Karen Russell - Sleep Donation

“Miss Edgewater!” A taffy-pull of an Indian man, six-foot-seven and El Greco thin, comes flapping down the hallway. “And these must be the famous sires of Baby A!” Mrs. Harkonnen giggles nervously. He introduces himself as Dr. Glasheen, a Fellow at the National Sleep Bank. “Okay, thanks for waiting. Had to get you folks in the system. Here are your bracelets. We’re going in.”

Dr. Glasheen hits a button. The glass partition begins to retract into the wall.

Here is what it feels like, to visit Hell at Dusk. Park your boss’s Prius outside this county hospital. Step into Ward Seven’s Sleep Incubation Chamber: the warm dark swallows you. A few orange and purple sconces are the only illumination. This darkness feels placental, as if we are in some marsupial pouch. Shadows as life-support. The room is powdered with intelligence; the patients are awake. You can feel their eyes on you, even if you can’t see them. Orderlies are now going from bed to bed, bending over the lumpy shadows that I know will turn into people, when our eyes adjust. Administering shots. “Dusking” them. Knocking these people out, at their request.

This is the latest med-slang for the electives’ group sedation, explains Dr. Glasheen to Justine Harkonnen. Dr. Glasheen has usurped me as the Chaperone. He directs us to Bed One. Arm in arm, the Harkonnens follow him while I trail behind, walking pigeon-toed to hush the squeaking of my soles.

The first elective we meet is a black woman in her late forties, Genevieve Hughes. Upon seeing Dr. Glasheen, her entire face changes. After a second, she manages a thin smile. Politeness overrides the gleam of terror in her eyes. But I gather from the reaction of other electives around us that the tall doctor must inspire this reflexive fear wherever he goes on Ward Seven, which makes sense given his role here, Dr. Glasheen, the Sleep Enforcer, King of Needles.

Genevieve Hughes’s eyes are like empty bowls that you want to fill with food. How has she lost so much weight and hair already? At home, she says, it got to where she was plucking out her eyelashes to stay awake, even as every cell in her body demanded sleep. Her husband drove her to the hospital. He begged her to enlist in the Ward Seven group sleep therapy program. “Live,” he said. (Hearing this, I feel a pang of, what, envy maybe  —because that is one beautifully succinct pitch, Mr. Hughes.) With obvious effort, Genevieve directs a grateful smile at Dr. Glasheen, even as she grips the bed’s guardrails with both hands, as if to avoid recoiling further from the man. Without Dr. Glasheen’s help, she says, she could not bear to face the dream again.

Before her contagion? Genevieve tells us she runs the downtown cineplex with her husband. We all nod excitedly  —everyone present has seen a Saturday matinee at her theater, and dreamed in tandem with dozens of other moviegoers. When Dori and I were growing up, this theater was a rat-infested death trap, but the Hugheses have since rehabbed the lobby into an Arabian palace that serves Milk Duds. “Oh!” says Mr. Harkonnen, pleased. “I know where that place is! My wife, before she was my wife, I took her to your theater, ma’am.” And even Dr. Glasheen cracks the brown egg of his face to smile. “I used to love scary movies, myself,” says Genevieve, “before the insomnia kicked in.” In April, she received the tainted sleep transfusion. Two nights later, the nightmare appeared inside her. Dr. Glasheen is smiling vacantly, checking his watch out of the squeezed corners of his eyes. The Harkonnens are now staring at Genevieve Hughes with frank, unsettled expressions. As she describes her elective insomnia, Genevieve keeps dragging down her lower eyelids with her index fingers, revealing the pink mucosal rims (a common habit among electives, we learn from Dr. Glasheen, who calls his patients, not without affection, “scab-pickers of vision”). She seems unaware that she is doing this. She yawns, sneezes.

“Bless you!” yelp the Harkonnens.

“You cannot catch her nightmare,” mouths the doctor to us, in the sort of public whisper that reduces everyone to children. Genevieve looks down at her blanket.

“We know that,” says Mr. Harkonnen, in his regular speaking growl.

Then Dr. Glasheen introduces Felix as “Baby A’s dad.”

Genevieve jumps. Her face blazes with some fever of hope.

“Oh! When we first heard they’d found a cure, my husband and I cried! I’m on the wait-list; they tell me it’s another five months yet…”

Mr. Harkonnen grunts softly.

Mrs. Harkonnen pulls out mall studio portraits of Baby A to show her. There’s Baby A arranged on a stuffed rainbow, a stuffed unicorn, a dirty pegasus. Apparently, the sadist mall photographer is also some kind of fairy-tale taxidermist. Baby A stares out at us from the wallet-sized glossies with her implacable blue eyes.

“And you’re the mother?”

“I’m her mother.”

The women study one another. Justine’s eyes are golf-ball white compared to Genevieve’s sunken yellowish ones. The glow produced by the wall sconces seems almost animate, flickering erratically around the room. After Dusking, Dr. Glasheen tells me, they will extinguish even these.

We are all being very disciplined about focusing on Genevieve, and not the other patients around us, some of whom have begun to babble to Dr. Glasheen that they do not want to be sedated, that in fact they would like to be discharged from the hospital.

“After sundown,” he complains to me, “they act like I’m Donor Y coming for them. They deny they ever requested sedation. I show my patients their signatures on the consents, and they act like it’s forgery. Dusking time, and suddenly nobody recognizes their own handwriting.”

And this is exactly what happens. Dr. Glasheen excuses himself to help the orderlies. Many of the electives cower at his approach. They seem to have developed a spontaneous amnesia, robbed by their foreboding of the Donor Y nightmare of their earlier daylit desire to sleep, and live.

Mr. Harkonnen brought a ball cap along just as a stress-prop, it seems. He keeps twisting it in front of his waist, wringing imaginary sweat from the brim.

“I hate Donor Y!” Mr. Harkonnen explodes.

Do you know that I smile? I do. Gotcha, Felix.

Genevieve murmurs something, softer than orange juice sucked through a straw; around us, the Dusking commotion drowns out all sound.

“What’s that, Mrs. Hughes?”

We all lean in.

“I don’t hate him. I feel terribly, terribly sorry for him, this Donor Y. He had to see these things alone, for who knows how long?”

Genevieve shakes her head, with that strangely paternalistic attitude the sick sometimes take towards the healthy, as if she’s preemptively forgiving us for what we’re too young to understand. Youth being gauged in this chamber as distance from the Donor Y nightmare. Then she’s gone.

All around us, people are exiting the room. Their bodies stay visible, but their eyes flutter and shut. Dusked, they lean back against the blue sheets. Many scream before they vanish. They claw at Dr. Glasheen. And I’m thinking, Control yourselves, we’re watching . And I’m thinking: Doctors, are you hearing this? Adjust the goddamn medication . And I, too, am shaking, with an out-of-nowhere anger. Not until the entire bedroom has gone quiet do I relax my grip on Justine’s arm. Mr. Harkonnen has got her other hand.

Some electives clench and grind their jaws with closed eyes, giving them a constipated look.

Some take on a magenta cast, as though their skin is being glazed from within by a barbecue brush  —fluctuating body temperature, says the unworried orderly. Dr. Glasheen is explaining something to us about the physiological differences between natural versus induced sleep, although nobody is paying attention. His hands, I notice as he gestures at their bodies, look big enough to juggle pumpkins. I wonder what he dreams about, off-shift. I wonder if he wouldn’t like to lift his patients’ scalps, and scoop the terrible vision out of them. Mr. Harkonnen and Mrs. Harkonnen are frowning down at the vacated faces on the pillows like parents at a swim meet, trying to glimpse the divers’ bodies under the froth of bubbles as they glide away.