Sleep Donation Read online

  I don’t know how to describe the unique claustrophobia of a sleep-draw, if you’ve never been present for one, except to compare it to the electric, heavy feeling of air carrying seawater. A frightening, exhilarating charge permeates the entire atmosphere of the Sleep Van; an overpowering sense of ambient destiny, fate crushing in on all sides. This is accompanied by a nostril-flaring, neck-prickling vertigo. What provokes this disorientation, says Dr. Peebles, is your body’s awareness of its proximity to an enveloping illusion—a dream, not your own, pumping out of a donor’s prone form. The unhosted ghosts of these dreams in transit, en route to facilities where they will be tested, processed, and plated on ice, awaiting transfusion. World blueprints. Roberta, according to our monitors, is discharging a shocking quantity of dreams. They go soaking out of her mouth and snaking through the breathing tubes, a galaxy per millisecond. The nurses claim not to notice the smell anymore, a clay odor you can almost taste, which reminds me of the white frogs we used to net from midnight ponds, the scooped and dripping lilies.

  Minutes four through eight, as the coils begin to heat: The child’s fantasy is in the room with us, unexpressed in any consciousness. Her dreams glug out of her. At the end of the draw, the machinery makes a fantastic chortle, a sort of mechanical blech, and one nurse, Luisa, who is very uncomfortable with child donation, giggles hysterically and says, “Pardon me!”

  DONOR Y

  Two days after my last callout to the Harkonnens, Rudy Storch and I are alone in the trailer, coding for dispatch. At 9:04 p.m., the Slumber Corps’ alert icon flashes onto our computer screens. Seconds later, Rudy is on the phone with Washington. They want every Corps employee present for a live broadcast, an “orientation” to some new crisis, set to air in an hour’s time.

  They’re calling it the worst scandal in the sleep bank’s seven-year history.

  “Oh, fuck me,” says Rudy, glued to the screen. “Get everybody in.”

  * * *

  . . .

  Here is what we learn in the hours that follow:

  On March 23, a man whom the media is calling “Donor Y” walked into a sleep bank in San Diego and asked to register. It was his first time donating sleep. According to his file, he is a forty-two-year-old white male, five feet seven, 189 pounds, 128/67 blood pressure, no sexual partners sharing the bed with him, no children. He checked no on all the disqualifying boxes: Sleep apnea: no. Sleepwalking: no. He was next handed the CDC alphabetized list of all three hundred known contagious nightmares—

   Abomination, horned

   Ambulance, frozen yellow siren

   Anthill, no queen

   Ants, flesh-eating

   Aorta, burst

   Asteroid, green

   Attic, grandmother’s ghost

   Attic, padlocked toy chest

   Avalanche, death of self

   Avalanche, death of spouse

   Avalanche, live burial

  Et cetera. Donor Y did not check a single box.

  For the past seven years, the CDC has been working in collaboration with every local branch of the Slumber Corps to keep a Dream Database. The CDC monitors the occurrence of communicable nightmares in order to detect trends and to track and investigate outbreaks of similar dreams in certain regions, “nightmare clusters.” Odds ratios, based on logistic regression models, are used to calculate the risk of infection from exposure to a sick dreamer.

  Donor Y self-reported clean. “Baby-like, fetal position” was what he wrote on his questionnaire in response to “Describe your sleep posture.” His handwriting is neat and evenly spaced; the only unusual thing about it is that Donor Y wrote in tiny all capitals, like a scream shrunken into a whisper. Having passed the health prescreen, he donated a twelve-hour unit of sleep—the legal limit for a man his age and weight. Nothing occurred during the draw to put the nurses on alert.

  His sleep was transported to the Berkeley testing and processing center; two days later, it was shipped to sleep banks all over the country. The nightmare may have been undetectable by standard testing. It may have been perfectly detectable and somehow missed by the technicians. What is known: Donor Y’s sleep was flagged as “healthy,” centrifugally spun, and packaged into “Sleep Blend G-17,” an amalgam of hundreds of donations designed to neutralize and dilute any residual impurities from single donors. Sleep blends are prepared for rapid delivery to the widest spectrum of insomniacs.

  Early estimates suggested that anywhere from one thousand to ten thousand patients might have been infected with Donor Y’s nightmare. Within hours of the alert, lawsuits are being threatened—the Slumber Corps is charged with failing to adequately screen volunteer donors and test their sleep.

  “Donors are given a questionnaire about their history of sleep disturbance,” says a spokeswoman for the Slumber Corps, Betsy Gamberri. They dressed her in dizzy-tall stilettos and a pink bolero with linebacker shoulder pads, as if seeking to increase her literal stature in the medical community.

  “The onus is on donors. You have to self-report your nightmares. The questionnaire, if answered correctly, should have eliminated him.”

  “Either the donor did not know he was infected with this nightmare or he lied,” says Dr. Peebles.

  Currently, the identity of Donor Y is being kept secret from the public—if it is, in fact, known. This omission stretches to accommodate the wildest theories: rumors of sabotaged files, internal Slumber Corps conspiracies.

  “Have you ever been to the San Diego bank, Trish?” whispers my colleague Jeremy in the Mobi-Van. “If the guy’s file went missing, I’m sure it was just some administrative fuck-up.”

  Jeremy does our branch’s data entry, and I guess he knows whereof he speaks. We agree that it’s far scarier, in its way, to think that a teenage volunteer with bangs in his eyes, some good-hearted college kid named Brad or Boomer, simply forgot to scan a state ID. You can see why the theorists are getting so much airtime. There’s something darkly reassuring about imagining a cabal under the earth, or a government plot, or any human scheme, to undergird the spread of his “plague dream.”

  What follows is a catastrophe for the Corps beyond our own worst institutional nightmares.

  The Donor Y scandal causes a nationwide drought in all the sleep banks.

  People are scared to donate. Many decide that Gould’s procedure must be hazardous. Their fear adheres to the physical apparatus: the silver helmet, the mask, and the catch-cot. Myths run rampant, a parallel contagion: What if you can contract a nightmare in the Sleep Vans? What if donors, too, expose themselves to the infection? Other donors dread becoming a Donor Y. Newscasters transmit the germ of fear to millions. The morning news, the evening news, it’s relentless:

  “Obviously, the American people have been lied to. The American people have been misled about the real risks of this sleep donation procedure.”

  Never have I heard “the American people” invoked so many times per hour.

  The CDC assembles a task force of dream epidemiologists.

  In the Mobi-Van, we are calling around the clock, reassuring old donors, begging. The intern jokes that he could use some bootleg sleep himself, until Rudy roars at him to knock it off.

  If you’ve ever watched people speedily disqualify themselves from serving on a jury in a courtroom, you can imagine the efficiency with which many of our cold calls recuse themselves. When I announce that I am a Slumber Corps recruiter, people launch into descriptions of their most bewildering dreams, as evidence that they are unfit to give:

  “Ma’am, I keep drowning in my own blood at night. I have the shadow of an insect, I dreamed that. Really, I’m a menace. My dreams aren’t right.”

  “This one I’ve been having since childhood. I call it the bottomless dream? The dead go spelunking into blue holes. Then for some reason I’m in Lithuania, in a jade
cave where the tornadoes breed.”

  “President Nixon strapped to a fire truck! Twice, I dreamed that this month.”

  A recent widower says: “What lugubrious facts. I regret that I will be unable to change them for you. My wife just died, you see, and she’s saturated my sleep like coffin milk.”

  A Russian woman interrupts my scripted pitch to scream at me, quite persuasively: “I should ask you; you should give me. Every hour I have, I need!”

  It’s a crisis of faith. Donors refuse to give sleep; donees who have spent months on our rolls are now refusing the transfusions. Suddenly, impossibly, we must advertise to recruit the sick ones.

  We need good sleepers and we need insomniacs. To combat attrition on two fronts, the Slumber Corps launches a new PR campaign. The TV spots show scrupulously groomed young couples, paragons of hygiene, holding up their children under a pristine full moon, yawning, smiling, waiting for their turn to donate at a Suburban Donation Station. Behind the van is a tract house and snail-shaped driveway. The message: the Sleep Van comes to you. Then the camera cuts to footage of a yellow nursery. There is zoo wallpaper, the zany chandelier of a baby mobile. The camera floats over a crib, pans down to a three-month-old infant’s seamless eyelid. A lavender bib with tiny sheep rises and falls on her perfect chest, with a dreamy evenness.

  SLEEP LIKE A BABY AGAIN:

  1-800-IMAWAKE

  It’s like watching food advertising for hungry mouths.

  We run a local hotline. On either side of me, Yoon and Jeremy are pouring reassurances into their telephone headsets. These salving phrases are the antibodies engineered for us by the Corps scientists, sets of facts to counteract the spread of doubt, terror. And as we speak them, we try hard to immunize ourselves, and one another, against the panic of the callers. “The Donor Y contagion is officially contained,” I say on repeat a hundred times a night. When I close my eyes, though, I picture a microscopic worm nuzzling under skin, blood-rocketed through the entire organ system.

  “The needy simply do not trust us,” complains Rudy Storch.

  “I can’t believe this,” says Jim, shaking his head.

  Very slowly, Jim reads off the names of Last Day insomniacs who have requested removal from our transfusion waiting list: “Rita dropped out? Melissa Van Ness? Has everybody lost their mind?”

  Reflexively, he keeps thumbing water from his eyes. Rudy has formulated a sort of chitinous shell of sarcasm to protect himself, but I worry about Jim.

  “Jesus. I mean, mistrust us, okay, think us diabolical, but let us help you.”

  I don’t tell Jim or Rudy that certain people on their staff mistrust them; that we all wonder at the brothers’ motivations for pouring their fortune into the Corps.

  Chief among the skeptics is Roger Kleier, the Slumber Corps janitor. He is always recruiting our doughy new interns to share his suspicions of the Storches. He is on the payroll; he is not a volunteer. His salary comes from the tremendous endowment made to our regional branch by Jim and Rudy Storch. Every month, an influx from the brothers’ coffers fills his bank account.

  “You gotta be shitting me! The toilet brothers give up a million-dollar business to work out of a trailer—why?”

  Roger is a naturally suspicious person. There are bodies that reject sleep transfusion after sleep transfusion. Bodies that come preprogrammed with evolved defenses against all foreign dreams, that respond to even infant sleep transfusions with a violent immune reaction. And goodness knows, I have worked with many people in this waking life who seem congenitally incapable of accepting any human donation of blood, marrow, sleep, criticism, praise, money, or love. Some days, I know, I’m one of them. You find that you’re not a match with the donor. Or you sense that the gift will take some freedom from you. Your body rebels, maybe you don’t even know why. But the donation is rejected.

  Roger’s janitorial desire to get a clean read on the Storches, his hostile curiosity about their motives, adds its resonance to the chorus that pours through my headset. During Phone Shifts, I read my updated script. I say: “The Donor Y outbreak was an anomaly.” I say: “Sleep donation is safer at this moment than it has ever been in history.” I say what I can say, and mean: “People are lying awake, dying. They need your help.”

  On a good night, I feel I’ve done a good thing. That donors will continue to replenish the sleep banks; that the risks to them are minimal; that the benefits to the insomniacs are incalculable, sky-wide, as enormous as any life-in-progress.

  On a bad night, this can feel like stitching an imaginary net under a hundred wheeling acrobats. Or promising the stars they’ll never burn out, fall. The Corps script doesn’t come with stage directions; I could ease up a little on the operatic vibrato of my promises. Politicians would retire their office before guaranteeing so many splendid tomorrows to their voters. Men don’t lie like this to get women into bed.

  Underneath my audible solicitations, I make another request, at a frequency far below the chittering of my transmissions to these people, my bullshit reassurances: Please let what I’m telling them stay true, please let them be safe?

  * * *

  . . .

  Donor Y.

  Why, why.

  I become obsessed with him.

  Was it a case of “malice aforethought”?

  This term I learned from a high school book, Moby-Dick: a white whale ramming with blind hate into the hull of a boat, trying to kill everyone aboard.

  “Malice aforethought,” the teacher explained, meant the whale could scheme, like a human, and design its revenge.

  Perhaps Donor Y wanted to settle some score with the universe. Perhaps Donor Y was tired of being an anonymous sufferer in a crowd and wanted to propagate his worst night. Gould’s machines gave him a way to tattoo his private horror onto the minds of strangers. This possibility—an uncomfortably arousing possibility—gets mentioned in every news story about the crisis. Villains sell papers. And I find that I prefer him this way: nasty, aware.

  Donor Y, when I try to picture him, never develops a face. What I see instead is a husk, a humanoid virus, interested only in the dissemination and replication of its own pain.

  You’ve heard about that sperm donor whose single cup of swimmers went on to sire legions of snub-nosed, blond half brothers and sisters? Our Donor Y has inseminated thousands of dreamers with his personal hell. He’s broadcast his nightmare to every demographic.

  Donor Y, Baby A. I picture them as opposite poles on an axis. Donor Y, pumping out the nightmare, and Baby A, pumping out black sleep.

  I find that I badly want Donor Y to be pure as well: purely evil.

  And if he betrays me by showing up, becoming real? Just some middle-aged guy in a sweater, with one uncommonly virulent nightmare? This scenario, I hate: Donor Y gave no thought at all to the possibility that he might be such a carrier. He was a sincere do-gooder. He saw a flyer and wandered up to a registrant. An earnest brunette administrator ran down the questionnaire with him in the lunar-lit tent, and both of them believed that his responses were honest.

  Last April, Rudy and Jim had me tell “Dori’s Story” at the Corps Sweet Dreams Benefit—our largest annual fundraiser. At the ball, I stuttered, lost my place twice. I torpedo-sneezed into an audience of billionaires.

  “No, Edgewater!” Rudy reassured me. “You got half the room with that. That snot was a good touch! I mean, I know it wasn’t a ‘touch’—with you, it’s never a performance—”

  In the bathroom, I rinsed my eyes. A German woman approached me, a Deutsche Bank widow in shimmering green. She complimented me, in her way, on the purity of my grief: “Still so sad! After all these years and tellings!”

  I’ve shared Dori with thousands of people now: reporters and talk show hosts; reluctant sleep donors; once, a jet-lagged, baffled, yet receptive Spanish prince at a strange and endless state lunch. E
very single time I tell it, I go into convulsions. I show her photograph.

  “She’s like a grief hemophiliac,” Rudy told the German widow, who was searching avidly for her checkbook; for an instant, we locked eyes over the sequined shoulder pad of this woman’s evening gown. “It doesn’t clot. It never runs dry.”

  Is our appeal to this alpha breed of ego a bad thing? Rudy argues that it’s one of our greatest accomplishments—that the Corps reorients the flow of ego, like the old river-dammers who got the water to run backward and irrigate a dry world. We at the Slumber Corps are hydraulic engineers. We redistribute funds, dreams, to eradicate thirst. And I don’t disagree; only it’s a strange way to help the living, to continually dredge her up, my sister.

  I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the similarities between what I do and what’s been done by Donor Y. Thanks to my efforts, millions of people are infected with Dori’s last breath. My job, as I understand it, is to compel our donors to feel the horror of her death. To “spread awareness.”

  “It won’t bring her back,” a trustee once told me soapily over another endless Slumber Corps charity spaghetti dinner, as if lathering his own hands with this antiseptic wisdom. Which, oh God, caused me to swallow a small withered tomato whole so I could hiss across the table, “I know that!”

  At the same time, what am I doing, if not reseeding my dead sister into as many fertile minds and bodies as possible?

  DORI

  Sometimes I think the right doctor could open my chest and find her there, my sister, frozen inside me, like a face in a locket.

  DONOR Y AND THE ELECTIVE INSOMNIACS