Sleep Donation

by Karen Russell

  “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 levitate inside the dark glass, coagulating into tiny continents.

  “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 each other. 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, we at the Corps have also discovered the same currents of goodness that originally drew him to his wife.

  “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 was 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:

  [We sell 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 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 traveling 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 work
s, 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 sacrificed their infant’s sleep, Jim Storch took a bold risk, I kept shut, the Japanese team gets her sleep on tap, all the terminal insomniacs are saved, et cetera, et cetera, freed from the chain of endless dependence on their donors. 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 has a head for zeroes, 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

  The Poppy Fields have been widely reported on: a special strain of poppy that 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 midcalf 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 seafloor. 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 like a birdcall: the sound of my name. Memories spread their wings, come home to roost, and I shudder under the weight of all these Trishes I’ve been, before the purple sleep cocktail, before the Night World parking lot and before my knock on the door that 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 toward 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, 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 mercenary 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 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 Hypnos’s 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 valet is a tall Asian woman who looks about the same age as our Slumber Corps interns. She wears a long white coat a
nd a white dress, for “atmosphere maintenance and heightened visibility,” she says. Behind her, the wind is picking up. It plows the fields. Each gust forces 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.”

  Who in their lifetime, pre–Insomnia Crisis, could ever have imagined shelling out that kind of money to unroll a rubber mat in the 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 angrily. “No privacy. Even if we paid the big money, I figured there would be some watcher there, lying a row away from us.”