Karen Russell - Sleep Donation

My regret is nearly instantaneous.

Mr. Harkonnen is standing on the lawn.

His arms are folded over his barrel chest, and the darkness lengthens and funnels around him. For a cold moment, I mistake these creased shadows for a shotgun.

“Mr. Harkonnen!” I wave, throwing my hands up, crossing the uncut grass towards him. “We’ve met. It’s Trish Edgewater  —”

“No way.”

“The Corps Recruitment Manager  —”

“Not tonight. We’re done here.”

Moonlight crosses his skin like moisture, light weeping down his craggy cheeks. He stands under the shadows of a giant poplar. Every time the boughs move in the wind, chunks of him go missing.

“Tonight we have a true crisis on our hands, sir  —”

“Is that so? Guess what I’ve got on my hands?”

His fists knot to form an imaginary cradle, which he swings furiously on the air.

“I’ve got a daughter. She needs her sleep. You show up here every goddamn week. Why can’t you find someone else’s kid to drain?”

Etiquette is a powerful programming, however, and easily exploitable. I sneeze. He sneezes back language at me, reflexive generosity: “Bless you.” A space opens up; I inch closer on the grass: “Mr. Harkonnen, can I trouble you for five minutes of your evening? I’m asking on behalf of my dead sister, Dori Edgewater…” He frowns, and I score an extra second  —a short tarmac  —but long enough for me to launch my pitch.

Quick as I’ve ever managed it, I transition into Dori-mode.

Up I float; somewhere, far below me, I see a blur that is my body, pitching my sister.

“Oh, my God,” he whispers when I’ve finished. “ That’s how she died?”

I glance down at my watch: four minutes have elapsed. A new record.

“And you’re saying if she’d had one extra hour of sleep  —”

“So the coroner tells me.”

The stars above the Harkonnens’ brick roof are spinning. Chowdery bile rises in the back of my throat, and I stare at Mr. Harkonnen’s shoes on the grass until it sinks again. I am truly spent, sweaty.

“Jesus.”

Mr. Harkonnen takes a step forward with his arm lifted, as if in greeting; it falls heavily on my shoulder.

“Well, I am very sorry to hear that. Very very sorry indeed,” he whistles.

Now things get considerably more complex; at the top of the lawn, the front door to the house swings wide. The darkness spits out Mrs. Harkonnen, who joins us.

“Hel-lo!” I call out, and wince with her at the volume of my voice, which sounds deranged at this late hour with unseasonable cheer; I wonder whether the nurses can hear any of this from the Van.

“I’m sorry, Justine,” I blurt out. “But it’s bad.”

I count off the numbers in the ER.

I reveal how very little sleep we need to stave off tragedy tonight. Really, a minuscule amount from a being this tiny. We will manufacture a poly-sleep blend from it, and it will benefit hundreds of dreamless sufferers.

“The baby is inside. Felix will get her.”

Head down like a linebacker, he shoulders past me on the grass, clipping me with his bicep. I gasp, surprised to enjoy the contact, even the fury behind it. It’s not unlike flirtation, a move that blatant, deliberate.

“Thank you,” I say, addressing the wife.

“You’re welcome,” grunts the husband, parking himself on the lawn again, like he can’t bear to let her have the last word.

For a long moment we stand in this frozen geometry, just beyond the orange headlights of the Sleep Van. As dizzy as the stars, as near and alone. Then Mr. Harkonnen shifts his weight so that we form a true circle, and a strange joy sparks and catches in my chest.

I deliver the good news to the Sleep Van. Everybody grins with relief. Now the Sleep Van is once again an authorized vehicle on Cedar Ridge Parkway, instead of a boxy white shark waiting in the shallows to feast upon a baby. Nurse Carla swings the Van into their driveway. Two nurses begin to swab the helmet with the blue solution; a third calls Jim, beaming. I decide to take a walk around the Harkonnens’ neighborhood; the Van is crowded, I tend to get underfoot, and I find that I do not want to be inside when Mrs. Harkonnen enters with the baby.

The Slumber Corps’ lifesaving operations run on the public’s trust and goodwill. Where money is concerned, we have to be careful. According to my bosses, we are working on establishing a scholarship fund for Baby A. Some kind of trust in her name. Legally, we are “just desperate,” swears Jim Storch, to finagle a way to express our organization’s gratitude to the family for the gift of Baby A’s sleep. But this expression of gratitude must be made with diplomacy, sensitivity.

“It’s delicate,” Rudy tells me.

“And muy illegal ,” echoes Jim.

Nobody in our Mobi-Van would suggest that the raw market would do a better or a fairer job of matching insomniacs and donors than the Slumber Corps. None of us can imagine the solution proposed by certain factions, “the sale of sleep,” leading to an equitable system. Not that the Slumber Corps is a perfect matchmaker. Our cold-calling can feel scattershot, and our dependence on strangers to refill the dream wells is total; the Sleep Banks are routinely on appeal for more units. You can’t program omniscience into the hospital computers, and people die on the Corps’ wait-lists every night. But our goal, at least, is articulable, stable, and very clear: to get clean, deep sleep to the insomniacs. I am proud to say that in its seven-year history, the Slumber Corps has never rejected an insomniac for financial reasons, or requested any kind of payment.

When I registered the Harkonnens as donors, I had no idea that their daughter’s sleep was a miracle in progress. Baby A is still the world’s only known universal donor. But there have been several cases of sleep donations that can be accepted by a remarkable percentage of insomniacs. Three years ago, sleep of a lightning-white purity got drawn from a ninety-two-year-old Lakota man in Laramie. Almost immediately after his discovery, he slipped into a coma, and ever since, against the wishes of some family members, the Wyoming Slumber Corps has been “mining him” for sleep  —a phrase favored by the media.

“Which is funny,” Rudy snarls, “when you consider all the mining, drilling, and earth-rape they are actually doing in Wyoming  —and here we have this living saint, sustaining hundreds of people with his sleep…”

The old man signed a contract, before losing consciousness, stipulating that he wanted his body to be farmed for sleep until its death. His last bequest. I admire the generosity of our Wyoming donor, and I invoke him at Drives. But I’ve also had such vibrant nightmares where I see the orphaned animal of his body, tethered to Gould’s machinery by the ponytail of blue wires. Strapped onto the cot, strapped into the helmet. The feet in socks.

Hundreds of lives have since been saved thanks to Baby A’s donations. Many thousands more, who are wait-listed for a Baby A transfusion, have been given an EEG-recording of Baby A’s brain waves, transformed into an audio recording, as part of an experimental study. There is some evidence that even this remote contact with Baby A’s sleep might reset insomniacs’ body clocks. All of this is well documented by our outreach videos.

But Baby A’s life would have been far better off, I’m certain, if I’d never found her.

The Harkonnens live in a “transitional” neighborhood  —houses that you might call “fixer-uppers” or derelict, depending on how cheerful you are feeling. Even light seems hesitant to enter them. Last year, many of the rotting facades got repainted in gumball shades of pink and lime, some misguided civic project to brighten this part of our city. It’s a pretty superficial shellacking  —the cars and motorcycles outside are still junkers. Lawns are covered with many octaves of weeds, shading from crud brown to yellowy beige, and even the leafy trees seem to me to have too many limbs, mutating away from the rooftops in a silent, wild freedom. Several bikes knock around on their chains, an eerily genial sound, as if the machines are gossiping. Early spring, and this whole block smells like flowers. The heaving blossoms turn out to be everywhere once you notice them, overflowing the rain gutters and the sills of second-story windows, unencouraged, unsupported, and nevertheless here once more, vivid white in the night air. Beauty staging its coup in every suburb and slum in the galaxy. You are lucky to be alive to see it, aren’t you, Edgewater? I have several canned lectures, designed to reduce my nausea after talking about Dori, which I mentally self-administer in Rudy’s stern voice.