Sleep Donation

The Sleep Van

The siren goes, and we code for dispatch. Nine times in twenty, lately, it’s the same address: 330 °Cedar Ridge Parkway.

Then we get a call back, saying the dispatch is cancelled.

Then we get a third call: no, disregard the cancellation; get a Sleep Van to the property, stat.

What’s happening, as revealed to us by a visibly distraught Jim: Mr. and Mrs. Harkonnen are having a “dispute.”

“Mr. Harkonnen says he wants to drop out.”

“So what?” says the intern. “We don’t even use his donations.”

“No, jackass. He’s trying to pull out with Baby A.”

Everybody looks over at that.

Rudy slaps his bald spot and leaves his hand there. A grapefruit hue spills underneath his fingers, as if the scalp is blushing.

Jim freezes in the center of the trailer, in full view of every staffer, and rubs his fists against his gray eyes. It’s a pitiful and futile gesture to witness, like watching an animal cower inside a plastic cage. We can see how scared Jim is of losing both things, Baby A and our good opinion of him.

Six staffers are working the phones tonight, and we are all mentally coaching him: Don’t cry, Jim.

Our Sleep Station has an unusual, top-heavy hierarchy—we have two supervisors, the Storch brothers. They are former CEOs who left the business world at the height of the Insomnia Crisis and now freely give of all their resources to the not-for-profit Slumber Corps. Money, time, intellect, leadership, creativity, toilet seats. The Storches made their fortune in the ergonomic toilet business. You may have seen their advertisements: “To shit upon a Storch feels better than a visit to your chiropractor.” Their extreme altruism is a provocation to everyone else on staff—an inducement to work even harder, a reminder that we could always be giving more.

Rudy and Jim have been my supervisors for seven years; I was the first recruiter assigned to their team. I don’t socialize with them outside work. Our contact is limited to this office (unless you count our public performances at Corps fund-raisers, the Charity Balls and Charity Golf-Offs). But I know every shadow of my bosses’ faces; all of their Storchy tics; that upsetting thing Rudy does with his pen caps; what Jim’s not saying at our meetings. The brothers are middle-aged Irish twins, clean shaven and built like longshoremen. Externally, they have slate eyes and cranberry-red hair balding in identical horseshoe patterns. Internally, each brother has his own uniquely fucked emotional metabolism. Rudy, for example, is currently managing his despair by bawling out the interns, sweat jewelling all along his dusky face like a July whisky glass.

The Storches are celebrities in the sleep crisis community. Eight years ago, the brothers served together on the inaugural Slumber Corps Board of Directors at Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Within months, the Corps had established outposts in every major city, pullulating green offshoots of the D.C. base. Soon local branches began operating more or less independently, soliciting donations for money and sleep, whereupon the Storch brothers promptly requested a demotion to this low-prestige placement in their home city. A “Solar Zone” assignment. We serve an urban core where the rate of insomnia is twenty-two percent higher than the national average. Our Pennsylvania city has one of the greatest REM-sleep deficits on the East Coast (although we are certainly not the worst hit: Tampa, riddlingly, currently leads the nation in new cases of the insomnia; the governor’s budget cuts in that Sunshine State have meant that Floridian sleep scientists remain stalled at the “dang”/“go figure” stage of their research). Hundreds of our old neighbors, friends, coworkers, and teachers are new insomniacs. They file for dream bankruptcy, appeal for Slumber Corps aid, wait to be approved for a sleep donor. It is a special kind of homelessness, says our mayor, to be evicted from your dreams. I believe our mayor is both genuinely concerned for his insomniac constituency, and also pandering to a powerfully desperate new voting block.

Currently the NCEH is investigating possible environmental causes in our city: everything from the water table to disturbed eagles’ nests to the brilliance of the moon on grass, to the antique screams of the historic monorail.

I grew up here, too.

We operate out of a Mobi-Office. Six interlocking trailers, dry-docked on a vacant downtown lot which the Corps leases from the city. “The redneck labyrinth,” Rudy calls it. A former FEMA engineer designed it as a temporary accommodation; a base camp for local teams working at the frontiers of the crisis. We’ve been working out of our tin can for half a decade. Nobody suggests moving into a brick-and-mortar office; nobody wants to peer through glass windows, in a building with a foundation, and admit that the insomnia emergency is now a permanent condition.

You’d think it would be difficult to hide in a trailer. But I’m chameleoned next to the phone wall, near the black window. Some intern has made curtains for the trailer windows, snaggy lace, which look nothing like curtains, in fact, but vestments tiny and obscene: bridal veils for mice, chinchilla negligees. They flutter in the trailer’s manic air-conditioning. Outside, the moon is a colossus. Its radiance makes every white of human manufacture seem dingy, impure.

I turn from the moon, remove the headset; I give myself one more blank moment.

“Where’s Trish?”

“Get Trish.”

“Over here,” I say.

“Edgewater!” screams Rudy. “There you are! We have a major goddamn problem.”

“A hitch,” Jim soothes.

“The mother is solid, she’s one hundred percent. The father, though—”

“The father is afflicted with doubts.”

“The father is a selfish prick.”

“Trish, honey…”

“Bastard hung up on me twice.”

“Whose signature is on the consent? Do we have both?”

Now everyone is staring at me.

“We do,” I say smoothly. “I have the file here.”

“Edgewater will handle this,” Rudy prophesies, staring right at me.

“Mr. Harkonnen needs to be reminded of why this is important.”

“Life-or-death.”

“I think he knows, Jim. I already pitched them.”

“ ‘Them’?”

“Her,” I admit. “The mother.”

“Aha!”

“But I’m sure she’s told him about Dori—”

“Not the way you tell it, Edgewater.” Rudy beams at me. Rudy is the kind of boss who goes from screaming to beaming in two seconds flat, at a psychopathic velocity.

“He’s got to hear it from you. Face-to-face.”

“Only a stone would refuse to donate after your pitch.”

“Trish, baby.”

“Edgewater.”

Pride heats my eyes. It’s reprehensible, but that’s what happens.

“It might not work,” I say. “If he’s that dead-set against it.”

Jim and Rudy pour it on even thicker, emphasizing that I am indispensable to the organization, that the Corps would be lost without me, et cetera.

“Look at you!” Rudy grins.

“Look at those hands,” Jim says approvingly.

We look at my hands, which are shaking. I feel proud again, which has got to be the wrong response to a set of involuntary tremors. My body knows what I’m about to do, and it’s balking, just like Mr. Harkonnen.

“You are the genuine article, Trish.”

“Okay.”

“You are simply the—”

“I said I’ll go, Rudy.”

Rudy is a bad recruiter. I’ve seen him in action. Potential donors sway on the brink of a yes, prepared to surrender to the gravity of the appeal, but then Rudy gets overzealous, Rudy turns the solicitation into a game of coercion, until at last his lip-smacking anticipation of their gift makes them wary again, and they stiffen into a no.

“That’s how we got Baby A, you know,” Jim whispers to the intern, Sam Yoon, a college junior in a mint-green dress shirt who is earnestly frowning as I exit the trailer; it’s a whisper I know I’m meant to hear.

“Trish pitched Mrs. Harkonnen at a Sleep Drive in a parking lot. Nabbed her right outside the grocery store, schlepping Baby A. Watch her pitch sometime. Shadow her at a Drive. She’s just pure appeal, pure passion for the cause. Her sister was Dori Edgewater.”

“Oh, my,” says the intern, exactly matching Rudy’s tone.

What distinguishes me as a recruiter, I’m told by Rudy and Jim, is that my sister’s death is evergreen for me, a pure shock, the freshest outrage. I don’t have to dig around with the needle; that vein is open on the surface.

“And Trish can’t fake it.”

“Cries every time.”

“Quakes, like.”

“She gets emotional, and people really respond.”

“Describes the sister like she’s standing right in front of her.”

“Sobs like she’s still at the wake—”

Jim frowns, self-startled.

He’s a mid-sentence self-startler, Jim. “Hiccups of insight,” he calls these moments. Whenever my boss is struck dumb by his own epiphanic inner light, I picture a tiny deer jolted out of its grazing with grass in its mouth, paralyzed by the brilliant approach of a Mack truck.

“Wait a sec, Rudy, why the hell do we call it that? A ‘wake’? For a dead gal? That’s terrible. That’s goddamn macabre.”

“I’ve wondered that myself. Seems a pretty grim joke.”

“Oh, there’s definitely a reason,” says the brown-nosing intern. “Some Catholic logic. Or is it a Jews’ thing?”

“People respond!” bellows Rudy. “Edgewater, she’s a little engine. Even our most resistant demographics will give to her. Males, retirees! Greenwich bankers, West Texas construction workers. The Southeast Asian community, where, as you well know, there is a culturally rooted suspicion of Sleep Donation.”

“Of course.” The intern nods.

“But they have no immunity to Edgewater’s story.”

I am hovering near the trailer door, holding my breath. They keep talking, and I listen. I desperately need what they are offering. A faith-transfusion. The why and the how of the organization. Our work and its value.

In high school, the Red Cross blood truck would pull up behind the trailers to collect donations from young, hale students, who got to skip homeroom and eat a raisin cookie and relinquish pints of type O. Dori gave, but I never did—I convinced myself that I was scared of needles. If I’d known then that I’d wind up here, begging strangers for an hour of their sleep, I think I would have given blood at every opportunity.

As a Corps volunteer, my duties are numerous and varied. Weekends, I mobilize the Sleep Van—a moonlit enterprise that dispatches a volunteer team to the homes of good sleepers, who have signed up to donate their rest to insomniacs. A Sleep Van has a spartan interior. The beds we call “catch-cots.” If the Van is equipped for infants and children, it features catch-cribs and trundles. Nurses slip on the anesthetic mask, open the IV of special chemicals, relieving a donor of consciousness; next, they clamp on and adjust the silver helmet, which does chafe a bit; one to two minutes after the loss of consciousness, once the donor enters a state of artificially stimulated sleep, the draw commences. The air in the Sleep Van turns balmy as the tubing heats; a donor’s dream-moist breath gets siphoned into nozzles that connect to our tanks. Healthy sleep is pumped out of the body into long, clear tubes.

Weeknights, I recruit.

We set up for Sleep Drives in neighborhoods all across the county, right at sundown. Nurses swab out helmets in multiple Vans, preparing to take sleep donations for testing. Administrators sit inside lit tents on suburban lawns, holding clipboards, prescreening donors with an eligibility questionnaire to filter out those whose sleep is prone to nightmares, disturbance. We babble the questions to volunteers under the midnight pines.

“When was your last full night of deep, unbroken sleep, ma’am?”

“When did you last dream about barking dogs, outer space, red grass, an ex-wife? Now, please be honest, sir—if your sleep was disturbed by her face, check the box…”

For most of the twenty-first century, insomnia was treatable by prescription medicines; I can still remember going with my father to pick up my sister’s sleeping tablets from the owl-faced pharmacist. Capsules of Silenor—half white and half carnation pink. Dori’s sleep trouble began early, at age eleven. Back then, before the disease progressed, medications reliably put her under. I used to study my sister’s face on the pillow, trying to catch the moment when the Silenor took effect.

Once her adolescent insomnia ratcheted up, for unknown reasons, into the full-blown disorder, Dori slept about four hours a night. But for years, this was enough. The body can be a marvel of resiliency, a cactus when it comes to sleep—capable of surviving on mere drops.

By twenty, however, Dori had developed a resistance to all sleep aids. She also became, quite suddenly, impossible to anesthetize. We learned this when she broke her leg in college and surgeons were forced to operate on a fully conscious Dori.

The anesthesiologist is still writing papers about her.

Her leg healed, but soon Dori lost the ability to sleep even three hours a night. She could not stay down long enough to cycle into REM. She had to drop out of college and move into a white hospital room. What didn’t they try on her? Dexmedetomidine, propofol, sevoflurane, xenon. The tranq gun used to bring down zoo elephants would have stopped her heart, or I’m sure they would have given that a go. Nobody could shade or muzzle her mind.

For the next year and seven months, Dori barely slept. Then the loss became total. The final day of my sister’s life unwound with zero regard for the moon or the sun. She died awake, after twenty days, eleven hours, and fourteen minutes without sleep. Locked flightlessly inside her skull.

As an adolescent, I used to seethe with jealousy, because whereas I got auburn stubs, Dori had these fringed butterfly eyes, jet lashes that curled so outrageously around her Caribbean-green irises that strangers assumed were drugstore falsies. During her endless Last Day, I remember studying those eyelashes pasted to her skin, at an angle of unrelieved attention. She blinked at me, her thinking slow as syrup, and I wished that she would not smile again, not ever again, not like that, because by that point every smile was an accident, a twitch driven by nothing that I recognized as human. My mouthy, gorgeous, stupid-brave sister Dori, Miss “Drive It Like You Stole It” (even when the only “It” available to us was our great-aunt’s haunted house of a wood-panelled Chrysler—who ever heard of a car with termites?), Miss “Three Jobs, Two College Majors, and There’s a Flask in my Purse,” was at this point a nobody. A “vegetable,” as they say—the doctors’ potted plant. And I hated the sight of her facial muscles pumpkin-grinning on the pillow, her pale eyes twitching, and I hated watching her go speechless under the conglomerate weight of so much unrelenting looking and thinking and listening and feeling, her mind worn thin by the sound of every cough and the plinking moisture of every raindrop, these noises exploding like grenades through her naked awareness—her mind crushed, in the end, by an avalanche of waking moments. Once sleep stopped melting time for Dori, she could not dig herself out. She was buried under snowflakes, minutes to hours to months.

The official cause of death was organ failure.

I know it doesn’t sound like much, on paper.

The same month Dori died, the CDC released the first case definition of the new terminal insomnia. Early estimates suggested that several hundred people in the United States were suffering from a total sleep loss; one year after my sister’s funeral, this number had swelled to twenty thousand. “Orexins,” the media taught us to call them. So that, almost immediately, the disorder became a metonym for its chosen victims. George Washington University Hospital opened the first dedicated critical-care insomnia ward—it was full within days. Congress allocated two billion for research.

It was not long thereafter that the mechanics of sleep donation were refined by Gould’s team at the D.C. sleep clinic, and the Slumber Corps began its good work.

In the months following the CDC release, many people dismissed the disorder as an exaggeration of a universal American condition. Who was sleeping enough? Nobody! The “crisis” seemed like more TV hyperbole designed to keep us glued to our screens, watching mattress commercials. America, in the childhood of our understanding of the insomnia crisis, called the first victims liars, hypochondriacs, wackos, crank-addicts, insurance defrauders, anxious plagiarists of “real,” biological disorders.

Now, of course, we know all too well that the insomnia epidemic is real. You need only consult its victims’ pink-spoked eyeballs, their gaunt faces engraved behind moonlit windows. Neuroscientists have since concluded that for a significant portion of the country’s population, the signalling function of the neuropeptide orexin has become impaired. Orexin deficiency has been linked to human narcolepsy, but this dysfunction causes the opposite effect: an untenable hyperarousal. Sleep becomes impossible. People like Dori remain conscious for months and even years, hostages of their brain’s chemicals, trapped in the vigilance state that eventually kills them.

What triggers the dysfunction in some brains as opposed to others? Do these people have some inherited anomaly—an underlying genetic predisposition to wakefulness? A higher-wattage consciousness? Or is the trigger environmental? Nobody knows. It’s the two-billion-dollar question. To date, every known case of the orexin-disruption has occurred in the Americas; nobody knows why this should be so, either. Some speculate that the sickness is connected to the oceans’ tides, magnetism, the poles, the hemispheres, the net of light and shadow on the globe.

Other pundits promise, with weird relish, that we are seeing “the end of sleep as we know it.” TV has become a glum Hall of Prophets: Dr. Daveesha Frank from the Boston Sleep Tank, who speaks like a robot programmed to self-destruct; dour professors wearing sunflower-yellow ties that film well. According to these professional Cassandras, sleep has been chased off the globe by our twenty-four-hour news cycle, our polluted skies and crops and waterways, the bald eyeballs of our glowing devices. We Americans are sitting in an electric chair that we engineered. What becomes of our circadian rhythms, the “old, glad harmonies” that leapt through us like the vascular thrust of water through leaves of grass? Bummer news, Walt: that song’s done. And the endogenous clock, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, hereditary prize of every human, that tiny star cluster of neurons in the hypothalamus which regulates our yawning appetites for hard winter light and spacey blackness, the master clock that syncs us to one another, and to the Earth’s rotation, the sun and the moon? To all the sister kingdoms on the twenty-four-hour circuit? Bacteria, Gila monsters, great sequoias, blue whales, orange groves, bear cubs, mustangs, toadstools, leopards, golden eagles, hyacinths, hippopotami, those tiny wizards, the butterflies, those glue-artists, the arachnids, and all the sequined life on the seafloor, the black urchins that improbably still clock time with us? Bummer news, everyone: the clock stops for humanity. Time itself will soon become an anachronism. Time, as our species has lived it on this planet, will cease to exist. No more dark/light binary. No more active red daytime, blue evening dissolving. No longer is sunshine the coagulant of consciousness, causing us to clot into personalities, to cohere once more on our pillows each morning. These TV scientists predict “a global desertification of dreams.” Soon, they promise, the disruption will afflict all of us. Sleep will go extinct. And eventually, unless we can find some way to synthesize it, so will we.

Generally, I’m mistrustful of these warblers, who do the dread-crescendo. But I’m embarrassed to report that the Slumber Corps has borrowed a page from their playbook, “eschatalogical manipulation.” At Sleep Drives in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, we are test-screening a documentary created by those ratings whores, the worst of the cable news fear lords, “Is Sleep Going Extinct?” I’m afraid to say it’s been very effective. We show it at night, like a popcorn horror flick. Terror, we’ve discovered, is a powerful donation-stimulant.

Meanwhile, sleep clinics in this country are operating at two hundred percent capacity; “Night Worlds” have sprouted all over America. “Night Worlds” have some kinship with the circled wagon trains of the West: the sleepless closing ranks against the night. They form spontaneously, on the margins of cities, but have developed an oddly standard layout: mazes of tents, nocturnally blooming speakeasies. Night World merchants cater to the sleepless ones with black market remedies: “moonlamps” to ease the dreariness of unremitting wakefulness, “cave medicines” derived from ancient myrtles and lichens. Songbirds from Germany and Thailand are sold as “bio-cures”—their binary chirping is said to reprogram dreams into the mind. Some Night Worlds function as quasi-legal campgrounds for homeless and unemployable insomniacs. These places are tolerated by the local authorities because they help the hospitals with overflow. At the ERs, many new insomniacs are being turned away nightly. Sent back to twist in exile on their mattresses, cutting their eyes on the moon’s blade until a donor can be found for them. They await our call. Until they are eligible for a sleep donation, there is nothing to be done for the majority of these people.

At Sleep Drives, we also screen the now-infamous footage of one of the first cases of the terminal insomnia: a young Guyanese woman from a suburb of Houston. After five weeks of near-total sleep loss, her braids have turned totally white. Her frosty hair looks almost comic, like a fright wig; her face is child-smooth. She presented at the Gould clinic in D.C. after fourteen complete days and nights without cycling into sleep. She is wearing a fluffy pink sweater, lilting gibberish. Her eyes bulge so that you cannot see the lids.

Nothing newsworthy, you might correctly assert, about the public performance of illness. Death’s dress rehearsal is ongoing at any bus stop in America, where sick people beg us not for minutes of sleep but for metallic dollar-flakes, wealth dandruff. Long before the sleep crisis, our downtown was a maze of sidewalk asylums. Immobilized people form a human shrubbery behind the courthouse, their lips whispering, their pink and brown palms extended, flat fronds shivering with need. Which is all to say: nothing the least bit strange to us, about public psychosis.

What makes this footage harrowing is its juxtaposition with a photograph of this Guyanese woman taken just five months earlier, before the onset of her orexin-disruption: her hazel eyes were shining and calm, tenanted by a sane woman, tethered to her memories; the eyes were seeing, presumably, only what was visible to everyone else in a room; her face was happy and plump, irrigated by sleep.

The young Guyanese insomniac never slept another minute. Unbeknownst to her doctors at the time of filming, she had already entered her LD, the ultimate interval of wakefulness that precedes death. “LD” for Last Day was a new acronym then, midwifed into the language by the sleep crisis; today, it’s universal med-slang. Kids of six use “LD-er” as a playground insult. Schools instruct children to treat orexins as “ordinary” humans (an instruction that contains its own defeat, doesn’t it?). The video is now nine years old. We’ll keep looping her forever, for donors. Twelve days after they shot her segment, she died. Her true name was then released to the public, like a genie unbottled: Carolina Belle Duncan, age nineteen. Today she is a CDC celebrity: the first recorded death from the orexin-impairment. Dori was the East Coast’s inaugural mortality, the fourteenth recorded death nationally.

A Johns Hopkins neurologist claimed that a mere two hours of recovery sleep would have prevented Carolina’s death from cardiac arrest. Nine to thirteen hours, he said, would have ended her hallucinations and readmitted her to the waking world with stable vital signs. The insomnia’s worst effects could be undone that speedily. One night’s sleep would have saved her life. He compared it to getting an emergency tank of oxygen to a stranded diver.

Nine to thirteen hours—that figure haunted me.

It haunted everybody, apparently.

Without sleep, how long can a person live? The record was set last year when a woman in Devil’s Creek, Nebraska, collapsed after twenty-two days. Five hundred and four hours, without a minute of replacement sleep. Masked like a raccoon, at half her original weight. Her body had rejected all transfusions. She was a white lady, but her face had turned a blotchy black. Yet this is a deceptive figure: twenty-two days. Months before her death, the Devil’s Creek woman had reported a complete cessation of sleep. Many insomniacs who claim they haven’t slept a wink in years are actually, unwittingly, lying to us. Patients swear they are awake. But the EEGs show that regions of the brain are going off-line. Neuronal networks shut down, fire on again, in a sort of cortical round-robin. “Micro-sleeps.” Rolling blackouts. Some areas go dark for whole minutes; still the insomniac claims to be fully awake. In effect, the brain doses itself with eyedroppers of unconsciousness. We think “microsleep” must account for certain orexins’ surprising longevity; some LD-ers, like Dori, can hang on for weeks before death from cardiac arrest, stroke, multiple organ failure.

Since joining the Slumber Corps, I’ve become obsessed with statistics. For bedside reading, I’ll sometimes turn to our brochures. I do a dozy arithmetic under the skirted blue lamp, until these numbers add up to a temporary conviction that I deserve a night’s sleep.

18 Insomniacs Will Dream Tonight, Thanks to Your Gift.

Less than 1 % of donors experience any kind of adverse reaction.

Since its inception, this branch of the Slumber Corps has helped over 3,000 insomniacs.

There are close to 250,000 people currently on our wait-lists nationwide. Priority always goes to urgency of need.

And my favorite:

34 % of Insomniacs Will Regain Their Natural Ability to Sleep After a SINGLE TRANSFUSION.

Our work really does save lives. Nobody can deny that extraordinary fact. During the early trials of the sleep donation procedure, Gould’s team made an astonishing finding. For roughly a third of patients, full recovery from the orexin-disorder is possible after a single ten-hour transfusion.

Doctors cannot yet account for why some patients continue to suffer from the orexin-disruption and require multiple transfusions, whereas others are “reset,” cured. The mode of action is unknown. Some doctors posit that, like electroconvulsive therapy, ECT, treatment, a sleep transfusion can produce profound changes in a recipient’s brain chemistry. Cases do exist where a single session of ECT results in some shockingly happy customers, says Dr. Gary Peebles, the Director of the National Sleep Bank (and where is the humor-transfusion of authentically funny jokes for Dr. Peebles? I wonder). In these cases, the administration of a strong electric current through the suffering patient’s brain reverses all symptoms of catatonia and depression, breaks cycles of mania and relieves many other plaguing shadows and diagnosable sorrows that can be found in the DSM-12. Our researchers, says Dr. Peebles, are working to discover just why the delivery of sleep to a dreamless body can and does produce a full recovery for certain patients—and only a temporary reprieve in others.

To date, every former insomniac who regained the ability to sleep, post-transfusion, remains fully rehabilitated. We have no recorded relapses. No longer are these patients dependent on the sleep of strangers. Post-transfusion, they can achieve REM in their home bedrooms: colors of their own freakish and individual manufacture flood their minds again, plots spiral up, imaginary faces and animals bubble and flume: they dream. It’s heartbreaking, of course, when this does not happen. Some people, we now fear, might require weekly sleep transfusions for the rest of their lives. A blank check to float their nights.

The Slumber Corps pledges to get sleep to every insomniac “for as long as her or his need persists.” That’s our mission statement. Where is all that sleep going to come from, you’re wondering? Us, too. Fiscally, it’s a bankrupting promise. Mathematically, I’m told, it’s a future lie. In five years time, the Slumber Corps’ monumental commitment to these insomniacs may well be an abandoned ideal, like a temple buried in the jungle. Smart people on the Slumber Corps’ own advisory board call our pledge a “pipe dream,” as dangerous as anything we test for at the Elmhurst, New Jersey, sleep-processing plant. Yet we continue to make this promise to our incurables.

On nights when sleep continues to elude me, I consult my “zeros.” My own recruitment stats.

And when even this does not work?

On my worst nights, when my eyes are burning and dawn is two hours away, I’ll give up on fact, give in to fantasy. I’ll shut my eyes and pretend that Dori is receiving one of these transfusions. They were not available, of course, when she needed them—when she lived. Which was not so long ago, not at all. The sun rises, and she’s home. Birdsong is twittering in the air, proof of invisible birds. Dori is back in the world. Her eyes open on her pillow, and they are sea green and absolutely clear. Voided of all nightmares. No earthworm nest disturbs her now, no crumb of boneyard dirt. Her waking is an instantaneous rebirth. Her hair spools onto the pillowcase, happy memories are coiling in her head, and tomorrow is laid out at her feet, a net of yellow light and blue shadow that stretches from bedframe to door.

And then?

Written out like this, you know, it sounds a little Frankenstein.

Pinkly flushed, arisen, my sister startles from the room. Grape bunches of curls spill down the back of her pajamas. She is the age she would be today: twenty-nine.