Karen Russell - Sleep Donation

Then we enroll their children in our donor program.

Four months ago, I pitched Mrs. Harkonnen at a Drive outside the Piggly Wiggly grocery. I spotted a baby’s face pinking out of her pretty woven papoose, and I introduced myself. Mrs. Harkonnen was an easy convert to the Slumber Corps, crying freely at Dori’s death story; the baby witnessed our exchange with that eerie calm babies have, dry-eyed and blank. Was her husband with her? No? Could I arrange to speak with him, get his signature? To dispatch a Sleep Van, we’d need both parents’ consent.

One week later, I paid a visit to 330 °Cedar Ridge Parkway to collect the consent forms. Mrs. Harkonnen greeted me on the porch with a shy smile, her hands starfished out in front of her; the nail polish was still wet. She’d remembered my name: “Trish! Come on in.” She’d put on red lipstick, was ready with a pot of decaf. Upstairs, the baby was crying; we’d both smiled automatically at the sound. “My husband’s with her. He signed your papers.” She pushed over the consent form; I saw that Felix Harkonnen’s autograph was freshly inked. “He’s a little worried about the procedure  —she’s our first child, you know, he’s a very protective father.”

The note of apology in her voice unnerved me a little; this was perhaps my first intimation that Mrs. Harkonnen was a very special sort of donor. I’d never met a mother like this, for whom the gift of a daughter’s sleep seemed so matter-of-fact. Why did she assume her husband’s reluctance needed explanation?

“But I told Felix all about those poor people on the waiting list. Why this sleep donation is so important to them. How did you call it? A ‘life serum.’” Then she’d paused, staring intently at me, and I saw that I’d been wrong to think this woman was in any way naive. There was some shrewdness alive inside her kindness, a perspicacity that thrilled and frightened me, that I did not understand. The quality of Mrs. Harkonnen’s attentiveness caused my whole body to prickle, as if invisible quills were lifting under my skin. This was a surprise. For the past eight months, I’d felt brain-dead and nerve-dead when I was not recruiting. I’d stumbled around in a daze during the periods between our Sleep Drives, those jagged white intervals of time, which I had formerly experienced, in unity, as “a day.”

“Your sister. I can’t stop thinking about her.”

“Oh?”

I’d stared up at the unshaded bulb above the Harkonnen kitchen table. Gravity can be exploited in these situations; moisture slid into my pupils. A swimmy seepage of green light contracted back inside the white bulb. I did not cry. Once the kitchen went matte again, I was able to meet her eyes:

“Well, thank you, thank you very much for keeping her in mind. My sister would be here today, if we’d had Gould’s technology. .”

Then my voice broke, and I had to really work to keep my grin from stretching into something crooked and hungry; my eyes felt suddenly dish-sized, much too large for my face. Ordinarily I only resurrect Dori during a pitch. That’s where I feel her. But that night I was certain that I sensed my sister’s presence in that stranger’s kitchen. Or almost certain. I badly wanted to see you, Dori, as you existed for Mrs. Harkonnen. Typically, my recruits receive the story of my sister’s death day with a mixture of sympathy and horror; many people give sleep as a kind of frightened oblation, a way to sandbag their healthy lives from her fate; if she “works” on them, they respond with a donation. But all most people ever really know about my sister’s life is how she died.

My smile became natural in response to Mrs. Harkonnen’s smile as she offered me a reheat on the black coffee, cream and sugar  —Mrs. Harkonnen was the kindest and gentlest inquisitor I’d ever met. Somehow she intuited all that I could not say about my sister, and she asked me only questions to which I possessed factual answers; I heard myself telling stories from our Pennsylvania childhood, these shadowy green memories of Dori that I’d never shared with any donor.

All this time, the baby had been wailing. At first I’d been astonished by her volume. Once Mrs. Harkonnen got me talking about Dori, however, I’d stopped noticing, until I was barely aware that I was shouting to be heard. Then that pour of solar sound cut out. The infant’s silence was as loud as her screams had been, at least. We turned from the forms together, and there was Mr. Harkonnen. He was standing at the top of the stairwell, holding the baby.

“I’ve changed my mind,” he said.

I stood, and so did Mrs. Harkonnen.

“Sit down,” Mrs. Harkonnen commanded me, suddenly steely. “Felix, we made a promise to these people  —”

Then I went perfectly still in their kitchen, holding chilly coffee, forgotten completely  —recruiting people to a cause, I’ve found, often isolates you in strange spandrels, caught between a stranger’s intersecting planes of aversion and desire; in the case of the Harkonnens, I was a literal trespasser. “Wait here,” said the red-eyed Mrs. Harkonnen, smiling sheepishly at me, as if she needed only to check on something burning in the oven. I eavesdropped on Mrs. Harkonnen woodpecker-drilling into the stout oak of Mr. Harkonnen: “We’re doing this. We have no choice. How can we live with ourselves otherwise? I won’t be able to live with myself.” As they argued on the stairwell, I closed my eyes and folded my hands on the kitchen table. I pictured a great fire fanning out through this house, consuming all obstacles. It was more a wish than a picture, to be honest. I’d willed the fire to eat a pathway to a yes.

I left 330 °Cedar Parkway with two signatures.

Four nights later, I dispatched a Sleep Van to the Harkonnens.

Baby A, on the night of that first, successful draw, was six and a quarter months old.

None of us had any clue, at that juncture, what the techs were about to uncover.

We shipped Baby A’s sleep to Elmhurst, New Jersey, one of our ten processing centers. Lab technicians were amazed. Multiple tests confirmed that her sleep had zero impurities: there were no nightmare-markers, no native dream-antibodies. No need, whatsoever, for the sleep of Baby A to be sieved and purified and reconstituted.

Baby A, it turns out, is a universal donor. No body rejects a transfusion of her sleep.

Her discovery has been called “a boon for all humanity” by Dr. Gary Peebles. She is our dream gold mine. Banks all across the country are on appeal for her sample. Lab techs work frantically to synthesize it  —“artificial sleep” has been a goal of medical researchers since the sleep banks first started operations.

Tonight will mark our sixteenth draw from Baby A. Sixteen draws in four months! That’s nearly half of Baby A’s life.

December, we drew twelve hours from the baby.

In January, we bumped up to thirty-six.

In February, we started drawing the max catch for her weight.

This March, the Sleep Van has been parked on the Harkonnens’ block every week.

When the numbers of insomniacs on our waiting rolls peaked, we were able to blend and redistribute the sleep of Baby A into forty-eight bodies. It was national news: “Baby A Saves the Night.”

Currently Baby A is underwriting many hundreds of lives with her sleep donations, with no end to the crisis in sight. Who could have guessed that an eighteen-pound infant would have that kind of power? Who can blame Baby A’s father, for abhorring our discovery?

When I pull up at 330 °Cedar Ridge Parkway, it’s a little after midnight. A trio of nurses are seated in the back of the Van. Outside the night is scintillating, calm. A basketball hoop in the Harkonnens’ driveway keeps its monocular eye fixed on their two-toned jalopy, a brown sedan with faded turquoise doors. Large white flowers blossom all over the property in unlikely, untended spots; one clump fronds out about a foot from the Chevy’s rear tires. I tell the Head Nurse that I want to go in alone; I perform better alone. “Are you sure, Trish?” she asks, with undisguised relief.