Sleep Donation

by Karen Russell

  As crazy as it sounds, I keep feeling that if I knew her true name, I could protect her better. I’ve heard strangers refer to “Baby A” as if she is some inorganic compound, a designer sleep drug. All night, people dial the hotline and beg me to get them wait-listed for the “Baby A cure.” Anyone in America who has a bad dream calls in, which means the phones never stop ringing. I go hoarse shouting down their doubts: “No,” I say, “the helmet is safe, the tubes are sterilized. No, there is zero chance that you will contaminate the nation’s sleep supply, as he did.” I promise my recruits that the Donor Y crisis has precipitated important policy changes, exhaustive safety rubrics for the Sleep Vans, expensive rounds of testing for nightmare prions. All this public paranoia, I say, obscures the statistics: sleep donation has never been safer.

  I don’t feel great about this, myself.

  “How do we really know it’s safe for these people to donate?” I ask Jim and Rudy.

  “We don’t know.”

  “We can’t know.”

  “That kind of epistemic murk is unavoidable, Edgewater.”

  “Error, of course, is inevitable in some proportion of the cases.”

  “We should describe the Donor Y tragedy as a freakish exception—which it is.”

  “But it’s unrealistic to expect perfection from any human institution, Trish.”

  “And from any human, period.”

  “You know this.”

  Boy, do I.

  “We need to accept the world as it is, honey, not as we wish it to be,” Jim says, with a self-regarding puff on the wish and the be. Jim, I’m told, was a theater major at his Midwestern college. He often projects these Page-a-Day aphorisms from his diaphragm, as if he were still auditioning to be Jean Valjean in Les Mis.

  But the need is quantifiable, uncontestable, and growing. People are drowning in light, fully awake. Children are propped on pillows, foaming soft sounds, singing a terrible music without words. We show videos of them at drives, which get incredible sleep-yields. Moms who see it are ready to strip down in the nearest Sleep Van and give us five years of sleep on the spot. Some of the youngest orexins became insomniacs at age two; they have no memories of sleeping. Cued by some off-screen producer, these obliging, dying toddlers tell the large blank eye of the camera that they do not remember dreaming one night in their lives. Sleep: What is that?

  These children live in a state of conscious terror, their school days exchanged for a noon-lit netherworld. The sleep banks in Virginia, Florida, and Oregon are dried out. So I keep calling.

  At a little after midnight, my voice gives out. The office trailer is equipped with a Murphy bed, what I think of as the whipped cream of beds, sprouting whitely from the wall. I pull it down.

  “Working late?”

  It’s just me and Jeremy in here now. Everyone else left hours ago.

  Jeremy is our Mobi-Van’s shy secretary, biracial, not quite thirty, who wears his hair in a carroty Afro and has dozens of chunky rings and ear cuffs and basically looks like a warlock in denim. He has what I suppose you might call “boundary issues” in a healthier office environment; here, he’s just one open eye among many. His reward for being an extraordinarily effective person is that he does the equivalent of three jobs for the same low salary. Jeremy is a sweetheart. He looks our recruits in their eyes when he thanks them, and piles wool blankets near the feet of the unconscious donors. When the nurses start a draw, he flinches for them. He donates sleep himself. Since the crisis began, Jeremy’s given half a year of his life: 4,392 hours—he grins proudly—which is far in excess of the legal limits; Rudy or Jim must be pulling strings for him to give so much, on a regular basis. Somebody needs to cut him off now. If you give beyond your sleep-recharge threshold, push beyond the body’s natural limits, you’ll suffer the same consequences of sleep loss that afflict our insomniacs: cognitive impairment, physiological exhaustion, collapse. Jeremy stumbles around the trailer like a zombie some mornings, zonked from a nine-hour draw.

  I realize that he is hovering in front of the door, glancing back at me with a look that is totally unlike Jeremy, full of cagey apprehensiveness.

  “You’re sleeping here?”

  “I am.”

  “Want a tuck-in?”

  I do.

  “Just let me brush my teeth,” I mumble.

  He hits the lights.

  It’s been years since I’ve done anything resembling ordinary socializing. For most of my colleagues at the Corps, this is so. We joke that the Insomnia Crisis has ruined our sex lives—we don’t have time to sleep with anyone recreationally, we’re too busy begging for sleep on the phone.

  I listen under the sheets as Jeremy unzips his jeans near the door, wriggles out of them. Tiny wood-sprite eyes litter the darkness, red and green—just the office electronics. No true darkness left in the modern world, some Luddites complain, fingering light pollution as the root of the new insomnia. Jeremy, a wiry shadow, lowers his full weight onto the Murphy, which whinnies on its springs; this Murphy bed turns out to be an expert ventriloquist of eager naked bodies. He gives me a nip on my bare neck. Then a consulting kiss, salty and quick. Jeremy’s hands, which are so warm, move under my clothing with a confidence that suggests he has been in touch with some of our colleagues about my amenability.

  One thing the Corps has taught me is that my needs are quite common. I have become much more forthright about disclosing them. Shameless, I guess you could say, although I still have a vestige of girlhood modesty, and would prefer the word honest. And I am perfectly willing to make a gift-in-kind to my peers, when their complementary need arises. After-hours Jeremy turns out to be a very different quantity than the quiet male secretary who brings baby carrots for lunch and sneezes in sunlight. He, too, is suddenly quite candid about what his body requires from my body. This is our training. Most of our time is spent asking strangers for donations.

  There are, of course, no consent forms to sign for this kind of transfusion. No nurses to adjust the fit or monitor its progress.

  “Perhaps there is some equivocation on the part of the lady?” Jeremy says at one point, with a frightfully sad tact.

  “No, no, I—this is as wet as things ever really get, honey,” I whisper. “Under these conditions…”

  I slide my hips forward on the mattress. After that, we manage beautifully, this hungry silhouette who is my friend Jeremy and I.

  “Sorry,” he sighs afterward, licking our sweat from my neck. “That was too quick.”

  I shake my head—it wasn’t. Any longer would have been, for me, an almost unbearable exposure to the self-eradicating bliss of servicing and being serviced, all at once. It’s a rare transfer wherein both bodies get to be donor and recipient and recipient and donor. We are stroking each other’s knuckles now, side by side on the Murphy.

  Jeremy sits up and swings his legs over the bed’s edge. He doubles over into a faceless hill, feeling around the floor for the shed skins of his socks, his T-shirt.

  “Stay?” I blurt out.

  This in stark violation of the contract.

  “Oh, God, Trish, I—”

  “No, sorry, I’m not thinking clearly, it’s gotten so late. Go”—I hand him his missing sock, give a little push—“you need a good night’s sleep.”

  Jeremy cocks his head at me for a confusing moment; then he squeezes my hand and stands, hobbles toward the trailer exit.

  “Thank you,” we say at the same time, and my whole body heats up.

  “Get some rest, girl.”

  After I hear his car drive off, I turn the lights back on.

  You know, I’m afraid that working for the Corps may be irreversibly perverting the way I evaluate human exchanges. Now who is the donor, the donee? I’ll wonder, watching a high school couple kiss at the mall. Are they a match? Will their transfusion be a success? What song
s are the corporations piping into her body? I’ll ask myself on the city bus, watching the driver’s long neck tense and relax as she receives rhythm transfusions via her fuchsia earbuds.

  The Storches’ “office” within the trailer is a locked shed on wheels annexed to the main vehicle. It’s a wonder that the two inventors of ergonomic johns can function in such a comfortless space.

  Quite easily, with the key I copied two years ago, I enter Jim and Rudy’s inner sanctum. It smells like Pine-Sol and cinnamon chewing gum.

  On my knees, I go sleuthing for her records.

  “Harkonnen, Baby A—”

  The Storches keep hard copies of important documents in an old-school filing cabinet, school-locker gray, the ichthyosaur of the modern storage world. (“Everything is, of course, also in the cloud,” I’ve overheard Rudy reassuring visitors, which is a very disorienting and mystical statement, out of context.)

  Hunting her name, I come across a stack of letters addressed to Jim. On impulse I read one. I read the whole batch. They are more frightening to me than the Donor Y nightmare. I read through them twice, my eyes blurring and uncrossing; I feel a funny pang, imagining Jeremy home in his bed. It’s three a.m. Who am I supposed to call now? I lift the phone to dial the Harkonnens, hang it back on the receiver. I stare at Dori’s photographs on the Slumber Corps pamphlets, a stack of hundreds, and start to cry.

  JIM

  The following morning, Jim calls me into his office. How much can you age in one day? Wrinkles I’ve never seen before are now tractor-gouged across his forehead. We stare across his desk, his gray eyes regarding mine with a strange calm: It’s a gaze that feels prehistoric, entirely shorn of seven years of respect and affection. I stare back. For just a moment, I get this aerial sense of what might happen next, like the view from the top of the roller coaster. This is power, I realize. Not just seeing the future, but deciding it. Jim’s career is in my hands.

  Then Jim surprises me by speaking first.

  “So. Who are you planning to tell?”

  All night, I rehearsed for this confrontation. I’d assumed that, as Jim’s accuser, I would lead.

  “Who told you that I know?”

  “Cameras, Trish. You don’t think we have cameras in here?”

  Cameras? Blood rushes to my face.

  “You saw what we—what Jeremy and I…”

  Horrifyingly, Jim grins.

  At dawn I’d stripped the Murphy bed and folded it back into the wall; the sticky sheets are bunched in a bag at my feet, to be smuggled out of the trailer after sunset. I wonder how many of the dozens of donations I’ve taken and offered on the Murphy bed have been witnessed by Jim, or Rudy.

  “Jim, I’m sorry,” I hear myself apologizing. “I shouldn’t have gone through your things—”

  “We trusted you.”

  “I only wanted to know Baby A’s name—”

  “My God, Trish. I would have told you that.” Jim, who is never angry, is fury-mottled, his entire neck cheetah print. “Now look what you’ve done—you’ve threatened our entire organization.”

  Her name is Abigail. Abby Harkonnen. I’m not the only one who knows this. A biotech firm in Japan has been purchasing units of her sleep from Jim, for a dollar sum that left me reeling. Jim’s first correspondence with them is dated a mere two weeks after Baby A’s inaugural donation; most of the catch from her third and fourth draws was sold to a Tokyo lab. It’s unclear from the letters who else might have been involved, or how Jim managed to smuggle her sleep out of the country. I have no idea what, if anything, Rudy might know; these letters were signed by Jim. According to one contract I found, assuming I read the thing right, Jim has made in excess of fifty million dollars for the sale of Baby A’s sleep.

  How dare you—I know this is a moral anachronism. A phrase sad and silly, excerpted from an era of bygone incredulity, from a black-and-white movie; and yet for hours last night, alone on the Murphy bed, these were the only three words I could think.

  “So now we have a real problem, Trish.”

  He gives me a stern look, as if I’m the one in trouble.

  “Jim?” My voice comes out in a child’s whisper. “Why did you do this?”

  “Their team approached me. They’ll clone her sleep before we manage it, I guarantee it. They are working to make an artificial injectable right this second.”

  “All that money—”

  “Went right back into our organization. Nothing traceable to us, or to the Harkonnen baby. Anonymous donations,” he says smoothly, and I don’t know whether to believe him.

  “But the Harkonnens,” I try again. Jim? Where have you gone? What I want, impossibly, is to blow the whistle on Jim to Jim; to appeal to my “real” boss, who would surely be appalled to learn what this doppelgänger monster who has stolen Jim Storch’s face and name has done.

  “We’re not hurting anybody, baby.” Now he’s speaking in the soothing voice I love, the voice of yesterday-Jim, as if responding to my mental summons. Somehow this familiar tone makes me feel much worse. Queasily, I stare at my hands splayed on Jim’s desk.

  “Only a portion of her donations has gone overseas. The rest, as you know better than anybody, we’ve distributed in this country.”

  I’m grinding down so hard my jaw is pulsing. An artificial injectable. How much money does he stand to gain, I wonder, if the Japanese team succeeds?

  He tries a different tack.

  “Trish, weren’t you and Dori raised religious? Do you know the parable of the loaves and the fishes? The mustard seed, the parable of the talents?”

  When he sees my blank face, he shrugs.

  “Forget it. We grew up Irish Catholic. Look: I took the Harkonnen gift, and I multiplied it. Can you imagine what it will make possible if they synthesize her sleep? In the grand scheme, the benefits that accrue to every living person will be extraordinary.”

  My head has been shaking no, I realize, possibly since this conversation began.

  “But I’ve been telling her parents that her draws go straight to the National Sleep Bank. That we need every drop of her sleep to save lives—”

  “So you know,” he snaps, as if he’s lost his patience with a delinquent student. “Who do you plan to tell?”

  “Jim. We have to—”

  Now it’s my turn to pause, self-startled. From the lump in my throat, I discover that I am unready to separate from our “we,” not yet, or to evict Jim from that pronoun. For seven years, we’ve been a team. And Jim loves my sister, not just what she does for our organization, I feel very certain of that.

  “Did you keep some of the money?” I hear myself ask.

  “Listen, Trish, we cannot control for every variable. Human greediness…it’s not even necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion.”

  Jim seems to round some bend in his own mind; without warning, like the sun breaking through clouds, he is smiling almost wistfully down his long nose at me.

  “Maybe it’s just what we mean when we say a necessary evil. Look at the population we serve. Any one of the insomniacs, at any time, could choose death. Some do, as you know. The ones who get their name on our waiting lists want to sleep because they want to live. They are greedy, greedy, greedy for relief, more life.”

  Jim is a better recruiter than Rudy. I watch his gray eyes go mock ingenuous behind his glasses. He quits trying to bully me.

  “It’s your choice, of course.” He steeples his long fingers, his smile now one of rueful contemplation. I can no longer tell what is genuine, what is performance; perhaps Jim shares my confusion.

  “Jim—”

  “I’m just urging you to think about the consequences of your actions. My life will be over, of course—it will kill me, frankly, the scandal. But let’s not talk about my life; that’s quite irrelevant to the big picture. Instead, Trish, I’d suggest yo
u think about the suffering people on our waiting lists. The media will be all over us. Look at the disruption from Donor Y, the damage he’s caused!”

  I nod.

  “The fines will be astronomical. Our public image will never fully recover. Without the goodwill of the public, what do we run on? Trish, I know that you are smart enough to understand why it was necessary to give these foreign researchers a crack at achieving synthesis. But the media is going to crucify me, they don’t give a damn who they hurt, and listen, there will be a run on the sleep banks like something out of the Great Depression. People will die, no doubt. Laws might be overturned—infant donations could become a thing of the past. We will certainly never draw from Baby A again if you turn me in.”

  “What if you just…confess, Jim. Apologize, resign.”

  Jim shakes his head at me so slowly, with a maddening air, affectionate and severe, like some fairy-tale father denying his daughter a poisoned apple.

  “I know that would make things more comfortable for you.”

  “Please, Jim,” I say, hating and hating the meekness of my voice. This is not how I imagined our confrontation going. “Please, will you turn yourself in? I don’t want to be the one.”

  He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, puts the glasses on again.

  “So you’ve convinced yourself, then. You’ve already decided. You think it’s the right thing to do, regardless of the cost to millions of terminally ill people.”

  “I didn’t say that…”

  I can feel my uncertainty returning, a thickening blue mist that rolls in between Jim’s face and my own. Helplessly, I watch this happen. Then my decision softens back into a speculation: What will happen to the Corps, and to all the people on our waiting lists, if I fail to keep Jim’s confidence? He’s right, isn’t he? We are still in crisis mode from Donor Y; easily, I can imagine a nationwide boycott of the sleep banks if the news about an infant’s “stolen sleep” breaks. I can imagine much worse.

  And nobody else is doing this work.