacs will sleep through the night, and open their eyes at
dawn. Thirty-three percent of our patients make a full recovery . .
.”

You can’t argue with those numbers, can you? I plan to one day
ask Abigail.

Granted, we never gave you a choice, but wouldn’t you have
agreed to transfer those dreams to us, knowing now what you could
not know then? This sort of subjunctive calculus, nobody teaches in
school. Artificial sleep, for example, “sleep for all”

—who can say if we will achieve it? I keep
roto-dialing strangers, begging for their surplus unconsciousness.
Next Wednesday night, Baby A and I are both scheduled to donate.
Somewhere, let’s hope, on the opposite side of the world or galaxy,
there is a research team working out a more reliable source.

Ever since the dawn with Mr. Harkonnen, I
have been unable to pitch in the same way. I have no idea why this
should be so. I only know that at Drives, I speak in my own voice
about the Slumber Corps, and I don’t retell the story of Dori’s
death. I don’t relive her ending, or go into the convulsions. When
my voice shakes, it’s only because I’m nervous

—I’ve got no practice at this sort of
storytelling. I do talk about my sister, who she was before the
crisis, although I find this makes me shy. Unfettered from her
death, Dori’s ghost takes on new shapes, and I find myself
remembering more and more about her. In this new pitch, I describe
her as a teenager, and even earlier. I mention the many insomniacs
my sister’s age or younger who have been cured by transfusions, and
who can dream on their own once more thanks to the Slumber Corps.
Often, I lead with Baby A. Imagine, I tell them, how she’ll feel
when she grows up, and learns how many lives she’s saved.

If potential donors tell me they cannot afford to spare their
sleep, I never press. The results of the new approach? By every
metric we’ve got

—donors recruited,
sleep donated, insomniacs’ lives saved

—my pitch is a disaster. There are Drives
where I only recruit five donors. There was one Drive, on a rainy
Thursday night outside the shopping mall, where I recruited none.
My “zeros” were actually zero, which has never happened to me
before. I’ve fallen so far that I’m not even ranked, nationally, as
a recruiter. In our Solar Zone, I’m number three of six. But you
know what? Some people do give. I’ll leave a Sleep Drive with a
third fewer recruits than I was expecting for a crowd that size,
but Dori, inside the people with whom I leave her story, is an
ellipsis, alive. She’s not a nightmare I’ve implanted within them,
a means to an end

—of that much, I
feel almost certain.

If I stop telling Dori's story, I
wonder, where will she go?

Jim’s out-and-out despondent. He paces
our trailer with watering eyes. It’s that Jim-despair that feels at
once completely false, like the maudlin dirges of horn instruments
on a Mexican soap, and genuine, out of his control. Rudy Storch is
furious with me, salty and affronted; worse yet, I’ll sometimes
catch him casting me looks of feral betrayal, as if somehow I’m the
toothy trap that sprang shut on his paw.

“Edgewater, goddamnit. Have you seen your zeros? How you sleep
at night, I do not know. This experiment is
up
, it has got
to stop.”

He grits his teeth; he doesn’t touch me now, or scream at me. He
won’t joke.

“Please. Please. I understand that
you’re
more
comfortable. But what you’re doing is irresponsible. It’s . . .
it’s . . .” he sputters, his eyes cloudy with exhaustion.
“It’s . . .”

He never finishes, and it doesn’t matter. Dori’s quieted, she’s
become uncooperative. I can’t go back to the old style of pitching
now.

The first three times I call, I hang
up.

The fourth time I call, I get an automated female voice,
thanking me for contacting the Slumber Corps Whistle-Blower’s
Program. This unshockable voice instructs me to leave the most
detailed message possible about the institutional corruption I have
witnessed, or in which I have participated, to include fraud,
waste, abuse, policy violations, discrimination, illegal conduct,
unethical conduct, unsafe conduct or any other misconduct by the
Slumber Corps organization, its employees or its volunteers.

I drop the phone as if scalded.

To honor my contract with Mr. Harkonnen,
I take the bus to make my donation at our regional Sleep Donation
Station. This month I am certain that I will be rejected at the
screening

—I have been dreaming of
Baby A nonstop, of the flutter-suck of her tiny mouth. In one
nightmare, she breast-fed from my sister, who had a saint’s face in
death, pale and sad and lit strangely from below, one green eye
eaten away.

What uglier proof of its deep pollution could my mind present me
with?

I am afraid of these dreams, which I cannot stop or change.

I am afraid that even my desire to do good will spin out of my
control, and become evil.

Orexins have been reported in Uganda, Taiwan, England. Infected
sleep was transfused in Chile. In the Mobi-Office, Jim is calling
me “baby” again, I think because it’s been a month now and I
haven’t said anything to anyone about Baby A’s exported sleep.
Sometimes I think I can feel Jim’s secret exerting a subtle gravity
in my body, like a sick second pulse. I worry that it’s warping my
dreams in ways their machines won’t uncover in time and perverting
even my conscious intentions.

At the reception window, I clear my throat.

“I think my sleep might be unusable this month, miss. I think
there is something wrong with it.”

To which an icy voice replies, “Have a seat. We’ll be the judge
of that.”

And I wonder: How many of the donors seated around me are
secretly hoping for a similar outcome? To be exposed as broken,
corrupted

—to have our impurities
discovered, under some investigator’s microscope, so that we can be
exempted from ever having to give again? “Opting out”

—Jim’s grim euphemism seems to apply here,
too. What a relief, I think, to never again worry that you might be
the one poisoning the nation’s sleep supply. Is anybody else having
this fantasy with me? I gaze around the lobby, where six of us are
waiting to learn if our dreams are healthy. One robust lady in a
Minnie Mouse sweatshirt is scribbling furiously on her clipboard;
she leans over to ask me, “Honey, how do you spell ‘piranha’?”

It takes some time to input my nightmare onto the form. Then I
have to wait even longer for them to run the database scan. At the
end of the hall, in custard-colored booths the size of library
carrels, potential donors are going over their nightmares with
staff members. I catch fragments:

“. . . a bunny-like twitchy face . . .”

“. . . and the barber had electric-green hair . . .”

“Okay!” says an administrator to her donor brightly. “You’re
good to go here, Donald!”

This is really it, I think. You are about to be banned from
donation. Greedily, I start to hope for this. It’s so sly, the way
that fears and hopes and dreams and nightmares can belly-flip into
one another. The longer I sit in the hard chair, the more I want to
be dismissed. Fondly I recall excused absences and doctors’ notes,
those pink tickets to hours of solitude. Chicken pox: one p.m. and
the green cheesecloth curtains drawn, the relief of seeing no one,
doing nothing, itching my sores in secret, breaking in my monster
skin alone.
Exempt me, exempt me
.
For reasons of
public safety, for the greater good, tell me I can go home now and
sleep for myself only.

“No,” says the attending physician, “nothing here to disqualify
you.”

She gives me a wide, patient smile, as if to suggest that she
deals with hypochondriacs like me hourly, people who believe that
their nightmares must be uniquely wretched, worse than anybody
else’s, who fall for the body’s shaky aggrandizements of its plans
and pains.

I’m incredulous: “You’re sure? You want to check the database
again?”

It’s not pure, she says, my sleep; but it’s good enough, and the
need is urgent.

“You’re still eligible to give, Mrs. Edgewater.”

So I do.

Summer greens the trees on
3300
Cedar Ridge Parkway, and I continue to donate.
For every hour Baby A gives, I give my hour. But I have the queasy
feeling every day now, like there’s nothing I can do that’s not a
betrayal of Dori, or of somebody’s dead or breathing, conscious or
sleeping, much-loved body.