Sleep Donation Read online

  “No, you’re bound and determined to sink us, are you? Tie up the Corps in another bullshit scandal.”

  “Jim—”

  “So.” He leans back in his chair. “When are you going to tell them?”

  “Who?”

  “The Harkonnens.”

  DONOR Y

  Breaking news: the Donor Y nightmare appears to have provoked a mass suicide. Early reports indicate that between the hours of midnight and two a.m., eleven women woke and dressed and left their houses. Insect-synced by the dreadful coincidence of their illness, by a motive foreign to their formerly healthy minds, they embarked on a nocturnal migration to the coastline. This plot was smuggled into them by the Donor Y nightmare, swear the victims’ grieving families. They were not driving at all but driven by his vision. At one bridge near San Rafael, the women queued up, only women that night, according to police reports; they jumped in the fuzzy glow of their headlights, their cars still idling behind them, sliding out of their slippers or stepping out of their heels, climbing barefoot up the girders, taking ginger, seaward steps along the black rail, trailing shadows. There is footage of them falling, captured by a useless security camera riveted to the bridge pilings. Gulls sometimes flit past the camera lens, shrieking, and it is hard to see these birds and not to think of the ghosts of the infected women.

  BABY A

  The suburbs are rain-wet and green. Those white flowers look even more abundant than before, if that’s possible. They could be sentient, almost, wagging their lunar tongues at us from glittering gutters and construction sites. The van pulls around a familiar corner, parks. The moon really is inexpressibly bright.

  Does it matter if we mean what we say, if the mere fact of the utterance saves lives? I am thinking about Jim, what to do about him.

  Tonight, Baby A’s blue eyes flutter open in the catch-crib; a nurse adjusts the flow of the ultrasedative, and she falls into REM sleep within seconds. It’s a free fall, accelerated by our medications; she descends through the uppermost levels into deep sleep, our monitors confirming “delta wave,” and it’s from this vacant corridor of being, beyond the reach of language, image, or memory, that Abigail Harkonnen produces the lifesaving black flow, the cure for insomnia, sleep piped in from her last home, perhaps, whatever “stasis in darkness” precedes even the womb.

  After the draw is done, I bike straight home. It’s a little after one a.m. I’ve locked the bike and I’m heading to the apartment when I notice headlights come on at the end of the street. A car rolls slowly toward me, blinding me. A brown sedan with turquoise doors.

  “Get in,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “We’re going on a field trip.”

  NIGHT WORLD

  Night Worlds, in some regions of America, are now referred to as “Eyesores.” Apparently, not even terminal insomniacs can resist the urge to pun. A sign is visible from the highway: ALL SORE-EYES WELCOME!

  In our county, the Night World is located at the exit for the old fairgrounds, which have been converted into a midnight solarium. A sapphire penumbra rings the entire complex of tents and shanties. After a silent twenty minutes, Mr. Harkonnen parks in an overgrown field; he walks around and opens my door. He steers me, holding tight to the flesh of my upper arm; for balance, I grab hold of his wrist. His thick fingers around my arm feel like a blood pressure cuff. We moth along toward the light in this odd physical arrangement, swinging our free arms. Dozens of jalopies and motorcycles have been abandoned here, their chrome-plated wheels swallowed in the weeds like jewel-toned ruins. Some of these are luxury vehicles: BMWs, Jaguars. There is something perversely cheering to me about the fact that tonight, rich insomniacs must have gotten lonely enough to disable their alarms and leave their marble enclaves, coming down the mountain to a Night World.

  Two months after the Donor Y contagion, there are those who need sleep and those who fear it. If there is friction between these two terminal camps—envy, resentment, suspicion—I don’t feel it. Celebration is definitely the wrong word for what we’re seeing: the pack of slack, exhausted bodies, leaning on silver fenders. But I hear laughter. True hoots and back-claps. Little-bird sounds of cheeks kissed in greeting. It’s what you might call a heterogeneous mix of revenants (and I think for some reason of our great-aunt’s AA meetings, the weak greenish light and hurt savage smiles, decades-sober alcoholics and freckled young drunks gathered in a church basement around a coffeepot). Old orexins, new electives. Have these faces been awake for days, weeks, months? Years? It’s a surprisingly tough call. Insomnia ages you overnight—this is a new Oil of Olay cliché minted by the beauty industry, which is really pushing those day-to-night creams now. We pass four girls in a huddle who could be sisters. Those eyes. Wound-tight flesh. Hair in strings. Cyan networks of veins around their temples, like some cruel Greek crown. Teeth eroded to a monochrome gray. Three black girls, one ghost-white girl. Electives, infected with the Donor Y nightmare, I’d guess, given what we overhear:

  “Look, if you do fall asleep? You gotta try to stay awake inside the dream.”

  People are symptoms of dreams—

  This was our favorite line of poetry, my sister’s and mine, in the lone college class we’d ever taken together, before her professors finally united to insist that she take a medical leave of absence. Dori picked it out, from Fanny Howe’s O’Clock, and let me tag along in the wake of her mature aesthetic. It was a generous hand-me-down, her taste in poetry; she also gave me her favorite green leather jacket, her Fender Starcaster, and the leftovers of her beauty products. I was the heiress to all the unused crazy colors in her eye shadow three-packs, you know, the freak blue Maybelline smuggles in between the taupe and the gray, which Dori always said was like the strawberry you’re forced to buy in Neapolitan ice cream; plus Dori’s prostitute-on-holiday blusher, Dori’s pressed powder that looked like ancient silicate from Planet of the Apes. I threw it all away after her death, which I now have come to regret. Words I guess are her more durable artifacts. Only how did the rest of our poem go?

  People are symptoms of dreams

  Bombs are symptoms of rage

  Dori, with her ancient face at twenty: “It’s a real mind-fuck. I won’t be beautiful again, will I?” And before I could answer, “Shut up, shut up, shut up. I’m sorry. That was a shitty thing to ask. Don’t lie. Trish? Let’s get the mirrors out of here, okay?”

  Mr. Harkonnen and I pass the group of teenage girls. We fall in step with an older crowd. Veterans, I’m assuming. LD-ers with the telltale features: desolated eyes and cheek hollows, nacreous skin. The Night World is a ten-minute walk west of here. I remember this hike from grade school; yellow school buses had parked and spilled kids into these same fields. Mr. Harkonnen and I are moving at twice the speed of the insomniacs around us. I’m tempted to stagger, fake a limp. Out of some misguided solidarity? To protect these sick ones from my health? Sometimes, at Sleep Drives, I will catch myself unconsciously adopting the accent of the immigrant family I’m recruiting, mangling my own English, falling in step with the foreign family’s rhythms. In any case, Mr. Harkonnen won’t let me fall back. He races us along.

  The boardwalk is only lit at intervals. Wide orange planks alternate with stripes of raw night. Fifty yards ahead of us, shadows acquire gender, features, then slide back into anonymity. We step onto the wooden platform and walk through a cracked neon rainbow that buzzes twelve feet above us. It’s the old entrance to the county fair. A relic from more innocent times, pre–Night World, resuscitated by some insomniac electrician. Now a grim arcade spills before us: stalls that advertise midnight barbers, disbarred sleep doctors, bartender-pharmacists. Dark green and purple tents ripple across the grass like Venus flytraps, their bright flaps swallowing people. Kiosks hawk antidotes to thought, to light:

  BEST QUALITY LULLABIES

  OBLIVION PRODS

  DR. BOB BRAIN’S HATCHET—

  CUT T
HE ELECTRICITY ONCE AND FOR ALL

  The boardwalk unwinds for seeming miles, and I know from adolescent explorations that eventually these fairgrounds dissolve into a true woods, a nature preserve of spruce and pines.

  When I tell Mr. Harkonnen that this is my first visit to a Night World, he is unaccountably pleased.

  We draw up to one of the speakeasy tents.

  The chalkboard lists the evening specials.

  Medicines, a thousand of them, to induce sleep.

  Medicines to stay awake—sunlight bulleting through an elective insomniac’s brain.

  “In here,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “Ladies first.”

  It’s very easy, I discover, to comply with him. Since strapping into his sedan, I’ve felt unworthy of objecting to anything that’s happening. Once the tent’s flaps close, I find myself crowding as near as I can comfortably get to Mr. Harkonnen’s sweat-damp left side. What a crowd. Near the flaps, a trio of twenty-somethings are sharing a pint of some dubious medicine. Tangerine bubbles fizz over the rim. Bubbles are rising in every glass in the joint, Mr. Harkonnen points out, marine blue and dark pink and lurid violet. So these aren’t your standard soda mixers, but some self-catalyzing enchantment. Threads of limber color rise to meet the insomniacs’ parched lips, as if, inside their pint glasses, these medicines are already doing the work of dreaming for them. Up and down the wooden bar, insomniacs sit a breath away from one another on the high, rickety stools. The way they booze as a unit makes me think of Vikings rowing a longship. Lifting their glasses, slamming them down. Fighting the waves, I assume, inside their bodies.

  Sink-and-Swim is the name of one of the advertised soporifics.

  But the bartender-pharmacist keeps splashing grapey black and auroral fluids into alternating glasses, and you get the sense some tide is truly turning. In this Night World, the two groups are generating their own countercurrent. They laugh, gulp, swallow, they even seem to blink, to one rhythm.

  I doubt it’s my right, as a healthy sleeper, to read the scene this way and to be enchanted by the Night World’s unlikely friendliness; but I am anyhow.

  The footage I best remember, from local television depictions: This same fairground looked like a refugee camp. Dozens of bone-thin bodies swarming the bonfires, flumes of red flame in metal cans, their shoulder bones jutting rhythmically through the free blankets from the Night World dispensary, like big cats gathered around a kill.

  Next to us, a woman’s head is rolling on a man’s shoulder, her pink curls tumbling onto his chest like a cloud at anchor. I think she’s an elective whom Donor Y infected. Her eyes are milky and ewe-blank, hugely dilated; she jumps when she yawns. “Keep me up,” she demands, and this scarecrow of a man bellies around on the barstool to face her, tucking his shirt into his waistband; obligingly, he strokes her moist forehead, the strawberry rash on her cheeks and chin, the cuticle-width scar under her left eye. Trying to keep her in this world with him, awake. He’s an orexin, I think—someone who wants only to sleep—and he’s not looking so hot himself: eggy eyes, poached by his illness; skin like white wax. On a calendar, I bet these two are in their early thirties. The whole time his fingers brush her pimpled hairline, he’s murmuring something into her earlobe, like her face is a story he’s reading to her. Her Braille memoir. He reads on, and with each syllable, her smile widens. With his big thumbs, he prizes her eyelids open. This he does for the exhausted, terrified woman with a clinical tenderness and focus—one species of sufferer trying to help another. I’m holding my breath. The man catches me watching, winks.

  Are they a couple? I ask.

  The man smiles.

  “Sure. Met her five minutes ago, when I sat down here. You’re invited to the wedding.”

  Recipients and donors. Donors and recipients. Variations of this couple’s exchange are happening with a hothouse spontaneity up and down the bar: people with equal but opposite afflictions, propping each other up.

  This is my beautifully stable impression of Night World culture for maybe two more minutes; then something explodes near my head. Blue medicine leaks in an Arctic smear down the cabinet door. Whatever it is smells faintly of garlic. So much for romance. Near the tent flaps, a fight has broken out: two gizzardy LD-ers are haggling over their bar tab. It seems they have goaded each other into consuming two thousand dollars’ worth of some placebo-slush. They dispute the bill in hoarse screams: “That was your round, Leonard!” Napkins wag from their hands, covered in scrawled numbers, two rival accounts of their debts to each other—a bar tab that seems to stretch back to the Big Bang.

  Mr. Harkonnen returns with our drinks. To avoid the brawl, we retreat further into the tent, choose stools next to a dark oak cabinet.

  “Got us the cheap stuff,” he says.

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  Shooting Stars is the name of my medicinal cocktail.

  I don’t ask what it does. Three sips in, my expectations go colorless. Then I find myself leaning against Mr. Harkonnen’s left side. Mr. Harkonnen smells like nothing unexpected: burned coffee grounds, Old Spice aftershave. These odors are like flung harpoons—they sail out of the Night World and back across the highway, wrenching whole continents of normalcy into this dark tent: malls and supermarkets, nonlethal sunsets, jarred tomatoes, orderly hedgerows, carpet cleaner, kitty litter, everybody’s junk mail piling up on tables, geese flapping across meridians on their winter-spring cycle…and soon I’m having to close my eyes to fight a supreme dizziness, as many times and seasons collide inside my chest. I take another long gulp of the cocktail. This time, the effect is immediate. Heat radiates outward until my skin feels ready to burst, until my skeleton is both holding me upright on the barstool and dissolving, inside me, into melting vertebrae, a million memories unstoppered in my brain, rising up my spine, flowing down, my body too small to contain them, shrinking even as the dizzy light expands in all directions, and no way to protect myself against the assault, this onslaught of sound and light, and nowhere to release it, all the aggregating echoes, Dori’s voice, our father’s, a thousand other whisperers…

  I blink twice, rub my eyes: incredibly, the Night World tent is still here. I study my watch, relieved that I can read the numbers: three minutes have elapsed since we sat down. Beside me, Mr. Harkonnen is eating green pistachios out of an ashtray. He smiles at me. His face looks placid, in the illegible and alien way that stingrays’ bellies look placid as they smooth along glass walls.

  “That was an intense drink,” I say, frowning down at my lap.

  “Still is.”

  “Was it supposed to wake us up?”

  “You bet.”

  I rub my tingling ears.

  “Are you, ah, feeling it?”

  “I’m drinking a virgin medicinal cocktail, actually.”

  “Oh. So…”

  “Just gin.”

  Mr. Harkonnen leans back against the side of the medicine cabinet. His arms are flung gregariously behind his head. I blink down at our shoes, my head still spinning.

  “I thought we should have a private talk,” he says. “Away from the house.”

  I gaze up at him from behind my glass. Some disturbed dreamer has scratched Screams from the raven-lunged in a vitreous green ink on the wooden bar. The tent’s droning moonlamps make it feel as though we’re all boozing inside a tremendous bug zapper.

  “Things have become tense,” he adds. “Around the household.”

  “You’re fighting with Justine?”

  “We’re fighting, yes.”

  “About Baby A?”

  “No, about the recycling. What do you think?”

  He tips his drink back, motions for me to follow suit.

  “We were a happy couple, a happy family. Can you imagine that? Six months ago, that was our status: happy. But then you show up—”

  “You can stop.”


  “Oh, she won’t hear of it now. ‘Divorce me, then,’ she says. ‘Take me to court. We’re going to cooperate with them, it’s the right thing to do.’ ”

  “It’s a donation.” I swallow. “Nobody can force you.”

  “So she thinks—ha!”

  Mr. Harkonnen has finished his virgin sleep cocktail. Angrily, he shakes the drained glass.

  His tongue darts around to catch the last clear droplets. The tongue’s froggy orbit around the glass seems many evolutionary leaps removed from the wounded intelligence in Mr. Harkonnen’s black eyes.

  “She thinks that one day you will stop asking.”

  “But we will! When the neuroscientists figure out a way to synthesize what Baby A produces naturally—”

  “Ha!”

  For the duration of his laughing fit, Mr. Harkonnen stares down at the bar with the bulge-eyed consternation of a man trying to discreetly cough up a bone into a cloth napkin; eventually, he regains control of his voice.

  “And how old will my daughter be then?” he asks calmly. “Ten? Twenty?”

  She’ll be dead. This thought is nothing I will. It blows into and through me, part of a leaf-swirl of my worst fears. To erase it, I imagine Baby A at eighteen, laughing, a bright-eyed college freshman. In my mind’s eye she is Dori’s age in her last photograph, with Dori’s sly smile. Will Baby A graduate? I wonder. Live to a decade that my sister never got to see? Will the crisis go into remission? I try to summon an image of Baby A in middle age, sleeping without the suctioning hiss of our machines, dreaming of something unspeakably beautiful. But I can’t seem to nudge the picture any deeper into the future.

  “She’ll be a lot younger than ten, I bet. The scientists are working around the clock—”

  Mr. Harkonnen snaps for the bartender.

  “We’d like to try one of your specials.”