Sleep Donation

Baby A

I want to learn Baby A’s name.

This desire has been growing in me for days now, spiking with the Donor Y crisis, and tonight I feel crazed with it—actually feverish. Donors under the age of eighteen are assigned a letter at random, an “Alpha-Nym,” by our system. Most parents slip up at some point, blurt out their child’s full name. Not the Harkonnens. “Baby A,” they say smoothly, tucking her true identity into this blanket. Mrs. Harkonnen may well have told me her daughter’s name at our first meeting in the grocery store parking lot, but I didn’t know to pay attention back then.

As crazy as it sounds, I keep feeling that if I knew her true name, I could protect her better. I’ve heard strangers refer to “Baby A” as if she is some inorganic compound, a designer sleep drug. All night, people dial the hotline and beg me to get them wait-listed for the “Baby A cure.” Anyone in America who has a bad dream calls in, which means the phones never stop ringing. I go hoarse shouting down their doubts: No, I say, the helmet is safe, the tubes are sterilized. No, there is zero chance that you will contaminate the nation’s sleep supply, as he did. I promise my recruits that the Donor Y crisis has precipitated important policy changes, exhaustive safety rubrics for the Sleep Vans, expensive rounds of testing for nightmare-prions. All this public paranoia, I say, obscures the statistics: sleep donation has never been safer.

I don’t feel great about this, myself.

“How do we really know it’s safe for these people to donate?” I ask Jim and Rudy.

“We don’t know.”

“We can’t know.”

“That kind of epistemic murk is unavoidable, Edgewater.”

“Error, of course, is inevitable in some proportion of the cases.”

“We should describe the Donor Y tragedy as a freakish exception—which it is.”

“But it’s unrealistic to expect perfection from any human institution, Trish.”

“And from any human, period.”

“You know this.”

Boy, do I.

“We need to accept the world as it is, honey, not as we wish it to be,” Jim says, with a self-regarding puff on the “wish” and the “be.” Jim, I’m told, was a theater major at his Midwestern college. It means he underscores statements he actually does believe with some of the gayer accents.

But the need is quantifiable, uncontestable, and growing. People are drowning in light, fully awake. Children are propped on pillows, foaming soft sounds, singing a terrible music without words. We show videos of them at Drives, which get incredible sleep-yields. Moms who see it are ready to strip down in the nearest Sleep Van and give us five years of sleep on the spot. Some of the youngest orexins became insomniacs at age two; they have no memories of sleeping. Cued by some off-screen producer, these obliging, dying toddlers tell the large blank eye of the camera that they do not remember dreaming one night in their lives. Sleep: What is that?

These children live in a state of conscious terror, their school days exchanged for a noonlit netherworld. The Sleep Banks in Virginia, Florida, and Oregon are dried out. So I keep calling.

At a little after midnight, my voice gives out. The office trailer is equipped with a Murphy bed, what I think of as the whipped cream of beds, sprouting whitely from the wall. I pull it down.

“Working late?”

It’s just me and Jeremy in here now. Everyone else left hours ago.

Jeremy is our vacuously optimistic male secretary, who wears his hair in a carroty Afro and has dozens of chunky rings and ear cuffs and basically looks like a warlock in denim. He is a sweetheart. He does this job for no pay. He looks our recruits in their eyes when he thanks them, and piles wool blankets near the feet of the unconscious donors. When the nurses start a draw, he flinches for them. He donates sleep himself. Since the crisis began, Jeremy’s given half a year of his life: 4,392 hours—he grins proudly—which is far in excess of the legal limits; Rudy or Jim must be pulling strings for him to give so much, on a regular basis. Somebody needs to cut him off now. If you give beyond your sleep recharge threshold, push beyond the body’s natural limits, you’ll suffer the same consequences of sleep loss that afflict our insomniacs: cognitive impairment, physiological exhaustion, collapse. Jeremy stumbles around the trailer like a zombie some mornings, zoinked from a nine-hour draw.

I realize that he is hovering in front of the door, glancing back at me with a look that is totally unlike Jeremy, full of cagey apprehensiveness.

“You’re sleeping here?”

“I am.”

“Want a tuck-in?”

I do.

“Just let me brush my teeth,” I mumble.

He hits the lights.

It’s been years since I’ve done anything resembling ordinary socializing. For most of my colleagues at the Corps, this is so. We joke that the insomnia crisis has ruined our sex lives—we don’t have time to sleep with anyone recreationally, we’re too busy begging for sleep on the phone.

I listen under the sheets as Jeremy unzips his jeans near the door, wriggles out of them. Tiny woodsprite eyes litter the darkness, red and green—just the office electronics. No true darkness left in the modern world, some Luddites complain, fingering light pollution as the root of the new insomnia. Jeremy, a wiry shadow, lowers his full weight onto the Murphy, which whinnies on its springs; this Murphy bed turns out to be an expert ventriloquist of naked bodies. He gives me a nip on my bare neck. Then a consulting kiss, salty and quick. Jeremy’s hands, which are so warm, move under my clothing with a confidence that suggests he has been in touch with some of our colleagues about my amenability.

One thing the Corps has taught me is that my needs are quite common. I have become much more forthright about disclosing them. Shameless, I guess you could say, although I still have a vestige of girlhood modesty, and would prefer the word “honest.” And I am perfectly willing to make a gift-in-kind to my peers, when their complementary need arises. After-hours Jeremy turns out to be a very different quantity than the quiet male secretary who brings baby carrots for lunch and sneezes in sunlight. He, too, is suddenly quite candid about what his body requires from my body. This is our training. Most of our time is spent asking strangers for donations.

There are, of course, no consent forms to sign for this kind of transfusion. No nurses to adjust the fit or monitor its progress.

“Perhaps there is some equivocation on the part of the lady?” Jeremy says at one point, with a frightfully sad tact.

“No, no, I—this is as wet as things ever really get, honey,” I whisper. “Under these conditions…”

I slide my hips forward on the mattress. After that, we manage beautifully, me and this hungry silhouette who is my friend Jeremy.

“Sorry,” he sighs afterwards, licking our sweat from my neck. “That was too quick.”

I shake my head—it wasn’t. Any longer would have been, for me, an almost unbearable exposure to the self-eradicating bliss of servicing and being serviced, all at once. It’s a rare transfer wherein both bodies get to be donor and recipient and recipient and donor. We are stroking each other’s knuckles now, side by side on the Murphy.

Jeremy sits up and swings his legs over the bed’s edge. He doubles over into a faceless hill, feeling around the floor for the shed skins of his socks, his T-shirt.

“Stay?” I blurt out.

This in stark violation of the contract.

“Oh, God, Trish, I—”

“No, sorry, I’m not thinking clearly, it’s gotten so late. Go—” I hand him his missing sock, give a little push. “You need a good night’s sleep.”

Jeremy cocks his head at me for a confusing moment; then he squeezes my hand and stands, hobbles towards the trailer exit.

“Thank you,” we say at the same time, and my whole body heats up.

“Get some rest, girl.”

After I hear his car drive off, I turn the lights back on.

You know, I’m afraid that working for the Corps may be irreversibly perverting the way I evaluate human exchanges. Now who is the donor, the donee? I’ll wonder, watching a high school couple kiss at the mall. Are they a match? Will their transfusion be a success? What songs are the corporations piping into her body? I’ll ask myself on the city bus, watching the female driver’s long neck tense and relax as she receives rhythm transfusions via her fuchsia earbuds.

The Storches’ “office” within the trailer is a locked shed on wheels annexed to the main vehicle. It’s a wonder that the two inventors of ergonomic johns can function in such a comfortless space.

Quite easily, with the key I copied two years ago, I enter Jim and Rudy’s inner sanctum. It smells like Pine-Sol and cinnamon chewing gum.

On my knees, I go sleuthing for her records.

“Harkonnen, Baby A—”

The Storches keep hard copies of important documents in an old-school filing cabinet, school-locker gray, the ichthyosaur of the modern storage world. (“Everything is, of course, also in the cloud,” I’ve overheard Rudy reassuring visitors, which is a very disorienting and mystical statement, out of context.)

Hunting her name, I come across a stack of letters addressed to Jim. On impulse I read one. I read the whole batch. They are more frightening to me than the Donor Y nightmare. I read through them twice, my eyes blurring and uncrossing; I feel a funny pang, imagining Jeremy home in his bed. It’s three a.m. Who am I supposed to call now? I lift the phone to dial the Harkonnens, hang it back on the receiver. I stare at Dori’s photographs on the Slumber Corps pamphlets, a stack of hundreds, and start to cry.