Sleep Donation: A Novella (Kindle Single) (11 page)

Breaking news: Donor Y has been
discovered by the authorities. He flew into SFO from
Oahu and was apprehended by a customs agent. His image is splashed
everywhere. In his passport photo, Donor Y looks so ordinary: he’s
got a crew cut, a square jawline, brown eyes. All the obvious
symmetries. Acne scars swirl over his cheeks like just-audible
music. It’s the kind of face that can be forgotten instantly, or
easily digested into any crowd. From his bland expression, you
would never assume this person could gestate and host the most
virile, lethal nightmare in the world’s history. His name has still
not been released.

According to preliminary reports, this man claims he had no idea
that he was infected with a nightmare at the time of his donation.
He is pleading innocent to the charges that he deliberately
sabotaged our nation’s sleep supply. He agrees to a polygraph test
and insists that he has never had the nightmare himself. He’s been
sleeping soundly, apparently, for months. So Donor Y may turn out
to be exactly what I feared the most: a good soul. Another human
capsule, as clueless as the rest of us about his mind’s
contents.

“Please help me,” I say when she answers
the door. “Is Felix home?”

“Trish!” she mouths silently. Pantomiming, which means the baby
is sleeping. “Oh dear, what’s wrong? Don’t worry.”

She hugs me on the front porch, and I hug her back, for a length
of time that would feel unnatural with anybody but Justine
Harkonnen. I try to record, to preserve in my skeleton, in my
muscle memory, exactly how this feels. I figure there’s a real
chance that thirty minutes from now I’ll be back on the lawn.
Ousted from the Harkonnens’ lives for good, or even, it’s occurred
to me, in the back of a police car

—didn’t we steal their child’s sleep for
profit? Felix must be home

—the
turquoise and brown car is baking in the sun. Strays weave around
its tires like material shadows. There is a universe where I never
tell the Harkonnens what I know about Jim. Or how I tried to use my
dead sister, like tongs, to get something supple and alive out of
them. I rest my head on Justine’s shoulder; instinctively, her hand
flies up to pat my back. A driver in a passing car might think we
are dancing in place. Through the doorway, I can see Mr. Harkonnen
rocking Baby A, who is sleeping for herself this afternoon. Only
her head pokes out of the sling, which makes Abigail look like the
crinkled face in the moon. Deep inside me, I feel Dori stirring,
her dead eyes opening to peer out through mine. Dori, in life, was
honest “to a fault,” as they say. She’s dead, I mostly believe
that, but we all pray, don’t we? To ourselves, if not to some
provident Eye in the clouds.

In the doorframe, Mrs. Harkonnen is smiling, shining, with that
innocence that we of the Slumber Corps love and abhor in her. With
those wide-sky eyes, all blue, and a faith that precedes knowledge,
Mrs. Harkonnen ushers me into her home. She says in a whisper, so
as not to wake her baby daughter, “Come in, Trish. Whatever’s
wrong, we’ll get to the bottom of it. I’m sure we can figure this
out.”

The good news, or the mixed news, it
might be fairer to say, is that I will not be performing this
information-transfusion for the first time.

Last night, I called the hotline. Actually, I called the hotline
about a hundred times. I couldn’t speak, and I couldn’t speak, I
lost track of how many times I dropped the call, and then the
seventieth or the eleven hundredth time that I dialed this hotline,
for no reason I was able to discern, I heard myself begin.

After the phone clicked down, I woke up to what I’d done.

Maybe I will take that leave of absence now, after
all
.

I slumped, cored and cold, the way I used to feel after Drives.
I sat watching the gray phone where it levitated on the wall, but
no human from the Corps called me back; I wonder who picks up these
messages.

All that dial tone I ingested must have come roaring out of me.
To get the whole thing across properly, with all its nuances, I had
to call back several times, resuming where I’d left off. When I
finished, the scraped white moon was out. Near the end of my
transmission, I heard myself, insanely, thanking the chittering
machine for recording so much tape, and I felt a quakey relief,
thinking that at last I was rid of it, that events would now rush
to meet us, but at least I’d been honest, or as honest as I could
be, starting with my first association with the Harkonnens. I
leaned my head against the wall, listening to the droning silence.
I exhausted myself with speculations about whether I’d set the
wrong or the right outcome in motion. Unsurprisingly, last night I
couldn’t sleep. I wondered what, if anything, would happen as a
result of the phone call

—if even now
some dream or nightmare was massing into our future, gathering like
weather, becoming real. But I also thought, with the sly old
happiness,
No matter what tomorrow brings, you can be sure
of
at least
one thing, Edgewater: tonight you’ve
given Dori’s story to a stranger.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters,
organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either
products of the author’s imagination or used
fictitiously. 

SLEEP DONATION. Copyright © 2014 by Karen Russell. All
rights reserved. Published in the United States of America. No part
of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address
Atavist Books, 555 West 18th Street, New York, New York
10011.

ISBN: 978-1-937894-28-3

• Art Direction and Design: Chip Kidd
  
• Illustrations: Kevin Tong