Sleep Donation: A Novella (Kindle Single)

by Russell, Karen

  I park the Prius in the Visitor Lot. Ward Seven may be new, but the Visitor Lot looks unchanged to me. There’s a Honda in my old spot, in the shade of the lone tree; years ago, I tell Justine, that’s where I liked to park when I came here to see Dori.

  Ward Seven opened without ceremony, no ribbon-cutting, a week after the mass-infection of Flight 109. Seventy-nine people in our city received transfusions of the tainted sleep. Seventeen of them now do their sleeping here. These people have checked themselves into Ward Seven because they are terrified of falling into the dream, and too frightened to sleep at home. They badly want to live; and so, with the aid of hypnotics, under the doctors’ supervision, they get sent back into the hell of the REM-cycle. It’s an unspeakably brave act, say the sleep doctors who work with this population. To ask for that help. To accept the monstrous costs. “Do I wake up rested?” I heard a patient laugh bitterly on the radio. “Are you crazy? Every night is a rematch with his nightmare. But they tell me if I don’t dream at all, I’ll die.” In the Mobi-Van, we have photocopies of several of the Ward Seven electives’ authorization forms, to show our donors. It’s very moving to me, to see their signatures on the consents.

  On Ward Seven, there is a glass partition.

  “Look at them,” Mrs. Harkonnen breathes.

  The room behind the glass is so dark, it takes a moment to see what’s caught Mrs. Harkonnen’s eye. Short beds bracket the shadows. Orderlies walk along the aisle, misting the patients’ heads like cabbage rows, attaching the electrodes that will monitor their sleep. These patients are also research subjects, who submit nightly to polysomnography, who offer up their infected sleep for study.

  Staring into Ward Seven, we sway slightly, as if we are out to sea.

  “My heart is really pounding,” murmurs Mrs. Harkonnen. So Mr. Harkonnen and I draw around her like parentheses. We each take a hand. Justine turns her blue eyes from Felix’s face to mine with an almost animal faith; the look of a leashed creature who presumes she’s being led somewhere for a reason. It’s the same look, incidentally, that the patients are giving the orderlies.

  This Field Trip, I decide, was a terrible idea. I don’t like the firing-squad ratio of thin dreamers to burly male orderlies. I don’t want to watch these poor people go dark, or see anyone get pillow-smothered by the doctors’ hypnotics. I can’t stand the thought of the Donor Y dream slinking through them, awaiting its opportunity to flash into reality. Despite everything I know about the nightmare’s transmission, and the “Facts, Not Fears” campaign; despite the reverb of my own voice chanting panic-antidotes into the blue Corps telephones; despite what I publicly avow to believe about the “contained” contagion, and the humble, human origins of the Donor Y nightmare-prion? I am grateful for this glass. Out here, we’re safe. We are moated by health.

  “We’re just going to watch them?” says Mr. Harknonnen. “Like the bears in the damn zoo?”

  “I guess so.”

  I think we’re all relieved to be on this side of the Ward Seven partition.

  When I was a kid, when I was the “good sleeper” in our family, I’d lie on my back and cramp with a wretched pleasure, knowing my sister was awake, and feeling with delicate, bird-footed certainty that my own eyelids would soon flutter, and I would be off. This I labeled “the bad-bad feeling.” It was my relief, and what I can now identify as the baseless smugness of the healthy. I loved my sister, but by age nine I’d learned already to hedge that love with revulsion, afraid that I would catch her problem.

  “Miss Edgewater!” A taffy-pull of an Indian man, six-foot-seven and El Greco thin, comes flapping down the hallway. “And these must be the famous sires of Baby A!” Mrs. Harkonnen giggles nervously. He introduces himself as Dr. Glasheen, a Fellow at the National Sleep Bank. “Okay, thanks for waiting. Had to get you folks in the system. Here are your bracelets. We’re going in.”

  Dr. Glasheen hits a button. The glass partition begins to retract into the wall.

  Here is what it feels like, to visit Hell at Dusk. Park your boss’s Prius outside this county hospital. Step into Ward Seven’s Sleep Incubation Chamber: the warm dark swallows you. A few orange and purple sconces are the only illumination. This darkness feels placental, as if we are in some marsupial pouch. Shadows as life-support. The room is powdered with intelligence; the patients are awake. You can feel their eyes on you, even if you can’t see them. Orderlies are now going from bed to bed, bending over the lumpy shadows that I know will turn into people, when our eyes adjust. Administering shots. “Dusking” them. Knocking these people out, at their request.

  This is the latest med-slang for the electives’ group sedation, explains Dr. Glasheen to Justine Harkonnen. Dr. Glasheen has usurped me as the Chaperone. He directs us to Bed One. Arm in arm, the Harkonnens follow him while I trail behind, walking pigeon-toed to hush the squeaking of my soles.

  The first elective we meet is a black woman in her late forties, Genevieve Hughes. Upon seeing Dr. Glasheen, her entire face changes. After a second, she manages a thin smile. Politeness overrides the gleam of terror in her eyes. But I gather from the reaction of other electives around us that the tall doctor must inspire this reflexive fear wherever he goes on Ward Seven, which makes sense given his role here, Dr. Glasheen, the Sleep Enforcer, King of Needles.

  Genevieve Hughes’s eyes are like empty bowls that you want to fill with food. How has she lost so much weight and hair already? At home, she says, it got to where she was plucking out her eyelashes to stay awake, even as every cell in her body demanded sleep. Her husband drove her to the hospital. He begged her to enlist in the Ward Seven group sleep therapy program. “Live,” he said. (Hearing this, I feel a pang of, what, envy maybe—because that is one beautifully succinct pitch, Mr. Hughes.) With obvious effort, Genevieve directs a grateful smile at Dr. Glasheen, even as she grips the bed’s guardrails with both hands, as if to avoid recoiling further from the man. Without Dr. Glasheen’s help, she says, she could not bear to face the dream again.

  Before her contagion? Genevieve tells us she runs the downtown cineplex with her husband. We all nod excitedly—everyone present has seen a Saturday matinee at her theater, and dreamed in tandem with dozens of other moviegoers. When Dori and I were growing up, this theater was a rat-infested death trap, but the Hugheses have since rehabbed the lobby into an Arabian palace that serves Milk Duds. “Oh!” says Mr. Harkonnen, pleased. “I know where that place is! My wife, before she was my wife, I took her to your theater, ma’am.” And even Dr. Glasheen cracks the brown egg of his face to smile. “I used to love scary movies, myself,” says Genevieve, “before the insomnia kicked in.” In April, she received the tainted sleep transfusion. Two nights later, the nightmare appeared inside her. Dr. Glasheen is smiling vacantly, checking his watch out of the squeezed corners of his eyes. The Harkonnens are now staring at Genevieve Hughes with frank, unsettled expressions. As she describes her elective insomnia, Genevieve keeps dragging down her lower eyelids with her index fingers, revealing the pink mucosal rims (a common habit among electives, we learn from Dr. Glasheen, who calls his patients, not without affection, “scab-pickers of vision”). She seems unaware that she is doing this. She yawns, sneezes.

  “Bless you!” yelp the Harkonnens.

  “You cannot catch her nightmare,” mouths the doctor to us, in the sort of public whisper that reduces everyone to children. Genevieve looks down at her blanket.

  “We know that,” says Mr. Harkonnen, in his regular speaking growl.

  Then Dr. Glasheen introduces Felix as “Baby A’s dad.”

  Genevieve jumps. Her face blazes with some fever of hope.

  “Oh! When we first heard they’d found a cure, my husband and I cried! I’m on the wait-list; they tell me it’s another five months yet . . .”

  Mr. Harkonnen grunts softly.

  Mrs. Harkonnen pulls out mall studio portraits of Baby A to show her. There’s Baby A arranged on a stuffed rainbow, a stuffed unicorn, a dirty pegasus. Appare
ntly, the sadist mall photographer is also some kind of fairy-tale taxidermist. Baby A stares out at us from the wallet-sized glossies with her implacable blue eyes.

  “And you’re the mother?”

  “I’m her mother.”

  The women study one another. Justine’s eyes are golf-ball white compared to Genevieve’s sunken yellowish ones. The glow produced by the wall sconces seems almost animate, flickering erratically around the room. After Dusking, Dr. Glasheen tells me, they will extinguish even these.

  We are all being very disciplined about focusing on Genevieve, and not the other patients around us, some of whom have begun to babble to Dr. Glasheen that they do not want to be sedated, that in fact they would like to be discharged from the hospital.

  “After sundown,” he complains to me, “they act like I’m Donor Y coming for them. They deny they ever requested sedation. I show my patients their signatures on the consents, and they act like it’s forgery. Dusking time, and suddenly nobody recognizes their own handwriting.”

  And this is exactly what happens. Dr. Glasheen excuses himself to help the orderlies. Many of the electives cower at his approach. They seem to have developed a spontaneous amnesia, robbed by their foreboding of the Donor Y nightmare of their earlier daylit desire to sleep, and live.

  Mr. Harkonnen brought a ball cap along just as a stress-prop, it seems. He keeps twisting it in front of his waist, wringing imaginary sweat from the brim.

  “I hate Donor Y!” Mr. Harkonnen explodes.

  Do you know that I smile? I do. Gotcha, Felix.

  Genevieve murmurs something, softer than orange juice sucked through a straw; around us, the Dusking commotion drowns out all sound.

  “What’s that, Mrs. Hughes?”

  We all lean in.

  “I don’t hate him. I feel terribly, terribly sorry for him, this Donor Y. He had to see these things alone, for who knows how long?”

  Genevieve shakes her head, with that strangely paternalistic attitude the sick sometimes take towards the healthy, as if she’s preemptively forgiving us for what we’re too young to understand. Youth being gauged in this chamber as distance from the Donor Y nightmare. Then she’s gone.

  All around us, people are exiting the room. Their bodies stay visible, but their eyes flutter and shut. Dusked, they lean back against the blue sheets. Many scream before they vanish. They claw at Dr. Glasheen. And I’m thinking, Control yourselves, we’re watching. And I’m thinking: Doctors, are you hearing this? Adjust the goddamn medication. And I, too, am shaking, with an out-of-nowhere anger. Not until the entire bedroom has gone quiet do I relax my grip on Justine’s arm. Mr. Harkonnen has got her other hand.

  Some electives clench and grind their jaws with closed eyes, giving them a constipated look.

  Some take on a magenta cast, as though their skin is being glazed from within by a barbecue brush—fluctuating body temperature, says the unworried orderly. Dr. Glasheen is explaining something to us about the physiological differences between natural versus induced sleep, although nobody is paying attention. His hands, I notice as he gestures at their bodies, look big enough to juggle pumpkins. I wonder what he dreams about, off-shift. I wonder if he wouldn’t like to lift his patients’ scalps, and scoop the terrible vision out of them. Mr. Harkonnen and Mrs. Harkonnen are frowning down at the vacated faces on the pillows like parents at a swim meet, trying to glimpse the divers’ bodies under the froth of bubbles as they glide away.

  “She won’t enter REM-sleep for another ninety minutes,” he tells them.

  Mrs. Harkonnen’s blue eyes are shining-wet.

  Mr. Harkonnen says, “There ought to be some way to arm them, you know. Send them back into this asshole’s nightmare with a handgun, some protection. It’s not fair.”

  “It’s not fair,” agrees Dr. Glasheen, with the worn-smooth voice of someone whose expectations have all been filed away by the nightly emery of his hospital duties.

  In the last bed, a woman has somehow managed to Houdini out of the elastic beige restraints and her green paper gown. Now she’s lying naked on top of the sheets, snoring lightly. She’s fallen asleep on her back with her pale feet crossed at the ankles. A fine sweat glistens all over her body, so that she looks like a melting icicle.

  Donor Y

  Four a.m., in the morning after Ward Seven.

  Can’t sleep. Can’t sink into sleep.

  My diet of zeros doesn’t seem to be working anymore.

  Something else to hate you for, Donor Y.

  Baby A

  I want to learn Baby A’s name.

  This desire has been growing in me for days now, spiking with the Donor Y crisis, and tonight I feel crazed with it—actually feverish. Donors under the age of eighteen are assigned a letter at random, an “Alpha-Nym,” by our system. Most parents slip up at some point, blurt out their child’s full name. Not the Harkonnens. “Baby A,” they say smoothly, tucking her true identity into this blanket. Mrs. Harkonnen may well have told me her daughter’s name at our first meeting in the grocery store parking lot, but I didn’t know to pay attention back then.

  As crazy as it sounds, I keep feeling that if I knew her true name, I could protect her better. I’ve heard strangers refer to “Baby A” as if she is some inorganic compound, a designer sleep drug. All night, people dial the hotline and beg me to get them wait-listed for the “Baby A cure.” Anyone in America who has a bad dream calls in, which means the phones never stop ringing. I go hoarse shouting down their doubts: No, I say, the helmet is safe, the tubes are sterilized. No, there is zero chance that you will contaminate the nation’s sleep supply, as he did. I promise my recruits that the Donor Y crisis has precipitated important policy changes, exhaustive safety rubrics for the Sleep Vans, expensive rounds of testing for nightmare-prions. All this public paranoia, I say, obscures the statistics: sleep donation has never been safer.

  I don’t feel great about this, myself.

  “How do we really know it’s safe for these people to donate?” I ask Jim and Rudy.

  “We don’t know.”

  “We can’t know.”

  “That kind of epistemic murk is unavoidable, Edgewater.”

  “Error, of course, is inevitable in some proportion of the cases.”

  “We should describe the Donor Y tragedy as a freakish exception—which it is.”

  “But it’s unrealistic to expect perfection from any human institution, Trish.”

  “And from any human, period.”

  “You know this.”

  Boy, do I.

  “We need to accept the world as it is, honey, not as we wish it to be,” Jim says, with a self-regarding puff on the “wish” and the “be.” Jim, I’m told, was a theater major at his Midwestern college. It means he underscores statements he actually does believe with some of the gayer accents.

  But the need is quantifiable, uncontestable, and growing. People are drowning in light, fully awake. Children are propped on pillows, foaming soft sounds, singing a terrible music without words. We show videos of them at Drives, which get incredible sleep-yields. Moms who see it are ready to strip down in the nearest Sleep Van and give us five years of sleep on the spot. Some of the youngest orexins became insomniacs at age two; they have no memories of sleeping. Cued by some off-screen producer, these obliging, dying toddlers tell the large blank eye of the camera that they do not remember dreaming one night in their lives. Sleep: What is that?

  These children live in a state of conscious terror, their school days exchanged for a noonlit netherworld. The Sleep Banks in Virginia, Florida, and Oregon are dried out. So I keep calling.

  At a little after midnight, my voice gives out. The office trailer is equipped with a Murphy bed, what I think of as the whipped cream of beds, sprouting whitely from the wall. I pull it down.

  “Working late?”

  It’s just me and Jeremy in here now. Everyone else left hours ago.

  Jeremy is our vacuously optimistic male secretary, who wears
his hair in a carroty Afro and has dozens of chunky rings and ear cuffs and basically looks like a warlock in denim. He is a sweetheart. He does this job for no pay. He looks our recruits in their eyes when he thanks them, and piles wool blankets near the feet of the unconscious donors. When the nurses start a draw, he flinches for them. He donates sleep himself. Since the crisis began, Jeremy’s given half a year of his life: 4,392 hours—he grins proudly—which is far in excess of the legal limits; Rudy or Jim must be pulling strings for him to give so much, on a regular basis. Somebody needs to cut him off now. If you give beyond your sleep recharge threshold, push beyond the body’s natural limits, you’ll suffer the same consequences of sleep loss that afflict our insomniacs: cognitive impairment, physiological exhaustion, collapse. Jeremy stumbles around the trailer like a zombie some mornings, zoinked from a nine-hour draw.

  I realize that he is hovering in front of the door, glancing back at me with a look that is totally unlike Jeremy, full of cagey apprehensiveness.

  “You’re sleeping here?”

  “I am.”

  “Want a tuck-in?”

  I do.

  “Just let me brush my teeth,” I mumble.

  He hits the lights.

  It’s been years since I’ve done anything resembling ordinary socializing. For most of my colleagues at the Corps, this is so. We joke that the insomnia crisis has ruined our sex lives—we don’t have time to sleep with anyone recreationally, we’re too busy begging for sleep on the phone.

  I listen under the sheets as Jeremy unzips his jeans near the door, wriggles out of them. Tiny woodsprite eyes litter the darkness, red and green—just the office electronics. No true darkness left in the modern world, some Luddites complain, fingering light pollution as the root of the new insomnia. Jeremy, a wiry shadow, lowers his full weight onto the Murphy, which whinnies on its springs; this Murphy bed turns out to be an expert ventriloquist of naked bodies. He gives me a nip on my bare neck. Then a consulting kiss, salty and quick. Jeremy’s hands, which are so warm, move under my clothing with a confidence that suggests he has been in touch with some of our colleagues about my amenability.