Sleep Donation

The Poppy Fields

The Poppy Fields have been widely reported on: a special strain of poppy which releases an “aromatic hypnotic,” sometimes called an “olfactory blanket.” Poppies are trendy, if that word can be applied to foredoomed miracle cures. All over the country, Night World gardeners are pruning the flame-bright poppies beneath the moon. The gardeners’ headlamps reveal a wilderness of faces, insomniacs whose bloodshot eyes are even redder than the poppies. They lie on bedrolls and grain sacks in parallel rows, breathing in the flowers.

We reach the edge of the boardwalk, step off into grass.

In the distance, the woods wall us from the city. Pines span the horizon, nearly black in color at this hour, with the pointy, standard look of fence-posts. A wooden sign with an arrow reads: FIFTY YARDS TO THE POPPY FIELDS.

Behind us, the fairgrounds waver like some hallucinatory reef: the calm anemone billowing of the Night World tents, the barkers’ poles like red coral, the electric green spokes of the Dream Wheel. At this distance, even the screams of the insomniacs receiving Oblivion Prods contribute to this illusion, their faraway cries transformed by repetition into an implacable background, like waves crashing on rocks.

And then we are mid-calf in acres of flowers. “The Placebo Fields,” we joke in the Mobi-Van—but, my God, it is hard to hold on to your cynicism when you actually see them. Under the moon, the poppies look as bright as jewels on the sea floor. We wade through hundreds of them, the scarlet buds drumming against our shins, and I find it’s almost frightening to bend the stems back, to graze the petals with my fingers. This is no mirage. But it’s a shock to find this sea at our city’s edge, and to find myself navigating it with Mr. Harkonnen. Who knows if the poppies’ fragrance is a real insomnia cure? I realize that I don’t smell a thing. But my thoughts shrink to a whisper, and soon I start to feel like I’m sleeping already.

Pain tickles my heel.

“I think I stepped on something…”

“I’d keep walking,” said Mr. Harkonnen, swallowing, his voice a thick buzz in my ears. “If I were you.”

“Will you look for me, will you check—”

“It’s okay, Trish.”

And this is a real gift: the sound of my name. Connected to that stem, memories spread their wings, and I recollect who I’ve been, before the purple sleep cocktail, before the Night World parking lot and before my knock on the door which turned Mr. Harkonnen’s daughter into Baby A, before the sleep crisis, and even before Dori’s last day.

Very gratefully, I keep pace with him.

Remember this, I instruct myself.

Mr. Harkonnen steers me towards a small shack in the center of the field. It looks like a boat at anchor in this strange Atlantic. Night World staffers mill around it, grabbing blankets, chatting with groups of insomniacs.

“Do you know about the Legend of the Poppies?” a young attendant asks us with mechanical charm, tugging her black ponytail around her collarbone. She is the Valet, I realize, taking cash for the bedrolls and the blue inhalers, directing bodies to their pallets among the red flowers.

“I do,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “You told me. But tell her.”

With the mechanical cheer of any waitress, she beams at us each in turn.

“According to Greek legend, the poppy flower was the gift of Hypnos, the god of sleep, to help Demeter to dream again. Demeter was exhausted by the search for her lost daughter, whom Hades had taken to be his bride in the underworld. Now, Demeter was so tired that she could no longer make the harvest grow. But his poppies cast a spell on her. She slept, and when she woke, the corn was growing green and tall again.”

Mr. Harkonnen fishes for his wallet, tips her a buck.

“Yup. Thanks. That’s a rough night for Mom. The devil’s got your daughter.”

This female attendant is a tall Asian girl who is the same age as our Slumber Corps interns. She wears a long white coat and a white dress, for “atmosphere maintenance and heightened visibility,” she says. Behind her, the wind is picking up. It plows the fields. Each gust obliges the worst kind of devotion from the mutely chattering blossoms, grinding them against the soil, knocking their red heads around. The wind could do this to us, too, at any instant, it seems to want us to know, and the thousand poppies nod their agreement.

Suddenly I am overcome by drowsiness.

Mr. Harkonnen, beside me, lets out a shuddering yawn.

Women wander the poppy fields, in white nightgowns, carrying vessels of water, or some other transparent liquid. In calm, emotionless voices, they begin to halt the unsteady pilgrims and to ask them questions:

“Would you like a sip of the supplemental poppy tea, dear?”

“Would you like sheets and a pillow? We can sleep you on plot seven, or for forty-five dollars we can upgrade you to plot twelve, directly under the moon…”

It’s funny: Who in their lifetime, pre — Insomnia Crisis, could ever have imagined shelling out that kind of money to unroll a rubber mat in dirt? But just hearing the soothing voices as they recite the Poppy Fields’ menu of pricey sorceries is enough to implant these desires in me. Hungers appear in my mind, like coins flipped into a wishing pool.

America’s great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively, to a body like mine, and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end. Forty-five dollars for the moon-plot? Put it on the card. What a steal.

“No,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “You know what? No, thanks, miss.”

He grabs my arm and then we’re hurrying away. Red poppies lisp after us; if their magic works, we must be resistant to it. Neither of us keel over into slumber. We have to walk through these sections of the Poppy Fields with great care, because the shapes humping the grass are people.

Maybe ten minutes beyond the Poppy Fields, when the “enchanted” flowers have ebbed back into scraggly, depopulated weeds, Mr. Harkonnen stops to rub his eyes on his sleeve. “Too many people there tonight.” His shoulders punch up at the sky, some martial shrug. “No privacy. Even if we paid the big money, I figured there would be some watcher there, lying a row away from us.”

But that is not our problem any longer. Currently, we are moving parallel to the woods. There are a million visible stars, miles of dark. We seem to be the only two people.

Why did you bring me here? I do not ask him.

Abby—Baby A—she’s a hero, I do not reassure him.

Instead I say:

“Mr. Harkonnen—Felix—do you think the elective insomniacs have a choice?”

He grunts, picking his way across the unlit grass.

“Yes. Some of them go to the hospital for help, and some come here to die.”

“Do you think I gave you a choice?”

“Who do you think you are, girl? We chose. We’re choosing. Only you assholes sure rigged the game up good. Now, if you hadn’t shown up at our door in the first place… but let’s walk.”

We wander off into the shadows far beyond the “All Sore-Eyes Welcome!” sign, through uncut grass that brushes at my bare ankles; his hand drops to the small of my back, I take his arm, we are stumbling. All of this proceeds with a sultry inevitability, with a logic that mimics the odd chordal progressions of dreams, and for the first time in a long while I feel utterly relaxed. He frog-marches me far beyond the fairgrounds until I let him see that I’m not going to stumble; then he loosens his grip. Still he doesn’t let go of my arm. Wherever we are now, we’ve missed the dividing line that separates the fairgrounds’ unkempt margins from the nature preserve. Together we ford rivers of cattails, until the fever pitch of the Night World is entirely erased by distance, silence. The only sound is the occasional scream of some nocturnal hawk, which rips through the deep quiet of the sky like a skunk stripe drawn through black fur. We have to clamber over several enormous logs, Mr. Harkonnen grunting and slipping, offering me a hand. In the dark, these felled trees look as frighteningly misplaced as the bodies “sleeping” in the Poppy Fields. They make a lateral map of the woods as it must have been, before some storm. At one point, I look up and I see a spreading V pushing over the pines, many dozens of wings pulsing far above our heads; only it must be a very odd flock, because no shape resembles any other. Their wingspans, too, are irregular, some short and some long. Gaping up, I watch them multiply—what sort of flock is this, for what purpose are so many different birds gathering? It’s too dark to even guess at their names. Silvery light seems to pour from their wings, although I know this watershed must be an illusion caused by the mediating stars. Starlight liquefies and streams as the black shapes cross the Pleiades. They arrow over the trees so swiftly that before I can point out their bladed and scissoring bodies to Mr. Harkonnen, they are gone.

At last, when I am swaying on my feet, he stops.

“Here.”

“Here’s good. Sure.”

“Now, lay down.”

Overhead, two hawks carousel around. It’s years since I’ve been this close to the green perfume of any woods.

“Stay put. No—Jesus, knock that off.” He rolls his eyes. “Are you stupid? That’s not why I brought you here.”

I misunderstood. I assumed he needed a transfusion of something straightforward, something on the level of what I did with Jeremy. I rebutton my blouse.

Mr. Harkonnen lies down in the grass beside me, grunting. Then he maneuvers my head onto his chest, makes a vise of his bicep. I cry out from surprise, just once, and a tawny blur streaks out of the scrub and runs past my cheek in the dirt. It’s the fastest mouse in the world, I think, and then realize that my eyes are streaming.

“Here—” he repeats, trying to crook an arm under my shoulder. My hair gets yanked loose from its ponytail and spills onto his T-shirt. He shifts us around until my earlobe is pressed against the bony plate of his clavicle, where I can hear his heart drumming.

“Sleep!” he commands.

“Okay. Okay.” I take a shuddery breath. “Why?”

“Because I said so,” he says, viscous and triumphant. From his slur, I can hear how the medicines are dragging him under, too.

“You sleep for as long as I say, got it?”

“I will, Mr. Harkonnen.”

This consent is easy to offer. Nothing troubles me at all now.

“Good.” He faces me on the grass, eye to eye under the pillow-white moon. “Night.”

The following dawn with Baby A’s father is one of the strangest of my life. How a person who so evidently hated me for months can now relate to me with such natural solicitousness is as bewildering as any flower opening in the desert. Whatever waters fed the blossoming of this affection are invisible to me. It’s got to be some misdirection of the profoundest kind. Misplaced tenderness for Baby A, maybe, or for his wife, Justine. I wake up to a gray-flying sky, the sun not yet risen, and Mr. Harkonnen offering me a sip of water from his canteen. He takes the corner of his shirt, moist with dew, and rubs the dirt from my face.

I receive this kindness as best I can.

It’s strange to see Mr. Harkonnen in daylight. We are our sober selves again, thank God. Dori, her memory, is caged as pressure in my ribs. Whatever came unravelled last night feels neatly spooled this morning. I exhale, feeling safer and safer as the sun inches up.

“How did you sleep?” he whispers.

“I slept beautifully. Thank you. And you?”

“I slept good,” he grunts, suddenly bashful. “That lime stuff was killer, whatever we were drinking. I feel well rested.”

“Did you dream?”

“If I did, I don’t remember.”

“Me, neither.”

Mr. Harkonnen nods, as if this is the bridge he’s been waiting for.

He tells me he has a proposition for me, regarding dreams.

“I want you to make me a promise,” he says. “Let’s draw up a contract, right here. If you are going to continue to draw sleep from my daughter, I want you to swear that you’ll give exactly that amount, every time. A matching donation. For as long as she gives, you give, too. You don’t rest again until I say you can.”

The sun shivers free of the distant pines.

“Of course,” I hear myself say.

We shake on this.

He nods twice, flushed and seemingly satisfied. With my free hand I peel a blade of grass from his stubbled chin. I find that I’m exhilarated by our contract’s terms.

We stand up in the dirt. We laugh a little, to drain a pus of awkwardness. I feel the strangest happiness. Tight muscles spasm everywhere in my arms, and an alkaline taste I can’t name coats my throat. Mr. Harkonnen swallows. He has not released my palm.

Then I wish for whatever is flowing between us to remain unnamed, formless, unmeted into story or ever “experienced” in the past tense, and so concluded; I don’t want to say it, I don’t even want to try to understand it, and so begin to mistake it for something else, and something else after that, paling shadows of this original feeling, something inaudibly delicate that would not survive the passage into speech.

Shadows windmill over Felix’s face. Like he’s been caught out, all of a sudden, in some extra-dimensional autumn. Where are the falling leaves coming from? Clouds go racing over the field. Down below, our hands are still clasped. I’m relieved, relieved. I don’t feel like a slave to the contract. I don’t feel that Mr. Harkonnen tricked or frightened me into it. Each time I stare down at our handshake, I feel the same vertigo, a dislocation that is much stranger than mere anticipation, as though I’m being catapulted forward in time, rocketed to my death, perhaps, or to some absolute horizon, where I get a glimpse of my own life massing into form, and a thrilling feel for all that will happen to me now, all that I cannot know, haven’t yet done, haven’t spoken, haven’t thought, will or won’t. Just entering the contract does this. No matter what happens next, I’ll have one constant now, won’t I? Thanks to Felix, my dreams will be twinned to the dreams of his baby. The simple algebra of our arrangement feels like a ladder that he is holding out to me.

“I will not let you down,” I tell Mr. Harkonnen. “I won’t quit.”

He gives me a tight smile, a look I recognize from my own mirror as the winched contentment of a recruiter; the pitch is finished, the contract inked and under way.

“All right. Better get us home.”

Overhead, the sun is fully risen. A flock goes rowing over the pines, and this species I do recognize: they are Pennsylvania starlings. A hundred common gray-black birds, frequent visitors to our childhood backyard. They go shirring through the goggled blues of the May sky, the azure pools of air between the white clouds, moving east, each bird uniformly lit by the round sun. We walk under them, retracing our steps. Eventually Mr. Harkonnen drops my hand, but the world we return through feels solid and good.

Mr. Harkonnen drops me off a block from the Mobi-Office; I’m afraid my colleagues will recognize his brown and turquoise sedan and get the wrong impression. We did spend the night together, but that true statement is so misleading that I think it’s worse than a lie. It’s 7:02 a.m. But I see that as early as I am, I’m still not the first staffer to punch in.