Karen Russell - Sleep Donation

My head has been shaking no , I realize, possibly since this conversation began.

“But I’ve been telling her parents that her draws go straight to the National Sleep Bank. That we need every drop of her sleep to save lives  —”

“So you know,” he snaps, as if he’s lost his patience with a delinquent student. “Who do you plan to tell?”

“Jim. We have to  —”

Now it’s my turn to pause, self-startled. From the lump in my throat, I discover that I am unready to separate from our “we,” not yet, or to evict Jim from that pronoun. For seven years, we’ve been a team. And Jim loves my sister, her, the missing person, not just what she does for our organization, I feel very certain of that.

“Did you keep some of the money?” I say abruptly.

“Listen, Trish, we cannot control for every variable. Human greediness… it’s not even necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion.”

Jim seems to round some bend in his own mind; without warning, like the sun breaking through clouds, he is smiling almost wistfully down his long nose at me.

“Maybe it’s just what we mean when we say ‘a necessary evil.’ Look at the population we serve. Any one of the insomniacs, at any time, could choose death. Some do, as you know. The ones who get their name on our wait-lists want to sleep because they want to live. They are greedy, greedy, greedy for relief, more life.”

Jim is a better recruiter than Rudy. I watch his gray eyes go mock-ingenuous behind his glasses. He quits trying to bully me.

“It’s your choice, of course.” He steeples his long fingers, his smile now one of rueful contemplation. I can no longer tell what is genuine, what is performance; perhaps Jim shares my confusion.

“Jim  —”

“I’m just urging you to think about the consequences of your actions. My life will be over, of course  —it will kill me, frankly, the scandal. But let’s not talk about my life; that’s quite irrelevant to the big picture. Instead, Trish, I’d suggest you think about the suffering people on our wait-lists. The media will be all over us. Look at the disruption from Donor Y, the damage he’s caused!”

I nod.

“The fines will be astronomical. Our public image will never fully recover. Without the goodwill of the public, what do we run on? Trish, I know that you are smart enough to understand why it was necessary to give these foreign researchers a crack at achieving synthesis. But the media is going to crucify me, they don’t give a damn who they hurt, and listen, there will be a run on the sleep banks like something out of the Great Depression. People will die, no doubt. Laws might be overturned  —infant donations could become a thing of the past. We will certainly never draw from Baby A again if you turn me in.”

“What if you just… confess, Jim. Apologize, resign.”

Jim shakes his head at me so slowly, with a maddening air, affectionate and severe, like a father denying his daughter a poisoned apple.

“I know that would make things more comfortable for you .”

“Please, Jim,” I say, hating and hating the meekness of my voice. This is not how I imagined our confrontation, not at all. “Please, will you turn yourself in? I don’t want to be the one.”

He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, puts them on again.

“So you’ve convinced yourself, then. You’ve already decided. You think it’s the right thing to do, regardless of the cost to others.”

“I didn’t say that…”

I can feel my uncertainty returning, like a thickening blue mist that rolls in between Jim’s face and my own. Helplessly, I watch this happen. Then my decision softens back into a speculation: What will happen to the Corps, and to all the people on our wait-lists, if I fail to keep Jim’s confidence? He’s right, isn’t he? We are still in crisis mode from Donor Y; easily, I can imagine a nationwide boycott of the sleep banks if the news about an infant’s “stolen sleep” breaks. I can imagine much worse.

And nobody else is doing this work.

“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.”

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.

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 ultra-sedative, 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 blackflow, 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 towards me, blinding me. A brown sedan with turquoise doors.

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

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 ahold of his wrist. His thick fingers around my arm feel like a blood pressure cuff. We moth along towards 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.