Sleep Donation

by Karen Russell

  The note of apology in her voice unnerved me a little; this was perhaps my first intimation that Mrs. Harkonnen was a very special sort of donor. I’d never met a mother like this, for whom the gift of a daughter’s sleep seemed so matter-of-fact. Why did she assume her husband’s reluctance needed explanation?

  “But I told Felix all about those poor people on the waiting list. Why this sleep donation is so important to them. How did you call it? A ‘life serum.’ ” Then she’d paused, staring intently at me, and I saw that I’d been wrong to think this woman was in any way naive. There was some shrewdness alive inside her kindness, a perspicacity that thrilled and frightened me, that I did not understand. The quality of Mrs. Harkonnen’s attentiveness caused my whole body to prickle, as if invisible quills were lifting under my skin. This was a surprise. For the past eight months, I’d felt brain-dead and nerve-dead when I was not recruiting. I’d stumbled around in a daze during the periods between our Sleep Drives, those jagged white intervals of time, that I had formerly experienced, in unity, as “a day.”

  “Your sister. I can’t stop thinking about her.”

  “Oh?”

  I’d stared up at the unshaded bulb above the Harkonnens’ kitchen table. Gravity can be exploited in these situations; moisture slid into my pupils. A swimmy seepage of green light contracted back inside the white bulb. I did not cry. Once the kitchen went matte again, I was able to meet her eyes:

  “Well, thank you, thank you very much for keeping her in mind. My sister would be here today, if we’d had Gould’s technology…”

  Then my voice broke, and I had to really work to keep my grin from stretching into something crooked and hungry; my eyes felt suddenly dish-size, much too large for my face. Ordinarily I only resurrect Dori during a pitch. That’s where I feel her. But that night I was certain that I sensed my sister’s presence in that stranger’s kitchen. Or almost certain. I badly wanted to see you, Dori, as you existed for Mrs. Harkonnen. Typically, my recruits receive the story of my sister’s death day with a mixture of sympathy and horror; many people give sleep as a kind of frightened oblation, a way to sandbag their healthy lives from her fate; if she “works” on them, they respond with a donation. But all most people ever really know about my sister’s life is how she died.

  My smile became natural in response to Mrs. Harkonnen’s smile as she offered me a reheat on the black coffee, cream and sugar—Mrs. Harkonnen was the kindest and gentlest inquisitor I’d ever met. Somehow she intuited all that I could not say about my sister, and she asked me only questions to which I possessed factual answers; I heard myself telling stories from our Pennsylvania childhood, these shadowy green memories of Dori that I’d never shared with any donor.

  All this time, the baby had been wailing. At first, I’d been astonished by her volume. Once Mrs. Harkonnen got me talking about Dori, however, I’d stopped noticing, until I was barely aware that I was shouting to be heard. Then that pour of solar sound cut out. The infant’s silence was as loud as her screams had been, at least. We turned from the forms together, and there was Mr. Harkonnen. He was standing at the top of the stairwell, holding the baby.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” he said.

  I stood, and so did Mrs. Harkonnen.

  “Sit down,” Mrs. Harkonnen commanded me, suddenly steely. “Felix, we made a promise to these people—”

  Then I went perfectly still in their kitchen, holding chilly coffee, forgotten completely—recruiting people to a cause, I’ve found, often isolates you in strange spandrels, caught between a stranger’s intersecting planes of aversion and desire; in the case of the Harkonnens, I was a literal trespasser. “Wait here,” said the red-eyed Mrs. Harkonnen, smiling sheepishly at me, as if she needed only to check on something burning in the oven. I eavesdropped on Mrs. Harkonnen’s woodpecker-drilling into the stout oak of Mr. Harkonnen: “We’re doing this. We have no choice. How can we live with ourselves otherwise? I won’t be able to live with myself.” As they argued on the stairwell, I closed my eyes and folded my hands on the kitchen table. I pictured a great fire fanning out through this house, consuming all obstacles. It was more a wish than a picture, to be honest. I’d willed the fire to eat a pathway to a yes.

  I left 3300 Cedar Parkway with two signatures.

  Four nights later, I dispatched a Sleep Van to the Harkonnen residence.

  OUR UNIVERSAL DONOR

  Baby A, on the night of that first, successful draw, was six and a quarter months old.

  None of us had any clue, at that juncture, what the techs were about to uncover.

  We shipped Baby A’s sleep to Elmhurst, New Jersey, one of our ten processing centers. Lab technicians were amazed. Multiple tests confirmed that her sleep had zero impurities: There were no nightmare-markers, no native dream-antibodies. No need, whatsoever, for the sleep of Baby A to be sieved and purified and reconstituted.

  Baby A, it turns out, is a universal donor. Nobody rejects a transfusion of her sleep.

  Her discovery has been called “a boon for all humanity” by Dr. Gary Peebles. She is our dream gold mine. Banks across the country are on appeal for her sample. Lab techs work frantically to synthesize it. “Artificial sleep” has been a goal of medical researchers since the sleep banks first started operations.

  Tonight will mark our sixteenth draw from Baby A. Sixteen draws in four months!

  That’s nearly half of Baby A’s life.

  December, we drew twelve hours from the baby.

  In January, we bumped up to thirty-six.

  In February, we started drawing the max catch for her weight.

  This March, the Sleep Van has been parked on the Harkonnens’ block every week.

  When the numbers of insomniacs on our waiting rolls peaked, we were able to blend and redistribute the sleep of Baby A into forty-eight bodies. It was national news: “Baby A Saves the Night.”

  Currently Baby A is underwriting many hundreds of lives with her sleep donations, with no end to the crisis in sight. Who could have guessed that an eighteen-pound infant would have that kind of power? Who can blame Baby A’s father, for abhorring our discovery?

  * * *

  . . .

  When I pull up at 3300 Cedar Ridge Parkway, it’s a little after midnight. A trio of nurses are seated in the back of the van. Outside the night is scintillating, calm. A basketball hoop in the Harkonnens’ driveway keeps its monocular eye fixed on their two-toned jalopy, a brown sedan with faded turquoise doors. Large white flowers blossom all over the property in unlikely, untended spots; one clump fronds out about a foot from the Chevy’s rear tires. I tell the head nurse that I want to go in alone; I perform better alone. “Are you sure, Trish?” she asks, with undisguised relief.

  My regret is nearly instantaneous.

  Mr. Harkonnen is standing on the lawn.

  His arms are folded over his barrel chest, and the darkness lengthens and funnels around him. For a cold moment, I mistake these creased shadows for a shotgun.

  “Mr. Harkonnen!” I wave, throwing my hands up, crossing the uncut grass toward him. “We’ve met. It’s Trish Edgewater—”

  “No way.”

  “The Corps Recruitment Manager—”

  “Not tonight. We’re done here.”

  Moonlight crosses his skin like moisture, light weeping down his craggy cheeks. He stands under the shadows of a giant poplar. Every time the boughs move in the wind, chunks of him go missing.

  “Tonight, we have a true crisis on our hands, sir—”

  “Is that so? Guess what I’ve got on my hands?”

  His fists knot to form an imaginary cradle, which he swings furiously on the air.

  “I’ve got a daughter. She needs her sleep. You show up here every goddamn week. Why can’t you find someone else’s kid to drain?”

  Etiquette is a powerful programming, however, an
d easily exploitable. I sneeze. He sneezes back language at me, reflexive generosity: “Bless you.” A space opens up; I inch closer on the grass: “Mr. Harkonnen, can I trouble you for five minutes of your evening? I’m asking on behalf of my dead sister, Dori Edgewater…” He frowns, and I score an extra second—a short tarmac—but long enough for me to launch my pitch.

  Quick as I’ve ever managed it, I transition into Dori-mode.

  Up I float; somewhere, far below me, I see a blur that is my body, pitching my sister.

  “Oh, my God,” he whispers when I’ve finished. “That’s how she died?”

  I glance down at my watch: four minutes have elapsed. A new record. “And you’re saying if she’d had one extra hour of sleep—”

  “So the coroner tells me.”

  The stars above the Harkonnens’ brick roof are spinning. Chowdery bile rises in the back of my throat, and I stare at Mr. Harkonnen’s shoes on the grass until it sinks again. I am truly spent, sweaty.

  “Jesus.”

  Mr. Harkonnen takes a step forward with his arm lifted, as if in greeting; it falls heavily on my shoulder.

  “Well, I am very sorry to hear that. Very, very sorry indeed.” He whistles.

  Now things get considerably more complex; at the top of the lawn, the front door to the house swings wide. The darkness spits out Mrs. Harkonnen, who joins us.

  “Hel-lo!” I call out, and wince with her at the volume of my voice, which sounds deranged at this late hour with unseasonable cheer; I wonder whether the nurses can hear any of this from the van.

  “I’m sorry, Justine,” I blurt out. “But it’s bad.”

  I count off the numbers in the ER.

  I reveal how very little sleep we need to stave off tragedy tonight. Really, a minuscule amount from a being this tiny. We will manufacture a poly-sleep blend from it, and it will benefit hundreds of dreamless sufferers.

  “The baby is inside. Felix will get her.”

  Head down like a linebacker, he shoulders past me on the grass, clipping me with his bicep. I gasp, surprised to enjoy the contact, even the fury behind it. It’s not unlike flirtation, a move that blatant, deliberate.

  “Thank you,” I say, addressing the wife.

  “You’re welcome,” grunts the husband, parking himself on the lawn again, like he can’t bear to let her have the last word.

  For a long moment we stand in this frozen geometry, just beyond the orange headlights of the Sleep Van. As dizzy as the stars, as close and alone. Then Mr. Harkonnen shifts his weight so that we form a true circle, and a strange joy sparks and catches in my chest.

  * * *

  . . .

  I deliver the good news to the Sleep Van. Everybody grins with relief. Now the Sleep Van is once again an authorized vehicle on Cedar Ridge Parkway, instead of a boxy white shark waiting in the shallows to feast upon a baby. Nurse Carla swings the van into their driveway. Two nurses begin to swab the helmet with the blue solution; a third calls Jim, beaming. I decide to take a walk around the Harkonnens’ neighborhood; the van is crowded, I tend to get underfoot, and I find that I do not want to be inside when Mrs. Harkonnen enters with the baby.

  The Slumber Corps’ lifesaving operations run on the public’s trust and goodwill. Where money is concerned, we have to be careful. According to my bosses, we are working on establishing a scholarship fund for Baby A. Some kind of trust in her name. Legally, we are “just desperate,” swears Jim Storch, to finagle a way to express our organization’s gratitude to the family for the gift of Baby A’s sleep. But this expression of gratitude must be made with diplomacy, sensitivity.

  “It’s delicate,” Rudy tells me.

  “And muy ilegal,” echoes Jim.

  Nobody in our Mobi-Van would suggest that the raw market would do a better or a fairer job of matching insomniacs and donors than the Slumber Corps. None of us can imagine the solution proposed by certain factions, “the sale of sleep,” leading to an equitable system. Not that the Slumber Corps is a perfect matchmaker. Our cold calling can feel scattershot, and our dependence on strangers to refill the dream wells is total; the sleep banks are routinely on appeal for more units. You can’t program omniscience into the hospital computers, and people die on the Corps’ waiting lists every night. But our goal, at least, is articulable, stable, and very clear: to get clean, deep sleep to the insomniacs. I am proud to say that in its seven-year history, the Slumber Corps has never rejected an insomniac for financial reasons or requested any kind of payment.

  When I registered the Harkonnens as donors, I had no idea that their daughter’s sleep was a miracle in progress. Baby A is still the world’s only known universal donor. But there have been several cases of sleep donations that can be accepted by a remarkable percentage of insomniacs. Three years ago, sleep found to be “highly transfusable” across many demographics was drawn from a ninety-two-year-old Swedish man in Laramie. Almost immediately after his donation, he slipped into a coma, and ever since, against the wishes of some family members, the Wyoming Slumber Corps has been “mining him” for sleep—a phrase favored by the media.

  “Which is funny,” Rudy snarls, “when you consider all the mining, drilling, and earth rape they are actually doing in Wyoming—and here we have this living saint, sustaining hundreds of people with his sleep.”

  The old man signed a contract, before losing consciousness, stipulating that he wanted his body to be farmed for sleep until its death. His last bequest. I admire the generosity of our Wyoming donor, and I invoke him at drives. But I’ve also had such vibrant nightmares where I see the orphaned animal of his body, tethered to Gould’s machinery by the ponytail of blue wires. Strapped onto the cot, strapped into the helmet. The feet in socks.

  Hundreds of lives have since been saved thanks to Baby A’s donations. Many thousands more, who are wait-listed for a Baby A transfusion, have been given an EEG recording of Baby A’s brain waves, transformed into an audio recording, as part of an experimental study. There is some evidence that even this remote contact with Baby A’s sleep might reset insomniacs’ body clocks. All of this is well documented by our outreach videos.

  But Baby A’s life would have been far better off, I’m certain, if I’d never found her.

  * * *

  . . .

  The Harkonnens live in a “transitional” neighborhood—houses that you might call “fixer-uppers,” or derelict, depending on how cheerful you are feeling. Even light seems hesitant to enter them. Last year, many of the rotting facades got repainted in gumball shades of pink and lime, some misguided civic project to brighten this part of our city. It’s a pretty superficial shellacking—the cars and motorcycles outside are still junkers. Lawns are covered with many octaves of weeds, shading from crud brown to yellowy beige, and even the leafy trees seem to me to have too many limbs, mutating away from the rooftops in a silent, wild freedom. Several bikes knock around on their chains, an eerily genial sound, as if the machines are gossiping. Early spring, and this whole block smells like flowers. The heaving blossoms turn out to be everywhere once you notice them, overflowing the rain gutters and the sills of second-story windows, unencouraged, unsupported, and nevertheless here once more, vivid white in the night air. Beauty staging its coup in every suburb and slum in the galaxy. You are lucky to be alive to see it, aren’t you, Edgewater? I have several canned lectures, designed to reduce my nausea after talking about Dori, which I mentally self-administer in Rudy’s stern voice.

  Tonight, I’m snuffed. Dori’s story, now in its told state, expulsed, floats somewhere far outside me, emitting its jellyfish light. Sometimes her absence takes me over and then I’m a sleepwalker. Now, for example, as I double back to the Harkonnens.

  Here they come again, the white flowers, bystanders rooted in the bright light flowing from the Sleep Van. Bodies move with their own sly life behind the windows, bending and straightening.
For no easily discernible reason, I am terrified to reenter the Sleep Van. At some sore point on my revolution around the Harkonnens’ block, I seem to have removed my name badge, my Corps Recruiter jacket. I’d much prefer to remain a stranger out here underneath these fragrant narcotics, the ruffling white blossoms.

  I can hear the baby crying. Up ahead I see the Harkonnens’ two-toned Chevy again, brown and turquoise, the basketball hoop with its frayed net. Underneath it, the Sleep Van is parked with its rear doors wide open, spilling yellow light across the lawn. Framed in the window, I see Baby A strapped to the catch-crib, her feet tensing and relaxing like little fists.

  * * *

  . . .

  “No, no, see the bag inflating? She’s still breathing on her own—”

  “Get a seal on that, Carmen. Get a tighter seal on that.”

  * * *

  …

  After the Harkonnen draw, we drive to the other side of town, to get a draw from Roberta Frias. Roberta is six and such a funny kid, chatty until the very second before the anesthetic crests and rolls her under. She’s no Baby A. But her sleep is very useful to us, transfusable into a high percentage of insomniacs. EEGs of her first draw dazzled the nurses. Beautiful NREM—slow-wave, delta sleep, the state in which a body repairs tissue, builds bone and muscle, strengthens its immune system.

  On the catch-cot, under the clear mask, her smile flutters and disappears. Her mother always dresses Roberta up for a donation, and the nurses have given up on telling her that this is unnecessary; tonight, she’s wearing a frilly yellow dress covered in tiny gray mice and a pink hairband. Her parents are watching from the corner of the Sleep Van, nervous and proud. Mr. Frias, a chubby Puerto Rican pastor, taxi driver, and devoted father, a lip-biter, gives me the thumbs-up when our eyes meet.