Karen Russell - Sleep Donation

“No,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “You know what? No, thanks, miss.”

He grabs my arm and then we’re hurrying away. Red poppies lisp after us; if their magic works, we must be resistant to it. Neither of us keel over into slumber. We have to walk through these sections of the Poppy Fields with great care, because the shapes humping the grass are people.

Maybe ten minutes beyond the Poppy Fields, when the “enchanted” flowers have ebbed back into scraggly, depopulated weeds, Mr. Harkonnen stops to rub his eyes on his sleeve. “Too many people there tonight.” His shoulders punch up at the sky, some martial shrug. “No privacy. Even if we paid the big money, I figured there would be some watcher there, lying a row away from us.”

But that is not our problem any longer. Currently, we are moving parallel to the woods. There are a million visible stars, miles of dark. We seem to be the only two people.

Why did you bring me here ? I do not ask him.

Abby—Baby A—she’s a hero , I do not reassure him.

Instead I say:

“Mr. Harkonnen  —Felix  —do you think the elective insomniacs have a choice?”

He grunts, picking his way across the unlit grass.

“Yes. Some of them go to the hospital for help, and some come here to die.”

“Do you think I gave you a choice?”

“Who do you think you are, girl? We chose. We’re choosing. Only you assholes sure rigged the game up good. Now, if you hadn’t shown up at our door in the first place… but let’s walk.”

We wander off into the shadows far beyond the “All Sore-Eyes Welcome!” sign, through uncut grass that brushes at my bare ankles; his hand drops to the small of my back, I take his arm, we are stumbling. All of this proceeds with a sultry inevitability, with a logic that mimics the odd chordal progressions of dreams, and for the first time in a long while I feel utterly relaxed. He frog-marches me far beyond the fairgrounds until I let him see that I’m not going to stumble; then he loosens his grip. Still he doesn’t let go of my arm. Wherever we are now, we’ve missed the dividing line that separates the fairgrounds’ unkempt margins from the nature preserve. Together we ford rivers of cattails, until the fever pitch of the Night World is entirely erased by distance, silence. The only sound is the occasional scream of some nocturnal hawk, which rips through the deep quiet of the sky like a skunk stripe drawn through black fur. We have to clamber over several enormous logs, Mr. Harkonnen grunting and slipping, offering me a hand. In the dark, these felled trees look as frighteningly misplaced as the bodies “sleeping” in the Poppy Fields. They make a lateral map of the woods as it must have been, before some storm. At one point, I look up and I see a spreading V pushing over the pines, many dozens of wings pulsing far above our heads; only it must be a very odd flock, because no shape resembles any other. Their wingspans, too, are irregular, some short and some long. Gaping up, I watch them multiply  —what sort of flock is this, for what purpose are so many different birds gathering? It’s too dark to even guess at their names. Silvery light seems to pour from their wings, although I know this watershed must be an illusion caused by the mediating stars. Starlight liquefies and streams as the black shapes cross the Pleiades. They arrow over the trees so swiftly that before I can point out their bladed and scissoring bodies to Mr. Harkonnen, they are gone.

At last, when I am swaying on my feet, he stops.

“Here.”

“Here’s good. Sure.”

“Now, lay down.”

Overhead, two hawks carousel around. It’s years since I’ve been this close to the green perfume of any woods.

“Stay put. No  —Jesus, knock that off.” He rolls his eyes. “Are you stupid? That’s not why I brought you here.”

I misunderstood. I assumed he needed a transfusion of something straightforward, something on the level of what I did with Jeremy. I rebutton my blouse.

Mr. Harkonnen lies down in the grass beside me, grunting. Then he maneuvers my head onto his chest, makes a vise of his bicep. I cry out from surprise, just once, and a tawny blur streaks out of the scrub and runs past my cheek in the dirt. It’s the fastest mouse in the world, I think, and then realize that my eyes are streaming.

“Here  —” he repeats, trying to crook an arm under my shoulder. My hair gets yanked loose from its ponytail and spills onto his T-shirt. He shifts us around until my earlobe is pressed against the bony plate of his clavicle, where I can hear his heart drumming.

“Sleep!” he commands.

“Okay. Okay.” I take a shuddery breath. “Why?”

“Because I said so,” he says, viscous and triumphant. From his slur, I can hear how the medicines are dragging him under, too.

“You sleep for as long as I say, got it?”

“I will, Mr. Harkonnen.”

This consent is easy to offer. Nothing troubles me at all now.

“Good.” He faces me on the grass, eye to eye under the pillow-white moon. “Night.”

The following dawn with Baby A’s father is one of the strangest of my life. How a person who so evidently hated me for months can now relate to me with such natural solicitousness is as bewildering as any flower opening in the desert. Whatever waters fed the blossoming of this affection are invisible to me. It’s got to be some misdirection of the profoundest kind. Misplaced tenderness for Baby A, maybe, or for his wife, Justine. I wake up to a gray-flying sky, the sun not yet risen, and Mr. Harkonnen offering me a sip of water from his canteen. He takes the corner of his shirt, moist with dew, and rubs the dirt from my face.

I receive this kindness as best I can.

It’s strange to see Mr. Harkonnen in daylight. We are our sober selves again, thank God. Dori, her memory, is caged as pressure in my ribs. Whatever came unravelled last night feels neatly spooled this morning. I exhale, feeling safer and safer as the sun inches up.

“How did you sleep?” he whispers.

“I slept beautifully. Thank you. And you?”

“I slept good,” he grunts, suddenly bashful. “That lime stuff was killer, whatever we were drinking. I feel well rested.”

“Did you dream?”

“If I did, I don’t remember.”

“Me, neither.”

Mr. Harkonnen nods, as if this is the bridge he’s been waiting for.

He tells me he has a proposition for me, regarding dreams.

“I want you to make me a promise,” he says. “Let’s draw up a contract, right here. If you are going to continue to draw sleep from my daughter, I want you to swear that you’ll give exactly that amount, every time. A matching donation. For as long as she gives, you give, too. You don’t rest again until I say you can.”

The sun shivers free of the distant pines.

“Of course,” I hear myself say.

We shake on this.

He nods twice, flushed and seemingly satisfied. With my free hand I peel a blade of grass from his stubbled chin. I find that I’m exhilarated by our contract’s terms.

We stand up in the dirt. We laugh a little, to drain a pus of awkwardness. I feel the strangest happiness. Tight muscles spasm everywhere in my arms, and an alkaline taste I can’t name coats my throat. Mr. Harkonnen swallows. He has not released my palm.

Then I wish for whatever is flowing between us to remain unnamed, formless, unmeted into story or ever “experienced” in the past tense, and so concluded; I don’t want to say it, I don’t even want to try to understand it, and so begin to mistake it for something else, and something else after that, paling shadows of this original feeling, something inaudibly delicate that would not survive the passage into speech.