Karen Russell - Sleep Donation

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, me and my sister, in the lone college class we ever took together, before her professors finally joined forces to insist that she take a medical leave of absence. Dori picked it out, of course, 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 crazycolors 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 teenaged 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 schoolbuses 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 genders, 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 THE 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 in 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 on the prowl.

Next to us, a woman’s head is rolling on a man’s shoulder, her sheepy curls tossing on his navy sleeve like a cloud at anchor. I think she’s an elective who 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 angry 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.