Sleep Donation: A Novella (Kindle Single) (7 page)

Some electives clench and grind their jaws with closed eyes,
giving them a constipated look.

Some take on a magenta cast, as though their skin is being
glazed from within by a barbecue brush

—fluctuating body temperature, says the
unworried orderly. Dr. Glasheen is explaining something to us about
the physiological differences between natural versus induced sleep,
although nobody is paying attention. His hands, I notice as he
gestures at their bodies, look big enough to juggle pumpkins. I
wonder what he dreams about, off-shift. I wonder if he wouldn’t
like to lift his patients’ scalps, and scoop the terrible vision
out of them. Mr. Harkonnen and Mrs. Harkonnen are frowning down at
the vacated faces on the pillows like parents at a swim meet,
trying to glimpse the divers’ bodies under the froth of bubbles as
they glide away.

“She won’t enter REM-sleep for another ninety
minutes,” he tells them.

Mrs. Harkonnen’s blue eyes are shining-wet.

Mr. Harkonnen says, “There ought to be some way to arm them, you
know. Send them back into this asshole’s nightmare with a handgun,
some protection. It’s not fair.”

“It’s not fair,” agrees Dr. Glasheen, with the worn-smooth voice
of someone whose expectations have all been filed away by the
nightly emery of his hospital duties.

In the last bed, a woman has somehow managed to Houdini out of
the elastic beige restraints and her green paper gown. Now she’s
lying naked on top of the sheets, snoring lightly. She’s fallen
asleep on her back with her pale feet crossed at the ankles. A fine
sweat glistens all over her body, so that she looks like a melting
icicle.

Four a.m., in the morning after Ward
Seven.

Can’t sleep. Can’t sink into sleep.

My diet of zeros doesn’t seem to be working anymore.

Something else to hate you for, Donor Y.

I want to learn Baby A’s name.

This desire has been growing in me for days now, spiking with
the Donor Y crisis, and tonight I feel crazed with it

—actually feverish. Donors under the age of
eighteen are assigned a letter at random, an “Alpha-Nym,” by our
system. Most parents slip up at some point, blurt out their child’s
full name. Not the Harkonnens. “Baby A,” they say smoothly, tucking
her true identity into this blanket. Mrs. Harkonnen may well have
told me her daughter’s name at our first meeting in the grocery
store parking lot, but I didn’t know to pay attention back
then.

As crazy as it sounds, I keep feeling that if I knew her true
name, I could protect her better. I’ve heard strangers refer to
“Baby A” as if she is some inorganic compound, a designer sleep
drug. All night, people dial the hotline and beg me to get them
wait-listed for the “Baby A cure.” Anyone in America who has a bad
dream calls in, which means the phones never stop ringing. I go
hoarse shouting down their doubts: No, I say, the helmet is safe,
the tubes are sterilized. No, there is zero chance that you will
contaminate the nation’s sleep supply, as he did. I promise my
recruits that the Donor Y crisis has precipitated important policy
changes, exhaustive safety rubrics for the Sleep Vans, expensive
rounds of testing for nightmare-prions. All this public paranoia, I
say, obscures the statistics: sleep donation has never been
safer.

I don’t feel great about this, myself.

“How
do
we really know it’s safe for these people to
donate?” I ask Jim and Rudy.

“We don’t know.”

“We can’t know.”

“That kind of epistemic murk is unavoidable, Edgewater.”

“Error, of course, is inevitable in some proportion of the
cases.”

“We should describe the Donor Y tragedy as a freakish
exception

—which it is.”

“But it’s unrealistic to expect perfection from any human
institution, Trish.”

“And from any human, period.”

“You know this.”

Boy, do I.

“We need to accept the world as it is, honey, not as we wish it
to be,” Jim says, with a self-regarding puff on the “wish” and the
“be.” Jim, I’m told, was a theater major at his Midwestern college.
It means he underscores statements he actually does believe with
some of the gayer accents.

But the need is quantifiable, uncontestable, and growing. People
are drowning in light, fully awake. Children are propped on
pillows, foaming soft sounds, singing a terrible music without
words. We show videos of them at Drives, which get incredible
sleep-yields. Moms who see it are ready to strip down in the
nearest Sleep Van and give us five years of sleep on the spot. Some
of the youngest orexins became insomniacs at age two; they have no
memories of sleeping. Cued by some off-screen producer, these
obliging, dying toddlers tell the large blank eye of the camera
that they do not remember dreaming one night in their lives. Sleep:
What is that?

These children live in a state of conscious terror, their school
days exchanged for a noonlit netherworld. The Sleep Banks in
Virginia, Florida, and Oregon are dried out. So I keep calling.

At a little after midnight, my voice gives out. The office
trailer is equipped with a Murphy bed, what I think of as the
whipped cream of beds, sprouting whitely from the wall. I pull it
down.

“Working late?”

It’s just me and Jeremy in here now. Everyone else left hours
ago.

Jeremy is our vacuously optimistic male secretary, who wears his
hair in a carroty Afro and has dozens of chunky rings and ear cuffs
and basically looks like a warlock in denim. He is a sweetheart. He
does this job for no pay. He looks our recruits in their eyes when
he thanks them, and piles wool blankets near the feet of the
unconscious donors. When the nurses start a draw, he flinches for
them. He donates sleep himself. Since the crisis began, Jeremy’s
given half a year of his life:
4,392
hours

—he grins proudly

—which is far in excess of the legal limits;
Rudy or Jim must be pulling strings for him to give so much, on a
regular basis. Somebody needs to cut him off now. If you give
beyond your sleep recharge threshold, push beyond the body’s
natural limits, you’ll suffer the same consequences of sleep loss
that afflict our insomniacs: cognitive impairment, physiological
exhaustion, collapse. Jeremy stumbles around the trailer like a
zombie some mornings, zoinked from a nine-hour draw.

I realize that he is hovering in front of the door, glancing
back at me with a look that is totally unlike Jeremy, full of cagey
apprehensiveness.

“You’re sleeping here?”

“I am.”

“Want a tuck-in?”

I do.

“Just let me brush my teeth,” I mumble.

He hits the lights.

It’s been years since I’ve done anything resembling ordinary
socializing. For most of my colleagues at the Corps, this is so. We
joke that the insomnia crisis has ruined our sex lives

—we don’t have time to sleep with anyone
recreationally, we’re too busy begging for sleep on the phone.

I listen under the sheets as Jeremy unzips his jeans near the
door, wriggles out of them. Tiny woodsprite eyes litter the
darkness, red and green

—just the
office electronics. No true darkness left in the modern world, some
Luddites complain, fingering light pollution as the root of the new
insomnia. Jeremy, a wiry shadow, lowers his full weight onto the
Murphy, which whinnies on its springs; this Murphy bed turns out to
be an expert ventriloquist of naked bodies. He gives me a nip on my
bare neck. Then a consulting kiss, salty and quick. Jeremy’s hands,
which are so warm, move under my clothing with a confidence that
suggests he has been in touch with some of our colleagues about my
amenability.

One thing the Corps has taught me is that my needs are quite
common. I have become much more forthright about disclosing them.
Shameless, I guess you could say, although I still have a vestige
of girlhood modesty, and would prefer the word “honest.” And I am
perfectly willing to make a gift-in-kind to my peers, when their
complementary need arises. After-hours Jeremy turns out to be a
very different quantity than the quiet male secretary who brings
baby carrots for lunch and sneezes in sunlight. He, too, is
suddenly quite candid about what his body requires from my body.
This is our training. Most of our time is spent asking strangers
for donations.

There are, of course, no consent forms to sign for this kind of
transfusion. No nurses to adjust the fit or monitor its
progress.

“Perhaps there is some equivocation on the part of the lady?”
Jeremy says at one point, with a frightfully sad tact.

“No, no, I

—this is as wet as
things ever really get, honey,” I whisper. “Under these
conditions . . .”

I slide my hips forward on the mattress. After that, we manage
beautifully, me and this hungry silhouette who is my friend
Jeremy.

“Sorry,” he sighs afterwards, licking our sweat from my neck.
“That was too quick.”

I shake my head

—it wasn’t. Any
longer would have been, for me, an almost unbearable exposure to
the self-eradicating bliss of servicing and being serviced, all at
once. It’s a rare transfer wherein both bodies get to be donor and
recipient and recipient and donor. We are stroking each other’s
knuckles now, side by side on the Murphy.

Jeremy sits up and swings his legs over the bed’s edge. He
doubles over into a faceless hill, feeling around the floor for the
shed skins of his socks, his T-shirt.

“Stay?” I blurt out.

This in stark violation of the contract.

“Oh, God, Trish, I

—”

“No, sorry, I’m not thinking clearly, it’s gotten so late.
Go

—” I hand him his missing sock,
give a little push. “You need a good night’s sleep.”

Jeremy cocks his head at me for a confusing moment; then he
squeezes my hand and stands, hobbles towards the trailer exit.

“Thank you,” we say at the same time, and my whole body heats
up.

“Get some rest, girl.”

After I hear his car drive off, I turn the lights back on.

You know, I’m afraid that working for the Corps may be
irreversibly perverting the way I evaluate human exchanges.
Now
who is the donor, the donee? I’ll wonder, watching a
high school couple kiss at the mall. Are they a match? Will their
transfusion be a success? What songs are the corporations piping
into her body? I’ll ask myself on the city bus, watching the female
driver’s long neck tense and relax as she receives rhythm
transfusions via her fuchsia earbuds.

The Storches’ “office” within the trailer is a locked shed on
wheels annexed to the main vehicle. It’s a wonder that the two
inventors of ergonomic johns can function in such a comfortless
space.

Quite easily, with the key I copied two years ago, I enter Jim
and Rudy’s inner sanctum. It smells like Pine-Sol and cinnamon
chewing gum.

On my knees, I go sleuthing for her records.

“Harkonnen, Baby A

—”

The Storches keep hard copies of important documents in an
old-school filing cabinet, school-locker gray, the ichthyosaur of
the modern storage world. (“Everything is, of course, also in the
cloud,” I’ve overheard Rudy reassuring visitors, which is a very
disorienting and mystical statement, out of context.)

Hunting her name, I come across a stack of letters addressed to
Jim. On impulse I read one. I read the whole batch. They are more
frightening to me than the Donor Y nightmare. I read through them
twice, my eyes blurring and uncrossing; I feel a funny pang,
imagining Jeremy home in his bed. It’s three a.m. Who am I supposed
to call now? I lift the phone to dial the Harkonnens, hang it back
on the receiver. I stare at Dori’s photographs on the Slumber Corps
pamphlets, a stack of hundreds, and start to cry.

The following morning, Jim calls me into
his office. How much can you age in one day? Wrinkles I’ve never
seen before are now tractor-gouged across his forehead. We stare
across his desk, his gray eyes regarding mine with a strange calm:
it’s a gaze that feels prehistoric, entirely shorn of seven years
of respect and affection. I stare back. For just a moment, I get
this aerial sense of what might happen next, like the view from the
top of the roller coaster. This is power, I realize. Jim’s career
is in my hands.

Then Jim surprises me by speaking first.

“So. Who are you planning to tell?”

All night, I rehearsed for this confrontation; I’d assumed that,
as Jim’s accuser, I would lead.

“Who told you that I know?”

“Cameras, Trish. You don’t think we have cameras in here?”

Cameras? Blood rushes to my face.

“You saw what we

—what me and
Jeremy . . .”

Horrifyingly, Jim grins.

At dawn I stripped the Murphy bed and folded it back into the
wall; the sticky sheets are bunched in a bag at my feet, to be
smuggled out of the trailer after sunset. I wonder how many of the
dozens of donations I’ve taken and offered on the Murphy bed have
been witnessed by Jim, or Rudy.

“Jim, I’m sorry,” I hear myself apologizing. “I shouldn’t have
gone through your things

—”

“We trusted you.”

“I only wanted to know Baby A’s name

—”

“My God, Trish. I would have told you that.” Jim, who is never
angry, is fury-mottled, his entire neck splotched crimson. “Now
look what you’ve done

—you’ve
threatened our entire organization.”

Her name is Abigail. Abby Harkonnen. I’m not the only one who
knows this. There are merchants in Japan who have been purchasing
units of her sleep from Jim, for a dollar sum that left me reeling.
The first correspondence with the Japanese sleep merchants occurs a
mere two weeks after Baby A’s inaugural donation; most of the catch
from her third and fourth draws got sold to a Tokyo lab. It’s
unclear from the letters who else might have been involved, or how
Jim managed to smuggle her sleep out of the country. I have no idea
what, if anything, Rudy might know; these letters were signed by
Jim. According to one contract I found, assuming I read the thing
right, Jim made in excess of two million dollars for the sale of
Baby A’s sleep.

How dare you

—
I know this
is a moral anachronism. A phrase sad and silly, excerpted from an
era of bygone incredulity, from a black-and-white movie; and yet
for hours last night, alone on the Murphy bed, these were the only
three words I could think.

“So now we have a real problem, Trish.”

“Wait a sec

—
I’m
the one
in trouble? Jim.” My voice comes out in a child’s whisper. “Why did
you do this?"

“Their team approached me. They’ll clone her sleep before we
manage it, I guarantee it. They are working to make an artificial
injectable right this second.”

“All that money

—”

“Went right back into our organization. Nothing traceable to us,
or to the Harkonnen baby. Anonymous donations,” he says smoothly,
and I don’t know whether to believe him.

“But the Harkonnens,” I try again.
Jim? Where have you
gone?
What I want, impossibly, is to blow the whistle on Jim
to
Jim; to appeal to my “real” boss, who would surely be
appalled to learn what this doppelgänger monster who has stolen Jim
Storch’s face and name has done.

“We’re not hurting anybody, baby.” Now he’s speaking in the
soothing voice I love, the voice of yesterday-Jim, as if responding
to my mental summons. Somehow this familiar tone makes me feel much
worse. Queasily, I stare at my hands splayed on Jim’s desk.

“Only a portion of her donations has gone overseas. The rest, as
you know better than anybody, we’ve distributed in this
country.”

I’m grinding down so hard my jaw is pulsing.
An artificial
injectable.
How much money does he stand to gain, I wonder, if
the Japanese team succeeds?

He tries a different tack.

“Trish, weren’t you and Dori raised religious? Do you know the
parable of the loaves and the fishes? The mustard seed, the parable
of the talents?”

When he sees my blank face, he shrugs.

“Forget it. We grew up Irish-Catholic. Look: I took the
Harkonnen gift, and I
multiplied it
. Can you imagine what
it will make possible if they synthesize her sleep? In the grand
scheme, the benefits that accrue to every living person will be
extraordinary.”

My head has been shaking
no
, I realize, possibly since
this conversation began.

“But I’ve been telling her parents that her draws go straight to
the National Sleep Bank. That we need every drop of her sleep to
save lives

—”

“So you know,” he snaps, as if he’s lost his patience with a
delinquent student. “Who do you plan to tell?”

“Jim. We have to

—”

Now it’s my turn to pause, self-startled. From the lump in my
throat, I discover that I am unready to separate from our “we,” not
yet, or to evict Jim from that pronoun. For seven years, we’ve been
a team. And Jim loves my sister, her, the missing person, not just
what she does for our organization, I feel very certain of
that.

“Did you keep some of the money?” I say abruptly.

“Listen, Trish, we cannot control for every variable. Human
greediness . . . it’s not even necessarily a bad thing, in my
opinion.”

Jim seems to round some bend in his own mind; without warning,
like the sun breaking through clouds, he is smiling almost
wistfully down his long nose at me.

“Maybe it’s just what we mean when we say ‘a necessary evil.’
Look at the population we serve. Any one of the insomniacs, at any
time, could choose death. Some do, as you know. The ones who get
their name on our wait-lists want to sleep because they want to
live. They are greedy, greedy, greedy for relief, more life.”

Jim is a better recruiter than Rudy. I watch his gray eyes go
mock-ingenuous behind his glasses. He quits trying to bully me.

“It’s your choice, of course.” He steeples his long fingers, his
smile now one of rueful contemplation. I can no longer tell what is
genuine, what is performance; perhaps Jim shares my confusion.

“Jim

—”

“I’m just urging you to think about the consequences of your
actions.
My
life will be over, of course

—it will kill me, frankly, the scandal. But
let’s not talk about my life; that’s quite irrelevant to the big
picture. Instead, Trish, I’d suggest you think about the suffering
people on our wait-lists. The media will be all over us. Look at
the disruption from Donor Y, the damage
he’s
caused!”

I nod.

“The fines will be astronomical. Our public image will never
fully recover. Without the goodwill of the public, what do we run
on? Trish, I know that you are smart enough to understand why it
was necessary to give these foreign researchers a crack at
achieving synthesis. But the media is going to crucify me, they
don’t give a damn who they hurt, and listen, there will be a run on
the sleep banks like something out of the Great Depression. People
will die, no doubt. Laws might be overturned

—infant donations could become a thing of the
past. We will certainly never draw from Baby A again if you turn me
in.”

“What if you just . . . confess, Jim. Apologize, resign.”

Jim shakes his head at me so slowly, with a maddening air,
affectionate and severe, like a father denying his daughter a
poisoned apple.

“I know that would make things more comfortable for
you
.”

“Please, Jim,” I say, hating and hating the meekness of my
voice. This is not how I imagined our confrontation, not at all.
“Please, will you turn yourself in? I don’t want to be the
one.”

He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, puts them on again.

“So you’ve convinced yourself, then. You’ve already decided. You
think it’s the right thing to do, regardless of the cost to
others.”

“I didn’t say that . . .”

I can feel my uncertainty returning, like a thickening blue mist
that rolls in between Jim’s face and my own. Helplessly, I watch
this happen. Then my decision softens back into a speculation: What
will happen to the Corps, and to all the people on our wait-lists,
if I fail to keep Jim’s confidence? He’s right, isn’t he? We are
still in crisis mode from Donor Y; easily, I can imagine a
nationwide boycott of the sleep banks if the news about an infant’s
“stolen sleep” breaks. I can imagine much worse.

And nobody else is doing this work.

“No, you’re bound and determined to sink us, are you? Tie up the
Corps in another bullshit scandal.”

“Jim

—”

“So.” He leans back in his chair. “When are you going to tell
them?”

“Who?”

“The Harkonnens.”