His sleep was transported to the Berkeley testing and processing center; two days later, it was shipped to sleep banks all over the country. The nightmare may have been undetectable by standard testing. It may have been perfectly detectable and somehow missed by the technicians. What is known: Donor Y’s sleep was flagged as “healthy,” centrifugally spun, and packaged into “Sleep Blend G-17,” an amalgam of hundreds of donations designed to neutralize and dilute any residual impurities from single donors. “Sleep blends” are prepared for rapid delivery to the widest spectrum of insomniacs.
Early estimates suggested that anywhere from one thousand to ten thousand patients might have been infected with Donor Y’s nightmare. Within hours of the Corps alert, lawsuits are being threatened—the Slumber Corps is charged with failing to adequately screen volunteer donors and test their sleep.
“Donors are given a questionnaire about their history of sleep disturbance,” says a spokeswoman for the Slumber Corps, Betsy Gamberri. They dressed her in dizzy-tall stilettos and a pink bolero with linebacker shoulder pads, as if seeking to increase her literal stature in the medical community.
“The onus is on donors. You have to self-report your nightmares. The questionnaire, if answered correctly, should have eliminated him.”
“Either the donor did not know he was infected with this nightmare or he lied,” says Dr. Peebles.
Currently, the identity of Donor Y is being kept secret from the public—if it is, in fact, known. This omission stretches to accommodate the wildest theories: rumors of sabotaged files, internal Slumber Corps conspiracies.
“Have you ever been to the San Diego bank, Trish?” whispers my colleague Jeremy in the Mobi-Van. “If the guy’s file went missing, I’m sure it was just some administrative fuck-up.”
Jeremy does our branch’s data entry, and I guess he knows whereof he speaks. We agree that it’s far scarier, in its way, to think that a teenaged volunteer with bangs in his eyes, some good-hearted college kid named Brad or Boomer, simply forgot to scan a state ID. You can see why the theorists are getting so much airtime. There’s something darkly reassuring about imagining a cabal under the earth, or a government plot, or any human scheme, to undergird the spread of his “plague dream.”
What follows is a catastrophe for the Corps beyond our own worst institutional nightmares.
The Donor Y scandal causes a nationwide drought in all the Sleep Banks.
People are scared to donate. Many decide that Gould’s procedure must be hazardous. Their fear adheres to the physical apparatus: the silver helmet, the mask and the catch-cot. Myths run rampant, a parallel contagion: What if you can contract a nightmare in the Sleep Vans? What if donors, too, expose themselves to the infection? Other donors dread becoming a Donor Y. Newscasters transmit the germ of fear to millions. The morning news, the evening news, it’s relentless:
“Obviously, the American people have been lied to, the American people have been misled about the real risks of this sleep donation procedure . . .”
Never have I heard “the American people” invoked so many times per hour.
The CDC assembles a task force of dream epidemiologists.
In the Mobi-Van, we are calling around the clock, reassuring old donors, begging. The intern jokes that he could use some bootleg sleep himself, until Rudy roars at him to knock it off.
If you’ve ever watched people speedily disqualify themselves from serving on a jury in a courtroom, you can imagine the efficiency with which many of our cold calls recuse themselves. When I announce that I am a Slumber Corps recruiter, people launch into descriptions of their most bewildering dreams, as evidence that they are unfit to give:
“Ma’am, I keep drowning in my own blood at night. I have the shadow of an insect, I dreamed that. Really, I’m a menace. My dreams aren’t right . . .”
“This one I’ve been having since childhood, I call it the bottomless dream? The dead go spelunking into blue holes. Then for some reason I’m in Lithuania, in a jade cave where the tornadoes breed . . .”
“President Nixon strapped to a fire truck! Twice, I dreamed that this month . . .”
A recent widower says: “What lugubrious facts. I regret that I will be unable to change them for you. My wife just died, you see, and she’s saturated my sleep like coffin milk.”
A Russian woman interrupts my scripted pitch to scream at me, quite persuasively: “I should ask you, you should give me. Every hour I have, I need!”
It’s a crisis of faith. Donors refuse to give sleep; donees who have spent months on our rolls are now refusing the transfusions. Suddenly, impossibly, we must advertise to recruit the sick ones.
We need good sleepers and we need insomniacs. To combat attrition on two fronts, the Slumber Corps launches a new PR campaign. The TV spots show scrupulously groomed young couples, paragons of hygiene, holding up their children under a pristine full moon, yawning, smiling, waiting for their turn to donate at a Suburban Donation Station. Behind the Van is a tract house and snail-shaped driveway. The message: the Sleep Van comes to you. Then the camera cuts to footage of a yellow nursery. There is zoo wallpaper, the zany chandelier of a baby mobile. The camera floats over a crib, pans down to a three-month-old infant’s seamless eyelid. A lavender bib with tiny sheep rises and falls on her perfect chest, with a dreamy evenness.
“SLEEP LIKE A BABY AGAIN: 1-800-IMAWAKE.”
It’s like watching food advertising for hungry mouths.
We run a local hotline. On either side of me, Yoon and Jeremy are pouring reassurances into their telephone headsets. These salving phrases are the antibodies engineered for us by the Corps scientists, sets of facts to counteract the spread of doubt, terror. And as we speak them, we try hard to immunize ourselves, and one another, against the panic of the callers. “The Donor Y contagion is officially contained,” I say on repeat a hundred times a night. When I close my eyes, though, I picture a microscopic worm nuzzling under skin, blood-rocketed through the entire organ system.
“The needy simply do not trust us,” complains Rudy Storch.
“I can’t believe this,” says Jim, shaking his head.
Very slowly, Jim reads off the names of Last Day insomniacs who have requested removal from our transfusion wait-list: “Rita dropped out? Melissa Van Ness? Has everybody lost their mind?”
Reflexively, he keeps thumbing water from his eyes. Rudy has formulated a sort of chitinous shell of sarcasm to protect him, but I worry about Jim.
“Jesus. I mean, mistrust us, okay, think us diabolical, but let us help you.”
I don’t tell Jim or Rudy that certain people on their staff mistrust them; that we all wonder at the brothers’ motivations for pouring their fortune into the Corps.
Chief among the skeptics is Roger Kleier, the Slumber Corps janitor. He is always recruiting our doughy new interns to share his suspicions of the Storches. He is on payroll, he is not a volunteer. His salary comes from the tremendous endowment made to our regional branch by Jim and Rudy Storch. Every month, an influx from the brothers’ coffers fills his bank account.
“You gotta be shitting me! The toilet brothers give up a million-dollar business to work out of a trailer—why?”
Roger is a naturally suspicious person. There are bodies that reject sleep transfusion after sleep transfusion. Bodies that come preprogrammed with evolved defenses against all foreign dreams, that respond to even infant sleep-transfusions with a violent immune reaction. And goodness knows, I have worked with many people in this waking life who seem congenitally incapable of accepting any human donation of blood, marrow, sleep, criticism, praise, money, love. Some days, I know, I’m one of them. You find that you’re not a match with the donor. Or you sense that the gift will take some freedom from you. Your body rebels, maybe you don’t even know why. But the donation is rejected.
Roger’s janitorial desire to get a clean read on the Storches, his hostile curiosity about their motives, adds its resonance to the chorus that pours th
rough my headset. During Phone Shifts, I read my updated script. I say: “The Donor Y outbreak was an anomaly.” I say: “Sleep donation is safer at this moment than it has ever been in history.” I say what I can say, and mean: “People are lying awake, dying. They need your help.”
On a good night, I feel I’ve done a good thing. That donors will continue to replenish the Sleep Banks; that the risks to them are minimal; that the benefits to the insomniacs are incalculable, sky-wide, as enormous as any life-in-progress.
On a bad night, this can feel like stitching an imaginary net under a hundred wheeling acrobats. Or promising the stars they’ll never burn out, fall. The Corps script doesn’t come with stage directions; I could ease up a little on the doomy enthusiasm. Politicians would retire their office before guaranteeing so many splendid tomorrows to their voters. Men don’t lie like this to get women into bed.
Underneath my audible solicitations, I make another request, at a frequency far below the chittering of my transmissions to these people, my bullshit reassurances: Please let what I’m telling them stay true, please let them be safe.
* * *
Donor Y.
Why, why.
I become obsessed with him.
Was it a case of “malice aforethought”?
This term I learned from a high school book, Moby-Dick: a white whale ramming with blind hate into the hull of a boat, trying to kill everyone aboard.
“Malice aforethought,” the teacher explained, meant the whale could scheme, like a man, and design its revenge.
Perhaps Donor Y wanted to settle some score with the universe. Perhaps Donor Y was tired of being an anonymous sufferer in a crowd, and wanted to propagate his worst night. Gould’s machines gave him a way to tattoo his private horror onto the minds of strangers. This possibility—an uncomfortably arousing possibility—gets mentioned in every news story about the crisis. Villains sell papers. And I find that I prefer him this way: nasty, aware.
Donor Y, when I try to picture him, never develops a face. What I see instead is a husk, a humanoid virus, interested only in the dissemination and replication of its own pain.
You’ve heard about that sperm donor whose single cup of swimmers went on to sire legions of snub-nosed, blond half brothers and sisters? Our Donor Y has inseminated thousands of dreamers with his personal hell. He’s broadcast his nightmare to every demographic.
Donor Y, Baby A. I picture them as opposite poles on an axis. Donor Y, pumping out the nightmare, and Baby A, pumping out black sleep.
I find that I badly want Donor Y to be pure as well: purely evil.
And if he betrays me by showing up, becoming real? Just some middle-aged guy in a sweater, with one uncommonly virulent nightmare? This scenario, I hate: Donor Y gave no thought at all to the possibility that he might be such a carrier. He was a sincere do-gooder. He saw a flyer and wandered up to a registrant. An earnest brunette administrator ran down the questionnaire with him in the lunar-lit tent, and both of them believed that his responses were honest.
Last April, Rudy and Jim had me tell “Dori’s Story” at the Corps Sweet Dreams Benefit—our largest annual fund-raiser. At the ball, I stuttered, lost my place twice. I torpedo-sneezed into an audience of billionaires.
“No, Edgewater!” Rudy reassured me. “You got half the room with that. That snot was a good touch! I mean I know it wasn’t a ‘touch’—with you, it’s never a performance—”
In the bathroom, I rinsed my eyes. A German woman approached me, a Deutsche Bank widow in shimmering green. She complimented me, in her way, on the purity of my grief: “Still so sad! After all these years and tellings!”
I’ve shared Dori with thousands of people now: reporters and talk show hosts; reluctant sleep donors; once, a jet-lagged, baffled, yet receptive African king at a strange and endless state lunch. Every single time I tell it, I go into convulsions. I show her photograph.
“She’s like a grief hemophiliac,” Rudy told the German widow, who was searching avidly for her checkbook; for an instant, we locked eyes over the sequined shoulder pad of this woman’s evening gown. “It doesn’t clot. It never runs dry.”
Is our appeal to this alpha breed of ego a bad thing? Rudy argues that it’s one of our greatest accomplishments—that the Corps reorients the flow of ego, like the old river-dammers who got the water to run backwards and irrigate a dry world. We at the Slumber Corps are hydraulic engineers. We redistribute funds, dreams, to eradicate thirst. And I don’t disagree; only it’s a strange way to help the living, to continually dredge her up, my sister.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the similarities between what I do and what’s been done by Donor Y. Thanks to my efforts, millions of people are infected with Dori’s last breath. My job, as I understand it, is to compel our donors to feel the horror of her death. To “spread awareness.”
“It won’t bring her back,” a trustee once told me soapily over another endless Slumber Corps charity spaghetti dinner, as if lathering his own hands with this antiseptic wisdom. Which, oh God, caused me to swallow a small withered tomato whole so I could hiss across the table, “I know that!”
At the same time, what am I doing, if not reseeding my dead sister into as many fertile minds and bodies as possible?
Dori
Sometimes I think the right doctor could open my chest and find her there, my sister, frozen inside of me, like a face in a locket.
Donor Y and The Elective Insomniacs
Ten days after Donor Y’s story breaks, the San Francisco ER admits a group of twenty chattering maniacs who are refusing sleep. Every one of them tests positive for the Donor Y nightmare. These people were not our patients. They did not receive transfusions from American sleep banks. They were passengers on Flight 109, from Havana to SFO. Immediately, the passengers become misery-celebrities. They represent an entirely new species of revenant in our midnight world.
We learn that these people were part of a group of sixty-one medical tourists. As recently as a week ago, not one of these twenty new victims of the nightmare contagion could fall asleep. Either unwilling or unable to wait another night on the Slumber Corps rolls, they’d chartered a flight to Cuba and paid to receive an experimental sleep transfusion. They spent a week recovering in Havana, cocooned in a secret room behind the Malecón Hospital, near the leafy gold light and the shining Bahia. Sleeping and dreaming, assimilating the transfusion. During that time, the Cuban doctors confirmed that twenty of the twenty-two American recipients had regained their ability to fall asleep on their own. As happens in the best-case scenarios, a single transfusion had jolted them into their original sleep-wake cycles. The return flight to San Francisco should have been a beautiful milestone for these people: stars shuttling past the cabin windows, the recovered insomniacs drifting into natural sleep. Half an hour into the flight, the steward reported hearing piercing screams throughout the cabin. A fifty-three-year-old male passenger from North Carolina, snoring in a middle seat, 13B, was the first to present symptoms of the Donor Y nightmare. Soon half a dozen other passengers seemed to be plummeting into the same dream, and then the howls came at regular intervals, according to the steward at the press conference, “everyone screaming at once, the way a Ferris wheel sounds, like they were all going in circles.”
The Corps was not unaware that such medical tourism occurred. They had reports of sleep transfusions being offered for cash already under way in Cuba, Vietnam, Haiti, western Germany, despite Headquarters’ issued warnings to American insomniacs regarding these “back-alley dream dealers,” decrying their lack of oversight and regulation, their profit-hunger, their shabby facsimiles of Gould’s machines. What nobody knows is how the Cubans wound up with units of the tainted sleep in the first place.
Fusillades of educated speculation erupt on our TVs:
Units of the infected sleep have crossed the ocean, through some black-market transaction.
An American who received one of the tainted sleep transfusions
gave—or sold—her infected sleep abroad.
And then things shade into hysteria, with some people alleging that the Donor Y pathogen has gone airborne. What if it was sneezed out, coughed up, a scum of germs on skin? What if it was transmitted to all the passengers via the recycled air of the plane?
The Corps issues a press release: NIGHTMARE-PRIONS CAN ONLY BE TRANSMITTED THROUGH SLEEP TRANSFUSIONS. The Donor Y nightmare cannot be contracted orally, or through skin. It is not an airborne virus. It is not transmitted through insect bites, food, water, or sexual contact with a sick dreamer. There is no risk of transmission to a sleep donor.
But this does not halt the proliferation of paranoiac theories regarding motive, transmission.
It feels like a moment in history. Even in the present, you get that shivery sense, watching the greenish footage of Flight 109 parked on the tarmac, the circular door to this winged hospice opening and releasing the victims of the outbreak down spindly stairs. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost”—this expression I’ve known since childhood, and never once had the occasion to use. These descending people on the TV screen look like they’ve seen worse. Several older men are crying, their shoulders hiccuping up and down under the red Slumber Corps blankets. In the hospital, they won’t pull their heads through the teal pajama holes. They don’t dare blink. They pry the lids open with thumb and forefinger; some beg for stitches, tape.
The doctors are calling them “elective insomniacs.”
The doctors have begun to forcibly sedate some of these patients, at their request, since they are incapable of mastering their terror of sleep.
The goal of the electives: to stay conscious. To never again cycle into REM.
And then we learn that the passengers of Flight 109 are not the only ones: hundreds of other victims of the Donor Y contagion are refusing to sleep.
Sleep Donation: A Novella (Kindle Single) Page 4