Sleep Donation: A Novella (Kindle Single) (8 page)

Breaking news: the Donor Y nightmare
appears to have provoked a mass suicide. Early reports indicate
that between the hours of midnight and two a.m., eleven women woke
and dressed and left their houses. Insect-synced by the dreadful
coincidence of their illness, by a motive foreign to their formerly
healthy minds, they embarked on a nocturnal migration to the
coastline. This plot was smuggled into them by the Donor Y
nightmare, swear the victims’ grieving families. They were not
driving at all but driven by his vision. At one bridge near San
Rafael, the women queued up, only women that night, according to
police reports; they jumped in the fuzzy glow of their headlights,
their cars still idling behind them, sliding out of their slippers
or stepping out of their heels, climbing barefoot up the girders,
taking ginger, seaward steps along the black rail, trailing
shadows. There is footage of them falling captured by a useless
security camera riveted to the bridge pilings. Gulls sometimes flit
past the camera lens, shrieking, and it is hard to see these birds
and not to think of the ghosts of the infected women.

The suburbs are rain-wet and green. Those
white flowers look even more abundant than before, if that’s
possible. They could be sentient, almost, wagging their lunar
tongues at us from glittering gutters and construction sites. The
Van pulls around a familiar corner, parks. The moon really is
inexpressibly bright.

Does it matter if we mean what we say, if the mere fact of the
utterance saves lives?

I am thinking about Jim, what to do about him.

Tonight Baby A’s blue eyes flutter open in the catch-crib; a
nurse adjusts the flow of the ultra-sedative, and she falls into
REM sleep within seconds. It’s a free-fall,
accelerated by our medications; she descends through the uppermost
levels into deep sleep, our monitors confirming “delta-wave,” and
it’s from this vacant corridor of being, beyond the reach of
language, image, or memory, that Abigail Harkonnen produces the
lifesaving blackflow, the cure for insomnia, sleep piped in from
her last home, perhaps, whatever “stasis in darkness” precedes even
the womb.

After the draw is done, I bike straight home. It’s a little
after one a.m. I’ve locked the bike and I’m heading to the
apartment when I notice headlights come on at the end of the
street. A car rolls slowly towards me, blinding me. A brown sedan
with turquoise doors.

“Get in,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “We’re going on a field trip.”

Night Worlds, in some regions of America,
are now referred to as “Eyesores.” Apparently, not even terminal
insomniacs can resist the urge to pun. A sign is visible from the
highway: “All Sore-Eyes Welcome!”

In our county, the Night World is located at the exit for the
old fairgrounds, which have been converted into a midnight
solarium. A sapphire penumbra rings the entire complex of tents and
shanties. After a silent twenty minutes, Mr. Harkonnen parks in an
overgrown field; he walks around and opens my door. He steers me,
holding tight to the flesh of my upper arm; for balance, I grab
ahold of his wrist. His thick fingers around my arm feel like a
blood pressure cuff. We moth along towards the light in this odd
physical arrangement, swinging our free arms. Dozens of jalopies
and motorcycles have been abandoned here, their chrome-plated
wheels swallowed in the weeds like jewel-toned ruins. Some of these
are luxury vehicles: BMWs, Jaguars. There is something
perversely cheering to me about the fact that tonight, rich
insomniacs must have gotten lonely enough to disable their alarms
and leave their marble enclaves, coming down the mountain to a
Night World.

Two months after the Donor Y contagion, there are those who need
sleep and those who fear it. If there is friction between these two
terminal camps

—envy, resentment,
suspicion

—I don’t feel it.
“Celebration” is definitely the wrong word for what we’re seeing:
the pack of slack, exhausted bodies, leaning on silver fenders. But
I hear laughter. True hoots and back-claps. Little-bird sounds of
cheeks kissed in greeting. It’s what you might call a heterogeneous
mix of revenants (and I think for some reason of our great-aunt’s
AA meetings, the weak greenish light and hurt savage
smiles, decades-sober alcoholics and freckled young drunks gathered
in a church basement around a coffeepot). Old orexins, new
electives. Have these faces been awake for days, weeks, months?
Years? It’s a surprisingly tough call.
Insomnia ages you
overnight

—this is a new Oil of
Olay cliché minted by the beauty industry, which is really pushing
those day-to-night creams now. We pass four girls in a huddle who
could be sisters. Those
eyes
. Wound-tight flesh. Hair in
strings. Cyan networks of veins around their temples, like some
cruel Greek crown. Teeth eroded to a monochrome gray. Three black
girls, one ghost-white girl. Electives, infected with the Donor Y
nightmare, I’d guess, given what we overhear:

“Look, if you do fall asleep? You gotta try to stay
awake
inside the dream.”

People are symptoms of dreams

—

This was our favorite line of poetry, me and my sister, in the
lone college class we ever took together, before her professors
finally joined forces to insist that she take a medical leave of
absence. Dori picked it out, of course, and let me tag along in the
wake of her mature aesthetic. It was a generous hand-me-down, her
taste in poetry; she also gave me her favorite green leather
jacket, her Fender Starcaster, and the leftovers of her beauty
products. I was the heiress to all the unused crazycolors in her
eye shadow three-packs, you know, the freak blue Maybelline
smuggles in between the taupe and the gray, which Dori always said
was like the strawberry you’re forced to buy in Neapolitan ice
cream; plus Dori’s prostitute-on-holiday blusher, Dori’s pressed
powder that looked like ancient silicate from
Planet of the
Apes
. I threw it all away after her death, which I now have
come to regret. Words I guess are her more durable artifacts. Only
how did the rest of our poem go?

People are symptoms of dreams / Bombs are symptoms of
rage

—

Dori, with her ancient face at twenty: “It’s a real mind-fuck. I
won’t be beautiful again, will I?” And before I could answer,
“Shut-up, shut-up, shut-up. I’m sorry. That was a shitty thing to
ask. Don’t lie. Trish? Let's get the mirrors out of here, okay
. . .”

Mr. Harkonnen and I pass the group of teenaged girls. We fall in
step with an older crowd. Veterans, I’m assuming.
LD-ers with the telltale features: desolated eyes and
cheek hollows, nacreous skin. The Night World is a ten-minute walk
west of here. I remember this hike from grade school; yellow
schoolbuses parked and spilled kids into these same fields. Mr.
Harkonnen and I are moving at twice the speed of the insomniacs
around us. I’m tempted to stagger, fake a limp. Out of some
misguided solidarity? To protect these sick ones from my health?
Sometimes, at Sleep Drives, I will catch myself unconsciously
adopting the accent of the immigrant family I’m recruiting,
mangling my own English, falling in step with the foreign family’s
rhythms. In any case, Mr. Harkonnen won’t let me fall back. He
races us along.

The boardwalk is only lit at intervals. Wide orange planks
alternate with stripes of raw night. Fifty yards ahead of us,
shadows acquire genders, features, then slide back into anonymity.
We step onto the wooden platform and walk through a cracked neon
rainbow that buzzes twelve feet above us. It’s the old entrance to
the county fair. A relic from more innocent times, pre−Night World;
resuscitated by some insomniac electrician. Now a grim arcade
spills before us: stalls that advertise midnight barbers, disbarred
sleep doctors, bartender-pharmacists. Dark green and purple tents
ripple across the grass like Venus flytraps, their bright flaps
swallowing people. Kiosks hawk antidotes to thought, to light:
“
BEST QUALITY LULLABIES.
”
“
OBLIVION PRODS.
” “
DR. BOB BRAIN’S HATCHET

—CUT THE ELECTRICITY ONCE AND FOR
ALL.
” The boardwalk unwinds for seeming miles, and I know
from adolescent explorations that eventually these fairgrounds
dissolve into a true woods, a nature preserve of spruce and
pines.

When I tell Mr. Harkonnen that this is my first visit to a Night
World, he is unaccountably pleased.

We draw up to one of the speakeasy tents.

The chalkboard lists the evening specials:

Medicines, a thousand of them, to induce sleep.

Medicines to
stay awake

—sunlight bulleting through an elective
insomniac’s brain.

“In here,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “Ladies first.”

It’s very easy, I discover, to comply with him. Since strapping
into his sedan, I’ve felt unworthy of objecting to anything that’s
happening. Once the tent’s flaps close, I find myself crowding as
near as I can comfortably get to Mr. Harkonnen’s sweat-damp left
side. What a crowd. Near the flaps, a trio of twenty-somethings are
sharing a pint of some dubious medicine. Tangerine bubbles fizz
over the rim. Bubbles are rising in every glass in the joint, Mr.
Harkonnen points out, marine blue and dark pink and lurid violet.
So these aren’t your standard soda mixers, but some self-catalyzing
enchantment. Threads of limber color rise to meet the insomniacs’
parched lips, as if, inside their pint glasses, these medicines are
already doing the work of dreaming for them. Up and down the wooden
bar, insomniacs sit a breath away from one another on the high,
rickety stools. The way they booze as a unit makes me think of
Vikings rowing in a longship. Lifting their glasses, slamming them
down. Fighting the waves, I assume, inside their bodies.

SINK–AND–SWIM
is the name of
one of the advertised soporifics.

But the bartender-pharmacist keeps splashing grapey black and
auroral fluids into alternating glasses, and you get the sense some
tide is truly turning. In this Night World, the two groups are
generating their own countercurrent. They laugh, gulp, swallow,
they even seem to blink to one rhythm.

I doubt it’s my right, as a healthy sleeper, to read the scene
this way, and to be enchanted by the Night World’s unlikely
friendliness; but I am anyhow.

The footage I best remember, from local television depictions?
This same fairground looked like a refugee camp. Dozens of
bone-thin bodies swarming the bonfires, flumes of red flame in
metal cans, their shoulder bones jutting rhythmically through the
free blankets from the Night World dispensary, like big cats on the
prowl.

Next to us, a woman’s head is rolling on a man’s shoulder, her
sheepy curls tossing on his navy sleeve like a cloud at anchor. I
think she’s an elective who Donor Y infected. Her eyes are milky
and ewe-blank, hugely dilated; she jumps when she yawns. “Keep me
up,” she demands, and this scarecrow of a man bellies around on the
barstool to face her, tucking his shirt into his waistband;
obligingly, he strokes her moist forehead, the angry rash on her
cheeks and chin, the cuticle-width scar under her left eye. Trying
to keep her in this world with him, awake. He’s an orexin, I
think

—someone who wants only to
sleep

—and he’s not looking so hot
himself: eggy eyes, poached by his illness, skin like white wax. On
a calendar, I bet these two are in their early thirties. The whole
time his fingers brush her pimpled hairline, he’s murmuring
something into her earlobe, like her face is a story he’s reading
to her. Her Braille memoir. He reads on, and with each syllable,
her smile widens. With his big thumbs, he prizes her eyelids open.
This he does for the exhausted, terrified woman with a clinical
tenderness and focus

—one species of
sufferer trying to help another. I’m holding my breath. The man
catches me watching, winks.

Are they a couple? I ask.

The man smiles.

“Sure. Met her five minutes ago, when I sat down here. You’re
invited to the wedding.”

Recipients and donors. Donors and recipients. Variations of this
couple's exchange are happening with a hothouse spontaneity up
and down the bar: people with equal but opposite afflictions,
propping each other up.

This is my beautifully stable impression of Night World culture
for maybe two more minutes; then something explodes near my head.
Blue medicine leaks in an Arctic smear down the cabinet door.
Whatever it is smells faintly of garlic. So much for romance. Near
the tent flaps, a fight has broken out: two gizzardy
LD-ers are haggling over their bar tab. It seems they
have goaded each other into consuming two thousand dollars’ worth
of some placebo-slush. They dispute the bill in hoarse screams:
“That was
your round
, Leonard!” Napkins wag from their
hands, covered in scrawl, two rival accounts of their debts to one
another

—a bar tab that seems to
stretch back to the Big Bang.

Mr. Harkonnen returns with our drinks. To avoid the brawl, we
retreat farther into the tent, choose stools next to a dark oak
cabinet.

“Got us the cheap stuff,” he says.

“Okay. Thank you.”

Shooting Stars is the name of my medicinal cocktail.

I don’t ask what it does. Three sips in, my expectations go
colorless. Then I find myself leaning against Mr. Harkonnen’s left
shoulder. Mr. Harkonnen smells like nothing unexpected: generic
deodorant, Old Spice aftershave. These odors are like flung
harpoons

—they sail out of the Night
World and back across the highway, wrenching whole continents of
normalcy into this dark tent: malls and supermarkets, non-lethal
sunsets, jarred tomatoes, orderly hedgerows, carpet cleaner, kitty
litter, everybody’s junk mail piling up on tables, geese flapping
across meridians on their winter-spring cycle . . . and soon I’m
having to close my eyes to fight a supreme dizziness, as many times
and seasons collide inside my chest. I take another long gulp of
the cocktail. This time, the effect is immediate. Heat radiates
outward until my skin feels ready to burst, until my skeleton is
both holding me upright on the barstool and also dissolving, inside
me, into melting vertebrae, a million memories unstoppered in my
brain, rising up my spine, flowing down, my body too small to
contain them, shrinking even as the dizzy light expands in all
directions, and no way to protect myself against the assault, this
onslaught of sound and light, and nowhere to release it, all the
aggregating echoes, Dori’s voice, our father’s, a thousand other
whisperers . . .

I blink twice, rub my eyes: incredibly, the Night World tent is
still here. I study my watch, relieved that I can read the numbers:
three minutes have elapsed since we sat down. Beside me, Mr.
Harkonnen is eating green pistachios out of an ashtray. He smiles
at me. His face looks placid, in the illegible and alien way that
stingrays’ bellies look placid as they smooth along glass
walls.

“That was an intense drink,” I say, frowning down at my lap.

“Still is.”

“Was it supposed to wake us up?”

“You bet.”

I rub my tingling ears.

“Are you, ah, feeling it?”

“I’m drinking a virgin medicinal cocktail, actually.”

“Oh. So . . .”

“Just gin.”

Mr. Harkonnen leans back against the side of the medicine
cabinet. His arms are flung gregariously behind his head. I blink
down at our shoes, my head still spinning.

“I thought we should have a private talk,” he says. “Away from
the house.”

I gaze up at him from behind my glass. Some disturbed dreamer
has scratched
Screams from the raven-lunged
in a vitreous
green ink onto the wooden bar. The tent’s droning moonlamps make it
feel as though we’re all boozing inside a tremendous bug
zapper.

“Things have become tense,” he adds. “Around the household.”

“You’re fighting with Justine?”

“We’re fighting, yes.”

“About Baby A?”

“No, about the recycling. What do you think?”

He tips his drink back, motions for me to follow suit.

“We were a happy couple, a happy family, can you imagine that?
Six months ago that was our status: happy. But then you show
up

—”