Sleep Donation

Jim

The following morning, Jim calls me into his office. How much can you age in one day? Wrinkles I’ve never seen before are now tractor-gouged across his forehead. We stare across his desk, his gray eyes regarding mine with a strange calm: it’s a gaze that feels prehistoric, entirely shorn of seven years of respect and affection. I stare back. For just a moment, I get this aerial sense of what might happen next, like the view from the top of the roller coaster. This is power, I realize. Jim’s career is in my hands.

Then Jim surprises me by speaking first.

“So. Who are you planning to tell?”

All night, I rehearsed for this confrontation; I’d assumed that, as Jim’s accuser, I would lead.

“Who told you that I know?”

“Cameras, Trish. You don’t think we have cameras in here?”

Cameras? Blood rushes to my face.

“You saw what we—what me and Jeremy…”

Horrifyingly, Jim grins.

At dawn I stripped the Murphy bed and folded it back into the wall; the sticky sheets are bunched in a bag at my feet, to be smuggled out of the trailer after sunset. I wonder how many of the dozens of donations I’ve taken and offered on the Murphy bed have been witnessed by Jim, or Rudy.

“Jim, I’m sorry,” I hear myself apologizing. “I shouldn’t have gone through your things—”

“We trusted you.”

“I only wanted to know Baby A’s name—”

“My God, Trish. I would have told you that.” Jim, who is never angry, is fury-mottled, his entire neck splotched crimson. “Now look what you’ve done—you’ve threatened our entire organization.”

Her name is Abigail. Abby Harkonnen. I’m not the only one who knows this. There are merchants in Japan who have been purchasing units of her sleep from Jim, for a dollar sum that left me reeling. The first correspondence with the Japanese sleep merchants occurs a mere two weeks after Baby A’s inaugural donation; most of the catch from her third and fourth draws got sold to a Tokyo lab. It’s unclear from the letters who else might have been involved, or how Jim managed to smuggle her sleep out of the country. I have no idea what, if anything, Rudy might know; these letters were signed by Jim. According to one contract I found, assuming I read the thing right, Jim made in excess of two million dollars for the sale of Baby A’s sleep.

How dare you—I know this is a moral anachronism. A phrase sad and silly, excerpted from an era of bygone incredulity, from a black-and-white movie; and yet for hours last night, alone on the Murphy bed, these were the only three words I could think.

“So now we have a real problem, Trish.”

“Wait a sec—I’m the one in trouble? Jim.” My voice comes out in a child’s whisper. “Why did you do this?"

“Their team approached me. They’ll clone her sleep before we manage it, I guarantee it. They are working to make an artificial injectable right this second.”

“All that money—”

“Went right back into our organization. Nothing traceable to us, or to the Harkonnen baby. Anonymous donations,” he says smoothly, and I don’t know whether to believe him.

“But the Harkonnens,” I try again. Jim? Where have you gone? What I want, impossibly, is to blow the whistle on Jim to Jim; to appeal to my “real” boss, who would surely be appalled to learn what this doppelgänger monster who has stolen Jim Storch’s face and name has done.

“We’re not hurting anybody, baby.” Now he’s speaking in the soothing voice I love, the voice of yesterday-Jim, as if responding to my mental summons. Somehow this familiar tone makes me feel much worse. Queasily, I stare at my hands splayed on Jim’s desk.

“Only a portion of her donations has gone overseas. The rest, as you know better than anybody, we’ve distributed in this country.”

I’m grinding down so hard my jaw is pulsing. An artificial injectable. How much money does he stand to gain, I wonder, if the Japanese team succeeds?

He tries a different tack.

“Trish, weren’t you and Dori raised religious? Do you know the parable of the loaves and the fishes? The mustard seed, the parable of the talents?”

When he sees my blank face, he shrugs.

“Forget it. We grew up Irish-Catholic. Look: I took the Harkonnen gift, and I multiplied it. Can you imagine what it will make possible if they synthesize her sleep? In the grand scheme, the benefits that accrue to every living person will be extraordinary.”

My head has been shaking no, I realize, possibly since this conversation began.

“But I’ve been telling her parents that her draws go straight to the National Sleep Bank. That we need every drop of her sleep to save lives—”

“So you know,” he snaps, as if he’s lost his patience with a delinquent student. “Who do you plan to tell?”

“Jim. We have to—”

Now it’s my turn to pause, self-startled. From the lump in my throat, I discover that I am unready to separate from our “we,” not yet, or to evict Jim from that pronoun. For seven years, we’ve been a team. And Jim loves my sister, her, the missing person, not just what she does for our organization, I feel very certain of that.

“Did you keep some of the money?” I say abruptly.

“Listen, Trish, we cannot control for every variable. Human greediness… it’s not even necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion.”

Jim seems to round some bend in his own mind; without warning, like the sun breaking through clouds, he is smiling almost wistfully down his long nose at me.

“Maybe it’s just what we mean when we say ‘a necessary evil.’ Look at the population we serve. Any one of the insomniacs, at any time, could choose death. Some do, as you know. The ones who get their name on our wait-lists want to sleep because they want to live. They are greedy, greedy, greedy for relief, more life.”

Jim is a better recruiter than Rudy. I watch his gray eyes go mock-ingenuous behind his glasses. He quits trying to bully me.

“It’s your choice, of course.” He steeples his long fingers, his smile now one of rueful contemplation. I can no longer tell what is genuine, what is performance; perhaps Jim shares my confusion.

“Jim—”

“I’m just urging you to think about the consequences of your actions. My life will be over, of course—it will kill me, frankly, the scandal. But let’s not talk about my life; that’s quite irrelevant to the big picture. Instead, Trish, I’d suggest you think about the suffering people on our wait-lists. The media will be all over us. Look at the disruption from Donor Y, the damage he’s caused!”

I nod.

“The fines will be astronomical. Our public image will never fully recover. Without the goodwill of the public, what do we run on? Trish, I know that you are smart enough to understand why it was necessary to give these foreign researchers a crack at achieving synthesis. But the media is going to crucify me, they don’t give a damn who they hurt, and listen, there will be a run on the sleep banks like something out of the Great Depression. People will die, no doubt. Laws might be overturned—infant donations could become a thing of the past. We will certainly never draw from Baby A again if you turn me in.”

“What if you just… confess, Jim. Apologize, resign.”

Jim shakes his head at me so slowly, with a maddening air, affectionate and severe, like a father denying his daughter a poisoned apple.

“I know that would make things more comfortable for you.”

“Please, Jim,” I say, hating and hating the meekness of my voice. This is not how I imagined our confrontation, not at all. “Please, will you turn yourself in? I don’t want to be the one.”

He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, puts them on again.

“So you’ve convinced yourself, then. You’ve already decided. You think it’s the right thing to do, regardless of the cost to others.”

“I didn’t say that…”

I can feel my uncertainty returning, like a thickening blue mist that rolls in between Jim’s face and my own. Helplessly, I watch this happen. Then my decision softens back into a speculation: What will happen to the Corps, and to all the people on our wait-lists, if I fail to keep Jim’s confidence? He’s right, isn’t he? We are still in crisis mode from Donor Y; easily, I can imagine a nationwide boycott of the sleep banks if the news about an infant’s “stolen sleep” breaks. I can imagine much worse.

And nobody else is doing this work.

“No, you’re bound and determined to sink us, are you? Tie up the Corps in another bullshit scandal.”

“Jim—”

“So.” He leans back in his chair. “When are you going to tell them?”

“Who?”

“The Harkonnens.”