Sleep Donation

by Karen Russell

  DORI

  Ever since the dawn with Mr. Harkonnen, I have been unable to pitch in the same way. I have no idea why this should be so. I only know that at drives, I speak in my own voice about the Slumber Corps, and I don’t retell the story of Dori’s death. I don’t relive her ending, or go into the convulsions. When my voice shakes, it’s only because I’m nervous—I’ve got no practice at this sort of storytelling. I do talk about my sister, who she was before the crisis, although I find this makes me shy. Unfettered from her death, Dori’s ghost takes on new shapes, and I find myself remembering more and more about her. In this new pitch, I describe her as a teenager, and even earlier. I mention the many insomniacs my sister’s age or younger who have been cured by transfusions, and who can dream on their own once more thanks to the Slumber Corps. Often, I lead with Baby A. Imagine, I tell them, how she’ll feel when she grows up, and learns how many lives she’s saved.

  If potential donors tell me they cannot afford to spare their sleep, I never press. The results of the new approach? By every metric we’ve got—donors recruited, sleep donated, insomniacs’ lives saved—my pitch is a disaster. There are drives where I only recruit five donors. There was one drive, on a rainy Thursday night outside the shopping mall, where I recruited none. My “zeros” were actually zero, which has never happened to me before. I’ve fallen so far that I’m not even ranked, nationally, as a recruiter. In our Solar Zone, I’m number three of six. But you know what? Some people do give. I’ll leave a Sleep Drive with a third fewer recruits than I was expecting for a crowd that size, but Dori, inside the people with whom I leave her story, is an ellipsis, alive. She’s not a nightmare I’ve implanted within them—of that much, I feel almost certain.

  * * *

  . . .

  If I stop telling Dori as a story, I wonder, where will she go?

  * * *

  . . .

  Jim’s out-and-out despondent. He paces our trailer with watering eyes. It’s that Jim-despair that feels at once completely false, like the maudlin dirges of horn instruments on a Mexican soap, and authentically out of his control. Rudy Storch is furious with me, salty and affronted; worse yet, I’ll sometimes catch him casting me looks of feral betrayal, as if somehow I’m the toothy trap that sprang shut on his paw.

  “Edgewater, goddammit. Have you seen your zeros? How you sleep at night, I do not know. This experiment is up; it has got to stop.”

  He grits his teeth; he doesn’t touch me now or scream at me. He won’t joke.

  “Please. Please. I understand that you’re more comfortable. But what you’re doing is irresponsible. It’s…it’s…” he’d sputtered, his eyes cloudy with exhaustion. “It’s…”

  He never finishes, and it doesn’t matter. Dori’s escaped from the grammar of the horror story I’ve been telling about her. Her ghost has quieted, become uncooperative. I can’t go back to the old style of pitching now.

  THE WHISTLEBLOWER’S HOTLINE

  The first three times I call, I hang up.

  The fourth time I call, I get an automated female voice, thanking me for contacting the Slumber Corps Whistleblower’s Program. This unshockable voice instructs me to leave the most detailed message possible about the institutional corruption I have witnessed, or in which I have participated, to include fraud, waste, abuse, policy violations, discrimination, illegal conduct, unethical conduct, unsafe conduct, or any other misconduct by the Slumber Corps organization, its employees or its volunteers.

  I drop the phone as if scalded.

  * * *

  . . .

  To honor my contract with Mr. Harkonnen, I take the bus to make my donation at our regional Sleep Donation Station. This month I am certain that I will be rejected at the screening—I have been dreaming of Baby A nonstop, of the flutter-suck of her tiny mouth. In one nightmare, she breastfed from my sister, who had a saint’s face in death, pale and sad and lit strangely from below, one green eye eaten away.

  What uglier proof of its deep pollution could my mind present me with?

  I am afraid of these dreams, which I cannot stop or change.

  I am afraid that even my desire to do good will spin out of my control and become evil.

  Orexins have been reported in Uganda, Taiwan, England. Infected sleep was transfused in Chile. In the Mobi-Office, Jim is calling me “baby” again, I think because it’s been a month now and I haven’t said anything to anyone about Baby A’s exported sleep. Sometimes I think I can feel Jim’s secret exerting a subtle gravity in my body, like a sick second pulse. I worry that it’s warping my dreams in ways their machines won’t uncover in time and perverting even my conscious intentions.

  At the reception window, I clear my throat.

  “I think my sleep might be unusable this week, miss. I think there is something wrong with it.”

  To which an icy voice replies, “Have a seat. We’ll be the judge of that.”

  And I wonder: How many of the donors seated around me are secretly hoping for a similar outcome? To be exposed as broken, corrupted—to have our impurities discovered, under some investigator’s microscope, so that we can be exempted from ever having to give again? “Opting out”—Jim’s grim euphemism seems to apply here, too. What a relief, I think, to never again worry that you might be the one poisoning the nation’s sleep supply. Is anybody else having this fantasy with me? I gaze around the waiting room, where six of us are waiting to learn if our dreams are healthy. One robust lady in a Minnie Mouse sweatshirt is scribbling furiously on her clipboard; she leans over to ask me, “Honey, how do you spell ‘piranha’?”

  There is something terribly funny to me about watching other donors holding their stubby number-two pencils, transcribing their dreams into flat grammar on real paper.

  One night soon, I’m sure, the notion of self-reporting will seem unimaginably old-fashioned. The butter churn of data collection. Almost everything else we do and say is now recorded: what we read, what we purchase, what we whisper to one another near speakers. Easily, I can imagine a new generation of children who wire themselves to the great glowing mind of the Slumber Corps. Children who grow up with the expectation that their dreams will be monitored by others.

  I’ve heard rumors that our Corps scientists are presently trying to develop a “sleep mask” that will upload live feeds of people’s dreams into a global dream database. If that’s true, it would be a very ambitious project—translating spikes of cerebral electricity into the faces and animals and nameless kingdoms that people see when they dream. A mask that would help the doctors to “nip a future nightmare contagion in the bud,” as Jim told me, still smiling even after I pointed out that the bud in his metaphor was, somewhat distressingly, a human head. A “sleep mask” to map our secret lives—so secret, in some cases, that even we don’t know about them. Perhaps soon it will become illegal to dream alone. What could be more dangerous?

  Sitting in the freezing waiting room, watching donors filing behind the flimsy plastic curtains, I find it takes no effort to imagine a bleak future where people get pulled from their beds, arrested for failing to wear their state-issued “sleep mask.” Jailed for doing their dreaming off-line, in the deep privacy of their bodies. Of course, the alternative is also terrifying: Depending on the honor system of self-reporting. On human recall, human goodness. Look, I shudder at that prospect myself. What human wouldn’t?

  I find myself marveling at the courage of the staffers, smiling ordinary smiles as they take the questionnaires from us. Sometimes you can see the tremor of a warranted fear—is it safe to receive these descriptions? Is it possible that the wrong words might take root inside them, mutate their own dreams?

  It takes some time to input my nightmare onto the form. Then I have to wait even longer for them to check my history against the known infectious nightmares. At the end of the hall, in custard-colored booths the size of library carrels, potentia
l donors are going over their nightmares with staff members. I catch fragments:

  “…a bunny-like twitchy face…”

  “…and the barber had electric-green hair…”

  “Okay!” says an administrator to her donor brightly. “You’re good to go here, Donald!”

  This is really it, I think. You are about to be banned from donation. Greedily, I start to hope for this. It’s so sly, the way that fears and hopes and dreams and nightmares can belly-flip into one another. The longer I sit in the hard chair, the more I want to be dismissed. Fondly I recall excused absences and doctors’ notes, those pink tickets to hours of solitude. Chicken pox, which I contracted at age ten and somehow never gave to Dori—that July quarantine returns to me now as a happy memory. One p.m. and the green-cheesecloth curtains drawn, the relief of seeing no one, doing nothing, scratching my sores in secret, breaking in my monster skin alone. Exempt me, exempt me. For reasons of public safety, for the greater good, tell me I can go home now and sleep for myself only.

  “No,” says the attending physician, “nothing here to disqualify you.”

  She gives me a wide, patient smile, as if to suggest that she deals with hypochondriacs like me hourly, people who believe that their nightmares must be uniquely wretched, worse than anybody else’s, who fall for the body’s shaky aggrandizements of its plans and pains.

  I’m incredulous: “You’re sure? You want to check the database again?”

  It’s not pure, she says, my sleep; but it’s good enough, and the need is urgent.

  “You’re still eligible to give, Mrs. Edgewater.”

  So I do.

  * * *

  . . .

  Summer greens the trees on 3300 Cedar Ridge Parkway, and I continue to donate. For every hour Baby A gives, I give my hour. But I have the queasy feeling without pause now; it seems there’s nothing I can do that’s not a betrayal of Dori, or of somebody’s dead or breathing, conscious or sleeping, much-loved body.

  DONOR Y

  Breaking news: Donor Y has been discovered by the authorities. He flew into SFO from Oahu and was apprehended by a customs agent. His image is splashed everywhere. In his passport photo, Donor Y looks so ordinary: he’s got a crew cut, a square jawline, brown eyes. All the obvious symmetries. Acne scars swirl over his cheeks like just-audible music. It’s the kind of face that can be forgotten instantly, or easily digested into any crowd. From his bland expression, you would never assume this person could gestate and host the most virile, lethal nightmare in the world’s history. His name has still not been released.

  According to preliminary reports, this man claims he had no idea that he was infected with a nightmare at the time of his donation. He is pleading innocent to the charges that he deliberately sabotaged our nation’s sleep supply. He agrees to a polygraph test and insists that he has never had the nightmare himself. He’s been sleeping soundly, apparently, for months. So Donor Y may turn out to be exactly what I feared the most: a good soul. Another human capsule, as clueless as the rest of us about his mind’s contents.

  BABY A

  “Please help me,” I say when she answers the door. “Is Felix home?”

  “Trish!” she mouths silently. Pantomiming, which means the baby is sleeping.

  “Oh dear, what’s wrong? Don’t worry.”

  She hugs me on the front porch, and I hug her back, for a length of time that would feel unnatural with anybody but Justine Harkonnen. I try to record, to preserve in my skeleton, in my muscle memory, exactly how this feels. I figure there’s a real chance that thirty minutes from now I’ll be back on the lawn. Ousted from the Harkonnens’ lives for good, or even, it’s occurred to me, in the back of a police car. If I were a gambling woman, I’d wager that I am about to be expelled from both my families—the Harkonnens, the Slumber Corps.

  Felix must be home—the turquoise and brown car is baking in the sun. Strays weave around its tires like material shadows. There is a universe where I never tell the Harkonnens what I learned about Jim. Or how I tried to use my dead sister, like tongs, to get something supple and alive out of them. I rest my head on Justine’s shoulder; instinctively, her hand flies up to pat my back. A driver in a passing car might think we are dancing in place. Through the doorway, I can see Mr. Harkonnen rocking Baby A, who is sleeping for herself this afternoon. Only her head pokes out of the yellow sling, which makes Abigail look like the crinkled face in the moon. Deep inside me, I feel Dori stirring, her dead eyes opening to peer out through mine. Dori, in life, was honest “to a fault,” as they say. She’s dead, I mostly believe that, but we all pray, don’t we? To ourselves, if not to some provident Eye in the clouds.

  In the doorframe, Mrs. Harkonnen is smiling, shining, with that innocence that we of the Slumber Corps love and abhor in her. With those wide-sky eyes, all blue, and a faith in me that I will never comprehend, Mrs. Harkonnen ushers me into her home. She says in a whisper, so as not to wake her baby daughter, “Come in, Trish. Whatever’s wrong, we’ll get to the bottom of it. I’m sure we can figure this out.”

  THE WHISTLEBLOWER’S HOTLINE

  The good news, or the mixed news, it might be fairer to say, is that I will not be performing this information transfusion for the first time.

  Last night, I called the hotline. Actually, I called the hotline about a hundred times. I couldn’t speak, and I couldn’t speak, I lost track of how many times I dropped the call, and then the seventieth or the eleven-hundredth time that I dialed this hotline, for no reason I was able to discern, I heard myself begin.

  After the phone clicked down, I woke up to what I’d done.

  Questions I held at bay for the call’s duration flooded into me then, as if I’d floated back within range of a radio tower. What if all donations dry up after the Corps scandal breaks, and more people suffer? What if Jim is a good man, a good thief, doing something “ugly but necessary,” as he told me—accelerating the science that will lead to a cure—and I’ve just made a horribly shortsighted mistake? But I find another theory far more plausible—that Jim’s plan was never to unlock the cure for the Insomnia Crisis, but to fill his own pockets. Perhaps the Corps’ shadow objective has always been to create “new global markets” for the most precious commodity of our time. And this is the scenario that closes my throat.

  Blink to blink, I toggled between these grandiose, apocalyptic fears to visions of a tiny infant in her crib, breathing.

  I slumped, cored and cold, the way I used to feel after drives. I sat watching the gray phone where it levitated on the wall, but no human from the Ethics & Compliance office called me back. I wonder who picks up these messages.

  All that dial tone I ingested must have come roaring out of me. To get the whole story across properly, with all its nuances, I had to call back several times, resuming where I’d left off. When I finished, the scraped white moon was out. Near the end of my transmission, I heard myself, insanely, thanking the chittering machine for recording so much tape, and I felt a quaky relief, thinking that at last I was rid of it, that events would now rush to meet us, but at least I’d been honest, or as honest as I could be, starting with my first association with the Harkonnens. I leaned my head against the wall, listening to the droning silence. I exhausted myself with speculations about whether I’d set the wrong or the right outcome in motion. Unsurprisingly, last night I couldn’t sleep. I wondered what, if anything, would happen as a result of the phone call—if even now some dream or nightmare was massing into our future, gathering like weather, becoming real. But I also thought, with the sly old happiness, No matter what tomorrow brings, you can be sure of at least one thing, Edgewater: tonight you’ve given Dori’s story to a stranger.

  ALERT LEVEL 3

  Report to the nearest quarantine station immediately if your dream contains one or more of the following images:

  THE DREAM OF A FRESH HUMILIATION

  MOST VIR
ULENT STRAIN

  Your Sex Tape Screening in the Old Cathedral

  NIGHTMARE CLUSTERS REPORTED IN AZ, CA, NM, NV, UT

  LESS COMMON STRAINS

  Wallpaper made of your poor report cards

  Your name misspelled on the headstone

  Surgeons snipping at the overgrown vines in your belly

  Your wolfhound leaving you for the neighbor man

  Winning a tank of naked hermit crabs

  THE DREAM OF THE GAZE YOU’VE BEEN AVOIDING

  MOST VIRULENT STRAIN

  Monkeys’ Faces Hiding in the Roses

  NIGHTMARE CLUSTERS REPORTED ID, MT, WY

  LESS COMMON STRAINS

  Ex-lovers’ portraits on a deck of playing cards

  Six wattled turkeys assessing you from the jury box

  Your daughter’s black eye pressed against the submarine porthole

  Unzipping a body bag and staring into your own blue face

  NEW PLAGUE DREAMS OF THE MIDDLE WEST

  MOST VIRULENT STRAIN

  Vultures in the Deserted Supermarket Aisles

  NIGHTMARE CLUSTERS REPORTED IN IA, IL, KS, MO, NE, OK

  LESS COMMON STRAINS

  Prehistoric grasshoppers fiddling on truck hoods

  Aurochs grazing on your linens at the laundromat

  Heavy rains of jackrabbits, hind legs drumming on rooftops

  Giant fixed-wing dragonflies idling on the tarmac

  Tiny gray frogs pouring out of showerheads and kitchen taps