People are symptoms of dreams / Bombs are symptoms of rage—
Dori, with her ancient face at twenty: “It’s a real mind-fuck. I won’t be beautiful again, will I?” And before I could answer, “Shut-up, shut-up, shut-up. I’m sorry. That was a shitty thing to ask. Don’t lie. Trish? Let's get the mirrors out of here, okay . . .”
Mr. Harkonnen and I pass the group of teenaged girls. We fall in step with an older crowd. Veterans, I’m assuming. LD-ers with the telltale features: desolated eyes and cheek hollows, nacreous skin. The Night World is a ten-minute walk west of here. I remember this hike from grade school; yellow schoolbuses parked and spilled kids into these same fields. Mr. Harkonnen and I are moving at twice the speed of the insomniacs around us. I’m tempted to stagger, fake a limp. Out of some misguided solidarity? To protect these sick ones from my health? Sometimes, at Sleep Drives, I will catch myself unconsciously adopting the accent of the immigrant family I’m recruiting, mangling my own English, falling in step with the foreign family’s rhythms. In any case, Mr. Harkonnen won’t let me fall back. He races us along.
The boardwalk is only lit at intervals. Wide orange planks alternate with stripes of raw night. Fifty yards ahead of us, shadows acquire genders, features, then slide back into anonymity. We step onto the wooden platform and walk through a cracked neon rainbow that buzzes twelve feet above us. It’s the old entrance to the county fair. A relic from more innocent times, pre−Night World; resuscitated by some insomniac electrician. Now a grim arcade spills before us: stalls that advertise midnight barbers, disbarred sleep doctors, bartender-pharmacists. Dark green and purple tents ripple across the grass like Venus flytraps, their bright flaps swallowing people. Kiosks hawk antidotes to thought, to light: “BEST QUALITY LULLABIES.” “OBLIVION PRODS.” “DR. BOB BRAIN’S HATCHET—CUT THE ELECTRICITY ONCE AND FOR ALL.” The boardwalk unwinds for seeming miles, and I know from adolescent explorations that eventually these fairgrounds dissolve into a true woods, a nature preserve of spruce and pines.
When I tell Mr. Harkonnen that this is my first visit to a Night World, he is unaccountably pleased.
We draw up to one of the speakeasy tents.
The chalkboard lists the evening specials:
Medicines, a thousand of them, to induce sleep.
Medicines to stay awake—sunlight bulleting through an elective insomniac’s brain.
“In here,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “Ladies first.”
It’s very easy, I discover, to comply with him. Since strapping into his sedan, I’ve felt unworthy of objecting to anything that’s happening. Once the tent’s flaps close, I find myself crowding as near as I can comfortably get to Mr. Harkonnen’s sweat-damp left side. What a crowd. Near the flaps, a trio of twenty-somethings are sharing a pint of some dubious medicine. Tangerine bubbles fizz over the rim. Bubbles are rising in every glass in the joint, Mr. Harkonnen points out, marine blue and dark pink and lurid violet. So these aren’t your standard soda mixers, but some self-catalyzing enchantment. Threads of limber color rise to meet the insomniacs’ parched lips, as if, inside their pint glasses, these medicines are already doing the work of dreaming for them. Up and down the wooden bar, insomniacs sit a breath away from one another on the high, rickety stools. The way they booze as a unit makes me think of Vikings rowing in a longship. Lifting their glasses, slamming them down. Fighting the waves, I assume, inside their bodies.
SINK–AND–SWIM is the name of one of the advertised soporifics.
But the bartender-pharmacist keeps splashing grapey black and auroral fluids into alternating glasses, and you get the sense some tide is truly turning. In this Night World, the two groups are generating their own countercurrent. They laugh, gulp, swallow, they even seem to blink to one rhythm.
I doubt it’s my right, as a healthy sleeper, to read the scene this way, and to be enchanted by the Night World’s unlikely friendliness; but I am anyhow.
The footage I best remember, from local television depictions? This same fairground looked like a refugee camp. Dozens of bone-thin bodies swarming the bonfires, flumes of red flame in metal cans, their shoulder bones jutting rhythmically through the free blankets from the Night World dispensary, like big cats on the prowl.
Next to us, a woman’s head is rolling on a man’s shoulder, her sheepy curls tossing on his navy sleeve like a cloud at anchor. I think she’s an elective who Donor Y infected. Her eyes are milky and ewe-blank, hugely dilated; she jumps when she yawns. “Keep me up,” she demands, and this scarecrow of a man bellies around on the barstool to face her, tucking his shirt into his waistband; obligingly, he strokes her moist forehead, the angry rash on her cheeks and chin, the cuticle-width scar under her left eye. Trying to keep her in this world with him, awake. He’s an orexin, I think—someone who wants only to sleep—and he’s not looking so hot himself: eggy eyes, poached by his illness, skin like white wax. On a calendar, I bet these two are in their early thirties. The whole time his fingers brush her pimpled hairline, he’s murmuring something into her earlobe, like her face is a story he’s reading to her. Her Braille memoir. He reads on, and with each syllable, her smile widens. With his big thumbs, he prizes her eyelids open. This he does for the exhausted, terrified woman with a clinical tenderness and focus—one species of sufferer trying to help another. I’m holding my breath. The man catches me watching, winks.
Are they a couple? I ask.
The man smiles.
“Sure. Met her five minutes ago, when I sat down here. You’re invited to the wedding.”
Recipients and donors. Donors and recipients. Variations of this couple's exchange are happening with a hothouse spontaneity up and down the bar: people with equal but opposite afflictions, propping each other up.
This is my beautifully stable impression of Night World culture for maybe two more minutes; then something explodes near my head. Blue medicine leaks in an Arctic smear down the cabinet door. Whatever it is smells faintly of garlic. So much for romance. Near the tent flaps, a fight has broken out: two gizzardy LD-ers are haggling over their bar tab. It seems they have goaded each other into consuming two thousand dollars’ worth of some placebo-slush. They dispute the bill in hoarse screams: “That was your round, Leonard!” Napkins wag from their hands, covered in scrawl, two rival accounts of their debts to one another—a bar tab that seems to stretch back to the Big Bang.
Mr. Harkonnen returns with our drinks. To avoid the brawl, we retreat farther into the tent, choose stools next to a dark oak cabinet.
“Got us the cheap stuff,” he says.
“Okay. Thank you.”
Shooting Stars is the name of my medicinal cocktail.
I don’t ask what it does. Three sips in, my expectations go colorless. Then I find myself leaning against Mr. Harkonnen’s left shoulder. Mr. Harkonnen smells like nothing unexpected: generic deodorant, Old Spice aftershave. These odors are like flung harpoons—they sail out of the Night World and back across the highway, wrenching whole continents of normalcy into this dark tent: malls and supermarkets, non-lethal sunsets, jarred tomatoes, orderly hedgerows, carpet cleaner, kitty litter, everybody’s junk mail piling up on tables, geese flapping across meridians on their winter-spring cycle . . . and soon I’m having to close my eyes to fight a supreme dizziness, as many times and seasons collide inside my chest. I take another long gulp of the cocktail. This time, the effect is immediate. Heat radiates outward until my skin feels ready to burst, until my skeleton is both holding me upright on the barstool and also dissolving, inside me, into melting vertebrae, a million memories unstoppered in my brain, rising up my spine, flowing down, my body too small to contain them, shrinking even as the dizzy light expands in all directions, and no way to protect myself against the assault, this onslaught of sound and light, and nowhere to release it, all the aggregating echoes, Dori’s voice, our father’s, a thousand other whisperers . . .
I blink twice, rub my eyes: incredibly, the Night World tent is still here. I stu
dy my watch, relieved that I can read the numbers: three minutes have elapsed since we sat down. Beside me, Mr. Harkonnen is eating green pistachios out of an ashtray. He smiles at me. His face looks placid, in the illegible and alien way that stingrays’ bellies look placid as they smooth along glass walls.
“That was an intense drink,” I say, frowning down at my lap.
“Still is.”
“Was it supposed to wake us up?”
“You bet.”
I rub my tingling ears.
“Are you, ah, feeling it?”
“I’m drinking a virgin medicinal cocktail, actually.”
“Oh. So . . .”
“Just gin.”
Mr. Harkonnen leans back against the side of the medicine cabinet. His arms are flung gregariously behind his head. I blink down at our shoes, my head still spinning.
“I thought we should have a private talk,” he says. “Away from the house.”
I gaze up at him from behind my glass. Some disturbed dreamer has scratched Screams from the raven-lunged in a vitreous green ink onto the wooden bar. The tent’s droning moonlamps make it feel as though we’re all boozing inside a tremendous bug zapper.
“Things have become tense,” he adds. “Around the household.”
“You’re fighting with Justine?”
“We’re fighting, yes.”
“About Baby A?”
“No, about the recycling. What do you think?”
He tips his drink back, motions for me to follow suit.
“We were a happy couple, a happy family, can you imagine that? Six months ago that was our status: happy. But then you show up—”
“You can stop.”
“Oh, she won’t hear of it now. ‘Divorce me, then,’ she says. ‘Take me to court. We’re going to cooperate with them, it’s the right thing to do . . .’ ”
“It’s a donation.” I swallow. “Nobody can force you.”
“So she thinks—ha!”
Mr. Harkonnen has finished his virgin sleep cocktail. Angrily, he shakes the drained glass. His tongue darts around to catch the last clear droplets. The tongue’s froggy orbit around the edge of the glass seems many evolutionary leaps removed from the wounded intelligence in Mr. Harkonnen’s black eyes.
“She thinks that one day you will stop asking.”
“But we will! When the neuroscientists figure out a way to synthesize what she produces naturally . . .”
“Ha!”
For the duration of his laughing fit, Mr. Harkonnen stares down at the bar with a face of social horror, the bulge-eyed consternation of a man who is trying to discreetly cough up a bone into a cloth napkin; eventually, he regains control of his voice.
“And how old will my daughter be then?” he asks calmly. “Ten? Twenty?”
She’ll be dead. This thought is nothing I will. It blows into and through me, part of a leaf-swirl of my worst fears. To erase it, I imagine Baby A at twenty, laughing, a bright-eyed college freshman.
“She’ll be a lot younger than ten, I bet. The scientists are working around the clock—”
Mr. Harkonnen snaps for the bartender.
“We’d like to try one of your specials.”
“Of course. What is your desired State of Vigilance? Or Depth of Sleep?” asks the bartender-pharmacist.
“Sleep for us, this time—”
The bartender-pharmacist winks at Mr. Harkonnen. With her tiny, fox-perfect teeth, she tears a blank envelope.
Service is democratic, I gather, in a Night World. Nobody here prescreens, or hands around eligibility questionnaires. The bewigged bartender-pharmacist, smoothing her magenta bangs, is happy to take our money. Eighty-four dollars for two drinks. Purple powder seems to float inside the dark glass, coagulating into tiny countries.
“You’ll be out cold,” I observe to Mr. Harkonnen.
He grins at a dim corner of the tent.
“So will you, though. Bottoms up.”
My body tenses, anticipating a second onrush of light. But three sips in, and this time I feel like a bone on sand, powdery and solid, too, and very still. Some protection is in the process of repealing itself. This is scary at first, but soon its absence feels like a relief. The heaviness of sentience, heavy history and caution—the drink drains it away. Shards are winking on the sand inside me and I find I have no desire to collect them, to dig or to investigate. I am strangely unbothered by the parched bar, the evaporating sea of reason, the flecks of thoughts, their disconnection.
“This is a good one,” Mr. Harkonnen says. “Sort of limey. Do you taste lime?”
It doesn’t last too long, that first hit of the soporific. A second later, I sober up; the waves come back, and I’m myself again, thinking my thoughts, albeit in a dangerously relaxed state.
Somehow it seems we’re talking about Baby A.
“I manage the YMCA. Soccer, baseball. For every boy, there is a season. I wanted a boy, until she came.” He smiles down at the bar, squeezing his fists together; it’s a funny gesture, and I wonder if he’s keeping something for or from himself. “And then I forgot that I ever wanted different.”
Until who came?
“Abigail!” I blurt out.
Mr. Harkonnen lifts an eyebrow.
“Baby A,” I correct, looking down.
“You got privileges, huh? Teacher’s pet? What else do you know about us?”
“I’d never betray her real name to anybody, sir.”
“So we’re back to ‘sir’ now.”
He takes a long drink.
“Go ahead. Call her Abby. Make her a baby.”
His grin hardens until his face looks wind-chapped.
“Baby A—that always sounded to me like some damn sports drink . . .”
I’m scared, and I think he is, too. Light from the moonlamps is reflected in Mr. Harkonnen’s eyes, tiny weather vanes spinning in each black pupil, and returning his stare I am dizzily aware that our night could go in any number of directions.
“What did your boss tell me? The tall one—who’s that again?”
“Jim. Or Rudy. They’re twins. ‘Tall’ doesn’t narrow it down.”
“He said you got the highest number of recruits.”
I feel myself darken. “Thanks to my sister. Her story.”
“So that’s the game, huh? You franchise your sister.”
“I don’t want to talk about her here.”
But his eyes gleam, he is taken by this idea.
“Sure. I get it now. You franchise her pain. Dori Edgewater. Well, it worked, didn’t it?” He grins at me with slack, fish-pale lips. “She’s famous. Everybody knows her, your sister. Just like everybody knows my daughter.”
Two hunchbacked men are fighting in the corner with their barstools lifted over their heads, the chair legs facing outward like spiny antlers, so that they look like enormous beetles charging one another; Night World bouncers in their ominous uniforms arrive to break it up. Jacked electives, reports the bartender-pharmacist. This altercation happens in the shallows, near the flaps. At our depth of the speakeasy, nobody so much as blinks.
I wait for Mr. Harkonnen to accuse me now:
You do what he did, he’ll add, to them. You are just like Donor Y.
Or what else might he say, regarding Dori?
She’s dead. She’s dead. What’s it going to take? Do you want me to ice a cake with that? Your sister’s dead. Everything you’ve done, you’ve done for yourself alone.
But Mr. Harkonnen’s focus seems to have rolled inward, onto his own failures:
“Justine is too damn good for her own good. She has no defenses. And Abby? Poor kid, I’m sure she’ll take after her mother. Assuming she makes it out of preschool. You think I can protect either of them, from what they turned out to be? My wife is a far better person than I am. That’s why I married her.”
I open my mouth intending to agree with him—to compliment the virtue of Mrs. Harkonnen.
Then I think
I have my own hiccup of insight into Mr. Harkonnen’s dilemma. He got more goodness than he bargained for, maybe, when he married her. Some flood he cannot dam or drain or control. Unfortunately for Felix Harkonnen, the same currents of goodness that originally drew him to his wife, we at the Corps have also discovered.
“I’d better shut up,” he says after a while. “Drank too much.”
But a minute later, he grabs my arm.
“Tell me this,” says Felix, whose first name I’ve yet to say aloud.
“If your sister—Dori—were alive today, and she were the universal donor? What would you do, huh? How much would you let them take from her?”
“If it were me, sir, I promise you, I’d let them—”
“But say it’s not you, in this scenario. Say it’s Dori.”
I don’t answer.
To our left, there is a burst of muted applause; people are whispering that an orexin-woman is genuinely asleep. Two men have lifted her up, and with infinite care they are transporting her through the smoky speakeasy. It’s quite something: the crowd falls into a silence that pulses with energetic longing, and people move around her dangling feet with the reverence due a new saint. Watching even one woman nod off into sleep has changed the tent’s entire atmosphere. Now the air feels almost musky with group credulity, the group’s decision to blink an apparition into reality. Her feet wave at us as she is carried from the tent, her entire body limp. If you were a cynic, you might assume this woman was a plant; her stunt-recovery, if that’s what we’re watching, seems to be very good for business. Medicines miracle around the bar, everyone buying everyone rounds. Nobody talks. Crickets are singing beyond the tent flaps, you can hear them in the silence. At one of the kiosks, they were selling a specially bred cricket with emerald wings as an “organic lullaby-machine.” The woman next to me has one in a ruby-tinted jar on the bar, its red legs fiddling away.
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