Karen Russell - Sleep Donation

“No, no, I  —this is as wet as things ever really get, honey,” I whisper. “Under these conditions…”

I slide my hips forward on the mattress. After that, we manage beautifully, me and this hungry silhouette who is my friend Jeremy.

“Sorry,” he sighs afterwards, licking our sweat from my neck. “That was too quick.”

I shake my head  —it wasn’t. Any longer would have been, for me, an almost unbearable exposure to the self-eradicating bliss of servicing and being serviced, all at once. It’s a rare transfer wherein both bodies get to be donor and recipient and recipient and donor. We are stroking each other’s knuckles now, side by side on the Murphy.

Jeremy sits up and swings his legs over the bed’s edge. He doubles over into a faceless hill, feeling around the floor for the shed skins of his socks, his T-shirt.

“Stay?” I blurt out.

This in stark violation of the contract.

“Oh, God, Trish, I  —”

“No, sorry, I’m not thinking clearly, it’s gotten so late. Go  —” I hand him his missing sock, give a little push. “You need a good night’s sleep.”

Jeremy cocks his head at me for a confusing moment; then he squeezes my hand and stands, hobbles towards the trailer exit.

“Thank you,” we say at the same time, and my whole body heats up.

“Get some rest, girl.”

After I hear his car drive off, I turn the lights back on.

You know, I’m afraid that working for the Corps may be irreversibly perverting the way I evaluate human exchanges. Now who is the donor, the donee? I’ll wonder, watching a high school couple kiss at the mall. Are they a match? Will their transfusion be a success? What songs are the corporations piping into her body? I’ll ask myself on the city bus, watching the female driver’s long neck tense and relax as she receives rhythm transfusions via her fuchsia earbuds.

The Storches’ “office” within the trailer is a locked shed on wheels annexed to the main vehicle. It’s a wonder that the two inventors of ergonomic johns can function in such a comfortless space.

Quite easily, with the key I copied two years ago, I enter Jim and Rudy’s inner sanctum. It smells like Pine-Sol and cinnamon chewing gum.

On my knees, I go sleuthing for her records.

“Harkonnen, Baby A  —”

The Storches keep hard copies of important documents in an old-school filing cabinet, school-locker gray, the ichthyosaur of the modern storage world. (“Everything is, of course, also in the cloud,” I’ve overheard Rudy reassuring visitors, which is a very disorienting and mystical statement, out of context.)

Hunting her name, I come across a stack of letters addressed to Jim. On impulse I read one. I read the whole batch. They are more frightening to me than the Donor Y nightmare. I read through them twice, my eyes blurring and uncrossing; I feel a funny pang, imagining Jeremy home in his bed. It’s three a.m. Who am I supposed to call now? I lift the phone to dial the Harkonnens, hang it back on the receiver. I stare at Dori’s photographs on the Slumber Corps pamphlets, a stack of hundreds, and start to cry.

The following morning, Jim calls me into his office. How much can you age in one day? Wrinkles I’ve never seen before are now tractor-gouged across his forehead. We stare across his desk, his gray eyes regarding mine with a strange calm: it’s a gaze that feels prehistoric, entirely shorn of seven years of respect and affection. I stare back. For just a moment, I get this aerial sense of what might happen next, like the view from the top of the roller coaster. This is power, I realize. Jim’s career is in my hands.

Then Jim surprises me by speaking first.

“So. Who are you planning to tell?”

All night, I rehearsed for this confrontation; I’d assumed that, as Jim’s accuser, I would lead.

“Who told you that I know?”

“Cameras, Trish. You don’t think we have cameras in here?”

Cameras? Blood rushes to my face.

“You saw what we  —what me and Jeremy…”

Horrifyingly, Jim grins.

At dawn I stripped the Murphy bed and folded it back into the wall; the sticky sheets are bunched in a bag at my feet, to be smuggled out of the trailer after sunset. I wonder how many of the dozens of donations I’ve taken and offered on the Murphy bed have been witnessed by Jim, or Rudy.

“Jim, I’m sorry,” I hear myself apologizing. “I shouldn’t have gone through your things  —”

“We trusted you.”

“I only wanted to know Baby A’s name  —”

“My God, Trish. I would have told you that.” Jim, who is never angry, is fury-mottled, his entire neck splotched crimson. “Now look what you’ve done  —you’ve threatened our entire organization.”

Her name is Abigail. Abby Harkonnen. I’m not the only one who knows this. There are merchants in Japan who have been purchasing units of her sleep from Jim, for a dollar sum that left me reeling. The first correspondence with the Japanese sleep merchants occurs a mere two weeks after Baby A’s inaugural donation; most of the catch from her third and fourth draws got sold to a Tokyo lab. It’s unclear from the letters who else might have been involved, or how Jim managed to smuggle her sleep out of the country. I have no idea what, if anything, Rudy might know; these letters were signed by Jim. According to one contract I found, assuming I read the thing right, Jim made in excess of two million dollars for the sale of Baby A’s sleep.

How dare you— I know this is a moral anachronism. A phrase sad and silly, excerpted from an era of bygone incredulity, from a black-and-white movie; and yet for hours last night, alone on the Murphy bed, these were the only three words I could think.

“So now we have a real problem, Trish.”

“Wait a sec —I’m the one in trouble? Jim.” My voice comes out in a child’s whisper. “Why did you do this?"

“Their team approached me. They’ll clone her sleep before we manage it, I guarantee it. They are working to make an artificial injectable right this second.”

“All that money  —”

“Went right back into our organization. Nothing traceable to us, or to the Harkonnen baby. Anonymous donations,” he says smoothly, and I don’t know whether to believe him.

“But the Harkonnens,” I try again. Jim? Where have you gone? What I want, impossibly, is to blow the whistle on Jim to Jim; to appeal to my “real” boss, who would surely be appalled to learn what this doppelgänger monster who has stolen Jim Storch’s face and name has done.

“We’re not hurting anybody, baby.” Now he’s speaking in the soothing voice I love, the voice of yesterday-Jim, as if responding to my mental summons. Somehow this familiar tone makes me feel much worse. Queasily, I stare at my hands splayed on Jim’s desk.

“Only a portion of her donations has gone overseas. The rest, as you know better than anybody, we’ve distributed in this country.”

I’m grinding down so hard my jaw is pulsing. An artificial injectable. How much money does he stand to gain, I wonder, if the Japanese team succeeds?

He tries a different tack.

“Trish, weren’t you and Dori raised religious? Do you know the parable of the loaves and the fishes? The mustard seed, the parable of the talents?”

When he sees my blank face, he shrugs.

“Forget it. We grew up Irish-Catholic. Look: I took the Harkonnen gift, and I multiplied it . Can you imagine what it will make possible if they synthesize her sleep? In the grand scheme, the benefits that accrue to every living person will be extraordinary.”