Karen Russell - Sleep Donation

“Have you ever been to the San Diego bank, Trish?” whispers my colleague Jeremy in the Mobi-Van. “If the guy’s file went missing, I’m sure it was just some administrative fuck-up.”

Jeremy does our branch’s data entry, and I guess he knows whereof he speaks. We agree that it’s far scarier, in its way, to think that a teenaged volunteer with bangs in his eyes, some good-hearted college kid named Brad or Boomer, simply forgot to scan a state ID. You can see why the theorists are getting so much airtime. There’s something darkly reassuring about imagining a cabal under the earth, or a government plot, or any human scheme, to undergird the spread of his “plague dream.”

What follows is a catastrophe for the Corps beyond our own worst institutional nightmares.

The Donor Y scandal causes a nationwide drought in all the Sleep Banks.

People are scared to donate. Many decide that Gould’s procedure must be hazardous. Their fear adheres to the physical apparatus: the silver helmet, the mask and the catch-cot. Myths run rampant, a parallel contagion: What if you can contract a nightmare in the Sleep Vans? What if donors, too, expose themselves to the infection? Other donors dread becoming a Donor Y. Newscasters transmit the germ of fear to millions. The morning news, the evening news, it’s relentless:

“Obviously, the American people have been lied to, the American people have been misled about the real risks of this sleep donation procedure…”

Never have I heard “the American people” invoked so many times per hour.

The CDC assembles a task force of dream epidemiologists.

In the Mobi-Van, we are calling around the clock, reassuring old donors, begging. The intern jokes that he could use some bootleg sleep himself, until Rudy roars at him to knock it off.

If you’ve ever watched people speedily disqualify themselves from serving on a jury in a courtroom, you can imagine the efficiency with which many of our cold calls recuse themselves. When I announce that I am a Slumber Corps recruiter, people launch into descriptions of their most bewildering dreams, as evidence that they are unfit to give:

“Ma’am, I keep drowning in my own blood at night. I have the shadow of an insect, I dreamed that. Really, I’m a menace. My dreams aren’t right…”

“This one I’ve been having since childhood, I call it the bottomless dream? The dead go spelunking into blue holes. Then for some reason I’m in Lithuania, in a jade cave where the tornadoes breed…”

“President Nixon strapped to a fire truck! Twice, I dreamed that this month…”

A recent widower says: “What lugubrious facts. I regret that I will be unable to change them for you. My wife just died, you see, and she’s saturated my sleep like coffin milk.”

A Russian woman interrupts my scripted pitch to scream at me, quite persuasively: “I should ask you , you should give me . Every hour I have, I need!”

It’s a crisis of faith. Donors refuse to give sleep; donees who have spent months on our rolls are now refusing the transfusions. Suddenly, impossibly, we must advertise to recruit the sick ones.

We need good sleepers and we need insomniacs. To combat attrition on two fronts, the Slumber Corps launches a new PR campaign. The TV spots show scrupulously groomed young couples, paragons of hygiene, holding up their children under a pristine full moon, yawning, smiling, waiting for their turn to donate at a Suburban Donation Station. Behind the Van is a tract house and snail-shaped driveway. The message: the Sleep Van comes to you. Then the camera cuts to footage of a yellow nursery. There is zoo wallpaper, the zany chandelier of a baby mobile. The camera floats over a crib, pans down to a three-month-old infant’s seamless eyelid. A lavender bib with tiny sheep rises and falls on her perfect chest, with a dreamy evenness.

“SLEEP LIKE A BABY AGAIN: 1-800-IMAWAKE.”

It’s like watching food advertising for hungry mouths.

We run a local hotline. On either side of me, Yoon and Jeremy are pouring reassurances into their telephone headsets. These salving phrases are the antibodies engineered for us by the Corps scientists, sets of facts to counteract the spread of doubt, terror. And as we speak them, we try hard to immunize ourselves, and one another, against the panic of the callers. “The Donor Y contagion is officially contained,” I say on repeat a hundred times a night. When I close my eyes, though, I picture a microscopic worm nuzzling under skin, blood-rocketed through the entire organ system.

“The needy simply do not trust us,” complains Rudy Storch.

“I can’t believe this,” says Jim, shaking his head.

Very slowly, Jim reads off the names of Last Day insomniacs who have requested removal from our transfusion wait-list: “Rita dropped out? Melissa Van Ness? Has everybody lost their mind?”

Reflexively, he keeps thumbing water from his eyes. Rudy has formulated a sort of chitinous shell of sarcasm to protect him, but I worry about Jim.

“Jesus. I mean, mistrust us, okay, think us diabolical, but let us help you.”

I don’t tell Jim or Rudy that certain people on their staff mistrust them ; that we all wonder at the brothers’ motivations for pouring their fortune into the Corps.

Chief among the skeptics is Roger Kleier, the Slumber Corps janitor. He is always recruiting our doughy new interns to share his suspicions of the Storches. He is on payroll, he is not a volunteer. His salary comes from the tremendous endowment made to our regional branch by Jim and Rudy Storch. Every month, an influx from the brothers’ coffers fills his bank account.

“You gotta be shitting me! The toilet brothers give up a million-dollar business to work out of a trailer —why? ”

Roger is a naturally suspicious person. There are bodies that reject sleep transfusion after sleep transfusion. Bodies that come preprogrammed with evolved defenses against all foreign dreams, that respond to even infant sleep-transfusions with a violent immune reaction. And goodness knows, I have worked with many people in this waking life who seem congenitally incapable of accepting any human donation of blood, marrow, sleep, criticism, praise, money, love. Some days, I know, I’m one of them. You find that you’re not a match with the donor. Or you sense that the gift will take some freedom from you. Your body rebels, maybe you don’t even know why. But the donation is rejected.

Roger’s janitorial desire to get a clean read on the Storches, his hostile curiosity about their motives, adds its resonance to the chorus that pours through my headset. During Phone Shifts, I read my updated script. I say: “The Donor Y outbreak was an anomaly.” I say: “Sleep donation is safer at this moment than it has ever been in history.” I say what I can say, and mean: “People are lying awake, dying. They need your help.”

On a good night, I feel I’ve done a good thing. That donors will continue to replenish the Sleep Banks; that the risks to them are minimal; that the benefits to the insomniacs are incalculable, sky-wide, as enormous as any life-in-progress.

On a bad night, this can feel like stitching an imaginary net under a hundred wheeling acrobats. Or promising the stars they’ll never burn out, fall. The Corps script doesn’t come with stage directions; I could ease up a little on the doomy enthusiasm. Politicians would retire their office before guaranteeing so many splendid tomorrows to their voters. Men don’t lie like this to get women into bed.

Underneath my audible solicitations, I make another request, at a frequency far below the chittering of my transmissions to these people, my bullshit reassurances: Please let what I’m telling them stay true, please let them be safe.