Sleep Donation

by Karen Russell

Ten days after Donor Y’s story breaks, the San Francisco ER admits a group of twenty chattering maniacs who are refusing sleep. Every one of them tests positive for the Donor Y nightmare. These people were not our patients. They did not receive transfusions from American sleep banks. They were passengers on Flight 109, from Havana to SFO. Immediately, the passengers become misery-celebrities. They represent an entirely new species of revenant in our midnight world.

  We learn that these people were part of a group of sixty-one medical tourists. As recently as a week ago, not one of these twenty new victims of the nightmare contagion could fall asleep. Either unwilling or unable to wait another night on the Slumber Corps rolls, they’d chartered a flight to Cuba and paid to receive an experimental sleep transfusion. They spent a week recovering in Havana, cocooned in a secret room behind the Hospital Hermanos Ameijeiras, near the leafy gold light and the shining bahía. Sleeping and dreaming, assimilating the transfusion. During that time, the Cuban doctors confirmed that twenty of the twenty-two American recipients had regained their ability to fall asleep on their own. As happens in the best-case scenarios, a single transfusion had jolted them into their original sleep/wake cycles. The return flight to San Francisco should have been a beautiful milestone for these people: stars shuttling past the cabin windows, the recovered insomniacs drifting into natural sleep. Half an hour into the flight, the steward reported hearing piercing screams throughout the cabin. A fifty-three-year-old male passenger from North Carolina, snoring in a middle seat, 13B, was the first to present symptoms of the Donor Y nightmare. Soon half a dozen other passengers seemed to be plummeting into the same dream, and then the howls came at regular intervals, according to the steward at the press conference, “everyone screaming at once, the way a Ferris wheel sounds, like they were all going in circles.”

  The Corps was not unaware that such medical tourism occurred. They had reports of sleep transfusions being offered for cash already underway in Cuba, Vietnam, Haiti, western Germany, despite headquarters’ issued warnings to American insomniacs regarding these “back-alley dream dealers,” decrying their lack of oversight and regulation, their profit hunger, their shabby facsimiles of Gould’s machines. What nobody knows is how the Cubans wound up with units of the tainted sleep in the first place.

  Fusillades of educated speculation erupt on our TVs:

  1. Units of the infected sleep have crossed the ocean, through some black-market transaction.

  2. An American who received one of the tainted sleep transfusions gave—or sold—her infected sleep abroad.

  And then things shade into hysteria, with some people alleging that the Donor Y pathogen has gone airborne. What if it was sneezed out, coughed up, a scum of germs on skin? What if it was transmitted to all the passengers via the recycled air of the plane?

  The Corps issues a press release: NIGHTMARE-PRIONS CAN ONLY BE TRANSMITTED THROUGH SLEEP TRANSFUSIONS. The Donor Y nightmare cannot be contracted orally, or through skin. It is not an airborne virus. It is not transmitted through insect bites, food, water, or sexual contact with a sick dreamer. There is no risk of transmission to a sleep donor.

  But this does not halt the proliferation of paranoiac theories regarding motive, transmission.

  It feels like a moment in history. Even in the present, you get that shivery sense, watching the greenish footage of Flight 109 parked on the tarmac, the circular door to this winged hospice opening and releasing the victims of the outbreak down spindly stairs. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost”—an expression I’ve known since childhood, and never once had the occasion to use. These descending people on the TV screen look like they’ve seen worse. Several older men are crying, their shoulders hiccuping up and down under the red Slumber Corps blankets. In the hospital, they won’t pull their heads through the teal pajama holes. They don’t dare blink. They pry their lids open with thumb and forefinger; some beg for stitches, tape.

  The doctors are calling them “elective insomniacs.”

  The doctors have begun to forcibly sedate some of these patients, at their request, since they are incapable of mastering their terror of sleep.

  The goal of the electives: to stay conscious. To never again cycle into REM.

  And then we learn that the passengers of Flight 109 are not the only ones, that hundreds of other victims of the Donor Y contagion are refusing to sleep.

  It’s startling how quickly their terror changes everything for us.

  People are confused by the new taxonomy of insomnia: Wait, these twenty insomniacs make a full recovery in Cuba, they have one bad dream, and they give up on sleep for good? So they are infected with a nightmare. What in God’s name could be so frightening that death seems preferable to sleeping? What are they seeing, at night?

  Newspapers are not even printing descriptions of the Donor Y nightmare. There is great concern that readers will convert the words into a copycat dream, causing waves of hypochondria, mass hysteria. As a protection, this press embargo strikes me as unnecessary—none of the infected patients can tell us anything of substance about the Donor Y nightmare, even after experiencing it for dozens of nights in a row. As one infected woman stammers in a radio interview, the Donor Y nightmare does not translate into “upstairs language.” Her speech was cold and precise, the words crisply etched against the silence, so that when I closed my eyes what I saw was not the dream but snowflakes, these soluble blue skeletons falling through space. What she could say about the dream melted quickly away, like a visitation from another world entirely.

  Doctors at the sleep clinics are working with teams of psychiatrists at the VA hospitals, hoping to replicate their success at getting PTSD-afflicted veterans to “risk” a night’s sleep. As far as elective insomnia goes, that’s our closest precedent: war veterans who are afraid to sleep, who dread their nightly redeployment to the Mekong Delta or Kabul, and the wet red scenes that might recur in dreams while they are trapped behind their eyelids.

  The horrible symmetry of the reversal is rich fodder for late-night TV comedians, jowly theologians, the news anchors with their sibilant pity, their masks of skin and hair. Ratings spike. Panic spikes. Windows shine late into the night, every home in America shingled in yellow rectangles of light, until it seems like entire neighborhoods are having allergic reactions to the Donor Y crisis; even people with no history of insomnia or dream transfusions are suddenly frightened to crawl into bed.

  The National Sleep Bank establishes a hotline for concerned citizens.

  Callers accuse any human volunteer who answers in a breathless singsong, like betrayed children: “You said this couldn’t happen!”

  If we failed, admits Dr. Peebles, it was a failure of imagination. Contagion itself: Early on, we foresaw this as a danger. We took the appropriate precautions. After early clinical trials of Gould’s machine showed certain nightmare prions could be passed from body to body, every laboratory in the country joined forces. New tests were developed: sleep assays, dream immunoblots. All donated sleep in this country is subjected to a rigorous screening and purification process.

  But this specific outcome of a nightmare contagion? “Elective insomnia”? This was unforeseeable. This was unpreventable. Who alive could have guessed that one San Diego man’s bad dream—no matter how frightening—could make patients nostalgic for their insomnia?

  A new mental illness, some psychiatrists are eager to label it.

  A kind of extreme sleep-anorexia.

  Iatrogenic: a word that sends me to the dictionary. More deadpan comedy: it means our “lifesaving” transfusions have provoked a secondary insomnia. The cure is worse than the disease.

  Some begin to speculate: Was this done by design? Is Donor Y a new kind of bioterrorist, who co-opted Gould’s technology to stage an attack?

  Some are beginning to believe he is the actual ungulate. The red-horned devil himself.

  I’m so stu
nned that when I answer calls, my mind’s a blank. I let my mouth reel off the Corps’ press release: “Now, more than ever before, the world needs your gift of sleep.”

  Elsewhere, the elective insomniacs are taking increasingly drastic measures to escape the REM cycle. They latch their eyeballs open, A Clockwork Orange self-torture. Abuse amphetamines. The most desperate electives will not seek treatment in the hospital, preferring instead the slow, excruciating death of sleep refusal. “Opting out,” Jim calls this.

  BABY A

  Breaking news: Several of the Flight 109 passengers receive emergency transfusions spun out of the Baby A donations, and doctors make yet another discovery. Shock-deliveries of Baby A’s untainted sleep can flush such nightmares out of the system. Glad tidings for the world, at last. A van screams over to the Harkonnen residence. More panacea-sleep gets pumped out of her.

  Within a twenty-four-hour span, the seven infected passengers who receive a transfusion of Baby A’s sleep are cleared of the Donor Y nightmare.

  The Baby A miracle is cheered by everyone, everywhere, with the powerful exception of our star donor’s father. Felix Harkonnen, on receiving the news that his daughter’s transfusions can eradicate Donor Y’s contagious nightmare: “They need her sleep, too? All these new people? My God, can’t you folks find another body to snatch here? Another of these universal donors? You’re telling me my kid’s the only one?” We both picture her then: somebody else’s daughter, playing Wiffle ball, riding her yellow bike to school, sleeping like a champ. “Go scout new talent, why don’t you?” he growled. “Scour the nursing homes. Find a hundred-year-old man. I don’t want my daughter’s first birthday to be in a Sleep Van.”

  Baby A’s supply cannot meet the increased demand. Her tiny body can produce only so many hours of sleep per week. Hundreds less than we need, it turns out, at the sleep banks.

  When I schedule my next visit to 3300 Cedar Ridge Parkway, I am deliberate about choosing a time when I know that Felix Harkonnen will not be home. Mrs. Harkonnen invites me in. She brings out a plate of sugar cookies and switches the television on, which permits us to crouch like spies on the orange sofa and whisper to each other, safely enclosed inside a bubble of background noise.

  “Tell me about your sister,” says Mrs. Harkonnen.

  “You want to hear it again?”

  “Can you stand to tell it again?”

  “Okay.”

  I am certain that Mrs. Harkonnen has no desire to hear another word about Dori; she is pushing me to make some reciprocal give, I think. Asking for a trade.

  “Go on—” she prods. “I’m all ears.”

  She leans back on the sofa, knocking the cork soles of her slippers on the glass table, her robe flapping open. I can see a swirl of mauve moles on her collarbone, the elastic band of her nursing bra biting into her pale left breast.

  “This was my sister,” I tell her, extracting the photograph from my bag.

  Unconsciously, half-consciously, I know we are both participating in the illusion that my sister is the one they will be helping. I brandish her photograph before Mrs. Harkonnen’s eyes, then my own, letting the spell set. Dori’s suffering I describe so freshly that anyone could be forgiven for forgetting that it’s over, forever.

  “We need to live as one body, don’t we, Trish?” she asks me, her blue eyes widening inches from my face.

  Mrs. Harkonnen and I have never talked religion, or gotten into her family background, but I suspect that something must have shattered her in a complementary way, to make her such a perfect match for my sister’s story. Maybe she, too, lost a sister. Maybe she belongs to a strict sect that advocates the gift of one’s every breath to strangers.

  But all my assumptions, Justine Harkonnen reverses. The physics of giving and receiving, as I understand them, seem not to apply here. Even to a van filled with Slumber Corps evangelists, her faith in the rightness of sleep donation is alarming. She gives what we demand, with blue eyes scrubbed of any misgivings. We all find this upsetting, I know it, although there’s not much room to say so. Nurse Carmen speaks her name with a censuring wonder. Nurse Luisa, who has three little boys, won’t make eye contact with Mrs. Harkonnen any longer. A good mother, the nurses nervously agree, should be growing more upset with us, more worried for her baby’s health, angrier about our chronic requests—not less.

  I follow the Harkonnens into the Sleep Van. Milk darkens a quarter-inch circle around Mrs. Harkonnen’s left nipple, an involuntary seepage of which she seems wholly unaware; underneath the giraffe-print blanket, black sleep gushes out of her daughter.

  There are natural laws that govern the flow of dream and substance from body to body, laws that determine the passage of electricity through tissue, the routes taken by ruby marrow and iodine crystals and colorless vibrations. Laws to order every visible and invisible migration.

  And I feel certain there must be a second set of laws, inscrutable but real, that governs exactly how much an individual can give to and receive from another. Some hydrology of human generosity. Because there are these gifts we can make to one another freely, reflexively, with no sting of loss; and there are gifts we fight to relinquish, beg to get.

  Mr. Harkonnen grabs me while the nurses adjust the baby’s silver helmet. Nurse Carmen, frowning, flicks at a gummed tube.

  “You have pushed beyond the limits of what she can spare,” growls Mr. Harkonnen.

  “We have not,” I say sadly.

  I show him the chart:

  PATIENT’S WEIGHT: 19 lbs

  MAXIMUM IN ONE SLEEP DRAW: 6 hrs

  MAXIMUM IN A 30-DAY PERIOD: 54 hrs

  “Well, what did you take just now?”

  “Six hours.”

  His eyes search my face.

  “You’re sure it’s safe for her to give that much?”

  Oh, I have no idea. Safety is nothing we can guarantee to a donor; that’s why I collect the signatures.

  “These days, the science is so advanced! Trust me, our sleep doctors know every vital detail pertaining to your daughter. They will take only what her body can afford to give, I absolutely promise you.”

  Midway through the draw, there is some hiccup; a green light blinks on above the monitors and we all wince, even the nurses. Which is a frightening thing to witness, this neon beeping registering on the nurses’ napkin-smooth faces—something akin to watching stewardesses flinch at midflight turbulence. Then the regular rhythms resume, draining more sleep from her chest. The Sleep Van fills with the odd slick smell, and the proprietary gurgle of the machine.

  In her womb, Baby A was formed inside a tidaling generosity. Glucose, oxygen, proteins, fats: all transferred from the mother’s bloodstream to the bloodstream of the baby.

  INTERMISSION: FAITH TRANSFUSION

  You start to feel like it’s all a Ponzi scheme.

  I have to go into the Storches’ private office in the trailer, to let the brothers administer to me.

  I want to know: Do they think I should do my pitch a different way?

  Jim scowls up at me from his office chair with good-natured bemusement, as if he’s trying to locate the humor in a very bad joke. Rudy speaks in a tone like knuckles cracking:

  “The Donor Y furor is negatively affecting your pitching. Is that the problem?”

  Yes, I say. One of them.

  There is microsleep; there is also microarousal. The brain’s partial awakening. At the cerebral disco, parts of the brain are always lighting up, going dark. I’m waking up, I tell the Storches. When I pitch, I am in two places at once—asleep, awake—merged with Dori, but also observing myself from above. There I am, far below, in a mall parking lot; I stagger backward as if shot. But I can also see beyond my body now, to the faces of my recruits. I can hear the threat encoded in my pitch. People go sheet-white, their heads shaking to the Dori-rhythms. Children hide behind th
eir parents’ legs, but they watch me, too, and they know that if their parents do not give sleep, if they “choose” not to donate, they, too, might die in this same juddering, blood-sputtering, irremediably conscious way.

  “And the problem is, what, that you feel guilty?”

  I nod.

  “Don’t. Problem solved.”

  “It’s this Donor Y bullshit. She’s scared, Rudy.”

  “What would really be a nightmare for us? If you quit pitching, at a time when we need every minute we can get of REM sleep.”

  Jim is pacing now, so agitated he won’t look my way.

  “If a takedown of our charity was something you planned, Donor Y?” says Jim, addressing the wavy blankness of a window. “Mission accomplished.”

  Does Jim talk to Donor Y, too? Is he the imaginary target for all of Jim’s anger? This fills me with a great sorrowful surprise. We have a phantom in common. I wonder how he appears to Jim, if he is a bearded terrorist, if he is an insane person, if he is perfect evil. Whoever he turns out to be, his dream has spawned actual fatalities. Thirty-two “suicides” have been linked to the Donor Y nightmare. (“Suicides” is another term being hotly debated at this moment, since many of the Donor Y−infected appear to have scaled ladders and jumped from catwalks and rooftops in a somnambulant fugue.) He incubated all those deaths, not one life.

  Then Rudy brightens, turning to me.

  “Have you seen your zeros this month? With the Baby A aggregates? That will be cheering. Get those percentages for her, Jim—”

  Worse, I’ve started to hear my doubts in Dori’s voice. She was always smarter than me, in school, outside school. If she were here, I would ask her what to do now. She’s not a word-talker, not anymore, but her pressure inside my rib cage translates quite clearly: This is how you turn a gift into extortion.

  “I think I have to try to find another way of pitching…”

  “Baby,” cautions Jim, “you need to calm down, now.”