Sleep Donation

by Karen Russell

  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 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, by what logic 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, lie 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 agreement is easy to broker. 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 tenderness 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 unraveled 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 shakes loose 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.

  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, suddenly, in some extradimensional 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 f
eels 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 underway.

  “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 shearing 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 DC 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 the 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 spreads through 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 says. “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 her baby 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 soft cloth 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’ve 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-size 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 four generations, 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-shift 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 give 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.