Sleep Donation: A Novella (Kindle Single)

by Russell, Karen

  We stand up in the dirt. We laugh a little, to drain a pus of awkwardness. I feel the strangest happiness. Tight muscles spasm everywhere in my arms, and an alkaline taste I can’t name coats my throat. Mr. Harkonnen swallows. He has not released my palm.

  Then I wish for whatever is flowing between us to remain unnamed, formless, unmeted into story or ever “experienced” in the past tense, and so concluded; I don’t want to say it, I don’t even want to try to understand it, and so begin to mistake it for something else, and something else after that, paling shadows of this original feeling, something inaudibly delicate that would not survive the passage into speech.

  Shadows windmill over Felix’s face. Like he’s been caught out, all of a sudden, in some extra-dimensional autumn. Where are the falling leaves coming from? Clouds go racing over the field. Down below, our hands are still clasped. I’m relieved, relieved. I don’t feel like a slave to the contract. I don’t feel that Mr. Harkonnen tricked or frightened me into it. Each time I stare down at our handshake, I feel the same vertigo, a dislocation that is much stranger than mere anticipation, as though I’m being catapulted forward in time, rocketed to my death, perhaps, or to some absolute horizon, where I get a glimpse of my own life massing into form, and a thrilling feel for all that will happen to me now, all that I cannot know, haven’t yet done, haven’t spoken, haven’t thought, will or won’t. Just entering the contract does this. No matter what happens next, I’ll have one constant now, won’t I? Thanks to Felix, my dreams will be twinned to the dreams of his baby. The simple algebra of our arrangement feels like a ladder that he is holding out to me.

  “I will not let you down,” I tell Mr. Harkonnen. “I won’t quit.”

  He gives me a tight smile, a look I recognize from my own mirror as the winched contentment of a recruiter; the pitch is finished, the contract inked and under way.

  “All right. Better get us home.”

  Overhead, the sun is fully risen. A flock goes rowing over the pines, and this species I do recognize: they are Pennsylvania starlings. A hundred common gray-black birds, frequent visitors to our childhood backyard. They go shirring through the goggled blues of the May sky, the azure pools of air between the white clouds, moving east, each bird uniformly lit by the round sun. We walk under them, retracing our steps. Eventually Mr. Harkonnen drops my hand, but the world we return through feels solid and good.

  * * *

  Mr. Harkonnen drops me off a block from the Mobi-Office; I’m afraid my colleagues will recognize his brown and turquoise sedan and get the wrong impression. We did spend the night together, but that true statement is so misleading that I think it’s worse than a lie. It’s 7:02 a.m. But I see that as early as I am, I’m still not the first staffer to punch in.

  Jim

  “Hey,” says Jim.

  “Hello,” I say.

  Donor Y

  The Tuesday following my strange dawning with Mr. Harkonnen, an alert calls every staffer into the trailer. We fish-gape around Rudy’s computer. Headquarters does a live broadcast from the D.C. offices, so that we learn about the Chinese orexins and electives fractionally faster than the rest of America.

  Breaking news: several dozen patients suffering from the orexin-disruption have sought treatment at the Sanya Hospital in Hainan Province, China. This medical milestone delivers a quiet shock to all of us in the Mobi-Van. Naively, we now realize, we believed the dysfunction was bounded by our hemisphere, peculiar to American sleepers. But here is proof that nobody is quarantined by geography—that anybody, anywhere, might become an orexin.

  It gets worse.

  Fourteen Chinese insomniacs in Hainan Province have also tested positive for the Donor Y nightmare. These people received sleep transfusions from an unknown source. The Corps was unaware of the existence of Chinese sleep clinics offering REM-transfusions for cash. Initial reports suggest that the fourteen Chinese men and women infected with the Donor Y–prion now exhibit an “extreme sleep aversion” similar to what we’ve seen with American elective insomniacs.

  Presently, our doctors know so little about how the nightmare is spreading that they can only describe symptoms, guess at causes. But it’s clear that my assurances were wrong. His dream is unchained, hopping bodies. The nightmare contagion is uncontained.

  * * *

  Jim calls me into his office.

  “Are you avoiding me, Trish?”

  “Ha-ha. That would be a ninja-feat, wouldn’t it, Jim? Avoiding you in this trailer.”

  “We barely speak.”

  I touch my throat, as if to suggest I have a common cold. At the same time, I feel this to be an accusatory gesture; Jim must know, of course, that his secret is the obstruction.

  “Who are you talking to these days? I wonder.”

  But then the door comes unhinged; Rudy steps in.

  In the narrow trailer window, I watch our faces darken like loaves in an oven.

  “Huh,” he says mildly. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “I’m talking to Trish. As per our discussion.”

  “Oh. Right. We don’t think it’s a good idea for you to spend quite so much time with Baby A’s family.”

  “It’s just not professional . . .”

  “Or it’s too professional. They don’t need that much from you, Edgewater.”

  “Your talents are now needed elsewhere.”

  “With the insomnia appearing on every continent . . .”

  “With the nightmare-infection spreading . . .”

  “Globally, we’re going to have new initiatives, new responsibilities . . .”

  The happiness comes on me like a sickness I can’t stop. I feel myself go fully automatic. A smile swarms onto my face, and somehow I am nodding at the brothers, taking notes. For a second it feels like old times to me, to stand under the headlamps of the brothers’ concern. Not just for me, but for the entire planet; listening to them rant about the world in peril has always given me the most unlikely sense of security, made me feel like I am safely in the center of a rapidly enlarging family. And I think back to the night three weeks ago when I stood between Justine and Felix Harkonnen, staring through the glass into Ward Seven.

  “I feel responsible for them,” I say, staring from Jim to Rudy. “The Harkonnens.”

  “You’d better get over that,” Rudy snarls. “You’re not.”

  Baby A

  Baby, baby. We’re in a pickle now, aren’t we, baby?

  “Hush, hush,” I murmur, bouncing her around the Van.

  It feels as if we’re orbiting the same black hole. Her sleep will not stop flooding through her, shadowing her blood. My sister’s ghost regenerates as one lean memory—the final hospital scene keeps doubling back on itself, repeating. So far, I’ve been diligent about making the matching donations. Many nights now, Baby A and I are going under sedation in tandem. Yesterday evening, for example, Nurse Carmen drew five hours from Abby in the Sleep Van, and I gave five hours at the Bank.

  Mrs. Harkonnen now refuses to let anybody but me touch Abigail before the procedure begins. Thank God, there’s not much to the prep—just rocking her to sleep, the basic bob-and-shush, the lullaby-bounce-step, that Dori and I perfected when we babysat in middle school. The nurses sterilize the helmet, spin-dry the colorless lozenge of the face mask. We hook the little bellows of her lungs to the larger bellows of our need.

  They really do trust me now, Mr. and Mrs. Harkonnen. Somehow I passed their independent screenings. They think I am sincere.

  Another influx of misplaced faith that I must queasily endure, and assimilate into my body, for the greater good, says Rudy, who does pay attention, and who has noticed how my cheeks flame around Jim.

  In a fairy tale, I would take Mrs. Harkonnen aside, suggest a scheme to deliver her daughter from our gloved hands, some prudent metamorphosis: We’ll smuggle her out as a bear cub, a red rose, an eagle. We’ll find some magical pair of shears to free your girl, I’d promise her. We’ll cut you loose from
the messy rest of us.

  Instead, I show them our latest promotional video. It’s genuinely uplifting—testimonials from survivors who received their daughter’s sleep transfusion. You can tell from the flat surf of each voice that a wave within them has crested and broken, and they are now safe on some far shore:

  “The nightmare is over.”

  “The nightmare is over.”

  “It was a miracle: I slept through the night, and I woke up.”

  We three watch it together in the Harkonnens’ living room, violin music swelling out of the speakers. Inside the Sleep Van, the video’s hero, Baby A, snores lightly under the leaf-sized green mask to replenish the black tanks of sleep.

  Nurse Carmen knocks once and pops her head in: “She’s done! Did a great job.”

  We switch the TV off.

  Baby A goes back to her mom. Now she’s awake and hungrily nursing, her white-socked feet doodling on air. One day soon she’ll wake up to what we’ve done, and what we’ve taken from her.

  “See you next Wednesday night.”

  “See you then,” the two adult Harkonnens echo.

  “We will never overdraw your daughter,” I hear myself promise them, responding to some fleeting shadow that crosses both faces.

  I make this promise at a moment when people are plunging their straws into any available centimeter of shale and water, every crude oil and uranium and mineral well on earth, with an indiscriminate and borderless appetite. Fresh air, the sight of trees—these are birthrights and pleasures that we seem bent on extinguishing. Some animals we’ve turned out to be. We have never in our species’ history respected Nature’s limits, the doomsday speculators announce, smacking their lips, until it seems like some compensatory sucrose must flood into their mouths every time they say the words “mass death.” According to their estimates, our species will be extinct in another generation, having exhausted every store of water and fuel on the planet. But this baby is small enough, and our need is great enough, that the nurses can be exquisitely precise, never withdrawing from her fleshy aquifer more than the recharge rate. We take, at most, six hours from her. We ration our greed.

  The Sleep Van, that white pod, readies itself to pull away from the mothership of the Harkonnen residence.

  “How far away are we from . . . from synthesis?” Mrs. Harkonnen wants to know.

  “Oh, goodness. That’s the dream, isn’t it?”

  Now we three give each other these faith-transfusions.

  Later, alone in the trailer, I continue to make outreach calls to donors with the narcotized zeal of all the other night-shifted Corps recruiters: “Thanks to your generous support, eighteen insomniacs will sleep through the night, and open their eyes at dawn. Thirty-three percent of our patients make a full recovery . . .”

  You can’t argue with those numbers, can you? I plan to one day ask Abigail.

  Granted, we never gave you a choice, but wouldn’t you have agreed to transfer those dreams to us, knowing now what you could not know then? This sort of subjunctive calculus, nobody teaches in school. Artificial sleep, for example, “sleep for all”—who can say if we will achieve it? I keep roto-dialing strangers, begging for their surplus unconsciousness. Next Wednesday night, Baby A and I are both scheduled to donate. Somewhere, let’s hope, on the opposite side of the world or galaxy, there is a research team working out a more reliable source.

  Dori

  Ever since the dawn with Mr. Harkonnen, I have been unable to pitch in the same way. I have no idea why this should be so. I only know that at Drives, I speak in my own voice about the Slumber Corps, and I don’t retell the story of Dori’s death. I don’t relive her ending, or go into the convulsions. When my voice shakes, it’s only because I’m nervous—I’ve got no practice at this sort of storytelling. I do talk about my sister, who she was before the crisis, although I find this makes me shy. Unfettered from her death, Dori’s ghost takes on new shapes, and I find myself remembering more and more about her. In this new pitch, I describe her as a teenager, and even earlier. I mention the many insomniacs my sister’s age or younger who have been cured by transfusions, and who can dream on their own once more thanks to the Slumber Corps. Often, I lead with Baby A. Imagine, I tell them, how she’ll feel when she grows up, and learns how many lives she’s saved.

  If potential donors tell me they cannot afford to spare their sleep, I never press. The results of the new approach? By every metric we’ve got—donors recruited, sleep donated, insomniacs’ lives saved—my pitch is a disaster. There are Drives where I only recruit five donors. There was one Drive, on a rainy Thursday night outside the shopping mall, where I recruited none. My “zeros” were actually zero, which has never happened to me before. I’ve fallen so far that I’m not even ranked, nationally, as a recruiter. In our Solar Zone, I’m number three of six. But you know what? Some people do give. I’ll leave a Sleep Drive with a third fewer recruits than I was expecting for a crowd that size, but Dori, inside the people with whom I leave her story, is an ellipsis, alive. She’s not a nightmare I’ve implanted within them, a means to an end—of that much, I feel almost certain.

  * * *

  If I stop telling Dori's story, I wonder, where will she go?

  * * *

  Jim’s out-and-out despondent. He paces our trailer with watering eyes. It’s that Jim-despair that feels at once completely false, like the maudlin dirges of horn instruments on a Mexican soap, and genuine, out of his control. Rudy Storch is furious with me, salty and affronted; worse yet, I’ll sometimes catch him casting me looks of feral betrayal, as if somehow I’m the toothy trap that sprang shut on his paw.

  “Edgewater, goddamnit. Have you seen your zeros? How you sleep at night, I do not know. This experiment is up, it has got to stop.”

  He grits his teeth; he doesn’t touch me now, or scream at me. He won’t joke.

  “Please. Please. I understand that you’re more comfortable. But what you’re doing is irresponsible. It’s . . . it’s . . .” he sputters, his eyes cloudy with exhaustion. “It’s . . .”

  He never finishes, and it doesn’t matter. Dori’s quieted, she’s become uncooperative. I can’t go back to the old style of pitching now.

  The Whistle–Blower’s Hotline

  The first three times I call, I hang up.

  The fourth time I call, I get an automated female voice, thanking me for contacting the Slumber Corps Whistle-Blower’s Program. This unshockable voice instructs me to leave the most detailed message possible about the institutional corruption I have witnessed, or in which I have participated, to include fraud, waste, abuse, policy violations, discrimination, illegal conduct, unethical conduct, unsafe conduct or any other misconduct by the Slumber Corps organization, its employees or its volunteers.

  I drop the phone as if scalded.

  * * *

  To honor my contract with Mr. Harkonnen, I take the bus to make my donation at our regional Sleep Donation Station. This month I am certain that I will be rejected at the screening—I have been dreaming of Baby A nonstop, of the flutter-suck of her tiny mouth. In one nightmare, she breast-fed from my sister, who had a saint’s face in death, pale and sad and lit strangely from below, one green eye eaten away.

  What uglier proof of its deep pollution could my mind present me with?

  I am afraid of these dreams, which I cannot stop or change.

  I am afraid that even my desire to do good will spin out of my control, and become evil.

  Orexins have been reported in Uganda, Taiwan, England. Infected sleep was transfused in Chile. In the Mobi-Office, Jim is calling me “baby” again, I think because it’s been a month now and I haven’t said anything to anyone about Baby A’s exported sleep. Sometimes I think I can feel Jim’s secret exerting a subtle gravity in my body, like a sick second pulse. I worry that it’s warping my dreams in ways their machines won’t uncover in time and perverting even my conscious intentions.

  At the reception window, I cl
ear my throat.

  “I think my sleep might be unusable this month, miss. I think there is something wrong with it.”

  To which an icy voice replies, “Have a seat. We’ll be the judge of that.”

  And I wonder: How many of the donors seated around me are secretly hoping for a similar outcome? To be exposed as broken, corrupted—to have our impurities discovered, under some investigator’s microscope, so that we can be exempted from ever having to give again? “Opting out”—Jim’s grim euphemism seems to apply here, too. What a relief, I think, to never again worry that you might be the one poisoning the nation’s sleep supply. Is anybody else having this fantasy with me? I gaze around the lobby, where six of us are waiting to learn if our dreams are healthy. One robust lady in a Minnie Mouse sweatshirt is scribbling furiously on her clipboard; she leans over to ask me, “Honey, how do you spell ‘piranha’?”

  It takes some time to input my nightmare onto the form. Then I have to wait even longer for them to run the database scan. At the end of the hall, in custard-colored booths the size of library carrels, potential donors are going over their nightmares with staff members. I catch fragments:

  “. . . a bunny-like twitchy face . . .”

  “. . . and the barber had electric-green hair . . .”

  “Okay!” says an administrator to her donor brightly. “You’re good to go here, Donald!”

  This is really it, I think. You are about to be banned from donation. Greedily, I start to hope for this. It’s so sly, the way that fears and hopes and dreams and nightmares can belly-flip into one another. The longer I sit in the hard chair, the more I want to be dismissed. Fondly I recall excused absences and doctors’ notes, those pink tickets to hours of solitude. Chicken pox: one p.m. and the green cheesecloth curtains drawn, the relief of seeing no one, doing nothing, itching my sores in secret, breaking in my monster skin alone. Exempt me, exempt me. For reasons of public safety, for the greater good, tell me I can go home now and sleep for myself only.