Karen Russell - St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Just put your head here,” I say, in a tone that implies I’ve nuzzled dozens of sleep-disordered ladies. I try to ease Emma’s curly head into the crook of my arm and end up elbowing her in the nose.

“Are you ready?”

“Ready.”

What can you do but take a girl at her word? But I hope she really is ready. Being unconscious with somebody, that’s a big deal.

I take a deep breath, pull on the rip cord, and plunge the clearing into darkness.

The Insomnia Balloon is in a clearing at the shallow end of the woods. You may have been there; it was public island property until Zorba started the camp a few years back.

The Insomnia Balloon isn’t an airship of the literal, sky-flying variety. Zorba says it’s for mental flights. The “balloon” part is actually an enormous lightbulb, suspended over a wicker basket by copper wires. It’s okay to be awake here, even after Lights Out. Sometimes, Zorba tells us, as a precursor to sleep, you need to let your thoughts dry out beneath the electric light. Eventually dream helium begins to fill your lungs. When you’re ready to soar inward, you pull the rip cord and turn the giant lightbulb off.

“How many sleep-disordered campers does it take to change a lightbulb?” Zorba likes to joke, and the punch line is, all of us. Every six months a three-hundred-pound replacement bulb arrives from Norway. The Insomnia Balloon buzzes around the clock, its filaments glowing in a giant glass vacuum bulb. It turns the surrounding forest into an undulant sea of pines. They seem to grow larger when we turn the balloon off, their blue shadows billowing out beneath the low stars. A froth of gully grass pokes through the holes in the wire basket. Emma’s blue eye is half open, a quarter of an inch from mine. She is staring at an ant crawling along one moon-limned strand of grass. She won’t look at me.

“Elijah, I can’t.”

“Do you not trust me? If it’s that you don’t trust me, just say so.”

“That’s not it! I just…” She bites her lip. “I shouldn’t have to explain it, you know, I just can’t….”

“Well, not with that attitude, you can’t.” My heartbeat thumps in my chest. Not exactly the pace I want to set if I’m going to deliver the eight hours of sleep I’ve been promising her. After all that big talk, I’m afraid my sleep latency period is going to be eye-blink brief. Slow down, and lengthen, I coach myself, trying to match my breath to hers. Slow down—

“Look, Emma, I’ve got you. I’ve got you, okay? Just relax—” And lengthen.

This night is the culmination of weeks of practice. Oglivy has been tutoring me in smooth rock-a-bye technique. I hum a lullaby into her ear, one that Ogli says is guaranteed to make the ladies go limp. She throws her head back in an exaggerated, feline yawn, which I take to be a good sign. I hum louder.

“Are you sleeping?”

“Oh!” she breathes. “Yes!” She makes some theatrical breathing noises that I guess must be Emma’s approximations of what a deeply sleeping girl would sound like, but actually make her sound like her trachea is obstructed by a golf ball. I try humming a little more softly.

And then, just when she’s started mumbling in that softly demented voice that precedes sleep, Oglivy comes crashing out of the woods, staggering into trees and generally destroying the ambience. Emma bolts upright. “Who’s there?” She wriggles away from me and tugs the balloon back on. The light startles her sleep-blurred face back into sociable lines. Damn. All my progress, erased.

“Oh, crap, sorry, guys.” Ogli whistles. “I didn’t, uh, mean to wake you….” He gives me a big, shit-eating grin.

“Ogli!” Emma looks relieved to see him. She claps a hand over her mouth, but not before she lets out a coy yawn in Ogli’s direction. I wish she’d save that stuff for me.

“Annie’s giving her Inspiration Assembly.” He coughs, averting his gaze with a showy gallantry while Emma rubs her eyelids back to their sentient position. “I thought we could all walk over together. Not that I care, but we’re gonna be late, Elijah.”

“We’ll be there in a second—” But Emma’s already clambering out of the wicker basket, tilting the hot yellow bulb. Shadows go spidering out across the clearing.

“Thanks, Oglivy.” She smiles. Her curly hair has a rosy glow in the balloon’s light. She looks all mussed up and livid and adorably mortal, these violet half-moons under her eyes. “You’re right, we’d better get there on time. I heard that last year one of the Incubi—”

“Incu buses, ” we correct.

“Incu bi ”—she frowns—“was late, and Zorba put her on laundry duty for a week.”

We all shudder. Laundry duty means you have to wash the acrid bed linens for Cabin 5, the Incontinents.

We walk towards the main cabin in silence. It’s no easy hike. Sweat and mosquitoes and a purple ambush of nettles. Our bare toes sink into the oxblood clumps of mud.

“Sorry, dude,” Ogli says under his breath. “I thought you were ballooning solo. I didn’t mean to wake you….”

“’S okay,” I sigh. “She was faking, anyways.”

When the trail opens onto the lake, I see that Oglivy’s timing was off, as usual. No way are we late. A few Somnambulists are still turning dreamy circles in the poppy pasture, tangling their sleep leashes in the furrows.

“Wait up, Ogli,” I wheeze. “We can’t all be late, retard.”

We’re all late. The camp director’s wife, Annie, is wrapping up her annual talk.

“…And now, I’m proud to say, my dream contagion has gone into remission, and I’ve been dreaming my own dreams for nearly three years.”

Scattered applause. Somebody bites into an apple. Oglivy and I exchange a bored glance. We have been coming to Z.Z.’s for so long that we’re practically de facto junior counselors. We know Annie’s spiel verbatim:

“Sleep is the heat that melts time, children. It’s a trick that you will practice here. But! We don’t expect to cure you of your sleep disorders in these few short weeks.”

Oglivy mouths along with Annie, fluttering his eyelids. He has Emma and me laughing with a hot-faced, helpless surrender that has nothing to do with the joke itself. After the white noise of school-year loneliness, I am so happy to be sitting with Ogli and Emma on this pulpy cedar floor again, making the same old jokes.

“That’s not why your parents send you here,” Annie continues, glaring in our direction. “We just want to provide you with a safe place to lie awake together. And maybe even,” she beams at the crowd, “to dream.”

“And,” I elbow Ogli, “to scream.” A veteran Narco sitting near us snickers. They never warn the new fish about all the midnight noises.

At Z.Z.’s, our nights echo with weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Popularity is determined according to an unspoken algorithm that averages the length and volume of your sleep-yodeled terror. Even at a place like Zorba’s, there’s still a clearly delineated social hierarchy:

Cabin 2: Sleep Apneics

Cabin 3: Somnambulists

Cabin 6: Somniloquists

Cabin 8: Headbangers

Cabin 11: Night Eaters

Cabin 7: Gnashers

Cabin 13: Night Terrors

Cabin 9: Insomniacs

Cabin 1: Narcoleptics

Cabin 10: Incubuses

Cabin 5: Incontinents

And then there’s us. Cabin 4: Miscellaneous. The ones whose parents checked the box marked “Other.” Our illnesses do not match any diagnostic criteria. That means that we’re considered anomalies by Gnasher dudes who have ground their pearly whites down to nubbins, by Incubus girls who think that demon jockeys are riding them in their sleep.

Oglivy is my Other brother, the only other person I have ever met who shares my same disorder. We’ve been bunk mates for the past three years. Annie calls us her twin boys with this syrupy, slightly unnerving tenderness. She doesn’t mean that we look alike. Oglivy is basketball-tall, with these small, pistachio-colored eyes and a pleasantly dopey face. I’m small and dark and inexpertly put together, all knees and elbows and face bones. My mom says I’m destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly. It’s not even like we have that much in common in our waking lives, although we get a lot of mileage out of our few points of intersection — our moonball fanaticism, our mutual abhorrence of grandmothers and cats, our worshipful respect for the hobo. But we are sleep twins, phobically linked by our identical dreams. He is the first and only person I have ever met who is also a prophet of the past.