Karen Russell - Sleep Donation

Are they a couple? I ask.

The man smiles.

“Sure. Met her five minutes ago, when I sat down here. You’re invited to the wedding.”

Recipients and donors. Donors and recipients. Variations of this couple's exchange are happening with a hothouse spontaneity up and down the bar: people with equal but opposite afflictions, propping each other up.

This is my beautifully stable impression of Night World culture for maybe two more minutes; then something explodes near my head. Blue medicine leaks in an Arctic smear down the cabinet door. Whatever it is smells faintly of garlic. So much for romance. Near the tent flaps, a fight has broken out: two gizzardy LD-ers are haggling over their bar tab. It seems they have goaded each other into consuming two thousand dollars’ worth of some placebo-slush. They dispute the bill in hoarse screams: “That was your round , Leonard!” Napkins wag from their hands, covered in scrawl, two rival accounts of their debts to one another  —a bar tab that seems to stretch back to the Big Bang.

Mr. Harkonnen returns with our drinks. To avoid the brawl, we retreat farther into the tent, choose stools next to a dark oak cabinet.

“Got us the cheap stuff,” he says.

“Okay. Thank you.”

Shooting Stars is the name of my medicinal cocktail.

I don’t ask what it does. Three sips in, my expectations go colorless. Then I find myself leaning against Mr. Harkonnen’s left shoulder. Mr. Harkonnen smells like nothing unexpected: generic deodorant, Old Spice aftershave. These odors are like flung harpoons  —they sail out of the Night World and back across the highway, wrenching whole continents of normalcy into this dark tent: malls and supermarkets, non-lethal sunsets, jarred tomatoes, orderly hedgerows, carpet cleaner, kitty litter, everybody’s junk mail piling up on tables, geese flapping across meridians on their winter-spring cycle… and soon I’m having to close my eyes to fight a supreme dizziness, as many times and seasons collide inside my chest. I take another long gulp of the cocktail. This time, the effect is immediate. Heat radiates outward until my skin feels ready to burst, until my skeleton is both holding me upright on the barstool and also dissolving, inside me, into melting vertebrae, a million memories unstoppered in my brain, rising up my spine, flowing down, my body too small to contain them, shrinking even as the dizzy light expands in all directions, and no way to protect myself against the assault, this onslaught of sound and light, and nowhere to release it, all the aggregating echoes, Dori’s voice, our father’s, a thousand other whisperers…

I blink twice, rub my eyes: incredibly, the Night World tent is still here. I study my watch, relieved that I can read the numbers: three minutes have elapsed since we sat down. Beside me, Mr. Harkonnen is eating green pistachios out of an ashtray. He smiles at me. His face looks placid, in the illegible and alien way that stingrays’ bellies look placid as they smooth along glass walls.

“That was an intense drink,” I say, frowning down at my lap.

“Still is.”

“Was it supposed to wake us up?”

“You bet.”

I rub my tingling ears.

“Are you, ah, feeling it?”

“I’m drinking a virgin medicinal cocktail, actually.”

“Oh. So…”

“Just gin.”

Mr. Harkonnen leans back against the side of the medicine cabinet. His arms are flung gregariously behind his head. I blink down at our shoes, my head still spinning.

“I thought we should have a private talk,” he says. “Away from the house.”

I gaze up at him from behind my glass. Some disturbed dreamer has scratched Screams from the raven-lunged in a vitreous green ink onto the wooden bar. The tent’s droning moonlamps make it feel as though we’re all boozing inside a tremendous bug zapper.

“Things have become tense,” he adds. “Around the household.”

“You’re fighting with Justine?”

“We’re fighting, yes.”

“About Baby A?”

“No, about the recycling. What do you think?”

He tips his drink back, motions for me to follow suit.

“We were a happy couple, a happy family, can you imagine that? Six months ago that was our status: happy. But then you show up  —”

“You can stop.”

“Oh, she won’t hear of it now. ‘Divorce me, then,’ she says. ‘Take me to court. We’re going to cooperate with them, it’s the right thing to do …’ ”

“It’s a donation.” I swallow. “Nobody can force you.”

“So she thinks  —ha!”

Mr. Harkonnen has finished his virgin sleep cocktail. Angrily, he shakes the drained glass. His tongue darts around to catch the last clear droplets. The tongue’s froggy orbit around the edge of the glass seems many evolutionary leaps removed from the wounded intelligence in Mr. Harkonnen’s black eyes.

“She thinks that one day you will stop asking .”

“But we will! When the neuroscientists figure out a way to synthesize what she produces naturally…”

“Ha!”

For the duration of his laughing fit, Mr. Harkonnen stares down at the bar with a face of social horror, the bulge-eyed consternation of a man who is trying to discreetly cough up a bone into a cloth napkin; eventually, he regains control of his voice.

“And how old will my daughter be then?” he asks calmly. “Ten? Twenty?”

She’ll be dead . This thought is nothing I will. It blows into and through me, part of a leaf-swirl of my worst fears. To erase it, I imagine Baby A at twenty, laughing, a bright-eyed college freshman.

“She’ll be a lot younger than ten, I bet. The scientists are working around the clock  —”

Mr. Harkonnen snaps for the bartender.

“We’d like to try one of your specials.”

“Of course. What is your desired State of Vigilance? Or Depth of Sleep?” asks the bartender-pharmacist.

“Sleep for us, this time  —”

The bartender-pharmacist winks at Mr. Harkonnen. With her tiny, fox-perfect teeth, she tears a blank envelope.

Service is democratic, I gather, in a Night World. Nobody here prescreens, or hands around eligibility questionnaires. The bewigged bartender-pharmacist, smoothing her magenta bangs, is happy to take our money. Eighty-four dollars for two drinks. Purple powder seems to float inside the dark glass, coagulating into tiny countries.

“You’ll be out cold,” I observe to Mr. Harkonnen.

He grins at a dim corner of the tent.

“So will you, though. Bottoms up.”

My body tenses, anticipating a second onrush of light. But three sips in, and this time I feel like a bone on sand, powdery and solid, too, and very still. Some protection is in the process of repealing itself. This is scary at first, but soon its absence feels like a relief. The heaviness of sentience, heavy history and caution  —the drink drains it away. Shards are winking on the sand inside me and I find I have no desire to collect them, to dig or to investigate. I am strangely unbothered by the parched bar, the evaporating sea of reason, the flecks of thoughts, their disconnection.

“This is a good one,” Mr. Harkonnen says. “Sort of limey. Do you taste lime?”

It doesn’t last too long, that first hit of the soporific. A second later, I sober up; the waves come back, and I’m myself again, thinking my thoughts, albeit in a dangerously relaxed state.

Somehow it seems we’re talking about Baby A.

“I manage the YMCA. Soccer, baseball. For every boy, there is a season. I wanted a boy, until she came.” He smiles down at the bar, squeezing his fists together; it’s a funny gesture, and I wonder if he’s keeping something for or from himself. “And then I forgot that I ever wanted different.”