One thing the Corps has taught me is that my needs are quite common. I have become much more forthright about disclosing them. Shameless, I guess you could say, although I still have a vestige of girlhood modesty, and would prefer the word “honest.” And I am perfectly willing to make a gift-in-kind to my peers, when their complementary need arises. After-hours Jeremy turns out to be a very different quantity than the quiet male secretary who brings baby carrots for lunch and sneezes in sunlight. He, too, is suddenly quite candid about what his body requires from my body. This is our training. Most of our time is spent asking strangers for donations.
There are, of course, no consent forms to sign for this kind of transfusion. No nurses to adjust the fit or monitor its progress.
“Perhaps there is some equivocation on the part of the lady?” Jeremy says at one point, with a frightfully sad tact.
“No, no, I—this is as wet as things ever really get, honey,” I whisper. “Under these conditions . . .”
I slide my hips forward on the mattress. After that, we manage beautifully, me and this hungry silhouette who is my friend Jeremy.
“Sorry,” he sighs afterwards, licking our sweat from my neck. “That was too quick.”
I shake my head—it wasn’t. Any longer would have been, for me, an almost unbearable exposure to the self-eradicating bliss of servicing and being serviced, all at once. It’s a rare transfer wherein both bodies get to be donor and recipient and recipient and donor. We are stroking each other’s knuckles now, side by side on the Murphy.
Jeremy sits up and swings his legs over the bed’s edge. He doubles over into a faceless hill, feeling around the floor for the shed skins of his socks, his T-shirt.
“Stay?” I blurt out.
This in stark violation of the contract.
“Oh, God, Trish, I—”
“No, sorry, I’m not thinking clearly, it’s gotten so late. Go—” I hand him his missing sock, give a little push. “You need a good night’s sleep.”
Jeremy cocks his head at me for a confusing moment; then he squeezes my hand and stands, hobbles towards the trailer exit.
“Thank you,” we say at the same time, and my whole body heats up.
“Get some rest, girl.”
After I hear his car drive off, I turn the lights back on.
You know, I’m afraid that working for the Corps may be irreversibly perverting the way I evaluate human exchanges. Now who is the donor, the donee? I’ll wonder, watching a high school couple kiss at the mall. Are they a match? Will their transfusion be a success? What songs are the corporations piping into her body? I’ll ask myself on the city bus, watching the female driver’s long neck tense and relax as she receives rhythm transfusions via her fuchsia earbuds.
The Storches’ “office” within the trailer is a locked shed on wheels annexed to the main vehicle. It’s a wonder that the two inventors of ergonomic johns can function in such a comfortless space.
Quite easily, with the key I copied two years ago, I enter Jim and Rudy’s inner sanctum. It smells like Pine-Sol and cinnamon chewing gum.
On my knees, I go sleuthing for her records.
“Harkonnen, Baby A—”
The Storches keep hard copies of important documents in an old-school filing cabinet, school-locker gray, the ichthyosaur of the modern storage world. (“Everything is, of course, also in the cloud,” I’ve overheard Rudy reassuring visitors, which is a very disorienting and mystical statement, out of context.)
Hunting her name, I come across a stack of letters addressed to Jim. On impulse I read one. I read the whole batch. They are more frightening to me than the Donor Y nightmare. I read through them twice, my eyes blurring and uncrossing; I feel a funny pang, imagining Jeremy home in his bed. It’s three a.m. Who am I supposed to call now? I lift the phone to dial the Harkonnens, hang it back on the receiver. I stare at Dori’s photographs on the Slumber Corps pamphlets, a stack of hundreds, and start to cry.
Jim
The following morning, Jim calls me into his office. How much can you age in one day? Wrinkles I’ve never seen before are now tractor-gouged across his forehead. We stare across his desk, his gray eyes regarding mine with a strange calm: it’s a gaze that feels prehistoric, entirely shorn of seven years of respect and affection. I stare back. For just a moment, I get this aerial sense of what might happen next, like the view from the top of the roller coaster. This is power, I realize. Jim’s career is in my hands.
Then Jim surprises me by speaking first.
“So. Who are you planning to tell?”
All night, I rehearsed for this confrontation; I’d assumed that, as Jim’s accuser, I would lead.
“Who told you that I know?”
“Cameras, Trish. You don’t think we have cameras in here?”
Cameras? Blood rushes to my face.
“You saw what we—what me and Jeremy . . .”
Horrifyingly, Jim grins.
At dawn I stripped the Murphy bed and folded it back into the wall; the sticky sheets are bunched in a bag at my feet, to be smuggled out of the trailer after sunset. I wonder how many of the dozens of donations I’ve taken and offered on the Murphy bed have been witnessed by Jim, or Rudy.
“Jim, I’m sorry,” I hear myself apologizing. “I shouldn’t have gone through your things—”
“We trusted you.”
“I only wanted to know Baby A’s name—”
“My God, Trish. I would have told you that.” Jim, who is never angry, is fury-mottled, his entire neck splotched crimson. “Now look what you’ve done—you’ve threatened our entire organization.”
Her name is Abigail. Abby Harkonnen. I’m not the only one who knows this. There are merchants in Japan who have been purchasing units of her sleep from Jim, for a dollar sum that left me reeling. The first correspondence with the Japanese sleep merchants occurs a mere two weeks after Baby A’s inaugural donation; most of the catch from her third and fourth draws got sold to a Tokyo lab. It’s unclear from the letters who else might have been involved, or how Jim managed to smuggle her sleep out of the country. I have no idea what, if anything, Rudy might know; these letters were signed by Jim. According to one contract I found, assuming I read the thing right, Jim made in excess of two million dollars for the sale of Baby A’s sleep.
How dare you—I know this is a moral anachronism. A phrase sad and silly, excerpted from an era of bygone incredulity, from a black-and-white movie; and yet for hours last night, alone on the Murphy bed, these were the only three words I could think.
“So now we have a real problem, Trish.”
“Wait a sec—I’m the one in trouble? Jim.” My voice comes out in a child’s whisper. “Why did you do this?"
“Their team approached me. They’ll clone her sleep before we manage it, I guarantee it. They are working to make an artificial injectable right this second.”
“All that money—”
“Went right back into our organization. Nothing traceable to us, or to the Harkonnen baby. Anonymous donations,” he says smoothly, and I don’t know whether to believe him.
“But the Harkonnens,” I try again. Jim? Where have you gone? What I want, impossibly, is to blow the whistle on Jim to Jim; to appeal to my “real” boss, who would surely be appalled to learn what this doppelgänger monster who has stolen Jim Storch’s face and name has done.
“We’re not hurting anybody, baby.” Now he’s speaking in the soothing voice I love, the voice of yesterday-Jim, as if responding to my mental summons. Somehow this familiar tone makes me feel much worse. Queasily, I stare at my hands splayed on Jim’s desk.
“Only a portion of her donations has gone overseas. The rest, as you know better than anybody, we’ve distributed in this country.”
I’m grinding down so hard my jaw is pulsing. An artificial injectable. How much money does he stand to gain, I wonder, if the Japanese team succeeds?
He tries a different tack.
&
nbsp; “Trish, weren’t you and Dori raised religious? Do you know the parable of the loaves and the fishes? The mustard seed, the parable of the talents?”
When he sees my blank face, he shrugs.
“Forget it. We grew up Irish-Catholic. Look: I took the Harkonnen gift, and I multiplied it. Can you imagine what it will make possible if they synthesize her sleep? In the grand scheme, the benefits that accrue to every living person will be extraordinary.”
My head has been shaking no, I realize, possibly since this conversation began.
“But I’ve been telling her parents that her draws go straight to the National Sleep Bank. That we need every drop of her sleep to save lives—”
“So you know,” he snaps, as if he’s lost his patience with a delinquent student. “Who do you plan to tell?”
“Jim. We have to—”
Now it’s my turn to pause, self-startled. From the lump in my throat, I discover that I am unready to separate from our “we,” not yet, or to evict Jim from that pronoun. For seven years, we’ve been a team. And Jim loves my sister, her, the missing person, not just what she does for our organization, I feel very certain of that.
“Did you keep some of the money?” I say abruptly.
“Listen, Trish, we cannot control for every variable. Human greediness . . . it’s not even necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion.”
Jim seems to round some bend in his own mind; without warning, like the sun breaking through clouds, he is smiling almost wistfully down his long nose at me.
“Maybe it’s just what we mean when we say ‘a necessary evil.’ Look at the population we serve. Any one of the insomniacs, at any time, could choose death. Some do, as you know. The ones who get their name on our wait-lists want to sleep because they want to live. They are greedy, greedy, greedy for relief, more life.”
Jim is a better recruiter than Rudy. I watch his gray eyes go mock-ingenuous behind his glasses. He quits trying to bully me.
“It’s your choice, of course.” He steeples his long fingers, his smile now one of rueful contemplation. I can no longer tell what is genuine, what is performance; perhaps Jim shares my confusion.
“Jim—”
“I’m just urging you to think about the consequences of your actions. My life will be over, of course—it will kill me, frankly, the scandal. But let’s not talk about my life; that’s quite irrelevant to the big picture. Instead, Trish, I’d suggest you think about the suffering people on our wait-lists. The media will be all over us. Look at the disruption from Donor Y, the damage he’s caused!”
I nod.
“The fines will be astronomical. Our public image will never fully recover. Without the goodwill of the public, what do we run on? Trish, I know that you are smart enough to understand why it was necessary to give these foreign researchers a crack at achieving synthesis. But the media is going to crucify me, they don’t give a damn who they hurt, and listen, there will be a run on the sleep banks like something out of the Great Depression. People will die, no doubt. Laws might be overturned—infant donations could become a thing of the past. We will certainly never draw from Baby A again if you turn me in.”
“What if you just . . . confess, Jim. Apologize, resign.”
Jim shakes his head at me so slowly, with a maddening air, affectionate and severe, like a father denying his daughter a poisoned apple.
“I know that would make things more comfortable for you.”
“Please, Jim,” I say, hating and hating the meekness of my voice. This is not how I imagined our confrontation, not at all. “Please, will you turn yourself in? I don’t want to be the one.”
He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, puts them on again.
“So you’ve convinced yourself, then. You’ve already decided. You think it’s the right thing to do, regardless of the cost to others.”
“I didn’t say that . . .”
I can feel my uncertainty returning, like a thickening blue mist that rolls in between Jim’s face and my own. Helplessly, I watch this happen. Then my decision softens back into a speculation: What will happen to the Corps, and to all the people on our wait-lists, if I fail to keep Jim’s confidence? He’s right, isn’t he? We are still in crisis mode from Donor Y; easily, I can imagine a nationwide boycott of the sleep banks if the news about an infant’s “stolen sleep” breaks. I can imagine much worse.
And nobody else is doing this work.
“No, you’re bound and determined to sink us, are you? Tie up the Corps in another bullshit scandal.”
“Jim—”
“So.” He leans back in his chair. “When are you going to tell them?”
“Who?”
“The Harkonnens.”
Donor Y
Breaking news: the Donor Y nightmare appears to have provoked a mass suicide. Early reports indicate that between the hours of midnight and two a.m., eleven women woke and dressed and left their houses. Insect-synced by the dreadful coincidence of their illness, by a motive foreign to their formerly healthy minds, they embarked on a nocturnal migration to the coastline. This plot was smuggled into them by the Donor Y nightmare, swear the victims’ grieving families. They were not driving at all but driven by his vision. At one bridge near San Rafael, the women queued up, only women that night, according to police reports; they jumped in the fuzzy glow of their headlights, their cars still idling behind them, sliding out of their slippers or stepping out of their heels, climbing barefoot up the girders, taking ginger, seaward steps along the black rail, trailing shadows. There is footage of them falling captured by a useless security camera riveted to the bridge pilings. Gulls sometimes flit past the camera lens, shrieking, and it is hard to see these birds and not to think of the ghosts of the infected women.
Baby A
The suburbs are rain-wet and green. Those white flowers look even more abundant than before, if that’s possible. They could be sentient, almost, wagging their lunar tongues at us from glittering gutters and construction sites. The Van pulls around a familiar corner, parks. The moon really is inexpressibly bright.
Does it matter if we mean what we say, if the mere fact of the utterance saves lives?
I am thinking about Jim, what to do about him.
Tonight Baby A’s blue eyes flutter open in the catch-crib; a nurse adjusts the flow of the ultra-sedative, and she falls into REM sleep within seconds. It’s a free-fall, accelerated by our medications; she descends through the uppermost levels into deep sleep, our monitors confirming “delta-wave,” and it’s from this vacant corridor of being, beyond the reach of language, image, or memory, that Abigail Harkonnen produces the lifesaving blackflow, the cure for insomnia, sleep piped in from her last home, perhaps, whatever “stasis in darkness” precedes even the womb.
After the draw is done, I bike straight home. It’s a little after one a.m. I’ve locked the bike and I’m heading to the apartment when I notice headlights come on at the end of the street. A car rolls slowly towards me, blinding me. A brown sedan with turquoise doors.
“Get in,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “We’re going on a field trip.”
Night World
Night Worlds, in some regions of America, are now referred to as “Eyesores.” Apparently, not even terminal insomniacs can resist the urge to pun. A sign is visible from the highway: “All Sore-Eyes Welcome!”
In our county, the Night World is located at the exit for the old fairgrounds, which have been converted into a midnight solarium. A sapphire penumbra rings the entire complex of tents and shanties. After a silent twenty minutes, Mr. Harkonnen parks in an overgrown field; he walks around and opens my door. He steers me, holding tight to the flesh of my upper arm; for balance, I grab ahold of his wrist. His thick fingers around my arm feel like a blood pressure cuff. We moth along towards the light in this odd physical arrangement, swinging our free arms. Dozens of jalopies and motorcycles have been abandoned here, their chrome-plated wheels swallowed in the weeds like jewel-toned ruins. S
ome of these are luxury vehicles: BMWs, Jaguars. There is something perversely cheering to me about the fact that tonight, rich insomniacs must have gotten lonely enough to disable their alarms and leave their marble enclaves, coming down the mountain to a Night World.
Two months after the Donor Y contagion, there are those who need sleep and those who fear it. If there is friction between these two terminal camps—envy, resentment, suspicion—I don’t feel it. “Celebration” is definitely the wrong word for what we’re seeing: the pack of slack, exhausted bodies, leaning on silver fenders. But I hear laughter. True hoots and back-claps. Little-bird sounds of cheeks kissed in greeting. It’s what you might call a heterogeneous mix of revenants (and I think for some reason of our great-aunt’s AA meetings, the weak greenish light and hurt savage smiles, decades-sober alcoholics and freckled young drunks gathered in a church basement around a coffeepot). Old orexins, new electives. Have these faces been awake for days, weeks, months? Years? It’s a surprisingly tough call. Insomnia ages you overnight—this is a new Oil of Olay cliché minted by the beauty industry, which is really pushing those day-to-night creams now. We pass four girls in a huddle who could be sisters. Those eyes. Wound-tight flesh. Hair in strings. Cyan networks of veins around their temples, like some cruel Greek crown. Teeth eroded to a monochrome gray. Three black girls, one ghost-white girl. Electives, infected with the Donor Y nightmare, I’d guess, given what we overhear:
“Look, if you do fall asleep? You gotta try to stay awake inside the dream.”
People are symptoms of dreams—
This was our favorite line of poetry, me and my sister, in the lone college class we ever took together, before her professors finally joined forces to insist that she take a medical leave of absence. Dori picked it out, of course, and let me tag along in the wake of her mature aesthetic. It was a generous hand-me-down, her taste in poetry; she also gave me her favorite green leather jacket, her Fender Starcaster, and the leftovers of her beauty products. I was the heiress to all the unused crazycolors in her eye shadow three-packs, you know, the freak blue Maybelline smuggles in between the taupe and the gray, which Dori always said was like the strawberry you’re forced to buy in Neapolitan ice cream; plus Dori’s prostitute-on-holiday blusher, Dori’s pressed powder that looked like ancient silicate from Planet of the Apes. I threw it all away after her death, which I now have come to regret. Words I guess are her more durable artifacts. Only how did the rest of our poem go?
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