Sleep Donation: A Novella (Kindle Single) (3 page)

To date, every former insomniac who regained the ability to
sleep, post-transfusion, remains fully rehabilitated. We have no
recorded relapses. No longer are these patients dependent on the
sleep of strangers. Post-transfusion, they can achieve
REM in their home bedrooms: colors of their own
freakish and individual manufacture flood their minds again, plots
spiral up, imaginary faces and animals bubble and flume: they
dream. It’s heartbreaking, of course, when this does not happen.
Some people, we now fear, might require weekly sleep transfusions
for the rest of their lives. A blank check to float their
nights.

The Slumber Corps pledges to get sleep to every insomniac “for
as long as her or his need persists.” That’s our mission statement.
Where is all that sleep going to come from, you’re wondering? Us,
too. Fiscally, it’s a bankrupting promise. Mathematically, I’m
told, it’s a future lie. In five years time, the Slumber Corps’
monumental commitment to these insomniacs may well be an abandoned
ideal, like a temple buried in the jungle. Smart people on the
Slumber Corps’ own advisory board call our pledge a “pipe dream,”
as dangerous as anything we test for at the Elmhurst, New Jersey,
sleep-processing plant. Yet we continue to make this promise to our
incurables.

On nights when sleep continues to elude me, I consult my
“zeros.” My own recruitment stats.

And when even this does not work?

On my worst nights, when my eyes are burning and dawn is two
hours away, I’ll give up on fact, give in to fantasy. I’ll shut my
eyes and pretend that Dori is receiving one of these transfusions.
They were not available, of course, when she needed them

—when she lived. Which was not so long ago, not at
all. The sun rises, and she’s home. Birdsong is twittering in the
air, proof of invisible birds. Dori is back in the world. Her eyes
open on her pillow, and they are sea green and absolutely clear.
Voided of all nightmares. No earthworm nest disturbs her now, no
crumb of boneyard dirt. Her waking is an instantaneous rebirth. Her
hair spools onto the pillowcase, happy memories are coiling in her
head, and tomorrow is laid out at her feet, a net of yellow light
and blue shadow that stretches from bedframe to door.

And then?

Written out like this, you know, it sounds a little
Frankenstein
.

Pinkly flushed, arisen, my sister startles from the room. Grape
bunches of curls spill down the back of her pajamas. She is the age
she would be today: twenty-nine.

Last July, the Supreme Court ruled that
babies could be donors, with their parents’ consent. Babies are
deep, rich wells for us. They serenely churn forth a pure, bracing
sleep, with zero adult terror corrupting it. Since the new law went
into effect, we Corps volunteers have been trying, with renewed
zeal, to sign up whole families. We’ll tap the parents’ sleep,
which is often useless to us (a fact we don’t advertise, of
course), just to get a baby’s donation. “Pump me first,” the
mothers implore, so overwrought that they vitiate their draws with
cortisone. We do not discuss this with the women

—their polluted sleep, the futility of
their generosity. We draw from parents because the experience
reassures them. Really, what the nurses are draining is these
mothers’ fear of the unknown. They wake up, refreshed, with no
memory of the draw, awash in goodwill.

Then we enroll their children in our donor program.

Four months ago, I pitched Mrs. Harkonnen at a Drive outside the
Piggly Wiggly grocery. I spotted a baby’s face pinking out of her
pretty woven papoose, and I introduced myself. Mrs. Harkonnen was
an easy convert to the Slumber Corps, crying freely at Dori’s death
story; the baby witnessed our exchange with that eerie calm babies
have, dry-eyed and blank. Was her husband with her? No? Could I
arrange to speak with him, get his signature? To dispatch a Sleep
Van, we’d need both parents’ consent.

One week later, I paid a visit to 3300 Cedar Ridge Parkway to
collect the consent forms. Mrs. Harkonnen greeted me on the porch
with a shy smile, her hands starfished out in front of her; the
nail polish was still wet. She’d remembered my name: “Trish! Come
on in.” She’d put on red lipstick, was ready with a pot of decaf.
Upstairs, the baby was crying; we’d both smiled automatically at
the sound. “My husband’s with her. He signed your papers.” She
pushed over the consent form; I saw that Felix Harkonnen’s
autograph was freshly inked. “He’s a little worried about the
procedure

—she’s our first
child, you know, he’s a very protective father.”

The note of apology in her voice unnerved me a little; this was
perhaps my first intimation that Mrs. Harkonnen was a very special
sort of donor. I’d never met a mother like this, for whom the gift
of a daughter’s sleep seemed so matter-of-fact. Why did she assume
her husband’s reluctance needed explanation?

“But I told Felix all about those poor people on the waiting
list. Why this sleep donation is so important to them. How did you
call it? A ‘life serum.’” Then she’d paused, staring intently at
me, and I saw that I’d been wrong to think this woman was in any
way naive. There was some shrewdness alive inside her kindness, a
perspicacity that thrilled and frightened me, that I did not
understand. The quality of Mrs. Harkonnen’s attentiveness caused my
whole body to prickle, as if invisible quills were lifting under my
skin. This was a surprise. For the past eight months, I’d felt
brain-dead and nerve-dead when I was not recruiting. I’d stumbled
around in a daze during the periods between our Sleep Drives, those
jagged white intervals of time, which I had formerly experienced,
in unity, as “a day.”

“Your sister. I can’t stop thinking about her.”

“Oh?”

I’d stared up at the unshaded bulb above the Harkonnen kitchen
table. Gravity can be exploited in these situations; moisture slid
into my pupils. A swimmy seepage of green light contracted back
inside the white bulb. I did not cry. Once the kitchen went matte
again, I was able to meet her eyes:

“Well, thank you, thank you very much for keeping her in mind.
My sister would be here today, if we’d had Gould’s technology . .
.”

Then my voice broke, and I had to really work to keep my grin
from stretching into something crooked and hungry; my eyes felt
suddenly dish-sized, much too large for my face. Ordinarily I only
resurrect Dori during a pitch. That’s where I feel her. But that
night I was certain that I sensed my sister’s presence in that
stranger’s kitchen. Or almost certain. I badly wanted to see you,
Dori, as you existed for Mrs. Harkonnen. Typically, my recruits
receive the story of my sister’s death day with a mixture of
sympathy and horror; many people give sleep as a kind of frightened
oblation, a way to sandbag their healthy lives from her fate; if
she “works” on them, they respond with a donation. But all most
people ever really know about my sister’s life is how she died.

My smile became natural in response to Mrs. Harkonnen’s smile as
she offered me a reheat on the black coffee, cream and
sugar

—Mrs. Harkonnen was the
kindest and gentlest inquisitor I’d ever met. Somehow she intuited
all that I could not say about my sister, and she asked me only
questions to which I possessed factual answers; I heard myself
telling stories from our Pennsylvania childhood, these shadowy
green memories of Dori that I’d never shared with any donor.

All this time, the baby had been wailing. At first I’d been
astonished by her volume. Once Mrs. Harkonnen got me talking about
Dori, however, I’d stopped noticing, until I was barely aware that
I was shouting to be heard. Then that pour of solar sound cut out.
The infant’s silence was as loud as her screams had been, at least.
We turned from the forms together, and there was Mr. Harkonnen. He
was standing at the top of the stairwell, holding the baby.

“I’ve changed my mind,” he said.

I stood, and so did Mrs. Harkonnen.

“Sit down,” Mrs. Harkonnen commanded me, suddenly steely.
“Felix, we made a promise to these people

—”

Then I went perfectly still in their kitchen, holding chilly
coffee, forgotten completely

—recruiting people to a cause, I’ve
found, often isolates you in strange spandrels, caught between a
stranger’s intersecting planes of aversion and desire; in the case
of the Harkonnens, I was a literal trespasser. “Wait here,” said
the red-eyed Mrs. Harkonnen, smiling sheepishly at me, as if she
needed only to check on something burning in the oven. I
eavesdropped on Mrs. Harkonnen woodpecker-drilling into the stout
oak of Mr. Harkonnen: “We’re doing this. We have no choice. How can
we live with ourselves otherwise? I won’t be able to live with
myself.” As they argued on the stairwell, I closed my eyes and
folded my hands on the kitchen table. I pictured a great fire
fanning out through this house, consuming all obstacles. It was
more a wish than a picture, to be honest. I’d willed the fire to
eat a pathway to a yes.

I left 3300 Cedar Parkway with two signatures.

Four nights later, I dispatched a Sleep Van to the
Harkonnens.

Baby A, on the night of that first,
successful draw, was six and a quarter months old.

None of us had any clue, at that juncture, what the techs were
about to uncover.

We shipped Baby A’s sleep to Elmhurst, New Jersey, one of our
ten processing centers. Lab technicians were amazed. Multiple tests
confirmed that her sleep had zero impurities: there were no
nightmare-markers, no native dream-antibodies. No need, whatsoever,
for the sleep of Baby A to be sieved and purified and
reconstituted.

Baby A, it turns out, is a universal donor. No body rejects a
transfusion of her sleep.

Her discovery has been called “a boon for all humanity” by Dr.
Gary Peebles. She is our dream gold mine. Banks all across the
country are on appeal for her sample. Lab techs work frantically to
synthesize it

—“artificial sleep” has
been a goal of medical researchers since the sleep banks first
started operations.

Tonight will mark our sixteenth draw from Baby A. Sixteen draws
in four months! That’s nearly half of Baby A’s life.

December, we drew twelve hours from the baby.

In January, we bumped up to thirty-six.

In February, we started drawing the max catch for her
weight.

This March, the Sleep Van has been parked on the Harkonnens’
block every week.

When the numbers of insomniacs on our waiting rolls peaked, we
were able to blend and redistribute the sleep of Baby A into
forty-eight bodies. It was national news: “Baby A Saves the
Night.”

Currently Baby A is underwriting many hundreds of lives with her
sleep donations, with no end to the crisis in sight. Who could have
guessed that an eighteen-pound infant would have that kind of
power? Who can blame Baby A’s father, for abhorring our
discovery?

When I pull up at
3300
Cedar Ridge Parkway, it’s a little after
midnight. A trio of nurses are seated in the back of the Van.
Outside the night is scintillating, calm. A basketball hoop in the
Harkonnens’ driveway keeps its monocular eye fixed on their
two-toned jalopy, a brown sedan with faded turquoise doors. Large
white flowers blossom all over the property in unlikely, untended
spots; one clump fronds out about a foot from the Chevy’s rear
tires. I tell the Head Nurse that I want to go in alone; I perform
better alone. “Are you sure, Trish?” she asks, with undisguised
relief.

My regret is nearly instantaneous.

Mr. Harkonnen is standing on the lawn.

His arms are folded over his barrel chest, and the darkness
lengthens and funnels around him. For a cold moment, I mistake
these creased shadows for a shotgun.

“Mr. Harkonnen!” I wave, throwing my hands up, crossing the
uncut grass towards him. “We’ve met. It’s Trish Edgewater

—”

“No way.”

“The Corps Recruitment Manager

—”

“Not tonight. We’re done here.”

Moonlight crosses his skin like moisture, light weeping down his
craggy cheeks. He stands under the shadows of a giant poplar. Every
time the boughs move in the wind, chunks of him go missing.

“Tonight we have a true crisis on our hands, sir

—”

“Is that so? Guess what I’ve got on my hands?”

His fists knot to form an imaginary cradle, which he swings
furiously on the air.

“I’ve got a daughter. She needs her sleep. You show up here
every goddamn week. Why can’t you find someone else’s kid to
drain?”

Etiquette is a powerful programming, however, and easily
exploitable. I sneeze. He sneezes back language at me, reflexive
generosity: “Bless you.” A space opens up; I inch closer on the
grass: “Mr. Harkonnen, can I trouble you for five minutes of your
evening? I’m asking on behalf of my dead sister, Dori
Edgewater . . .” He frowns, and I score an extra second

—a short tarmac

—but long enough for me to launch my
pitch.

Quick as I’ve ever managed it, I transition into Dori-mode.

Up I float; somewhere, far below me, I see a blur that is my
body, pitching my sister.

“Oh, my God,” he whispers when I’ve finished. “
That’s
how she died?”

I glance down at my watch: four minutes have elapsed. A new
record.

“And you’re saying if she’d had
one extra hour
of
sleep

—”

“So the coroner tells me.”

The stars above the Harkonnens’ brick roof are spinning.
Chowdery bile rises in the back of my throat, and I stare at Mr.
Harkonnen’s shoes on the grass until it sinks again. I am truly
spent, sweaty.

“Jesus.”

Mr. Harkonnen takes a step forward with his arm lifted, as if in
greeting; it falls heavily on my shoulder.

“Well, I am very sorry to hear that. Very very sorry indeed,” he
whistles.

Now things get considerably more complex; at the top of the
lawn, the front door to the house swings wide. The darkness spits
out Mrs. Harkonnen, who joins us.

“Hel-lo!” I call out, and wince with her at the volume of my
voice, which sounds deranged at this late hour with unseasonable
cheer; I wonder whether the nurses can hear any of this from the
Van.

“I’m sorry, Justine,” I blurt out. “But it’s bad.”

I count off the numbers in the ER.

I reveal how very little sleep we need to stave off tragedy
tonight. Really, a minuscule amount from a being this tiny. We will
manufacture a poly-sleep blend from it, and it will benefit
hundreds of dreamless sufferers.

“The baby is inside. Felix will get her.”

Head down like a linebacker, he shoulders past me on the grass,
clipping me with his bicep. I gasp, surprised to enjoy the contact,
even the fury behind it. It’s not unlike flirtation, a move that
blatant, deliberate.

“Thank you,” I say, addressing the wife.

“You’re welcome,” grunts the husband, parking himself on the
lawn again, like he can’t bear to let her have the last word.

For a long moment we stand in this frozen geometry, just beyond
the orange headlights of the Sleep Van. As dizzy as the stars, as
near and alone. Then Mr. Harkonnen shifts his weight so that we
form a true circle, and a strange joy sparks and catches in my
chest.

I deliver the good news to the Sleep Van.
Everybody grins with relief. Now the Sleep Van is once again an
authorized vehicle on Cedar Ridge Parkway, instead of a boxy white
shark waiting in the shallows to feast upon a baby. Nurse Carla
swings the Van into their driveway. Two nurses begin to swab the
helmet with the blue solution; a third calls Jim, beaming. I decide
to take a walk around the Harkonnens’ neighborhood; the Van is
crowded, I tend to get underfoot, and I find that I do not want to
be inside when Mrs. Harkonnen enters with the baby.

The Slumber Corps’ lifesaving operations run on the public’s
trust and goodwill. Where money is concerned, we have to be
careful. According to my bosses, we are working on establishing a
scholarship fund for Baby A. Some kind of trust in her name.
Legally, we are “just desperate,” swears Jim Storch, to finagle a
way to express our organization’s gratitude to the family for the
gift of Baby A’s sleep. But this expression of gratitude must be
made with diplomacy, sensitivity.

“It’s delicate,” Rudy tells me.

“And
muy
illegal
,” echoes Jim.

Nobody in our Mobi-Van would suggest that the raw market would
do a better or a fairer job of matching insomniacs and donors than
the Slumber Corps. None of us can imagine the solution proposed by
certain factions, “the sale of sleep,” leading to an equitable
system. Not that the Slumber Corps is a perfect matchmaker. Our
cold-calling can feel scattershot, and our dependence on strangers
to refill the dream wells is total; the Sleep Banks are routinely
on appeal for more units. You can’t program omniscience into the
hospital computers, and people die on the Corps’ wait-lists every
night. But our goal, at least, is articulable, stable, and very
clear: to get clean, deep sleep to the insomniacs. I am proud to
say that in its seven-year history, the Slumber Corps has never
rejected an insomniac for financial reasons, or requested any kind
of payment.

When I registered the Harkonnens as donors, I had no idea that
their daughter’s sleep was a miracle in progress. Baby A is still
the world’s only known universal donor. But there have been several
cases of sleep donations that can be accepted by a remarkable
percentage of insomniacs. Three years ago, sleep of a
lightning-white purity got drawn from a ninety-two-year-old Lakota
man in Laramie. Almost immediately after his discovery, he slipped
into a coma, and ever since, against the wishes of some family
members, the Wyoming Slumber Corps has been “mining him” for
sleep

—a phrase favored by the
media.

“Which is funny,” Rudy snarls, “when you consider all the
mining, drilling, and
earth-rape
they are
actually
doing in Wyoming

—and here we have this living saint,
sustaining hundreds of people with his sleep . . .”

The old man signed a contract, before losing consciousness,
stipulating that he wanted his body to be farmed for sleep until
its death. His last bequest. I admire the generosity of our Wyoming
donor, and I invoke him at Drives. But I’ve also had such vibrant
nightmares where I see the orphaned animal of his body, tethered to
Gould’s machinery by the ponytail of blue wires. Strapped onto the
cot, strapped into the helmet. The feet in socks.

Hundreds of lives have since been saved thanks to Baby A’s
donations. Many thousands more, who are wait-listed for a Baby A
transfusion, have been given an EEG-recording of Baby
A’s brain waves, transformed into an audio recording, as part of an
experimental study. There is some evidence that even this remote
contact with Baby A’s sleep might reset insomniacs’ body clocks.
All of this is well documented by our outreach videos.

But Baby A’s life would have been far better off, I’m certain,
if I’d never found her.

The Harkonnens live in a “transitional”
neighborhood

—houses that you might
call “fixer-uppers” or derelict, depending on how cheerful you are
feeling. Even light seems hesitant to enter them. Last year, many
of the rotting facades got repainted in gumball shades of pink and
lime, some misguided civic project to brighten this part of our
city. It’s a pretty superficial shellacking

—the cars and motorcycles outside are still
junkers. Lawns are covered with many octaves of weeds, shading from
crud brown to yellowy beige, and even the leafy trees seem to me to
have too many limbs, mutating away from the rooftops in a silent,
wild freedom. Several bikes knock around on their chains, an eerily
genial sound, as if the machines are gossiping. Early spring, and
this whole block smells like flowers. The heaving blossoms turn out
to be everywhere once you notice them, overflowing the rain gutters
and the sills of second-story windows, unencouraged, unsupported,
and nevertheless here once more, vivid white in the night air.
Beauty staging its coup in every suburb and slum in the galaxy.
You are lucky to be alive to see it, aren’t you,
Edgewater?
I have several canned lectures, designed to reduce
my nausea after talking about Dori, which I mentally
self-administer in Rudy’s stern voice.

Tonight I’m snuffed. Dori’s story, now in its told state,
expulsed, floats somewhere far outside of me, emitting its
jellyfish light. Sometimes her absence takes me over and then I’m a
sleepwalker. Now, for example, as I double back to the
Harkonnens.

Here they come again, the white flowers, bystanders rooted in
the bright light flowing from the Sleep Van. Bodies move with their
own sly life behind the windows, bending and straightening. For no
easily discernible reason, I am terrified to reenter the Sleep Van.
At some sore point on my revolution around the Harkonnens’ block, I
seem to have removed my name badge, my Corps Recruiter jacket. I’d
much prefer to remain a stranger out here underneath these fragrant
narcotics, the ruffling white blossoms.

I can hear the baby crying. Up ahead I see the Harkonnens'
two-toned Chevy again, brown and turquoise, the basketball hoop
with its frayed net. Underneath it, the Sleep Van is parked with
its rear doors wide open, spilling yellow light across the lawn.
Framed in the window, I see Baby A strapped to the catch-crib, her
feet tensing and relaxing like little fists.

“No, no, see the bag inflating? She’s
still breathing on her own

—”

“Get a seal on that, Carmen. Get a tighter seal on that.”

After the Harkonnen draw, we drive to the
other side of town, to get a draw from Roberta Frias. Roberta is
six and such a funny kid, chatty until the very second before the
anesthetic crests and rolls her under. She’s no Baby A. But her
sleep is remarkably limpid, a reliable match for many insomniacs.
EEGs of her first draw dazzled the nurses.
Beautiful NREM

—slow-wave, “delta” sleep, the state in which
a body repairs tissue, builds bone and muscle, strengthens its
immune system.

On the catch-cot, under the clear mask, her smile flutters and
disappears. Her mother always dresses Roberta up for a donation,
and the nurses have given up on telling her that this is
unnecessary; tonight she’s wearing a frilly yellow dress covered in
tiny gray mice and a pink hairband. Her parents are watching from
the corner of the Sleep Van, nervous and proud. Mr. Frias, a chubby
Puerto Rican pastor, taxi driver, and nervous father, a lip-biter,
gives me the thumbs-up when our eyes meet.

I don’t know how to describe the unique claustrophobia of a
sleep-draw, if you’ve never been present for one, except to compare
it to the electric, heavy feeling of air carrying seawater. A
frightening, exhilarating charge permeates the entire atmosphere of
the Sleep Van; an overpowering sense of ambient destiny, fate
crushing in on all sides. This accompanied by a nostril-flaring,
neck-prickling vertigo. What provokes this disorientation, says Dr.
Peebles, is your body’s awareness of its proximity to an enveloping
illusion

—a dream, not your own,
pumping out of a donor’s prone form. The unhosted ghosts of these
dreams in transit, en route to facilities where they will be
tested, processed, plated on ice, awaiting transfusion.
World-blueprints. Roberta, according to our monitors, is
discharging a shocking quantity of dreams. They go soaking out of
her mouth and snaking through the breathing tubes, a galaxy per
millisecond. The nurses claim not to notice the smell anymore, a
clay odor you can almost taste, which reminds me of the white frogs
we used to net from midnight ponds, the scooped and dripping
lilies.