Sleep Donation

Dori

Ever since the dawn with Mr. Harkonnen, I have been unable to pitch in the same way. I have no idea why this should be so. I only know that at Drives, I speak in my own voice about the Slumber Corps, and I don’t retell the story of Dori’s death. I don’t relive her ending, or go into the convulsions. When my voice shakes, it’s only because I’m nervous—I’ve got no practice at this sort of storytelling. I do talk about my sister, who she was before the crisis, although I find this makes me shy. Unfettered from her death, Dori’s ghost takes on new shapes, and I find myself remembering more and more about her. In this new pitch, I describe her as a teenager, and even earlier. I mention the many insomniacs my sister’s age or younger who have been cured by transfusions, and who can dream on their own once more thanks to the Slumber Corps. Often, I lead with Baby A. Imagine, I tell them, how she’ll feel when she grows up, and learns how many lives she’s saved.

If potential donors tell me they cannot afford to spare their sleep, I never press. The results of the new approach? By every metric we’ve got—donors recruited, sleep donated, insomniacs’ lives saved—my pitch is a disaster. There are Drives where I only recruit five donors. There was one Drive, on a rainy Thursday night outside the shopping mall, where I recruited none. My “zeros” were actually zero, which has never happened to me before. I’ve fallen so far that I’m not even ranked, nationally, as a recruiter. In our Solar Zone, I’m number three of six. But you know what? Some people do give. I’ll leave a Sleep Drive with a third fewer recruits than I was expecting for a crowd that size, but Dori, inside the people with whom I leave her story, is an ellipsis, alive. She’s not a nightmare I’ve implanted within them, a means to an end—of that much, I feel almost certain.

If I stop telling Dori's story, I wonder, where will she go?

Jim’s out-and-out despondent. He paces our trailer with watering eyes. It’s that Jim-despair that feels at once completely false, like the maudlin dirges of horn instruments on a Mexican soap, and genuine, out of his control. Rudy Storch is furious with me, salty and affronted; worse yet, I’ll sometimes catch him casting me looks of feral betrayal, as if somehow I’m the toothy trap that sprang shut on his paw.

“Edgewater, goddamnit. Have you seen your zeros? How you sleep at night, I do not know. This experiment is up, it has got to stop.”

He grits his teeth; he doesn’t touch me now, or scream at me. He won’t joke.

“Please. Please. I understand that you’re more comfortable. But what you’re doing is irresponsible. It’s… it’s…” he sputters, his eyes cloudy with exhaustion. “It’s…”

He never finishes, and it doesn’t matter. Dori’s quieted, she’s become uncooperative. I can’t go back to the old style of pitching now.