Sleep Donation: A Novella (Kindle Single) (5 page)

Last April, Rudy and Jim had me tell “Dori’s Story” at the Corps
Sweet Dreams Benefit

—our largest
annual fund-raiser. At the ball, I stuttered, lost my place twice.
I torpedo-sneezed into an audience of billionaires.

“No, Edgewater!” Rudy reassured me. “You got half the room with
that. That snot was a good touch! I mean I know it wasn’t a
‘touch’

—with you, it’s never a
performance

—”

In the bathroom, I rinsed my eyes. A German woman approached me,
a Deutsche Bank widow in shimmering green. She complimented me, in
her way, on the purity of my grief: “Still so sad! After all these
years and tellings!”

I’ve shared Dori with thousands of people now: reporters and
talk show hosts; reluctant sleep donors; once, a jet-lagged,
baffled, yet receptive African king at a strange and endless state
lunch. Every single time I tell it, I go into convulsions. I show
her photograph.

“She’s like a grief hemophiliac,” Rudy told the German widow,
who was searching avidly for her checkbook; for an instant, we
locked eyes over the sequined shoulder pad of this woman’s evening
gown. “It doesn’t clot. It never runs dry.”

Is our appeal to this alpha breed of ego a bad thing? Rudy
argues that it’s one of our greatest accomplishments

—that the Corps reorients the flow of ego,
like the old river-dammers who got the water to run backwards and
irrigate a dry world. We at the Slumber Corps are hydraulic
engineers. We redistribute funds, dreams, to eradicate thirst. And
I don’t disagree; only it’s a strange way to help the living, to
continually dredge her up, my sister.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the similarities between
what I do and what’s been done by Donor Y. Thanks to my efforts,
millions of people are infected with Dori’s last breath. My job, as
I understand it, is to compel our donors to feel the horror of her
death. To “spread awareness.”

“It won’t bring her back,” a trustee once told me soapily over
another endless Slumber Corps charity spaghetti dinner, as if
lathering his own hands with this antiseptic wisdom. Which, oh God,
caused me to swallow a small withered tomato whole so I could hiss
across the table, “I
know
that!”

At the same time, what am I doing, if not reseeding my dead
sister into as many fertile minds and bodies as possible?

Sometimes I think the right doctor could
open my chest and find her there, my sister, frozen inside of me,
like a face in a locket.

Ten days after Donor Y’s story breaks,
the San Francisco ER admits a group of twenty
chattering maniacs who are refusing sleep. Every one of them tests
positive for the Donor Y nightmare. These people were not our
patients. They did not receive transfusions from American sleep
banks. They were passengers on Flight
109
,
from Havana to SFO. Immediately, the passengers become
misery-celebrities. They represent an entirely new species of
revenant in our midnight world.

We learn that these people were part of a group of sixty-one
medical tourists. As recently as a week ago, not one of these
twenty new victims of the nightmare contagion could fall asleep.
Either unwilling or unable to wait another night on the Slumber
Corps rolls, they’d chartered a flight to Cuba and paid to receive
an experimental sleep transfusion. They spent a week recovering in
Havana, cocooned in a secret room behind the Malecón Hospital, near
the leafy gold light and the shining Bahia. Sleeping and dreaming,
assimilating the transfusion. During that time, the Cuban doctors
confirmed that twenty of the twenty-two American recipients had
regained their ability to fall asleep on their own. As happens in
the best-case scenarios, a single transfusion had jolted them into
their original sleep-wake cycles. The return flight to
San Francisco should have been a beautiful milestone for these
people: stars shuttling past the cabin windows, the recovered
insomniacs drifting into natural sleep. Half an hour into the
flight, the steward reported hearing piercing screams throughout
the cabin. A fifty-three-year-old male passenger from North
Carolina, snoring in a middle seat,
13B
,
was the first to present symptoms of the Donor Y nightmare. Soon
half a dozen other passengers seemed to be plummeting into the same
dream, and then the howls came at regular intervals, according to
the steward at the press conference, “everyone screaming at once,
the way a Ferris wheel sounds, like they were all going in
circles.”

The Corps was not unaware that such medical tourism occurred.
They had reports of sleep transfusions being offered for cash
already under way in Cuba, Vietnam, Haiti, western Germany, despite
Headquarters’ issued warnings to American insomniacs regarding
these “back-alley dream dealers,” decrying their lack of oversight
and regulation, their profit-hunger, their shabby facsimiles of
Gould’s machines. What nobody knows is how the Cubans wound up with
units of the tainted sleep in the first place.

Fusillades of educated speculation erupt on our
TVs:

1. Units of the infected sleep have crossed the ocean, through
   some black-market transaction.
   
2. An American who received one of the tainted sleep transfusions
   gave
   
   —or sold
   
   —her infected sleep abroad.
   

And then things shade into hysteria, with some people alleging
that the Donor Y pathogen has gone airborne. What if it was sneezed
out, coughed up, a scum of germs on skin? What if it was
transmitted to all the passengers via the recycled air of the
plane?

The Corps issues a press release:
NIGHTMARE-PRIONS CAN
ONLY
BE TRANSMITTED THROUGH
SLEEP TRANSFUSIONS
. The Donor Y nightmare cannot be
contracted orally, or through skin. It is not an airborne virus. It
is not transmitted through insect bites, food, water, or sexual
contact with a sick dreamer. There is no risk of transmission to a
sleep donor.

But this does not halt the proliferation of paranoiac theories
regarding motive, transmission.

It feels like a moment in history. Even in the present, you get
that shivery sense, watching the greenish footage of Flight
109
parked on the tarmac, the circular door
to this winged hospice opening and releasing the victims of the
outbreak down spindly stairs. “You look like you’ve seen a
ghost”

—this expression I’ve known
since childhood, and never once had the occasion to use. These
descending people on the TV screen look like they’ve
seen worse. Several older men are crying, their shoulders hiccuping
up and down under the red Slumber Corps blankets. In the hospital,
they won’t pull their heads through the teal pajama holes. They
don’t dare blink. They pry the lids open with thumb and forefinger;
some beg for stitches, tape.

The doctors are calling them “elective insomniacs.”

The doctors have begun to forcibly sedate some of these
patients, at their request, since they are incapable of mastering
their terror of sleep.

The goal of the electives: to stay conscious. To never again
cycle into REM.

And then we learn that the passengers of Flight
109
are not the only ones: hundreds of other victims
of the Donor Y contagion are refusing to sleep.

It’s startling how quickly their arrival changes everything for
us.

People are confused by the new taxonomy of insomnia: Wait, these
twenty insomniacs make a full recovery in Cuba, they have one bad
dream, and they give up on sleep
for good
? So they are
infected with a nightmare; what in God’s name could be so
frightening that death seems preferable to sleeping? What are they
seeing, at night?

Newspapers are not even printing descriptions of the Donor Y
nightmare. There is great concern that readers will convert the
words into a copycat dream, causing waves of hypochondria, mass
hysteria. As a protection, this press embargo strikes me as
unnecessary

—none of the infected
patients can tell us anything of substance about the Donor Y
nightmare, even after experiencing it for dozens of nights in a
row. As one infected woman explains in a radio interview, the Donor
Y nightmare does not translate into “upstairs language.” Her speech
was cold and precise, the words crisply etched against the silence,
so that when I closed my eyes what I saw was not the dream but
snowflakes, these soluble blue skeletons falling through space.
What she could say about the dream melted quickly away, like a
visitation from another world entirely.

Doctors at the sleep clinics are working with teams of
psychiatrists at the VA hospitals, hoping to replicate
their success at getting PTSD-afflicted veterans to
“risk” a night’s sleep. As far as elective insomnia goes, that’s
our closest precedent: war veterans who are afraid to sleep, who
dread their nightly redeployment to the Mekong Delta or Kabul, and
the wet red scenes that might recur in dreams while they are
trapped behind their eyelids.

The horrible symmetry of the reversal is rich fodder for
late-night TV comedians, jowly theologians, the news
anchors with their sibilant pity, their masks of skin and hair.
Ratings spike. Panic spikes. Windows shine late into the night,
every home in America shingled in yellow rectangles of light, until
it seems like entire neighborhoods are having allergic reactions to
the Donor Y crisis; even people with no history of insomnia or
dream transfusions are suddenly frightened to crawl into bed.

The National Sleep Bank establishes a hotline for concerned
citizens.

Callers accuse any human volunteer who answers in a breathless
singsong, like betrayed children: “You said this couldn’t
happen!”

If we failed, admits Dr. Peebles, it was a failure of
imagination. Contagion itself: early on, we foresaw this as a
danger. We took the appropriate precautions. After early clinical
trials of Gould’s machine showed certain nightmare-prions could be
passed from body to body, every laboratory in the country joined
forces. New tests got developed: sleep-assays, dream immunoblots.
All donated sleep in this country is subjected to a rigorous
screening and purification process.

But this specific outcome of a nightmare-contagion? “Elective
insomnia”? This was unforeseeable. This was unpreventable. Who
alive could have guessed that one San Diego man’s bad
dream

—no matter how
frightening

—could make patients
nostalgic
for their insomnia?

A new mental illness, some psychiatrists are eager to label
it.

A kind of extreme sleep-anorexia.

“Iatrogenic”: a word that sends me to the dictionary. More
deadpan comedy: it means our “lifesaving” transfusions have
provoked a secondary insomnia. The cure is worse than the
disease.

Some begin to speculate:
W
as
this done by
design? Is Donor Y a new kind of bioterrorist, who co-opted Gould’s
technology to stage an attack?

Some are beginning to believe he is the actual ungulate. The
red-horned devil himself.

I’m so stunned that when I answer calls, my mind’s a blank. I
let my mouth reel off the Corps’ press release: “Now, more than
ever before, the world needs your gift of sleep.”

Elsewhere, the elective insomniacs are taking increasingly
drastic measures to escape the REM-cycle. They latch
their eyeballs open, a
Clockwork Orange
self-torture.
Abuse amphetamines. The most desperate electives will not seek
treatment in the hospital, preferring instead the slow,
excruciating death of sleep refusal. “Opting out,” Jim calls
this.

Breaking news: several of the Flight
109
passengers receive emergency
transfusions spun out of the Baby A donations, and doctors make yet
another discovery. Shock-deliveries of Baby A’s untainted sleep can
flush such nightmares out of the system. Glad tidings for the
world, at last. A Van screams over to the Harkonnen residence. More
panacea-sleep gets pumped out of her.

Within a twenty-four-hour span, the seven infected passengers
who receive a transfusion of Baby A’s sleep are cleared of the
Donor Y nightmare.

The Baby A miracle is cheered by everyone, everywhere, with the
powerful exception of our star donor’s father. Felix Harkonnen, on
receiving the news that his daughter’s transfusions can eradicate
Donor Y’s contagious nightmare: “They need her sleep, too? All of
these new people? My God, can’t you folks find another body to
snatch here? Another of these universal donors? You’re telling me
my kid’s the only one?” We both picture her then: somebody else’s
daughter, playing Wiffle ball, riding her yellow bike to school,
sleeping like a champ. “Go scout new talent, why don’t you?” he
growled. “Scour the nursing homes. Find a hundred-year-old man. I
don’t want my daughter’s first birthday to be in a Sleep Van.”

Baby A’s supply cannot meet the increased demand. Her tiny body
can produce only so many hours of sleep per week. Hundreds less
than we need, it turns out, at the Sleep Banks.

When I schedule my next visit to
3300
Cedar Ridge Parkway, I am deliberate about choosing a time when I
know that Felix Harkonnen will not be home. Mrs. Harkonnen invites
me in. She brings out a plate of sugar cookies and switches the
television on, which permits us to crouch like spies on the orange
sofa and whisper to one another, safely enclosed inside a bubble of
background noise.

“Tell me about your sister,” says Mrs. Harkonnen.

“You want to hear it again?”

“Can you stand to tell it again?”

“Okay.”

I am certain that Mrs. Harkonnen has no desire to hear another
word about Dori; she is pushing me to make some reciprocal give, I
think. Asking for a trade.

“Go on

—” she prods. “I’m all
ears.”

She leans back on the cork soles of her slippers, her robe
flapping open. I can see a swirl of mauve moles on her collarbone,
her nursing bra biting into her pale left breast.

“This was my sister,” I tell her, extracting the photograph from
my bag.

Unconsciously, half-consciously, I know we are both
participating in the illusion that my sister is the one they will
be helping; I brandish her photograph before Mrs. Harkonnen’s eyes,
then my own, letting the spell set. Dori’s suffering I describe so
freshly that anyone could be forgiven for forgetting that it’s
over, forever.

“We need to live as one body, don’t we, Trish?” she asks me, her
blue eyes widening inches from my face.

Mrs. Harkonnen and I have never talked religion, or gotten into
her family background, but I suspect that something must have
shattered her in a complementary way, to make her such a perfect
match for my sister’s story. Maybe she, too, lost a sister. Maybe
she belongs to a strict sect that advocates the gift of one’s every
breath to strangers.

But all of my assumptions, Justine Harkonnen reverses. The
physics of giving and receiving, as I understand them, seem not to
apply here. Even to a Van filled with Slumber Corps evangelists,
her faith in the rightness of sleep donation is alarming. She gives
what we demand, with blue eyes scrubbed of any misgivings. We all
find this upsetting, I know it, although there’s not much room to
say so. Nurse Carmen speaks her name with a censuring wonder. Nurse
Luisa, who has three little boys, won’t make eye contact with Mrs.
Harkonnen any longer. A good mother, the nurses nervously agree,
should be growing
more
upset with us,
more
worried for her baby’s health,
angrier
about our chronic
requests

—not less.

I stay with the Harkonnens in the Sleep Van. Milk darkens a
quarter-inch circle around Mrs. Harkonnen’s left nipple, an
involuntary seepage of which she seems wholly unaware; underneath
the giraffe-print blanket, black sleep gushes out of her
daughter.

There are natural laws that govern the flow of dream and
substance from body to body, laws that determine the passage of
electricity through tissue, the routes taken by ruby marrow and
iodine crystals and colorless vibrations. Laws to order every
visible and invisible migration.

And I feel certain there must be a second set of laws,
inscrutable but real, that governs exactly how much a particular
individual can give to and receive from another. Some hydrology of
human generosity. Because there are these gifts we can make to one
another freely, reflexively, with no sting of loss; and there are
gifts we fight to relinquish, beg to get.

Mr. Harkonnen grabs me while the nurses adjust the baby’s silver
helmet. Nurse Carmen, frowning, flicks at a gummed tube.

“You have pushed beyond the limits of what she can spare,”
growls Mr. Harkonnen.

“We have not,” I say sadly.

I show him the chart:

PATIENT’S WEIGHT:
Nineteen
pounds

MAXIMUM IN ONE SLEEP DRAW:
Six
hours

MAXIMUM IN A 30−DAY PERIOD:
Fifty-four hours

“Well, what did you take just now?”

“Six hours.”

His eyes search my face.

“You’re sure it’s safe for her to give that much?”

Oh, I have no idea. Safety is nothing we can guarantee to a
donor; that’s why I collect the signatures.

“These days, the science is so advanced! Trust me: our sleep
doctors know every vital detail pertaining to your daughter. They
will take only what her body can afford to give, I absolutely
promise you.”

Midway through the draw, there is some hiccup; a green light
blinks on above the monitors and we all wince, even the nurses.
Which is a frightening thing to witness, this neon beeping
registering on the nurses’ napkin-smooth faces

—something akin to watching stewardesses
flinch at mid-flight turbulence. Then the regular rhythms resume,
draining more sleep from her chest. The Sleep Van fills with the
odd slick smell, and the proprietary gurgle of the machine.

In her womb, Baby A was formed inside a tidaling generosity.
Glucose, oxygen, proteins, fats: all transferred from the mother’s
bloodstream to the bloodstream of the baby.