Karen Russell - Sleep Donation

Will Mr. Harkonnen keep the secret? If I explain to him that the ensuing scandal really could undermine the entire institution? Actually kill people, according to Jim’s assessment? I can’t imagine that he will respond to the news with silence, or forgiveness.

Mr. Harkonnen is staring at me with a strangely avuncular expression; he hands me a green pistachio, crunches into his own. “There,” he says, like everything’s settled. “Let’s go for a walk. I’d like to show you the Poppy Fields. They’re really something. They’re way out beyond the tents. Do you know, ever since our field trip to Ward Seven, I’ve been coming out here every other night. Justine thinks I’m working late. And she’s not wrong.”

His grin is a further mystification, exposing a black back tooth.

“I am.”

“Why?” Then a startling answer occurs to me. “Are you sick, too?”

“No. it’s not that. After that night at Ward Seven, I just wanted to see these people for myself. Solo, you know. Without my wife. Without a chaperone.”

I giggle, terrified.

“It’s been quite an education.”

“For me, too, Mr. Hark  —”

“Good. We’re just getting started. The night is young.”

Something tightens in the air between us and I find that I’m pushing away from the bar, and from the empty glasses and the cracked pistachio hulls and the unslept faces. I have to stand to avoid falling off the barstool. I hold on to the bar’s edge, blinking hard into the moonlamps. Felix is studying my eyes. I amend my plan, watching him watching me, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that my plan amends itself, spontaneously inverts: Who is helped, if the father knows about the sale?

No one, says Jim.

Out loud, I make the easier apology:

“About Ward Seven? I’m really, really sorr  —”

“Don’t!” he roars. When the bartender-pharmacist looks over, he laughs: this is all in good fun, ma’am. He needn’t worry. Under her wig, her yellow-brown eyes regard us with a hilted intelligence, halted judgment. All of Night World seems to sparkle with a similar neutrality. Dulled gazes like swords in scabbards. Then we are back on the boardwalk, joining others on their slow bar crawl under the stars.

The Poppy Fields have been widely reported on: a special strain of poppy which releases an “aromatic hypnotic,” sometimes called an “olfactory blanket.” Poppies are trendy, if that word can be applied to foredoomed miracle cures. All over the country, Night World gardeners are pruning the flame-bright poppies beneath the moon. The gardeners’ headlamps reveal a wilderness of faces, insomniacs whose bloodshot eyes are even redder than the poppies. They lie on bedrolls and grain sacks in parallel rows, breathing in the flowers.

We reach the edge of the boardwalk, step off into grass.

In the distance, the woods wall us from the city. Pines span the horizon, nearly black in color at this hour, with the pointy, standard look of fence-posts. A wooden sign with an arrow reads: FIFTY YARDS TO THE POPPY FIELDS.

Behind us, the fairgrounds waver like some hallucinatory reef: the calm anemone billowing of the Night World tents, the barkers’ poles like red coral, the electric green spokes of the Dream Wheel. At this distance, even the screams of the insomniacs receiving Oblivion Prods contribute to this illusion, their faraway cries transformed by repetition into an implacable background, like waves crashing on rocks.

And then we are mid-calf in acres of flowers. “The Placebo Fields,” we joke in the Mobi-Van  —but, my God, it is hard to hold on to your cynicism when you actually see them. Under the moon, the poppies look as bright as jewels on the sea floor. We wade through hundreds of them, the scarlet buds drumming against our shins, and I find it’s almost frightening to bend the stems back, to graze the petals with my fingers. This is no mirage. But it’s a shock to find this sea at our city’s edge, and to find myself navigating it with Mr. Harkonnen. Who knows if the poppies’ fragrance is a real insomnia cure? I realize that I don’t smell a thing. But my thoughts shrink to a whisper, and soon I start to feel like I’m sleeping already.

Pain tickles my heel.

“I think I stepped on something…”

“I’d keep walking,” said Mr. Harkonnen, swallowing, his voice a thick buzz in my ears. “If I were you.”

“Will you look for me, will you check  —”

“It’s okay, Trish.”

And this is a real gift: the sound of my name. Connected to that stem, memories spread their wings, and I recollect who I’ve been, before the purple sleep cocktail, before the Night World parking lot and before my knock on the door which turned Mr. Harkonnen’s daughter into Baby A, before the sleep crisis, and even before Dori’s last day.

Very gratefully, I keep pace with him.

Remember this , I instruct myself.

Mr. Harkonnen steers me towards a small shack in the center of the field. It looks like a boat at anchor in this strange Atlantic. Night World staffers mill around it, grabbing blankets, chatting with groups of insomniacs.

“Do you know about the Legend of the Poppies?” a young attendant asks us with mechanical charm, tugging her black ponytail around her collarbone. She is the Valet, I realize, taking cash for the bedrolls and the blue inhalers, directing bodies to their pallets among the red flowers.

“I do,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “You told me. But tell her.”

With the mechanical cheer of any waitress, she beams at us each in turn.

“According to Greek legend, the poppy flower was the gift of Hypnos, the god of sleep, to help Demeter to dream again. Demeter was exhausted by the search for her lost daughter, whom Hades had taken to be his bride in the underworld. Now, Demeter was so tired that she could no longer make the harvest grow. But his poppies cast a spell on her. She slept, and when she woke, the corn was growing green and tall again.”

Mr. Harkonnen fishes for his wallet, tips her a buck.

“Yup. Thanks. That’s a rough night for Mom. The devil’s got your daughter.”

This female attendant is a tall Asian girl who is the same age as our Slumber Corps interns. She wears a long white coat and a white dress, for “atmosphere maintenance and heightened visibility,” she says. Behind her, the wind is picking up. It plows the fields. Each gust obliges the worst kind of devotion from the mutely chattering blossoms, grinding them against the soil, knocking their red heads around. The wind could do this to us, too, at any instant, it seems to want us to know, and the thousand poppies nod their agreement.

Suddenly I am overcome by drowsiness.

Mr. Harkonnen, beside me, lets out a shuddering yawn.

Women wander the poppy fields, in white nightgowns, carrying vessels of water, or some other transparent liquid. In calm, emotionless voices, they begin to halt the unsteady pilgrims and to ask them questions:

“Would you like a sip of the supplemental poppy tea, dear?”

“Would you like sheets and a pillow? We can sleep you on plot seven, or for forty-five dollars we can upgrade you to plot twelve, directly under the moon…”

It’s funny: Who in their lifetime, pre — Insomnia Crisis, could ever have imagined shelling out that kind of money to unroll a rubber mat in dirt? But just hearing the soothing voices as they recite the Poppy Fields’ menu of pricey sorceries is enough to implant these desires in me. Hungers appear in my mind, like coins flipped into a wishing pool.

America’s great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively, to a body like mine, and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end. Forty-five dollars for the moon-plot? Put it on the card. What a steal .