Sleep Donation: A Novella (Kindle Single) (9 page)

“You can stop.”

“Oh, she won’t hear of it now. ‘Divorce me, then,’ she says.
‘Take me to court. We’re going to cooperate with them, it’s
the
right thing to do
 . . .’ ”

“It’s a donation.” I swallow. “Nobody can force you.”

“So she thinks

—ha!”

Mr. Harkonnen has finished his virgin sleep cocktail. Angrily,
he shakes the drained glass. His tongue darts around to catch the
last clear droplets. The tongue’s froggy orbit around the edge of
the glass seems many evolutionary leaps removed from the wounded
intelligence in Mr. Harkonnen’s black eyes.

“She thinks that one day
you will stop asking
.”

“But we will! When the neuroscientists figure out a way to
synthesize what she produces naturally . . .”

“Ha!”

For the duration of his laughing fit, Mr. Harkonnen stares down
at the bar with a face of social horror, the bulge-eyed
consternation of a man who is trying to discreetly cough up a bone
into a cloth napkin; eventually, he regains control of his
voice.

“And how old will my daughter be then?” he asks calmly. “Ten?
Twenty?”

She’ll be dead
. This thought is nothing I will. It
blows into and through me, part of a leaf-swirl of my worst fears.
To erase it, I imagine Baby A at twenty, laughing, a bright-eyed
college freshman.

“She’ll be a lot younger than ten, I bet. The scientists are
working around the clock

—”

Mr. Harkonnen snaps for the bartender.

“We’d like to try one of your specials.”

“Of course. What is your desired State of Vigilance? Or Depth of
Sleep?” asks the bartender-pharmacist.

“Sleep for us, this time

—”

The bartender-pharmacist winks at Mr. Harkonnen. With her tiny,
fox-perfect teeth, she tears a blank envelope.

Service is democratic, I gather, in a Night World. Nobody here
prescreens, or hands around eligibility questionnaires. The
bewigged bartender-pharmacist, smoothing her magenta bangs, is
happy to take our money. Eighty-four dollars for two drinks. Purple
powder seems to float inside the dark glass, coagulating into tiny
countries.

“You’ll be out cold,” I observe to Mr. Harkonnen.

He grins at a dim corner of the tent.

“So will you, though. Bottoms up.”

My body tenses, anticipating a second onrush of light. But three
sips in, and this time I feel like a bone on sand, powdery and
solid, too, and very still. Some protection is in the process of
repealing itself. This is scary at first, but soon its absence
feels like a relief. The heaviness of sentience, heavy history and
caution

—the drink drains it away.
Shards are winking on the sand inside me and I find I have no
desire to collect them, to dig or to investigate. I am strangely
unbothered by the parched bar, the evaporating sea of reason, the
flecks of thoughts, their disconnection.

“This is a good one,” Mr. Harkonnen says. “Sort of limey. Do you
taste lime?”

It doesn’t last too long, that first hit of the soporific. A
second later, I sober up; the waves come back, and I’m myself
again, thinking my thoughts, albeit in a dangerously relaxed
state.

Somehow it seems we’re talking about Baby A.

“I manage the YMCA. Soccer, baseball. For every
boy, there is a season. I wanted a boy, until she came.” He smiles
down at the bar, squeezing his fists together; it’s a funny
gesture, and I wonder if he’s keeping something for or from
himself. “And then I forgot that I ever wanted different.”

Until who came?

“Abigail!” I blurt out.

Mr. Harkonnen lifts an eyebrow.

“Baby A,” I correct, looking down.

“You got privileges, huh? Teacher’s pet? What else do you know
about us?”

“I’d never betray her real name to anybody, sir.”

“So we’re back to ‘sir’ now.”

He takes a long drink.

“Go ahead. Call her Abby. Make her a baby.”

His grin hardens until his face looks wind-chapped.

“Baby A

—that always sounded to me
like some damn sports drink . . .”

I’m scared, and I think he is, too. Light from the moonlamps is
reflected in Mr. Harkonnen’s eyes, tiny weather vanes spinning in
each black pupil, and returning his stare I am dizzily aware that
our night could go in any number of directions.

“What did your boss tell me? The tall one

—who’s that again?”

“Jim. Or Rudy. They’re twins. ‘Tall’ doesn’t narrow it
down.”

“He said you got the highest number of recruits.”

I feel myself darken. “Thanks to my sister. Her story.”

“So that’s the game, huh? You franchise your sister.”

“I don’t want to talk about her here.”

But his eyes gleam, he is taken by this idea.

“Sure. I get it now. You franchise her pain. Dori Edgewater.
Well, it worked, didn’t it?” He grins at me with slack, fish-pale
lips. “She’s famous. Everybody knows her, your sister. Just like
everybody knows my daughter.”

Two hunchbacked men are fighting in the corner with their
barstools lifted over their heads, the chair legs facing outward
like spiny antlers, so that they look like enormous beetles
charging one another; Night World bouncers in their ominous
uniforms arrive to break it up. Jacked electives, reports the
bartender-pharmacist. This altercation happens in the shallows,
near the flaps. At our depth of the speakeasy, nobody so much as
blinks.

I wait for Mr. Harkonnen to accuse me now:

You do what he did
, he’ll add,
to them. You are
just like Donor Y.

Or what else might he say, regarding Dori?

She’s dead. She’s dead. What’s it going to take? Do you want
me to ice a cake with that? Your sister’s dead. Everything you’ve
done, you’ve done for yourself alone.

But Mr. Harkonnen’s focus seems to have rolled inward, onto his
own failures:

“Justine is too damn good for her own good. She has no defenses.
And Abby? Poor kid, I’m sure she’ll take after her mother. Assuming
she makes it out of preschool. You think I can protect either of
them, from what they turned out to be? My wife is a far better
person than I am. That’s why I married her.”

I open my mouth intending to agree with him

—to compliment the virtue of Mrs.
Harkonnen.

Then I think I have my own hiccup of insight into Mr.
Harkonnen’s dilemma. He got more goodness than he bargained for,
maybe, when he married her. Some flood he cannot dam or drain or
control. Unfortunately for Felix Harkonnen, the same currents of
goodness that originally drew him to his wife, we at the Corps have
also discovered.

“I’d better shut up,” he says after a while. “Drank too
much.”

But a minute later, he grabs my arm.

“Tell me this,” says Felix, whose first name I’ve yet to say
aloud.

“If your sister

—Dori

—were alive today, and she were the universal
donor? What would you do, huh? How much would you let them take
from her?”

“If it were me, sir, I promise you, I’d let them

—”

“But say it’s not you, in this scenario. Say it’s Dori.”

I don’t answer.

To our left, there is a burst of muted applause; people are
whispering that an orexin-woman is genuinely asleep. Two men have
lifted her up, and with infinite care they are transporting her
through the smoky speakeasy. It’s quite something: the crowd falls
into a silence that pulses with energetic longing, and people move
around her dangling feet with the reverence due a new saint.
Watching even one woman nod off into sleep has changed the tent’s
entire atmosphere. Now the air feels almost musky with group
credulity, the group’s decision to blink an apparition into
reality. Her feet wave at us as she is carried from the tent, her
entire body limp. If you were a cynic, you might assume this woman
was a plant; her stunt-recovery, if that’s what we’re watching,
seems to be very good for business. Medicines miracle around the
bar, everyone buying everyone rounds. Nobody talks. Crickets are
singing beyond the tent flaps, you can hear them in the silence. At
one of the kiosks, they were selling a specially bred cricket with
emerald wings as an “organic lullaby-machine.” The woman next to me
has one in a ruby-tinted jar on the bar, its red legs fiddling
away.

Half my drink is gone, I note. Mr. Harkonnen keeps slipping in
and out of focus on the barstool. My muscles, they’re melting. Tiny
knots untwist themselves throughout my body. What I somehow
continue not to say:

[Jim Storch sold your daughter’s sleep.]

What would Felix Harkonnen do if he knew this?

Just imagining the conversation makes my gut cramp. How will I
pitch it? I’ll tell him I had no idea my boss had brokered this
sale with the Japanese researchers. I’ll emphasize my ignorance;
I’ll tell him, too, that Jim Storch seems to genuinely believe that
the illegal transfer of Abigail’s sleep was both justified and
necessary. I find that I badly want to defend Jim to Mr. Harkonnen,
to explain that my boss believed he was acting in everyone’s best
interests, regardless of whether or not this is true. I want to
restate Jim’s grandiose, beautiful claims for Mr. Harkonnen. He
called his deal the only way forward.

What if Jim’s right?

I squeeze shut. Eyes closed, I try to imagine it: Jim’s decision
in transit. The Baby A sleep units travelling over the Pacific into
the right hands, the capable hands of these Tokyo researchers.

If his scheme fails, the Harkonnens need never know. If his
scheme works, and they do achieve synthesis, and manufacture
artificial sleep, a faucet of unconsciousness, an inexhaustible
dream well, “sleep for all,” the realized goal, my God, then we’ve
got an outcome straight out of a comic book, or the New Testament:
the Harkonnens sacrifice their infant’s sleep, Jim Storch takes a
bold risk, I keep shut, the Japanese team gets her sleep on tap,
all the terminal insomniacs are saved, et cetera, et cetera, in a
daisy chain of gorgeous goodness, fortune. And why not? Why
couldn’t it happen, just like that? Religions spore out of such
stories. Movies starring Denzel Washington are made of far
less.

“Slow down. You’ve got the hiccups.”

Mr. Harkonnen swings an arm around, thumps my back. With his
brown hair slicked back like that, with his house-musk of baby
powder and Old Spice, and his spatulate hands with their dirty
thumbnails, he’s got a mammalian sweetness to him in the
speakeasy’s neon den. His automatic tenderness must come from
taking care of Abby. Whenever Mr. Harkonnen burps the baby, he
looks like a gentle, enormous beaver. His gesture is well-timed
with my secret thoughts to make me want to tell him everything; and
then, not a second later, to make me scared of losing everyone. Not
just Rudy and Jim and my life in the Corps trailer, but the
Harkonnens.

I stare at Mr. Harkonnen. A chalky taste rises that I want only
to swallow. Easiest to believe Jim’s calculations, Jim’s
predictions. Why not? He is an empirical savant, Jim. He made his
fortune as a businessman.

But it’s useless to pretend that I can still trust Jim. Any
minute now, I’m going to tell Mr. Harkonnen. As scared as I am, I
don’t see how it can be avoided. Dori’s working in me, on me,
dissolving the capsule around the secret.
I must tell you
something very upsetting, Mr. Harkonnen
. . .

Will Mr. Harkonnen keep the secret? If I explain to him that the
ensuing scandal really could undermine the entire institution?
Actually kill people, according to Jim’s assessment? I can’t
imagine that he will respond to the news with silence, or
forgiveness.

Mr. Harkonnen is staring at me with a strangely avuncular
expression; he hands me a green pistachio, crunches into his own.
“There,” he says, like everything’s settled. “Let’s go for a walk.
I’d like to show you the Poppy Fields. They’re really something.
They’re way out beyond the tents. Do you know, ever since our field
trip to Ward Seven, I’ve been coming out here every other night.
Justine thinks I’m working late. And she’s not wrong.”

His grin is a further mystification, exposing a black back
tooth.

“I am.”

“Why?” Then a startling answer occurs to me. “Are you sick,
too?”

“No. it’s not that. After that night at Ward Seven, I just
wanted to see these people for myself. Solo, you know. Without my
wife. Without a chaperone.”

I giggle, terrified.

“It’s been quite an education.”

“For me, too, Mr. Hark

—”

“Good. We’re just getting started. The night is young.”

Something tightens in the air between us and I find that I’m
pushing away from the bar, and from the empty glasses and the
cracked pistachio hulls and the unslept faces. I have to stand to
avoid falling off the barstool. I hold on to the bar’s edge,
blinking hard into the moonlamps. Felix is studying my eyes. I
amend my plan, watching him watching me, or perhaps it is more
accurate to say that my plan amends itself, spontaneously inverts:
Who is helped, if the father knows about the sale?

No one, says Jim.

Out loud, I make the easier apology:

“About Ward Seven? I’m really, really sorr

—”

“Don’t!” he roars. When the bartender-pharmacist looks over, he
laughs: this is all in good fun, ma’am. He needn’t worry. Under her
wig, her yellow-brown eyes regard us with a hilted intelligence,
halted judgment. All of Night World seems to sparkle with a similar
neutrality. Dulled gazes like swords in scabbards. Then we are back
on the boardwalk, joining others on their slow bar crawl under the
stars.

The Poppy Fields have been widely
reported on: a special strain of poppy which releases an “aromatic
hypnotic,” sometimes called an “olfactory blanket.” Poppies are
trendy, if that word can be applied to foredoomed miracle cures.
All over the country, Night World gardeners are pruning the
flame-bright poppies beneath the moon. The gardeners’ headlamps
reveal a wilderness of faces, insomniacs whose bloodshot eyes are
even redder than the poppies. They lie on bedrolls and grain sacks
in parallel rows, breathing in the flowers.

We reach the edge of the boardwalk, step off into grass.

In the distance, the woods wall us from the city. Pines span the
horizon, nearly black in color at this hour, with the pointy,
standard look of fence-posts. A wooden sign with an arrow reads:
FIFTY YARDS TO THE POPPY FIELDS
.

Behind us, the fairgrounds waver like some hallucinatory reef:
the calm anemone billowing of the Night World tents, the barkers’
poles like red coral, the electric green spokes of the Dream Wheel.
At this distance, even the screams of the insomniacs receiving
Oblivion Prods contribute to this illusion, their faraway cries
transformed by repetition into an implacable background, like waves
crashing on rocks.

And then we are mid-calf in acres of flowers. “The Placebo
Fields,” we joke in the Mobi-Van

—but, my God, it is hard to hold on to your
cynicism when you actually see them. Under the moon, the poppies
look as bright as jewels on the sea floor. We wade through hundreds
of them, the scarlet buds drumming against our shins, and I find
it’s almost frightening to bend the stems back, to graze the petals
with my fingers. This is no mirage. But it’s a shock to find this
sea at our city’s edge, and to find myself navigating it with Mr.
Harkonnen. Who knows if the poppies’ fragrance is a real insomnia
cure? I realize that I don’t smell a thing. But my thoughts shrink
to a whisper, and soon I start to feel like I’m sleeping
already.

Pain tickles my heel.

“I think I stepped on something . . .”

“I’d keep walking,” said Mr. Harkonnen, swallowing, his voice a
thick buzz in my ears. “If I were you.”

“Will you look for me, will you check

—”

“It’s okay, Trish.”

And this is a real gift: the sound of my name. Connected to that
stem, memories spread their wings, and I recollect who I’ve been,
before the purple sleep cocktail, before the Night World parking
lot and before my knock on the door which turned Mr. Harkonnen’s
daughter into Baby A, before the sleep crisis, and even before
Dori’s last day.

Very gratefully, I keep pace with him.

Remember this
, I instruct myself.

Mr. Harkonnen steers me towards a small shack in the center of
the field. It looks like a boat at anchor in this strange Atlantic.
Night World staffers mill around it, grabbing blankets, chatting
with groups of insomniacs.

“Do you know about the Legend of the Poppies?” a young attendant
asks us with mechanical charm, tugging her black ponytail around
her collarbone. She is the Valet, I realize, taking cash for the
bedrolls and the blue inhalers, directing bodies to their pallets
among the red flowers.

“I do,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “You told me. But tell her.”

With the mechanical cheer of any waitress, she beams at us each
in turn.

“According to Greek legend, the poppy flower was the gift of
Hypnos, the god of sleep, to help Demeter to dream again. Demeter
was exhausted by the search for her lost daughter, whom Hades had
taken to be his bride in the underworld. Now, Demeter was so tired
that she could no longer make the harvest grow. But his poppies
cast a spell on her. She slept, and when she woke, the corn was
growing green and tall again.”

Mr. Harkonnen fishes for his wallet, tips her a buck.

“Yup. Thanks. That’s a rough night for Mom. The devil’s got your
daughter.”

This female attendant is a tall Asian girl who is the same age
as our Slumber Corps interns. She wears a long white coat and a
white dress, for “atmosphere maintenance and heightened
visibility,” she says. Behind her, the wind is picking up. It plows
the fields. Each gust obliges the worst kind of devotion from the
mutely chattering blossoms, grinding them against the soil,
knocking their red heads around. The wind could do this to us, too,
at any instant, it seems to want us to know, and the thousand
poppies nod their agreement.

Suddenly I am overcome by drowsiness.

Mr. Harkonnen, beside me, lets out a shuddering yawn.

Women wander the poppy fields, in white nightgowns, carrying
vessels of water, or some other transparent liquid. In calm,
emotionless voices, they begin to halt the unsteady pilgrims and to
ask them questions:

“Would you like a sip of the supplemental poppy tea, dear?”

“Would you like sheets and a pillow? We can sleep you on plot
seven, or for forty-five dollars we can upgrade you to plot twelve,
directly under the moon . . .”

It’s funny: Who in their lifetime, pre–Insomnia Crisis, could
ever have imagined shelling out that kind of money to unroll a
rubber mat in dirt? But just hearing the soothing voices as they
recite the Poppy Fields’ menu of pricey sorceries is enough to
implant these desires in me. Hungers appear in my mind, like coins
flipped into a wishing pool.

America’s great talent, I think, is to generate desires that
would never have occurred, natively, to a body like mine, and to
make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction,
an imaginary means to some concrete end.
Forty-five
dollars
for the moon-plot? Put it on the card. What a
steal
.

“No,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “You know what? No, thanks, miss.”

He grabs my arm and then we’re hurrying away. Red poppies lisp
after us; if their magic works, we must be resistant to it. Neither
of us keel over into slumber. We have to walk through these
sections of the Poppy Fields with great care, because the shapes
humping the grass are people.

Maybe ten minutes beyond the Poppy Fields, when the “enchanted”
flowers have ebbed back into scraggly, depopulated weeds, Mr.
Harkonnen stops to rub his eyes on his sleeve. “Too many people
there tonight.” His shoulders punch up at the sky, some martial
shrug. “No privacy. Even if we paid the big money, I figured there
would be some watcher there, lying a row away from us.”

But that is not our problem any longer. Currently, we are moving
parallel to the woods. There are a million visible stars, miles of
dark. We seem to be the only two people.

Why did you bring me here
? I do not ask him.

Abby

—Baby A

—she’s a hero
, I do not reassure
him.

Instead I say:

“Mr. Harkonnen

—Felix

—do you think the elective insomniacs have a
choice?”

He grunts, picking his way across the unlit grass.

“Yes. Some of them go to the hospital for help, and some come
here to die.”

“Do you think I gave you a choice?”

“Who do you think you are, girl? We chose. We’re choosing. Only
you assholes sure rigged the game up good. Now, if you hadn’t shown
up at our door in the first place . . . but let’s walk.”

We wander off into the shadows far beyond the “All Sore-Eyes
Welcome!” sign, through uncut grass that brushes at my bare ankles;
his hand drops to the small of my back, I take his arm, we are
stumbling. All of this proceeds with a sultry inevitability, with a
logic that mimics the odd chordal progressions of dreams, and for
the first time in a long while I feel utterly relaxed. He
frog-marches me far beyond the fairgrounds until I let him see that
I’m not going to stumble; then he loosens his grip. Still he
doesn’t let go of my arm. Wherever we are now, we’ve missed the
dividing line that separates the fairgrounds’ unkempt margins from
the nature preserve. Together we ford rivers of cattails, until the
fever pitch of the Night World is entirely erased by distance,
silence. The only sound is the occasional scream of some nocturnal
hawk, which rips through the deep quiet of the sky like a skunk
stripe drawn through black fur. We have to clamber over several
enormous logs, Mr. Harkonnen grunting and slipping, offering me a
hand. In the dark, these felled trees look as frighteningly
misplaced as the bodies “sleeping” in the Poppy Fields. They make a
lateral map of the woods as it must have been, before some storm.
At one point, I look up and I see a spreading V pushing over the
pines, many dozens of wings pulsing far above our heads; only it
must be a very odd flock, because no shape resembles any other.
Their wingspans, too, are irregular, some short and some long.
Gaping up, I watch them multiply

—what sort of flock is this, for what purpose
are so many different birds gathering? It’s too dark to even guess
at their names. Silvery light seems to pour from their wings,
although I know this watershed must be an illusion caused by the
mediating stars. Starlight liquefies and streams as the black
shapes cross the Pleiades. They arrow over the trees so swiftly
that before I can point out their bladed and scissoring bodies to
Mr. Harkonnen, they are gone.

At last, when I am swaying on my feet, he stops.

“Here.”

“Here’s good. Sure.”

“Now, lay down.”

Overhead, two hawks carousel around. It’s years since I’ve been
this close to the green perfume of any woods.

“Stay put. No

—Jesus, knock that
off.” He rolls his eyes. “Are you stupid? That’s not why I brought
you here.”

I misunderstood. I assumed he needed a transfusion of something
straightforward, something on the level of what I did with Jeremy.
I rebutton my blouse.

Mr. Harkonnen lies down in the grass beside me, grunting. Then
he maneuvers my head onto his chest, makes a vise of his bicep. I
cry out from surprise, just once, and a tawny blur streaks out of
the scrub and runs past my cheek in the dirt. It’s the fastest
mouse in the world, I think, and then realize that my eyes are
streaming.

“Here

—” he repeats, trying to
crook an arm under my shoulder. My hair gets yanked loose from its
ponytail and spills onto his T-shirt. He shifts us around until my
earlobe is pressed against the bony plate of his clavicle, where I
can hear his heart drumming.

“Sleep!” he commands.

“Okay. Okay.” I take a shuddery breath. “Why?”

“Because I said so,” he says, viscous and triumphant. From his
slur, I can hear how the medicines are dragging him under, too.

“You sleep for as long as I say, got it?”

“I will, Mr. Harkonnen.”

This consent is easy to offer. Nothing troubles me at all
now.

“Good.” He faces me on the grass, eye to eye under the
pillow-white moon. “Night.”

The following dawn with Baby A’s father
is one of the strangest of my life. How a person who so evidently
hated me for months can now relate to me with such natural
solicitousness is as bewildering as any flower opening in the
desert. Whatever waters fed the blossoming of this affection are
invisible to me. It’s got to be some misdirection of the
profoundest kind. Misplaced tenderness for Baby A, maybe, or for
his wife, Justine. I wake up to a gray-flying sky, the sun not yet
risen, and Mr. Harkonnen offering me a sip of water from his
canteen. He takes the corner of his shirt, moist with dew, and rubs
the dirt from my face.

I receive this kindness as best I can.

It’s strange to see Mr. Harkonnen in daylight. We are our sober
selves again, thank God. Dori, her memory, is caged as pressure in
my ribs. Whatever came unravelled last night feels neatly spooled
this morning. I exhale, feeling safer and safer as the sun inches
up.

“How did you sleep?” he whispers.

“I slept beautifully. Thank you. And you?”

“I slept good,” he grunts, suddenly bashful. “That lime stuff
was killer, whatever we were drinking. I feel well rested.”

“Did you dream?”

“If I did, I don’t remember.”

“Me, neither.”

Mr. Harkonnen nods, as if this is the bridge he’s been waiting
for.

He tells me he has a proposition for me, regarding dreams.

“I want you to make me a promise,” he says. “Let’s draw up a
contract, right here. If you are going to continue to draw sleep
from my daughter, I want you to swear that you’ll give exactly that
amount, every time. A matching donation. For as long as she gives,
you give, too. You don’t rest again until I say you can.”

The sun shivers free of the distant pines.

“Of course,” I hear myself say.

We shake on this.

He nods twice, flushed and seemingly satisfied. With my free
hand I peel a blade of grass from his stubbled chin. I find that
I’m exhilarated by our contract’s terms.

We stand up in the dirt. We laugh a little, to drain a pus of
awkwardness. I feel the strangest happiness. Tight muscles spasm
everywhere in my arms, and an alkaline taste I can’t name coats my
throat. Mr. Harkonnen swallows. He has not released my palm.

Then I wish for whatever is flowing between us to remain
unnamed, formless, unmeted into story or ever “experienced” in the
past tense, and so concluded; I don’t want to say it, I don’t even
want to try to understand it, and so begin to mistake it for
something else, and something else after that, paling shadows of
this original feeling, something inaudibly delicate that would not
survive the passage into speech.

Shadows windmill over Felix’s face. Like he’s been caught out,
all of a sudden, in some extra-dimensional autumn. Where are the
falling leaves coming from? Clouds go racing over the field. Down
below, our hands are still clasped. I’m relieved, relieved. I don’t
feel like a slave to the contract. I don’t feel that Mr. Harkonnen
tricked or frightened me into it. Each time I stare down at our
handshake, I feel the same vertigo, a dislocation that is much
stranger than mere anticipation, as though I’m being catapulted
forward in time, rocketed to my death, perhaps, or to some absolute
horizon, where I get a glimpse of my own life massing into form,
and a thrilling feel for all that will happen to me now, all that I
cannot know, haven’t yet done, haven’t spoken, haven’t thought,
will or won’t. Just entering the contract does this. No matter what
happens next, I’ll have one constant now, won’t I? Thanks to Felix,
my dreams will be twinned to the dreams of his baby. The simple
algebra of our arrangement feels like a ladder that he is holding
out to me.