Sleep Donation

Baby A

Baby, baby. We’re in a pickle now, aren’t we, baby?

“Hush, hush,” I murmur, bouncing her around the Van.

It feels as if we’re orbiting the same black hole. Her sleep will not stop flooding through her, shadowing her blood. My sister’s ghost regenerates as one lean memory—the final hospital scene keeps doubling back on itself, repeating. So far, I’ve been diligent about making the matching donations. Many nights now, Baby A and I are going under sedation in tandem. Yesterday evening, for example, Nurse Carmen drew five hours from Abby in the Sleep Van, and I gave five hours at the Bank.

Mrs. Harkonnen now refuses to let anybody but me touch Abigail before the procedure begins. Thank God, there’s not much to the prep—just rocking her to sleep, the basic bob-and-shush, the lullaby-bounce-step, that Dori and I perfected when we babysat in middle school. The nurses sterilize the helmet, spin-dry the colorless lozenge of the face mask. We hook the little bellows of her lungs to the larger bellows of our need.

They really do trust me now, Mr. and Mrs. Harkonnen. Somehow I passed their independent screenings. They think I am sincere.

Another influx of misplaced faith that I must queasily endure, and assimilate into my body, for the greater good, says Rudy, who does pay attention, and who has noticed how my cheeks flame around Jim.

In a fairy tale, I would take Mrs. Harkonnen aside, suggest a scheme to deliver her daughter from our gloved hands, some prudent metamorphosis: We’ll smuggle her out as a bear cub, a red rose, an eagle. We’ll find some magical pair of shears to free your girl, I’d promise her. We’ll cut you loose from the messy rest of us.

Instead, I show them our latest promotional video. It’s genuinely uplifting—testimonials from survivors who received their daughter’s sleep transfusion. You can tell from the flat surf of each voice that a wave within them has crested and broken, and they are now safe on some far shore:

“The nightmare is over.”

“The nightmare is over.”

“It was a miracle: I slept through the night, and I woke up.”

We three watch it together in the Harkonnens’ living room, violin music swelling out of the speakers. Inside the Sleep Van, the video’s hero, Baby A, snores lightly under the leaf-sized green mask to replenish the black tanks of sleep.

Nurse Carmen knocks once and pops her head in: “She’s done! Did a great job.”

We switch the TV off.

Baby A goes back to her mom. Now she’s awake and hungrily nursing, her white-socked feet doodling on air. One day soon she’ll wake up to what we’ve done, and what we’ve taken from her.

“See you next Wednesday night.”

“See you then,” the two adult Harkonnens echo.

“We will never overdraw your daughter,” I hear myself promise them, responding to some fleeting shadow that crosses both faces.

I make this promise at a moment when people are plunging their straws into any available centimeter of shale and water, every crude oil and uranium and mineral well on earth, with an indiscriminate and borderless appetite. Fresh air, the sight of trees—these are birthrights and pleasures that we seem bent on extinguishing. Some animals we’ve turned out to be. We have never in our species’ history respected Nature’s limits, the doomsday speculators announce, smacking their lips, until it seems like some compensatory sucrose must flood into their mouths every time they say the words “mass death.” According to their estimates, our species will be extinct in another generation, having exhausted every store of water and fuel on the planet. But this baby is small enough, and our need is great enough, that the nurses can be exquisitely precise, never withdrawing from her fleshy aquifer more than the recharge rate. We take, at most, six hours from her. We ration our greed.

The Sleep Van, that white pod, readies itself to pull away from the mothership of the Harkonnen residence.

“How far away are we from… from synthesis?” Mrs. Harkonnen wants to know.

“Oh, goodness. That’s the dream, isn’t it?”

Now we three give each other these faith-transfusions.

Later, alone in the trailer, I continue to make outreach calls to donors with the narcotized zeal of all the other night-shifted Corps recruiters: “Thanks to your generous support, eighteen insomniacs will sleep through the night, and open their eyes at dawn. Thirty-three percent of our patients make a full recovery. .”

You can’t argue with those numbers, can you? I plan to one day ask Abigail.

Granted, we never gave you a choice, but wouldn’t you have agreed to transfer those dreams to us, knowing now what you could not know then? This sort of subjunctive calculus, nobody teaches in school. Artificial sleep, for example, “sleep for all”—who can say if we will achieve it? I keep roto-dialing strangers, begging for their surplus unconsciousness. Next Wednesday night, Baby A and I are both scheduled to donate. Somewhere, let’s hope, on the opposite side of the world or galaxy, there is a research team working out a more reliable source.