Half my drink is gone, I note. Mr. Harkonnen keeps slipping in and out of focus on the barstool. My muscles, they’re melting. Tiny knots untwist themselves throughout my body. What I somehow continue not to say:
[Jim Storch sold your daughter’s sleep.]
What would Felix Harkonnen do if he knew this?
Just imagining the conversation makes my gut cramp. How will I pitch it? I’ll tell him I had no idea my boss had brokered this sale with the Japanese researchers. I’ll emphasize my ignorance; I’ll tell him, too, that Jim Storch seems to genuinely believe that the illegal transfer of Abigail’s sleep was both justified and necessary. I find that I badly want to defend Jim to Mr. Harkonnen, to explain that my boss believed he was acting in everyone’s best interests, regardless of whether or not this is true. I want to restate Jim’s grandiose, beautiful claims for Mr. Harkonnen. He called his deal the only way forward.
What if Jim’s right?
I squeeze shut. Eyes closed, I try to imagine it: Jim’s decision in transit. The Baby A sleep units travelling over the Pacific into the right hands, the capable hands of these Tokyo researchers.
If his scheme fails, the Harkonnens need never know. If his scheme works, and they do achieve synthesis, and manufacture artificial sleep, a faucet of unconsciousness, an inexhaustible dream well, “sleep for all,” the realized goal, my God, then we’ve got an outcome straight out of a comic book, or the New Testament: the Harkonnens sacrifice their infant’s sleep, Jim Storch takes a bold risk, I keep shut, the Japanese team gets her sleep on tap, all the terminal insomniacs are saved, et cetera, et cetera, in a daisy chain of gorgeous goodness, fortune. And why not? Why couldn’t it happen, just like that? Religions spore out of such stories. Movies starring Denzel Washington are made of far less.
“Slow down. You’ve got the hiccups.”
Mr. Harkonnen swings an arm around, thumps my back. With his brown hair slicked back like that, with his house-musk of baby powder and Old Spice, and his spatulate hands with their dirty thumbnails, he’s got a mammalian sweetness to him in the speakeasy’s neon den. His automatic tenderness must come from taking care of Abby. Whenever Mr. Harkonnen burps the baby, he looks like a gentle, enormous beaver. His gesture is well-timed with my secret thoughts to make me want to tell him everything; and then, not a second later, to make me scared of losing everyone. Not just Rudy and Jim and my life in the Corps trailer, but the Harkonnens.
I stare at Mr. Harkonnen. A chalky taste rises that I want only to swallow. Easiest to believe Jim’s calculations, Jim’s predictions. Why not? He is an empirical savant, Jim. He made his fortune as a businessman.
But it’s useless to pretend that I can still trust Jim. Any minute now, I’m going to tell Mr. Harkonnen. As scared as I am, I don’t see how it can be avoided. Dori’s working in me, on me, dissolving the capsule around the secret. I must tell you something very upsetting, Mr. Harkonnen . . .
Will Mr. Harkonnen keep the secret? If I explain to him that the ensuing scandal really could undermine the entire institution? Actually kill people, according to Jim’s assessment? I can’t imagine that he will respond to the news with silence, or forgiveness.
Mr. Harkonnen is staring at me with a strangely avuncular expression; he hands me a green pistachio, crunches into his own. “There,” he says, like everything’s settled. “Let’s go for a walk. I’d like to show you the Poppy Fields. They’re really something. They’re way out beyond the tents. Do you know, ever since our field trip to Ward Seven, I’ve been coming out here every other night. Justine thinks I’m working late. And she’s not wrong.”
His grin is a further mystification, exposing a black back tooth.
“I am.”
“Why?” Then a startling answer occurs to me. “Are you sick, too?”
“No. it’s not that. After that night at Ward Seven, I just wanted to see these people for myself. Solo, you know. Without my wife. Without a chaperone.”
I giggle, terrified.
“It’s been quite an education.”
“For me, too, Mr. Hark—”
“Good. We’re just getting started. The night is young.”
Something tightens in the air between us and I find that I’m pushing away from the bar, and from the empty glasses and the cracked pistachio hulls and the unslept faces. I have to stand to avoid falling off the barstool. I hold on to the bar’s edge, blinking hard into the moonlamps. Felix is studying my eyes. I amend my plan, watching him watching me, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that my plan amends itself, spontaneously inverts: Who is helped, if the father knows about the sale?
No one, says Jim.
Out loud, I make the easier apology:
“About Ward Seven? I’m really, really sorr—”
“Don’t!” he roars. When the bartender-pharmacist looks over, he laughs: this is all in good fun, ma’am. He needn’t worry. Under her wig, her yellow-brown eyes regard us with a hilted intelligence, halted judgment. All of Night World seems to sparkle with a similar neutrality. Dulled gazes like swords in scabbards. Then we are back on the boardwalk, joining others on their slow bar crawl under the stars.
The Poppy Fields
The Poppy Fields have been widely reported on: a special strain of poppy which releases an “aromatic hypnotic,” sometimes called an “olfactory blanket.” Poppies are trendy, if that word can be applied to foredoomed miracle cures. All over the country, Night World gardeners are pruning the flame-bright poppies beneath the moon. The gardeners’ headlamps reveal a wilderness of faces, insomniacs whose bloodshot eyes are even redder than the poppies. They lie on bedrolls and grain sacks in parallel rows, breathing in the flowers.
We reach the edge of the boardwalk, step off into grass.
In the distance, the woods wall us from the city. Pines span the horizon, nearly black in color at this hour, with the pointy, standard look of fence-posts. A wooden sign with an arrow reads: FIFTY YARDS TO THE POPPY FIELDS.
Behind us, the fairgrounds waver like some hallucinatory reef: the calm anemone billowing of the Night World tents, the barkers’ poles like red coral, the electric green spokes of the Dream Wheel. At this distance, even the screams of the insomniacs receiving Oblivion Prods contribute to this illusion, their faraway cries transformed by repetition into an implacable background, like waves crashing on rocks.
And then we are mid-calf in acres of flowers. “The Placebo Fields,” we joke in the Mobi-Van—but, my God, it is hard to hold on to your cynicism when you actually see them. Under the moon, the poppies look as bright as jewels on the sea floor. We wade through hundreds of them, the scarlet buds drumming against our shins, and I find it’s almost frightening to bend the stems back, to graze the petals with my fingers. This is no mirage. But it’s a shock to find this sea at our city’s edge, and to find myself navigating it with Mr. Harkonnen. Who knows if the poppies’ fragrance is a real insomnia cure? I realize that I don’t smell a thing. But my thoughts shrink to a whisper, and soon I start to feel like I’m sleeping already.
Pain tickles my heel.
“I think I stepped on something . . .”
“I’d keep walking,” said Mr. Harkonnen, swallowing, his voice a thick buzz in my ears. “If I were you.”
“Will you look for me, will you check—”
“It’s okay, Trish.”
And this is a real gift: the sound of my name. Connected to that stem, memories spread their wings, and I recollect who I’ve been, before the purple sleep cocktail, before the Night World parking lot and before my knock on the door which turned Mr. Harkonnen’s daughter into Baby A, before the sleep crisis, and even before Dori’s last day.
Very gratefully, I keep pace with him.
Remember this, I instruct myself.
Mr. Harkonnen steers me towards a small shack in the center of the field. It looks like a boat at anchor in this strange Atlantic. Night World staffers mill around it, grabbing blankets, chatting with groups of insomniacs.
&
nbsp; “Do you know about the Legend of the Poppies?” a young attendant asks us with mechanical charm, tugging her black ponytail around her collarbone. She is the Valet, I realize, taking cash for the bedrolls and the blue inhalers, directing bodies to their pallets among the red flowers.
“I do,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “You told me. But tell her.”
With the mechanical cheer of any waitress, she beams at us each in turn.
“According to Greek legend, the poppy flower was the gift of Hypnos, the god of sleep, to help Demeter to dream again. Demeter was exhausted by the search for her lost daughter, whom Hades had taken to be his bride in the underworld. Now, Demeter was so tired that she could no longer make the harvest grow. But his poppies cast a spell on her. She slept, and when she woke, the corn was growing green and tall again.”
Mr. Harkonnen fishes for his wallet, tips her a buck.
“Yup. Thanks. That’s a rough night for Mom. The devil’s got your daughter.”
This female attendant is a tall Asian girl who is the same age as our Slumber Corps interns. She wears a long white coat and a white dress, for “atmosphere maintenance and heightened visibility,” she says. Behind her, the wind is picking up. It plows the fields. Each gust obliges the worst kind of devotion from the mutely chattering blossoms, grinding them against the soil, knocking their red heads around. The wind could do this to us, too, at any instant, it seems to want us to know, and the thousand poppies nod their agreement.
Suddenly I am overcome by drowsiness.
Mr. Harkonnen, beside me, lets out a shuddering yawn.
Women wander the poppy fields, in white nightgowns, carrying vessels of water, or some other transparent liquid. In calm, emotionless voices, they begin to halt the unsteady pilgrims and to ask them questions:
“Would you like a sip of the supplemental poppy tea, dear?”
“Would you like sheets and a pillow? We can sleep you on plot seven, or for forty-five dollars we can upgrade you to plot twelve, directly under the moon . . .”
It’s funny: Who in their lifetime, pre–Insomnia Crisis, could ever have imagined shelling out that kind of money to unroll a rubber mat in dirt? But just hearing the soothing voices as they recite the Poppy Fields’ menu of pricey sorceries is enough to implant these desires in me. Hungers appear in my mind, like coins flipped into a wishing pool.
America’s great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively, to a body like mine, and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end. Forty-five dollars for the moon-plot? Put it on the card. What a steal.
“No,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “You know what? No, thanks, miss.”
He grabs my arm and then we’re hurrying away. Red poppies lisp after us; if their magic works, we must be resistant to it. Neither of us keel over into slumber. We have to walk through these sections of the Poppy Fields with great care, because the shapes humping the grass are people.
Maybe ten minutes beyond the Poppy Fields, when the “enchanted” flowers have ebbed back into scraggly, depopulated weeds, Mr. Harkonnen stops to rub his eyes on his sleeve. “Too many people there tonight.” His shoulders punch up at the sky, some martial shrug. “No privacy. Even if we paid the big money, I figured there would be some watcher there, lying a row away from us.”
But that is not our problem any longer. Currently, we are moving parallel to the woods. There are a million visible stars, miles of dark. We seem to be the only two people.
Why did you bring me here? I do not ask him.
Abby—Baby A—she’s a hero, I do not reassure him.
Instead I say:
“Mr. Harkonnen—Felix—do you think the elective insomniacs have a choice?”
He grunts, picking his way across the unlit grass.
“Yes. Some of them go to the hospital for help, and some come here to die.”
“Do you think I gave you a choice?”
“Who do you think you are, girl? We chose. We’re choosing. Only you assholes sure rigged the game up good. Now, if you hadn’t shown up at our door in the first place . . . but let’s walk.”
We wander off into the shadows far beyond the “All Sore-Eyes Welcome!” sign, through uncut grass that brushes at my bare ankles; his hand drops to the small of my back, I take his arm, we are stumbling. All of this proceeds with a sultry inevitability, with a logic that mimics the odd chordal progressions of dreams, and for the first time in a long while I feel utterly relaxed. He frog-marches me far beyond the fairgrounds until I let him see that I’m not going to stumble; then he loosens his grip. Still he doesn’t let go of my arm. Wherever we are now, we’ve missed the dividing line that separates the fairgrounds’ unkempt margins from the nature preserve. Together we ford rivers of cattails, until the fever pitch of the Night World is entirely erased by distance, silence. The only sound is the occasional scream of some nocturnal hawk, which rips through the deep quiet of the sky like a skunk stripe drawn through black fur. We have to clamber over several enormous logs, Mr. Harkonnen grunting and slipping, offering me a hand. In the dark, these felled trees look as frighteningly misplaced as the bodies “sleeping” in the Poppy Fields. They make a lateral map of the woods as it must have been, before some storm. At one point, I look up and I see a spreading V pushing over the pines, many dozens of wings pulsing far above our heads; only it must be a very odd flock, because no shape resembles any other. Their wingspans, too, are irregular, some short and some long. Gaping up, I watch them multiply—what sort of flock is this, for what purpose are so many different birds gathering? It’s too dark to even guess at their names. Silvery light seems to pour from their wings, although I know this watershed must be an illusion caused by the mediating stars. Starlight liquefies and streams as the black shapes cross the Pleiades. They arrow over the trees so swiftly that before I can point out their bladed and scissoring bodies to Mr. Harkonnen, they are gone.
At last, when I am swaying on my feet, he stops.
“Here.”
“Here’s good. Sure.”
“Now, lay down.”
Overhead, two hawks carousel around. It’s years since I’ve been this close to the green perfume of any woods.
“Stay put. No—Jesus, knock that off.” He rolls his eyes. “Are you stupid? That’s not why I brought you here.”
I misunderstood. I assumed he needed a transfusion of something straightforward, something on the level of what I did with Jeremy. I rebutton my blouse.
Mr. Harkonnen lies down in the grass beside me, grunting. Then he maneuvers my head onto his chest, makes a vise of his bicep. I cry out from surprise, just once, and a tawny blur streaks out of the scrub and runs past my cheek in the dirt. It’s the fastest mouse in the world, I think, and then realize that my eyes are streaming.
“Here—” he repeats, trying to crook an arm under my shoulder. My hair gets yanked loose from its ponytail and spills onto his T-shirt. He shifts us around until my earlobe is pressed against the bony plate of his clavicle, where I can hear his heart drumming.
“Sleep!” he commands.
“Okay. Okay.” I take a shuddery breath. “Why?”
“Because I said so,” he says, viscous and triumphant. From his slur, I can hear how the medicines are dragging him under, too.
“You sleep for as long as I say, got it?”
“I will, Mr. Harkonnen.”
This consent is easy to offer. Nothing troubles me at all now.
“Good.” He faces me on the grass, eye to eye under the pillow-white moon. “Night.”
* * *
The following dawn with Baby A’s father is one of the strangest of my life. How a person who so evidently hated me for months can now relate to me with such natural solicitousness is as bewildering as any flower opening in the desert. Whatever waters fed the blossoming of this affection are invisible to me. It’s got to be some misdirection of the profoundest kind. Misplaced ten
derness for Baby A, maybe, or for his wife, Justine. I wake up to a gray-flying sky, the sun not yet risen, and Mr. Harkonnen offering me a sip of water from his canteen. He takes the corner of his shirt, moist with dew, and rubs the dirt from my face.
I receive this kindness as best I can.
It’s strange to see Mr. Harkonnen in daylight. We are our sober selves again, thank God. Dori, her memory, is caged as pressure in my ribs. Whatever came unravelled last night feels neatly spooled this morning. I exhale, feeling safer and safer as the sun inches up.
“How did you sleep?” he whispers.
“I slept beautifully. Thank you. And you?”
“I slept good,” he grunts, suddenly bashful. “That lime stuff was killer, whatever we were drinking. I feel well rested.”
“Did you dream?”
“If I did, I don’t remember.”
“Me, neither.”
Mr. Harkonnen nods, as if this is the bridge he’s been waiting for.
He tells me he has a proposition for me, regarding dreams.
“I want you to make me a promise,” he says. “Let’s draw up a contract, right here. If you are going to continue to draw sleep from my daughter, I want you to swear that you’ll give exactly that amount, every time. A matching donation. For as long as she gives, you give, too. You don’t rest again until I say you can.”
The sun shivers free of the distant pines.
“Of course,” I hear myself say.
We shake on this.
He nods twice, flushed and seemingly satisfied. With my free hand I peel a blade of grass from his stubbled chin. I find that I’m exhilarated by our contract’s terms.
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