Sleep Donation: A Novella (Kindle Single) (4 page)

Minutes four through eight, as the coils begin to heat: the
child’s fantasy is in the room with us, unexpressed in any
consciousness. Her dreams glug out of her. At the end of the draw,
the machinery makes a fantastic chortle, a sort of mechanical
blech
, and one nurse, Louisa, who is very uncomfortable
with child donation, giggles hysterically and says, “Pardon
me!”

Two days after my last call out to the
Harkonnens, Rudy Storch and I are alone in the trailer, coding for
dispatch. At
9:04
p.m., the Slumber Corps’
alert icon flashes onto our computer screens. Seconds later, Rudy
is on the phone with Washington. They want every Corps employee
present for a live broadcast, an “orientation” to some new crisis,
set to air in an hour’s time.

They’re calling it the worst scandal in the Sleep Bank’s
seven-year history.

“Oh, fuck me,” says Rudy, glued to the screen. “Get everybody
in.”

Here is what we learn in the hours that
follow:

On March
23
, a man the media is calling
“Donor Y” walked into a Sleep Bank in San Diego and asked to
register. It was his first time donating sleep. According to his
file, he is a forty-two-year-old white male, five-seven,
189
pounds,
128/67
blood
pressure, no sexual partners sharing the bed with him, no children.
He checked no on all the disqualifying boxes. Sleep apnea: no.
Sleepwalking: no. He was next handed the CDC
alphabetized list of all three hundred known contagious
nightmares

—

Abomination, horned

Ambulance, frozen yellow siren

Anthill, no queen

Ants, flesh-eating

Aorta, burst

Asteroid, green

Attic, grandmother’s ghost

Attic, padlocked toy chest

Avalanche, death of self

Avalanche, death of spouse

Avalanche, live burial

Et cetera

Donor Y checked emphatic black noes all the way down the
line.

For the past seven years, the CDC has been working
in collaboration with every local branch of the Slumber Corps to
keep a Dream Database. The CDC monitors the occurrence
of communicable nightmares in order to detect trends and to track
and investigate outbreaks of similar dreams in certain regions,
“nightmare clusters.” Odds ratios, based on logistic regression
models, are used to calculate the risk of infection from exposure
to a sick dreamer.

Donor Y self-reported clean. “Baby-like, fetal position,” was
what he wrote on his questionnaire in response to the question
“Describe your sleep posture _____.” His handwriting is neat and
evenly spaced; the only unusual thing about it is that Donor Y
wrote in tiny all-capitals, like a scream shrunken down into a
whisper. Having passed the health prescreen, he donated a
twelve-hour unit of sleep

—the legal
limit for a man his age and weight. Nothing occurred during the
draw to put the nurses on alert.

His sleep was transported to the Berkeley testing and processing
center; two days later, it was shipped to sleep banks all over the
country. The nightmare may have been undetectable by standard
testing. It may have been perfectly detectable and somehow missed
by the technicians. What is known: Donor Y’s sleep was flagged as
“healthy,” centrifugally spun, and packaged into “Sleep Blend
G-17,” an amalgam of hundreds of donations designed to
neutralize and dilute any residual impurities from single donors.
“Sleep blends” are prepared for rapid delivery to the widest
spectrum of insomniacs.

Early estimates suggested that anywhere from one thousand to ten
thousand patients might have been infected with Donor Y’s
nightmare. Within hours of the Corps alert, lawsuits are being
threatened

—the Slumber Corps is
charged with failing to adequately screen volunteer donors and test
their sleep.

“Donors are given a questionnaire about their history of sleep
disturbance,” says a spokeswoman for the Slumber Corps, Betsy
Gamberri. They dressed her in dizzy-tall stilettos and a pink
bolero with linebacker shoulder pads, as if seeking to increase her
literal stature in the medical community.

“The onus is on donors. You have to self-report your nightmares.
The questionnaire, if answered correctly, should have eliminated
him.”

“Either the donor did not know he was infected with this
nightmare or he lied,” says Dr. Peebles.

Currently, the identity of Donor Y is being kept secret from the
public

—if it is, in fact, known.
This omission stretches to accommodate the wildest theories: rumors
of sabotaged files, internal Slumber Corps conspiracies.

“Have you ever
been
to the San Diego bank, Trish?”
whispers my colleague Jeremy in the Mobi-Van. “If the guy’s file
went missing, I’m sure it was just some administrative
fuck-up.”

Jeremy does our branch’s data entry, and I guess he knows
whereof he speaks. We agree that it’s far scarier, in its way, to
think that a teenaged volunteer with bangs in his eyes, some
good-hearted college kid named Brad or Boomer, simply forgot to
scan a state ID. You can see why the theorists are
getting so much airtime. There’s something darkly reassuring about
imagining a cabal under the earth, or a government plot, or any
human scheme, to undergird the spread of his “plague dream.”

What follows is a catastrophe for the Corps beyond our own worst
institutional nightmares.

The Donor Y scandal causes a nationwide drought in all the Sleep
Banks.

People are scared to donate. Many decide that Gould’s procedure
must be hazardous. Their fear adheres to the physical apparatus:
the silver helmet, the mask and the catch-cot. Myths run rampant, a
parallel contagion:
What if you can contract a nightmare in the
Sleep Vans? What if donors, too, expose themselves to the
infection?
Other donors dread
becoming
a Donor Y.
Newscasters transmit the germ of fear to millions. The morning
news, the evening news, it’s relentless:

“Obviously, the American people have been lied to, the American
people have been misled about
the real risks
of this sleep
donation procedure . . .”

Never have I heard “the American people” invoked so many times
per hour.

The CDC assembles a task force of dream
epidemiologists.

In the Mobi-Van, we are calling around the clock, reassuring old
donors, begging. The intern jokes that he could use some bootleg
sleep himself, until Rudy roars at him to knock it off.

If you’ve ever watched people speedily disqualify themselves
from serving on a jury in a courtroom, you can imagine the
efficiency with which many of our cold calls recuse themselves.
When I announce that I am a Slumber Corps recruiter, people launch
into descriptions of their most bewildering dreams, as evidence
that they are unfit to give:

“Ma’am, I keep drowning in my own blood at night. I have the
shadow of an insect, I dreamed that. Really, I’m a menace. My
dreams aren’t right . . .”

“This one I’ve been having since childhood, I call it the
bottomless dream? The dead go spelunking into blue holes. Then for
some reason I’m in Lithuania, in a jade cave where the tornadoes
breed . . .”

“President Nixon strapped to a fire truck! Twice, I dreamed that
this month . . .”

A recent widower says: “What lugubrious facts. I regret that I
will be unable to change them for you. My wife just died, you see,
and she’s saturated my sleep like coffin milk.”

A Russian woman interrupts my scripted pitch to scream at me,
quite persuasively: “I should ask
you
, you should give
me
. Every hour I have, I need!”

It’s a crisis of faith. Donors refuse to give sleep; donees who
have spent months on our rolls are now refusing the transfusions.
Suddenly, impossibly, we must advertise to recruit the sick
ones.

We need good sleepers and we need insomniacs. To combat
attrition on two fronts, the Slumber Corps launches a new
PR campaign. The TV spots show
scrupulously groomed young couples, paragons of hygiene, holding up
their children under a pristine full moon, yawning, smiling,
waiting for their turn to donate at a Suburban Donation Station.
Behind the Van is a tract house and snail-shaped driveway. The
message: the Sleep Van comes to you. Then the camera cuts to
footage of a yellow nursery. There is zoo wallpaper, the zany
chandelier of a baby mobile. The camera floats over a crib, pans
down to a three-month-old infant’s seamless eyelid. A lavender bib
with tiny sheep rises and falls on her perfect chest, with a dreamy
evenness.

“
SLEEP LIKE A BABY AGAIN:
1-800-IMAWAKE.
”

It’s like watching food advertising for hungry mouths.

We run a local hotline. On either side of me, Yoon and Jeremy
are pouring reassurances into their telephone headsets. These
salving phrases are the antibodies engineered for us by the Corps
scientists, sets of facts to counteract the spread of doubt,
terror. And as we speak them, we try hard to immunize ourselves,
and one another, against the panic of the callers. “The Donor Y
contagion is officially contained,” I say on repeat a hundred times
a night. When I close my eyes, though, I picture a microscopic worm
nuzzling under skin, blood-rocketed through the entire organ
system.

“The needy simply do not trust us,” complains Rudy Storch.

“I can’t believe this,” says Jim, shaking his head.

Very slowly, Jim reads off the names of Last Day insomniacs who
have requested removal from our transfusion wait-list: “Rita
dropped out? Melissa Van Ness? Has everybody lost their mind?”

Reflexively, he keeps thumbing water from his eyes. Rudy has
formulated a sort of chitinous shell of sarcasm to protect him, but
I worry about Jim.

“Jesus. I mean, mistrust us, okay, think us diabolical, but let
us help you.”

I don’t tell Jim or Rudy that certain people on their staff
mistrust
them
; that we all wonder at the brothers’
motivations for pouring their fortune into the Corps.

Chief among the skeptics is Roger Kleier, the Slumber Corps
janitor. He is always recruiting our doughy new interns to share
his suspicions of the Storches. He is on payroll, he is not a
volunteer. His salary comes from the tremendous endowment made to
our regional branch by Jim and Rudy Storch. Every month, an influx
from the brothers’ coffers fills his bank account.

“You gotta be shitting me! The toilet brothers give up a
million-dollar business to work out of a trailer

—
why?
”

Roger is a naturally suspicious person. There are bodies that
reject sleep transfusion after sleep transfusion. Bodies that come
preprogrammed with evolved defenses against all foreign dreams,
that respond to even infant sleep-transfusions with a violent
immune reaction. And goodness knows, I have worked with many people
in this waking life who seem congenitally incapable of accepting
any human donation of blood, marrow, sleep, criticism, praise,
money, love. Some days, I know, I’m one of them. You find that
you’re not a match with the donor. Or you sense that the gift will
take some freedom from you. Your body rebels, maybe you don’t even
know why. But the donation is rejected.

Roger’s janitorial desire to get a clean read on the Storches,
his hostile curiosity about their motives, adds its resonance to
the chorus that pours through my headset. During Phone Shifts, I
read my updated script. I say: “The Donor Y outbreak was an
anomaly.” I say: “Sleep donation is safer at this moment than it
has ever been in history.” I say what I can say, and mean: “People
are lying awake, dying. They need your help.”

On a good night, I feel I’ve done a good thing. That donors will
continue to replenish the Sleep Banks; that the risks to them are
minimal; that the benefits to the insomniacs are incalculable,
sky-wide, as enormous as any life-in-progress.

On a bad night, this can feel like stitching an imaginary net
under a hundred wheeling acrobats. Or promising the stars they’ll
never burn out, fall. The Corps script doesn’t come with stage
directions; I could ease up a little on the doomy enthusiasm.
Politicians would retire their office before guaranteeing so many
splendid tomorrows to their voters. Men don’t lie like this to get
women into bed.

Underneath my audible solicitations, I make another request, at
a frequency far below the chittering of my transmissions to these
people, my bullshit reassurances:
P
lease let what I’m
telling them stay true, please let them be safe.

Donor Y.

Why, why.

I become obsessed with him.

Was it a case of “malice aforethought”?

This term I learned from a high school book,
Moby-Dick
:
a white whale ramming with blind hate into the hull of a boat,
trying to kill everyone aboard.

“Malice aforethought,” the teacher explained, meant the whale
could scheme, like a man, and design its revenge.

Perhaps Donor Y wanted to settle some score with the universe.
Perhaps Donor Y was tired of being an anonymous sufferer in a
crowd, and wanted to propagate his worst night. Gould’s machines
gave him a way to tattoo his private horror onto the minds of
strangers. This possibility

—an
uncomfortably arousing possibility

—gets mentioned in every news story about the
crisis. Villains sell papers. And I find that I prefer him this
way: nasty, aware.

Donor Y, when I try to picture him, never develops a face. What
I see instead is a husk, a humanoid virus, interested only in the
dissemination and replication of its own pain.

You’ve heard about that sperm donor whose single cup of swimmers
went on to sire legions of snub-nosed, blond half brothers and
sisters? Our Donor Y has inseminated thousands of dreamers with his
personal hell. He’s broadcast his nightmare to every
demographic.

Donor Y, Baby A. I picture them as opposite poles on an axis.
Donor Y, pumping out the nightmare, and Baby A, pumping out black
sleep.

I find that I badly want Donor Y to be pure as well: purely
evil.

And if he betrays me by showing up, becoming real? Just some
middle-aged guy in a sweater, with one uncommonly virulent
nightmare? This scenario, I hate: Donor Y gave no thought at all to
the possibility that he might be such a carrier. He was a sincere
do-gooder. He saw a flyer and wandered up to a registrant. An
earnest brunette administrator ran down the questionnaire with him
in the lunar-lit tent, and both of them believed that his responses
were honest.