Sleep Donation

The Whistle — Blower’s Hotline

The first three times I call, I hang up.

The fourth time I call, I get an automated female voice, thanking me for contacting the Slumber Corps Whistle-Blower’s Program. This unshockable voice instructs me to leave the most detailed message possible about the institutional corruption I have witnessed, or in which I have participated, to include fraud, waste, abuse, policy violations, discrimination, illegal conduct, unethical conduct, unsafe conduct or any other misconduct by the Slumber Corps organization, its employees or its volunteers.

I drop the phone as if scalded.

To honor my contract with Mr. Harkonnen, I take the bus to make my donation at our regional Sleep Donation Station. This month I am certain that I will be rejected at the screening—I have been dreaming of Baby A nonstop, of the flutter-suck of her tiny mouth. In one nightmare, she breast-fed from my sister, who had a saint’s face in death, pale and sad and lit strangely from below, one green eye eaten away.

What uglier proof of its deep pollution could my mind present me with?

I am afraid of these dreams, which I cannot stop or change.

I am afraid that even my desire to do good will spin out of my control, and become evil.

Orexins have been reported in Uganda, Taiwan, England. Infected sleep was transfused in Chile. In the Mobi-Office, Jim is calling me “baby” again, I think because it’s been a month now and I haven’t said anything to anyone about Baby A’s exported sleep. Sometimes I think I can feel Jim’s secret exerting a subtle gravity in my body, like a sick second pulse. I worry that it’s warping my dreams in ways their machines won’t uncover in time and perverting even my conscious intentions.

At the reception window, I clear my throat.

“I think my sleep might be unusable this month, miss. I think there is something wrong with it.”

To which an icy voice replies, “Have a seat. We’ll be the judge of that.”

And I wonder: How many of the donors seated around me are secretly hoping for a similar outcome? To be exposed as broken, corrupted—to have our impurities discovered, under some investigator’s microscope, so that we can be exempted from ever having to give again? “Opting out”—Jim’s grim euphemism seems to apply here, too. What a relief, I think, to never again worry that you might be the one poisoning the nation’s sleep supply. Is anybody else having this fantasy with me? I gaze around the lobby, where six of us are waiting to learn if our dreams are healthy. One robust lady in a Minnie Mouse sweatshirt is scribbling furiously on her clipboard; she leans over to ask me, “Honey, how do you spell ‘piranha’?”

It takes some time to input my nightmare onto the form. Then I have to wait even longer for them to run the database scan. At the end of the hall, in custard-colored booths the size of library carrels, potential donors are going over their nightmares with staff members. I catch fragments:

“… a bunny-like twitchy face…”

“. . and the barber had electric-green hair…”

“Okay!” says an administrator to her donor brightly. “You’re good to go here, Donald!”

This is really it, I think. You are about to be banned from donation. Greedily, I start to hope for this. It’s so sly, the way that fears and hopes and dreams and nightmares can belly-flip into one another. The longer I sit in the hard chair, the more I want to be dismissed. Fondly I recall excused absences and doctors’ notes, those pink tickets to hours of solitude. Chicken pox: one p.m. and the green cheesecloth curtains drawn, the relief of seeing no one, doing nothing, itching my sores in secret, breaking in my monster skin alone. Exempt me, exempt me. For reasons of public safety, for the greater good, tell me I can go home now and sleep for myself only.

“No,” says the attending physician, “nothing here to disqualify you.”

She gives me a wide, patient smile, as if to suggest that she deals with hypochondriacs like me hourly, people who believe that their nightmares must be uniquely wretched, worse than anybody else’s, who fall for the body’s shaky aggrandizements of its plans and pains.

I’m incredulous: “You’re sure? You want to check the database again?”

It’s not pure, she says, my sleep; but it’s good enough, and the need is urgent.

“You’re still eligible to give, Mrs. Edgewater.”

So I do.

Summer greens the trees on 330 °Cedar Ridge Parkway, and I continue to donate. For every hour Baby A gives, I give my hour. But I have the queasy feeling every day now, like there’s nothing I can do that’s not a betrayal of Dori, or of somebody’s dead or breathing, conscious or sleeping, much-loved body.