Sleep Donation

by Karen Russell

  KAREN RUSSELL

  SLEEP DONATION

  Karen Russell has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, the “5 Under 35” prize from the National Book Foundation, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, son, and daughter.

  ALSO BY KAREN RUSSELL

  Orange World and Other Stories

  Vampires in the Lemon Grove: Stories

  Swamplandia!

  St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

  A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2020

  Copyright © 2014, 2020 by Karen Russell

  Illustrations by ALE + ALE, copyright © 2020 by Alessandro Lecis/Alessandra Panzeri

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published as an ebook by Atavist in 2014.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Russell, Karen, 1981– author.

  Title: Sleep donation / by Karen Russell.

  Description: Vintage Books original edition. | New York : Vintage Books, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020009017 (print) | LCCN 2020009018 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Horror fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3618.U755 S58 2020 (print) | LCC PS3618.U755 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020009017

  Vintage Contemporaries Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525566083

  Ebook ISBN 9780525566090

  Cover design by Linda Huang

  Cover illustration: ALE + ALE Illustrations © 2020 by Alessandro Lecis/Alessandra Panzeri

  www.vintagebooks.com

  ep_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Karen Russell

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Sleep Van

  Baby A

  Our Universal Donor

  Donor Y

  Dori

  Donor Y and the Elective Insomniacs

  Baby A

  Intermission: Faith Transfusion

  Field Trip

  Donor Y

  Baby A

  Jim

  Donor Y

  Baby A

  Night World

  The Poppy Fields

  Jim

  Donor Y

  Baby A

  Dori

  The Whistleblower’s Hotline

  Donor Y

  Baby A

  The Whistleblower’s Hotline

  Slumber Corps Alert: Active Nightmare Outbreaks in the U.S.

  Acknowledgments

  For Ada Starling Perez,

  the best sleeper in our family

  THE SLEEP VAN

  The siren goes, and we code for dispatch. Nine times in twenty, lately, it’s the same address: 3300 Cedar Ridge Parkway.

  Then we get a call back, saying the dispatch is canceled.

  Then we get a third call: no, disregard the cancellation; get a Sleep Van to the property, stat.

  What’s happening, as revealed to us by a visibly distraught Jim: Mr. and Mrs. Harkonnen are having a “dispute.”

  “Mr. Harkonnen says he wants to drop out.”

  “So what?” says the intern. “We don’t even use his donations.”

  “No, jackass. He’s trying to pull out with Baby A.”

  Everybody looks over at that.

  Rudy slaps his bald spot and leaves his hand there. A grapefruit hue spills underneath his fingers, as if the scalp is blushing.

  Jim freezes in the center of the trailer, in full view of every staffer, and rubs his fists against his gray eyes. It’s a pitiful and futile gesture to witness, like watching an animal cower inside a plastic cage. We can see how scared Jim is of losing both things: Baby A and our good opinion of him.

  Six staffers are working the phones tonight, and we are all mentally coaching him: Don’t cry, Jim.

  Our Sleep Station has an unusual, top-heavy hierarchy—we have two supervisors, the Storch brothers. They are former CEOs who left the business world at the height of the Insomnia Crisis to found the not-for-profit Slumber Corps and now freely give all their resources to its efforts. Money, time, intellect, leadership, creativity, toilet seats. The Storches made their fortune in the ergonomic toilet business. You may have seen their advertisements: “To shit upon a Storch feels better than a visit to your chiropractor.” Their extreme altruism is a provocation to everyone else on staff—an inducement to work even harder, a reminder that we could always be giving more.

  Rudy and Jim have been my supervisors for seven years; I was the first recruiter assigned to their team. I don’t socialize with them outside work. Our contact is limited to this office (unless you count our public performances at Corps fundraisers, the charity balls and charity golf-offs). But I know every shadow of my bosses’ faces, all their Storchy tics, that upsetting thing Rudy does with his pen caps, what Jim’s not saying at our meetings. The brothers are middle-aged Irish twins, clean shaven and built like longshoremen. Externally, they have slate eyes and cranberry-red hair, balding in identical horseshoe patterns. Internally, each brother has his own uniquely fucked emotional metabolism. Rudy, for example, is currently managing his despair by bawling out the interns, sweat jeweling all along his dusky face like a July whisky glass.

  The Storches are celebrities in the sleep crisis community. Eight years ago, the brothers served together as executive directors of the inaugural Slumber Corps Board at headquarters in Washington, DC. Within months, the Corps had established outposts in every major city, pullulating green offshoots of the DC base. Soon local branches began operating more or less independently, soliciting donations for money and sleep, whereupon the Storch brothers resigned from the board and promptly requested a demotion to this low-prestige placement in their home city. A Solar Zone assignment. They wanted to work directly on the front lines—to “embed” with us, according to Rudy, perhaps not the best choice of words during an insomnia epidemic. They claim to prefer our trailer to the DC offices. We serve an urban core where the rate of insomnia is twenty-two percent higher than the national average. Our Pennsylvania city has one of the greatest REM-sleep deficits on the East Coast (although we are certainly not the worst hit: Tampa, riddlingly, currently leads the nation in new cases of the insomnia; the governor’s budget cuts in the Sunshine State have meant that Floridian sleep scientists remain stalled at the “dang”/“go figure” stage of their research). Hundreds of our old neighbors, friends, coworkers, and teachers are new insomniacs. They file for dream bankruptcy, appeal for Slumber Corps aid, wait to be approved for a sleep donor. It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams. I believe our mayor is both genuinely concerned for his insomniac constituency and pandering to a powerfully desperate new
voting block.

  Currently the National Center for Environmental Health is investigating possible environmental causes in our city: everything from the water table to disturbed eagles’ nests to the brilliance of the moon on grass to the antique screams of the historic monorail.

  I grew up here, too.

  We operate out of a Mobi-Office. Six interlocking trailers, dry-docked on a vacant downtown lot that the Corps leases from the city. “The labyrinth,” Rudy calls it. A former FEMA engineer designed it as a temporary accommodation; a base camp for local teams working at the frontiers of the crisis. We’ve been working out of our tin can for half a decade. Nobody suggests moving into a brick-and-mortar office; nobody wants to peer through glass windows, in a building with a foundation, and admit that the insomnia emergency is now a permanent condition.

  You’d think it would be difficult to hide in a trailer. But I’m chameleoned next to the phone wall, near the black window. Some intern has made curtains for the trailer windows, snaggy lace, that look nothing like curtains, in fact, but like vestments tiny and obscene: bridal veils for mice, chinchilla negligees. They flutter in the trailer’s manic air-conditioning. Outside, the moon is a colossus. Its radiance makes every white of human manufacture seem dingy, impure.

  I turn from the moon, remove the headset; I give myself one more blank moment.

  “Where’s Trish?”

  “Get Trish.”

  “Over here,” I say.

  “Edgewater!” screams Rudy. “There you are! We have a major goddamn problem.”

  “A hitch,” Jim soothes.

  “The mother is solid; she’s one hundred percent. The father, though—”

  “The father is afflicted with doubts.”

  “The father is a selfish prick.”

  “Trish, honey…”

  “Bastard hung up on me twice.”

  “Whose signature is on the consent? Do we have both?”

  Now everyone is staring at me.

  “We do,” I say smoothly. “I have the file here.”

  “Edgewater will handle this,” Rudy prophesies, staring right at me.

  “Mr. Harkonnen needs to be reminded of why this is important.”

  “Life or death.”

  “I think he knows, Jim. I already pitched them.”

  “Them?”

  “Her,” I admit. “The mother.”

  “Aha!”

  “But I’m sure she’s told him about Dori—”

  “Not the way you tell it, Edgewater.” Rudy beams at me. Rudy is the kind of boss who goes from screaming to beaming in two seconds flat, at a psychopathic velocity.

  “He’s got to hear it from you. Face-to-face.”

  “Only a stone would refuse to donate after your pitch.”

  “Trish, baby.”

  “Edgewater.”

  Pride heats my eyes. It’s reprehensible, but that’s what happens.

  “It might not work,” I say. “If he’s that dead set against it.”

  Jim and Rudy pour it on even thicker, emphasizing that I am indispensable to the organization, that the Corps would be lost without me, et cetera.

  “Look at you!” Rudy grins.

  “Look at those hands,” Jim says approvingly.

  We look at my hands, which are shaking. I feel proud again, which has got to be the wrong response to a set of involuntary tremors. My body knows what I’m about to do, and it’s balking, just like Mr. Harkonnen.

  “You are the genuine article, Trish.”

  “Okay.”

  “You are simply the—”

  “I said I’ll go, Rudy.”

  Rudy is a bad recruiter. I’ve seen him in action. Potential donors sway on the brink of a yes, prepared to surrender to the gravity of the appeal, but then Rudy gets overzealous, Rudy turns the solicitation into a game of coercion, until at last his lip-smacking anticipation of their gift makes them wary again, and they stiffen into a no.

  “That’s how we got Baby A, you know,” Jim whispers to the intern, Sam Yoon, a college junior in a mint-green dress shirt who is earnestly frowning as I exit the trailer; it’s a whisper I know I’m meant to hear.

  “Trish pitched Mrs. Harkonnen at a Sleep Drive in a parking lot. Nabbed her right outside the grocery store, schlepping Baby A. Watch her pitch sometime. Shadow her at a drive. She’s just pure appeal, pure passion for the cause. Her sister was Dori Edgewater.”

  “Oh my,” says the intern, exactly matching Rudy’s tone.

  What distinguishes me as a recruiter, I’m told by Rudy and Jim, is that my sister’s death is evergreen for me, a pure shock, the freshest outrage. I don’t have to dig around with the needle; that vein is open on the surface.

  “And Trish can’t fake it.”

  “Cries every time.”

  “Quakes, like.”

  “She gets emotional, and people really respond.”

  “Describes the sister like she’s standing right in front of her.”

  “Sobs like she’s still at the wake—”

  Jim frowns, self-startled.

  He’s a midsentence self-startler, Jim. “Hiccups of insight,” he calls these moments. Whenever my boss is struck dumb by his own epiphanic inner light, I picture a tiny deer jolted out of its grazing with grass in its mouth, paralyzed by the brilliant approach of a Mack truck.

  “Wait a sec, Rudy, why the hell do we call it that? A wake? For a dead gal? That’s terrible. That’s goddamn macabre.”

  “I’ve wondered that myself. Seems a pretty grim joke.”

  “Oh, there’s definitely a reason,” says the brown-nosing intern. “Some Catholic logic. Or is it a Jewish thing?”

  “People respond!” bellows Rudy. “Edgewater, she’s a little engine. Even our most resistant demographics will give to her. Males, retirees! Greenwich bankers, West Texas construction workers. The Southeast Asian community, where, as you well know, there is a culturally rooted suspicion of sleep donations.”

  “Of course.” The intern nods.

  “But they have no immunity to Edgewater’s story.”

  I am hovering near the trailer door, holding my breath. They keep talking, and I listen. I desperately need what they are offering. A faith transfusion. The why and the how of the organization. Our work and its value.

  * * *

  . . .

  In high school, the Red Cross blood truck would pull up behind the trailers to collect donations from young, hale students, who got to skip homeroom and eat a raisin cookie and relinquish pints of type O. Dori gave, but I never did—I convinced myself that I was scared of needles. If I’d known then that I’d wind up here, begging strangers for an hour of their sleep, I think I would have given blood at every opportunity.

  As a Corps volunteer, my duties are numerous and varied. Weekends, I mobilize the Sleep Van—a moonlit enterprise that dispatches a volunteer team to the homes of good sleepers, who have signed up to donate their rest to insomniacs. A Sleep Van has a spartan interior. The beds we call “catch-cots.” If the van is equipped for infants and children, it features catch-cribs and trundles. Nurses slip on the anesthetic mask, open the IV of special chemicals, relieving a donor of consciousness; next, they clamp on and adjust the silver helmet, which does chafe a bit; one to two minutes after the loss of consciousness, once the donor enters a state of artificially stimulated sleep, the draw commences. The air in the Sleep Van turns balmy as the tubing heats; a donor’s dream-moist breath gets siphoned into nozzles that connect to our tanks. Healthy sleep is pumped out of the body into long, clear tubes.

  Weeknights, I recruit.

  We set up for Sleep Drives in neighborhoods across the county, right at sundown.

  Nurses swab out helmets in multiple vans, preparing to take sleep donations for testing. Administrators sit insi
de lit tents on suburban lawns, holding clipboards, prescreening donors with an eligibility questionnaire to filter out those whose sleep is prone to nightmares, disturbance. We babble the questions to volunteers under the midnight pines.

  “When was your last full night of deep, unbroken sleep, ma’am?”

  “When did you last dream about barking dogs, outer space, red grass, an ex-wife? Now, please be honest, sir—if your sleep was disturbed by her face, check the box…”

  * * *

  . . .

  For most of the twenty-first century, insomnia was treatable by prescription medicines; I can still remember going with my father to pick up my sister’s sleeping tablets from the owl-faced pharmacist. Capsules of Silenor—half white and half carnation pink. Dori’s sleep trouble began early, at age eleven. Back then, before the disease progressed, medications reliably put her under. I used to study my sister’s face on the pillow, trying to catch the moment when the Silenor took effect.

  Once her adolescent insomnia ratcheted up, for unknown reasons, into the full-blown disorder, Dori slept about four hours a night. But for years, this was enough. The body can be a marvel of resiliency, a cactus when it comes to sleep—capable of surviving on mere drops.

  By twenty, however, Dori had developed a resistance to all sleep aids. She also became, quite suddenly, impossible to anesthetize. We learned this when she broke her leg in college and surgeons were forced to operate on a fully conscious Dori.

  The anesthesiologist is still writing papers about her.

  Her leg healed, but soon Dori lost the ability to sleep even three hours a night. She could not stay down long enough to cycle into REM. She had to drop out of college and move into a white hospital room. What didn’t they try on her? Dexmedetomidine, propofol, sevoflurane, xenon. The tranq gun used to bring down zoo elephants would have stopped her heart, or I’m sure they would have given that a go. Nobody could shade or muzzle her mind.