Sleep Donation: A Novella (Kindle Single) (6 page)

You start to feel like it’s all
Ponzi.

I have to go into the Storches’ private office in the trailer,
to let the brothers administer to me:

I want to know, do they think I should do my pitch a different
way?

Jim scowls up at me from his office chair with good-natured
bemusement, as if he’s trying to locate the humor in a very bad
joke. Rudy speaks in a tone like knuckles clenching:

“The Donor Y furor is negatively affecting your pitching. Is
that the problem?”

Yes, I say. One of them.

There is micro-sleep; there is also micro-arousal. The brain’s
partial awakening. At the cerebral disco, parts of the brain are
always lighting up, going dark. I’m waking up, I tell the Storches.
When I pitch, I am in two places at once

—asleep, awake

—merged with Dori, but also observing myself
from above. There I am, far below, in a mall parking lot; I stagger
backwards as if shot. But I can also see beyond my body now, to the
faces of my recruits. I can hear the threat encoded in my pitch.
People go sheet-white, their heads shaking to the Dori-rhythms.
Children hide behind their parents’ legs, but they watch me, too,
and they know that if their parents do not give sleep, if they
“choose” not to donate, they, too, might die in this same
juddering, blood-sputtering, irremediably conscious way.

“And the problem is, what, that you feel guilty?”

I nod.

“Don’t. Problem solved.”

“It’s this Donor Y bullshit. She’s scared, Rudy.”

“What would really be a nightmare for us? If you quit pitching,
at a time when we need every minute we can get of
REM-sleep.”

Jim is pacing now, so agitated he won’t look my way.

“If a take-down of our charity was something you planned, Donor
Y?” says Jim, addressing the wavy blankness of a window. “Mission
accomplished.”

Does Jim talk to Donor Y, too? Is he the imaginary target for
all of Jim’s anger? This fills me with a great sorrowful surprise.
We have a phantom in common. I wonder how he appears to Jim, if he
is a bearded terrorist, if he is an insane person, if he is perfect
evil. Whoever he turns out to be, his dream has spawned actual
fatalities. Thirty-two “suicides” have been linked to the Donor Y
nightmare. (“Suicides” is another term being hotly debated at this
moment, since many of the Donor Y−infected appear to have scaled
ladders and jumped from catwalks and rooftops in a somnambulatory
fugue). He incubated all those deaths, not one life.

Then Rudy brightens, turning to me.

“Have you seen your zeros this month? With the Baby A
aggregates? That will be cheering. Get those percentages for her,
Jim

—”

Worse, I’ve started to hear my doubts in Dori’s voice. She was
always smarter than me, in school, outside of school. If she were
here, I would ask her what to do now. She’s not a word-talker, not
anymore, but her pressure inside my rib cage translates quite
clearly:
This is how you turn a gift into extortion.

“I think I have to try and find another way of
pitching . . .”

“Baby,” cautions Jim, “you need to calm down, now.”

“And I don’t want to terrify . . .”

“Oh,” says Rudy. “Edgewater.”

Jim’s face unpetals, revealing some depth of emotion beneath his
initial affectionate dismissal, his Storchy I’m-on-your-side smile.
Rage, I think.

“Jesus, Trish,” Jim murmurs. “We’re already so fucked here.”

Behind Jim, the trailer windows are flatly sparkling. At this
hour, they are black rectangles. It’s unnerving to look out, see
nothing.

“I hate that I’m always scaring everyone. Bullying them into
giving.”

“Don’t be. That’s not helpful.”

“That’s a waste of your talents.”

“Your energies, baby. They’re finite.”

“Take that fear and put it out there.”

“Put it
in
them

—”

“Get the hours, Edgewater. People are dying.”

“You’re one of the most valuable members of our team,
Edgewater.”

“Look: we want donors to feel good about the gift they are
making. But let’s just say, hypothetically, that they feel bad, or
scared. Does that change the quality of the gift, Edgewater?
No.”

Doesn’t it matter how you ask the question? Or if the tone of
your request is closer to a fist than to an open palm? Can the
nature of the request corrupt the purity of the gift, the donated
sleep? How stupid. How could it. A unit of sleep is a unit of
sleep, say my bosses. People have free will, they give if they want
to, don’t if they don’t.

I nod, relieved. What they say washes over me, washes in.
Oh, let i
t
, I think.
Stop making everything
wrong
.

“What better cause can you imagine?”

“Do the math on that.”

“You’re doing good work, Trish.”

“Keep up the good work, Edgewater.”

“Thanks, guys.”

This is what I want to believe, and now, with their assistance,
believe again.

When the Storches return from their
D.C. leadership retreat, they are almost
unrecognizably gung ho. In our trailer, they mandate enthusiasm for
the zillion Corps initiatives. “Field Trips” being one of
these:

49n:
“In the interests of greater
accountability, we want to show Slumber Corps’ donors the direct
impact of their sleep donations.”

Proposed venues: the regional sleep banks; the sleep hospices;
our downtown hospital, where donors can visit Ward Six, Orexins,
and Ward Seven, Elective Insomniacs.

“I vote Ward Seven,” says Rudy. He uses that verb as a courtesy,
as if we have equal say in the matter. “You chaperone, Edgewater.
We want the Harkonnens to meet the electives.”

“We’re allowed up for that? Non-family?”

“It’s all arranged. It’s a Meet and Greet. You introduce Justine
and Felix to the Baby A wait-list.”

“That way, you know, obverse-reverse? They’ll understand
exactly
what Baby A’s sleep means to these people.” Jim
beams at me. “Show them. She’s a miracle. She’s the best hope for
these electives.”

Rudy adds, “Don’t fuck it up.”

“Right,” I say.

Rudy lends me his Prius.

The Harkonnens are standing on their lawn when I arrive.

Nobody sits next to me.

Somehow, I got it into my head that Mrs. Harkonnen
wanted
to meet the electives. That she had a maternal
curiosity about these people wait-listed for her daughter’s sleep.
So it’s a shocker when Mrs. Harkonnen in her pretty new dress, with
its flouncy hemline, the pink and blue flowers, turns from Mr.
Harkonnen to me in the boss’s car and says, “You might have to hold
my hand, both of you.”

“She’s afraid,” Mr. Harkonnen translates. When he’s forced to
talk to me now, whatever he says, it’s like a hoof stirring turf:
red blood floods his face. We’ve known each other for four months,
me and Mr. Harkonnen. He has never suggested that I call him
Felix.

“I’m not afraid, Felix. I just don’t want to embarrass
anybody.”

She undoes her seat belt. I hear the click, I panic.

We’re still three miles from the hospital, I tell Justine.

Then she wraps her arms around my headrest, launches forward in
a whisper:

“Trish? I do worry that I might get a little emotional.”

“Emotional?”

And in the seconds and minutes that follow, I start to realize
how wedded I’ve become to my fantasy of this woman. To me, she is a
superhuman. Freakishly calm, freakishly generous, freakishly
strong, in her opaque convictions. I check the rearview for
confirmation of this impression. In the backseat, Justine’s face
looks grainy-white, her shoulders slump. Her face is terrified.

I park the Prius in the Visitor Lot. Ward Seven may be new, but
the Visitor Lot looks unchanged to me. There’s a Honda in my old
spot, in the shade of the lone tree; years ago, I tell Justine,
that’s where I liked to park when I came here to see Dori.

Ward Seven opened without ceremony, no ribbon-cutting, a week
after the mass-infection of Flight
109
.
Seventy-nine people in our city received transfusions of the
tainted sleep. Seventeen of them now do their sleeping here. These
people have checked themselves into Ward Seven because they are
terrified of falling into the dream, and too frightened to sleep at
home. They badly want to live; and so, with the aid of hypnotics,
under the doctors’ supervision, they get sent back into the hell of
the REM-cycle. It’s an unspeakably brave act, say the
sleep doctors who work with this population. To ask for that help.
To accept the monstrous costs. “Do I wake up rested?” I heard a
patient laugh bitterly on the radio. “Are you crazy? Every night is
a rematch with his nightmare. But they tell me if I don’t dream at
all, I’ll die.” In the Mobi-Van, we have photocopies of several of
the Ward Seven electives’ authorization forms, to show our donors.
It’s very moving to me, to see their signatures on the
consents.

On Ward Seven, there is a glass partition.

“Look at them,” Mrs. Harkonnen breathes.

The room behind the glass is so dark, it takes a moment to see
what’s caught Mrs. Harkonnen’s eye. Short beds bracket the shadows.
Orderlies walk along the aisle, misting the patients’ heads like
cabbage rows, attaching the electrodes that will monitor their
sleep. These patients are also research subjects, who submit
nightly to polysomnography, who offer up their infected sleep for
study.

Staring into Ward Seven, we sway slightly, as if we are out to
sea.

“My heart is really pounding,” murmurs Mrs. Harkonnen. So Mr.
Harkonnen and I draw around her like parentheses. We each take a
hand. Justine turns her blue eyes from Felix’s face to mine with an
almost animal faith; the look of a leashed creature who presumes
she’s being led somewhere for a reason. It’s the same look,
incidentally, that the patients are giving the orderlies.

This Field Trip, I decide, was a terrible idea. I don’t like the
firing-squad ratio of thin dreamers to burly male orderlies. I
don’t want to watch these poor people go dark, or see anyone get
pillow-smothered by the doctors’ hypnotics. I can’t stand the
thought of the Donor Y dream slinking through them, awaiting its
opportunity to flash into reality. Despite everything I know about
the nightmare’s transmission, and the “Facts, Not Fears” campaign;
despite the reverb of my own voice chanting panic-antidotes into
the blue Corps telephones; despite what I publicly avow to believe
about the “contained” contagion, and the humble, human origins of
the Donor Y nightmare-prion? I am grateful for this glass. Out
here, we’re safe. We are moated by health.

“We’re just going to watch them?” says Mr. Harknonnen. “Like the
bears in the damn zoo?”

“I guess so.”

I think we’re all relieved to be on this side of the Ward Seven
partition.

When I was a kid, when I was the “good sleeper” in our family,
I’d lie on my back and cramp with a wretched pleasure, knowing my
sister was awake, and feeling with delicate, bird-footed certainty
that my own eyelids would soon flutter, and I would be off. This I
labeled “the bad-bad feeling.” It was my relief, and what I can now
identify as the baseless smugness of the healthy. I loved my
sister, but by age nine I’d learned already to hedge that love with
revulsion, afraid that I would catch her problem.

“Miss Edgewater!” A taffy-pull of an Indian man, six-foot-seven
and El Greco thin, comes flapping down the hallway. “And these must
be the famous sires of Baby A!” Mrs. Harkonnen giggles nervously.
He introduces himself as Dr. Glasheen, a Fellow at the National
Sleep Bank. “Okay, thanks for waiting. Had to get you folks in the
system. Here are your bracelets. We’re going in.”

Dr. Glasheen hits a button. The glass partition begins to
retract into the wall.

Here is what it feels like, to visit Hell at Dusk. Park your
boss’s Prius outside this county hospital. Step into Ward Seven’s
Sleep Incubation Chamber: the warm dark swallows you. A few orange
and purple sconces are the only illumination. This darkness feels
placental, as if we are in some marsupial pouch. Shadows as
life-support. The room is powdered with intelligence; the patients
are awake. You can feel their eyes on you, even if you can’t see
them. Orderlies are now going from bed to bed, bending over the
lumpy shadows that I know will turn into people, when our eyes
adjust. Administering shots. “Dusking” them. Knocking these people
out, at their request.

This is the latest med-slang for the electives’ group sedation,
explains Dr. Glasheen to Justine Harkonnen. Dr. Glasheen has
usurped me as the Chaperone. He directs us to Bed One. Arm in arm,
the Harkonnens follow him while I trail behind, walking pigeon-toed
to hush the squeaking of my soles.

The first elective we meet is a black woman in her late forties,
Genevieve Hughes. Upon seeing Dr. Glasheen, her entire face
changes. After a second, she manages a thin smile. Politeness
overrides the gleam of terror in her eyes. But I gather from the
reaction of other electives around us that the tall doctor must
inspire this reflexive fear wherever he goes on Ward Seven, which
makes sense given his role here, Dr. Glasheen, the Sleep Enforcer,
King of Needles.

Genevieve Hughes’s eyes are like empty bowls that you want to
fill with food. How has she lost so much weight and hair already?
At home, she says, it got to where she was plucking out her
eyelashes to stay awake, even as every cell in her body demanded
sleep. Her husband drove her to the hospital. He begged her to
enlist in the Ward Seven group sleep therapy program. “Live,” he
said. (Hearing this, I feel a pang of, what, envy maybe

—because that is one beautifully succinct
pitch, Mr. Hughes.) With obvious effort, Genevieve directs a
grateful smile at Dr. Glasheen, even as she grips the bed’s
guardrails with both hands, as if to avoid recoiling further from
the man. Without Dr. Glasheen’s help, she says, she could not bear
to face the dream again.

Before her contagion? Genevieve tells us she runs the downtown
cineplex with her husband. We all nod excitedly

—everyone present has seen a Saturday matinee
at her theater, and dreamed in tandem with dozens of other
moviegoers. When Dori and I were growing up, this theater was a
rat-infested death trap, but the Hugheses have since rehabbed the
lobby into an Arabian palace that serves Milk Duds. “Oh!” says Mr.
Harkonnen, pleased. “I know where that place is! My wife, before
she was my wife, I took her to your theater, ma’am.” And even Dr.
Glasheen cracks the brown egg of his face to smile. “I used to love
scary movies, myself,” says Genevieve, “before the insomnia kicked
in.” In April, she received the tainted sleep transfusion. Two
nights later, the nightmare appeared inside her. Dr. Glasheen is
smiling vacantly, checking his watch out of the squeezed corners of
his eyes. The Harkonnens are now staring at Genevieve Hughes with
frank, unsettled expressions. As she describes her elective
insomnia, Genevieve keeps dragging down her lower eyelids with her
index fingers, revealing the pink mucosal rims (a common habit
among electives, we learn from Dr. Glasheen, who calls his
patients, not without affection, “scab-pickers of vision”). She
seems unaware that she is doing this. She yawns, sneezes.

“Bless you!” yelp the Harkonnens.

“You cannot catch her nightmare,” mouths the doctor to us, in
the sort of public whisper that reduces everyone to children.
Genevieve looks down at her blanket.

“We know that,” says Mr. Harkonnen, in his regular speaking
growl.

Then Dr. Glasheen introduces Felix as “Baby A’s dad.”

Genevieve jumps. Her face blazes with some fever of hope.

“Oh! When we first heard they’d found a cure, my husband and I
cried! I’m on the wait-list; they tell me it’s another five months
yet . . .”

Mr. Harkonnen grunts softly.

Mrs. Harkonnen pulls out mall studio portraits of Baby A to show
her. There’s Baby A arranged on a stuffed rainbow, a stuffed
unicorn, a dirty pegasus. Apparently, the sadist mall photographer
is also some kind of fairy-tale taxidermist. Baby A stares out at
us from the wallet-sized glossies with her implacable blue
eyes.

“And you’re the mother?”

“I’m her mother.”

The women study one another. Justine’s eyes are golf-ball white
compared to Genevieve’s sunken yellowish ones. The glow produced by
the wall sconces seems almost animate, flickering erratically
around the room. After Dusking, Dr. Glasheen tells me, they will
extinguish even these.

We are all being very disciplined about focusing on Genevieve,
and not the other patients around us, some of whom have begun to
babble to Dr. Glasheen that they do not want to be sedated, that in
fact they would like to be discharged from the hospital.

“After sundown,” he complains to me, “they act like
I’m
Donor Y coming for them. They deny they ever requested sedation. I
show my patients their signatures on the consents, and they act
like it’s forgery. Dusking time, and suddenly nobody recognizes
their own handwriting.”

And this is exactly what happens. Dr. Glasheen excuses himself
to help the orderlies. Many of the electives cower at his approach.
They seem to have developed a spontaneous amnesia, robbed by their
foreboding of the Donor Y nightmare of their earlier daylit desire
to sleep, and live.

Mr. Harkonnen brought a ball cap along just as a stress-prop, it
seems. He keeps twisting it in front of his waist, wringing
imaginary sweat from the brim.

“I hate Donor Y!” Mr. Harkonnen explodes.

Do you know that I smile? I do. Gotcha, Felix.

Genevieve murmurs something, softer than orange juice sucked
through a straw; around us, the Dusking commotion drowns out all
sound.

“What’s that, Mrs. Hughes?”

We all lean in.

“I don’t hate him. I feel terribly, terribly sorry for him, this
Donor Y. He had to see these things alone, for who knows how
long?”

Genevieve shakes her head, with that strangely paternalistic
attitude the sick sometimes take towards the healthy, as if she’s
preemptively forgiving us for what we’re too young to understand.
Youth being gauged in this chamber as distance from the Donor Y
nightmare. Then she’s gone.

All around us, people are exiting the room. Their bodies stay
visible, but their eyes flutter and shut. Dusked, they lean back
against the blue sheets. Many scream before they vanish. They claw
at Dr. Glasheen. And I’m thinking,
C
ontrol yourselves,
we’re watching
. And I’m thinking:
D
octors, are
you hearing this? Adjust the goddamn medication
. And I, too,
am shaking, with an out-of-nowhere anger. Not until the entire
bedroom has gone quiet do I relax my grip on Justine’s arm. Mr.
Harkonnen has got her other hand.