It’s startling how quickly their arrival changes everything for us.
People are confused by the new taxonomy of insomnia: Wait, these twenty insomniacs make a full recovery in Cuba, they have one bad dream, and they give up on sleep for good? So they are infected with a nightmare; what in God’s name could be so frightening that death seems preferable to sleeping? What are they seeing, at night?
Newspapers are not even printing descriptions of the Donor Y nightmare. There is great concern that readers will convert the words into a copycat dream, causing waves of hypochondria, mass hysteria. As a protection, this press embargo strikes me as unnecessary—none of the infected patients can tell us anything of substance about the Donor Y nightmare, even after experiencing it for dozens of nights in a row. As one infected woman explains in a radio interview, the Donor Y nightmare does not translate into “upstairs language.” Her speech was cold and precise, the words crisply etched against the silence, so that when I closed my eyes what I saw was not the dream but snowflakes, these soluble blue skeletons falling through space. What she could say about the dream melted quickly away, like a visitation from another world entirely.
Doctors at the sleep clinics are working with teams of psychiatrists at the VA hospitals, hoping to replicate their success at getting PTSD-afflicted veterans to “risk” a night’s sleep. As far as elective insomnia goes, that’s our closest precedent: war veterans who are afraid to sleep, who dread their nightly redeployment to the Mekong Delta or Kabul, and the wet red scenes that might recur in dreams while they are trapped behind their eyelids.
The horrible symmetry of the reversal is rich fodder for late-night TV comedians, jowly theologians, the news anchors with their sibilant pity, their masks of skin and hair. Ratings spike. Panic spikes. Windows shine late into the night, every home in America shingled in yellow rectangles of light, until it seems like entire neighborhoods are having allergic reactions to the Donor Y crisis; even people with no history of insomnia or dream transfusions are suddenly frightened to crawl into bed.
The National Sleep Bank establishes a hotline for concerned citizens.
Callers accuse any human volunteer who answers in a breathless singsong, like betrayed children: “You said this couldn’t happen!”
If we failed, admits Dr. Peebles, it was a failure of imagination. Contagion itself: early on, we foresaw this as a danger. We took the appropriate precautions. After early clinical trials of Gould’s machine showed certain nightmare-prions could be passed from body to body, every laboratory in the country joined forces. New tests got developed: sleep-assays, dream immunoblots. All donated sleep in this country is subjected to a rigorous screening and purification process.
But this specific outcome of a nightmare-contagion? “Elective insomnia”? This was unforeseeable. This was unpreventable. Who alive could have guessed that one San Diego man’s bad dream—no matter how frightening—could make patients nostalgic for their insomnia?
A new mental illness, some psychiatrists are eager to label it.
A kind of extreme sleep-anorexia.
“Iatrogenic”: a word that sends me to the dictionary. More deadpan comedy: it means our “lifesaving” transfusions have provoked a secondary insomnia. The cure is worse than the disease.
Some begin to speculate: Was this done by design? Is Donor Y a new kind of bioterrorist, who co-opted Gould’s technology to stage an attack?
Some are beginning to believe he is the actual ungulate. The red-horned devil himself.
I’m so stunned that when I answer calls, my mind’s a blank. I let my mouth reel off the Corps’ press release: “Now, more than ever before, the world needs your gift of sleep.”
Elsewhere, the elective insomniacs are taking increasingly drastic measures to escape the REM-cycle. They latch their eyeballs open, a Clockwork Orange self-torture. Abuse amphetamines. The most desperate electives will not seek treatment in the hospital, preferring instead the slow, excruciating death of sleep refusal. “Opting out,” Jim calls this.
Baby A
Breaking news: several of the Flight 109 passengers receive emergency transfusions spun out of the Baby A donations, and doctors make yet another discovery. Shock-deliveries of Baby A’s untainted sleep can flush such nightmares out of the system. Glad tidings for the world, at last. A Van screams over to the Harkonnen residence. More panacea-sleep gets pumped out of her.
Within a twenty-four-hour span, the seven infected passengers who receive a transfusion of Baby A’s sleep are cleared of the Donor Y nightmare.
The Baby A miracle is cheered by everyone, everywhere, with the powerful exception of our star donor’s father. Felix Harkonnen, on receiving the news that his daughter’s transfusions can eradicate Donor Y’s contagious nightmare: “They need her sleep, too? All of these new people? My God, can’t you folks find another body to snatch here? Another of these universal donors? You’re telling me my kid’s the only one?” We both picture her then: somebody else’s daughter, playing Wiffle ball, riding her yellow bike to school, sleeping like a champ. “Go scout new talent, why don’t you?” he growled. “Scour the nursing homes. Find a hundred-year-old man. I don’t want my daughter’s first birthday to be in a Sleep Van.”
Baby A’s supply cannot meet the increased demand. Her tiny body can produce only so many hours of sleep per week. Hundreds less than we need, it turns out, at the Sleep Banks.
When I schedule my next visit to 3300 Cedar Ridge Parkway, I am deliberate about choosing a time when I know that Felix Harkonnen will not be home. Mrs. Harkonnen invites me in. She brings out a plate of sugar cookies and switches the television on, which permits us to crouch like spies on the orange sofa and whisper to one another, safely enclosed inside a bubble of background noise.
“Tell me about your sister,” says Mrs. Harkonnen.
“You want to hear it again?”
“Can you stand to tell it again?”
“Okay.”
I am certain that Mrs. Harkonnen has no desire to hear another word about Dori; she is pushing me to make some reciprocal give, I think. Asking for a trade.
“Go on—” she prods. “I’m all ears.”
She leans back on the cork soles of her slippers, her robe flapping open. I can see a swirl of mauve moles on her collarbone, her nursing bra biting into her pale left breast.
“This was my sister,” I tell her, extracting the photograph from my bag.
Unconsciously, half-consciously, I know we are both participating in the illusion that my sister is the one they will be helping; I brandish her photograph before Mrs. Harkonnen’s eyes, then my own, letting the spell set. Dori’s suffering I describe so freshly that anyone could be forgiven for forgetting that it’s over, forever.
“We need to live as one body, don’t we, Trish?” she asks me, her blue eyes widening inches from my face.
Mrs. Harkonnen and I have never talked religion, or gotten into her family background, but I suspect that something must have shattered her in a complementary way, to make her such a perfect match for my sister’s story. Maybe she, too, lost a sister. Maybe she belongs to a strict sect that advocates the gift of one’s every breath to strangers.
But all of my assumptions, Justine Harkonnen reverses. The physics of giving and receiving, as I understand them, seem not to apply here. Even to a Van filled with Slumber Corps evangelists, her faith in the rightness of sleep donation is alarming. She gives what we demand, with blue eyes scrubbed of any misgivings. We all find this upsetting, I know it, although there’s not much room to say so. Nurse Carmen speaks her name with a censuring wonder. Nurse Luisa, who has three little boys, won’t make eye contact with Mrs. Harkonnen any longer. A good mother, the nurses nervously agree, should be growing more upset with us, more worried for her baby’s health, angrier about our chronic requests—not less.
I stay with the Harkonnens in the Sleep Van. Milk darkens a quarter-inch circle around Mrs. Harkonnen’s left nipple, an involuntary seepag
e of which she seems wholly unaware; underneath the giraffe-print blanket, black sleep gushes out of her daughter.
There are natural laws that govern the flow of dream and substance from body to body, laws that determine the passage of electricity through tissue, the routes taken by ruby marrow and iodine crystals and colorless vibrations. Laws to order every visible and invisible migration.
And I feel certain there must be a second set of laws, inscrutable but real, that governs exactly how much a particular individual can give to and receive from another. Some hydrology of human generosity. Because there are these gifts we can make to one another freely, reflexively, with no sting of loss; and there are gifts we fight to relinquish, beg to get.
Mr. Harkonnen grabs me while the nurses adjust the baby’s silver helmet. Nurse Carmen, frowning, flicks at a gummed tube.
“You have pushed beyond the limits of what she can spare,” growls Mr. Harkonnen.
“We have not,” I say sadly.
I show him the chart:
PATIENT’S WEIGHT: Nineteen pounds
MAXIMUM IN ONE SLEEP DRAW: Six hours
MAXIMUM IN A 30−DAY PERIOD: Fifty-four hours
“Well, what did you take just now?”
“Six hours.”
His eyes search my face.
“You’re sure it’s safe for her to give that much?”
Oh, I have no idea. Safety is nothing we can guarantee to a donor; that’s why I collect the signatures.
“These days, the science is so advanced! Trust me: our sleep doctors know every vital detail pertaining to your daughter. They will take only what her body can afford to give, I absolutely promise you.”
Midway through the draw, there is some hiccup; a green light blinks on above the monitors and we all wince, even the nurses. Which is a frightening thing to witness, this neon beeping registering on the nurses’ napkin-smooth faces—something akin to watching stewardesses flinch at mid-flight turbulence. Then the regular rhythms resume, draining more sleep from her chest. The Sleep Van fills with the odd slick smell, and the proprietary gurgle of the machine.
In her womb, Baby A was formed inside a tidaling generosity. Glucose, oxygen, proteins, fats: all transferred from the mother’s bloodstream to the bloodstream of the baby.
Intermission: Faith Transfusion
You start to feel like it’s all Ponzi.
I have to go into the Storches’ private office in the trailer, to let the brothers administer to me:
I want to know, do they think I should do my pitch a different way?
Jim scowls up at me from his office chair with good-natured bemusement, as if he’s trying to locate the humor in a very bad joke. Rudy speaks in a tone like knuckles clenching:
“The Donor Y furor is negatively affecting your pitching. Is that the problem?”
Yes, I say. One of them.
There is micro-sleep; there is also micro-arousal. The brain’s partial awakening. At the cerebral disco, parts of the brain are always lighting up, going dark. I’m waking up, I tell the Storches. When I pitch, I am in two places at once—asleep, awake—merged with Dori, but also observing myself from above. There I am, far below, in a mall parking lot; I stagger backwards as if shot. But I can also see beyond my body now, to the faces of my recruits. I can hear the threat encoded in my pitch. People go sheet-white, their heads shaking to the Dori-rhythms. Children hide behind their parents’ legs, but they watch me, too, and they know that if their parents do not give sleep, if they “choose” not to donate, they, too, might die in this same juddering, blood-sputtering, irremediably conscious way.
“And the problem is, what, that you feel guilty?”
I nod.
“Don’t. Problem solved.”
“It’s this Donor Y bullshit. She’s scared, Rudy.”
“What would really be a nightmare for us? If you quit pitching, at a time when we need every minute we can get of REM-sleep.”
Jim is pacing now, so agitated he won’t look my way.
“If a take-down of our charity was something you planned, Donor Y?” says Jim, addressing the wavy blankness of a window. “Mission accomplished.”
Does Jim talk to Donor Y, too? Is he the imaginary target for all of Jim’s anger? This fills me with a great sorrowful surprise. We have a phantom in common. I wonder how he appears to Jim, if he is a bearded terrorist, if he is an insane person, if he is perfect evil. Whoever he turns out to be, his dream has spawned actual fatalities. Thirty-two “suicides” have been linked to the Donor Y nightmare. (“Suicides” is another term being hotly debated at this moment, since many of the Donor Y−infected appear to have scaled ladders and jumped from catwalks and rooftops in a somnambulatory fugue). He incubated all those deaths, not one life.
Then Rudy brightens, turning to me.
“Have you seen your zeros this month? With the Baby A aggregates? That will be cheering. Get those percentages for her, Jim—”
Worse, I’ve started to hear my doubts in Dori’s voice. She was always smarter than me, in school, outside of school. If she were here, I would ask her what to do now. She’s not a word-talker, not anymore, but her pressure inside my rib cage translates quite clearly: This is how you turn a gift into extortion.
“I think I have to try and find another way of pitching . . .”
“Baby,” cautions Jim, “you need to calm down, now.”
“And I don’t want to terrify . . .”
“Oh,” says Rudy. “Edgewater.”
Jim’s face unpetals, revealing some depth of emotion beneath his initial affectionate dismissal, his Storchy I’m-on-your-side smile. Rage, I think.
“Jesus, Trish,” Jim murmurs. “We’re already so fucked here.”
Behind Jim, the trailer windows are flatly sparkling. At this hour, they are black rectangles. It’s unnerving to look out, see nothing.
“I hate that I’m always scaring everyone. Bullying them into giving.”
“Don’t be. That’s not helpful.”
“That’s a waste of your talents.”
“Your energies, baby. They’re finite.”
“Take that fear and put it out there.”
“Put it in them—”
“Get the hours, Edgewater. People are dying.”
“You’re one of the most valuable members of our team, Edgewater.”
“Look: we want donors to feel good about the gift they are making. But let’s just say, hypothetically, that they feel bad, or scared. Does that change the quality of the gift, Edgewater? No.”
Doesn’t it matter how you ask the question? Or if the tone of your request is closer to a fist than to an open palm? Can the nature of the request corrupt the purity of the gift, the donated sleep? How stupid. How could it. A unit of sleep is a unit of sleep, say my bosses. People have free will, they give if they want to, don’t if they don’t.
I nod, relieved. What they say washes over me, washes in. Oh, let it, I think. Stop making everything wrong.
“What better cause can you imagine?”
“Do the math on that.”
“You’re doing good work, Trish.”
“Keep up the good work, Edgewater.”
“Thanks, guys.”
This is what I want to believe, and now, with their assistance, believe again.
Field Trip
When the Storches return from their D.C. leadership retreat, they are almost unrecognizably gung ho. In our trailer, they mandate enthusiasm for the zillion Corps initiatives. “Field Trips” being one of these:
49n: “In the interests of greater accountability, we want to show Slumber Corps’ donors the direct impact of their sleep donations.”
Proposed venues: the regional sleep banks; the sleep hospices; our downtown hospital, where donors can visit Ward Six, Orexins, and Ward Seven, Elective Insomniacs.
“I vote Ward Seven,” says Rudy. He uses that verb as a courtesy, as if we have equal say in the matter. “You chaperone, Edgewater. We want
the Harkonnens to meet the electives.”
“We’re allowed up for that? Non-family?”
“It’s all arranged. It’s a Meet and Greet. You introduce Justine and Felix to the Baby A wait-list.”
“That way, you know, obverse-reverse? They’ll understand exactly what Baby A’s sleep means to these people.” Jim beams at me. “Show them. She’s a miracle. She’s the best hope for these electives.”
Rudy adds, “Don’t fuck it up.”
“Right,” I say.
Rudy lends me his Prius.
The Harkonnens are standing on their lawn when I arrive.
Nobody sits next to me.
Somehow, I got it into my head that Mrs. Harkonnen wanted to meet the electives. That she had a maternal curiosity about these people wait-listed for her daughter’s sleep. So it’s a shocker when Mrs. Harkonnen in her pretty new dress, with its flouncy hemline, the pink and blue flowers, turns from Mr. Harkonnen to me in the boss’s car and says, “You might have to hold my hand, both of you.”
“She’s afraid,” Mr. Harkonnen translates. When he’s forced to talk to me now, whatever he says, it’s like a hoof stirring turf: red blood floods his face. We’ve known each other for four months, me and Mr. Harkonnen. He has never suggested that I call him Felix.
“I’m not afraid, Felix. I just don’t want to embarrass anybody.”
She undoes her seat belt. I hear the click, I panic.
We’re still three miles from the hospital, I tell Justine.
Then she wraps her arms around my headrest, launches forward in a whisper:
“Trish? I do worry that I might get a little emotional.”
“Emotional?”
And in the seconds and minutes that follow, I start to realize how wedded I’ve become to my fantasy of this woman. To me, she is a superhuman. Freakishly calm, freakishly generous, freakishly strong, in her opaque convictions. I check the rearview for confirmation of this impression. In the backseat, Justine’s face looks grainy-white, her shoulders slump. Her face is terrified.
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