Sleep Donation

Baby A

Breaking news: several of the Flight 109 passengers receive emergency transfusions spun out of the Baby A donations, and doctors make yet another discovery. Shock-deliveries of Baby A’s untainted sleep can flush such nightmares out of the system. Glad tidings for the world, at last. A Van screams over to the Harkonnen residence. More panacea-sleep gets pumped out of her.

Within a twenty-four-hour span, the seven infected passengers who receive a transfusion of Baby A’s sleep are cleared of the Donor Y nightmare.

The Baby A miracle is cheered by everyone, everywhere, with the powerful exception of our star donor’s father. Felix Harkonnen, on receiving the news that his daughter’s transfusions can eradicate Donor Y’s contagious nightmare: “They need her sleep, too? All of these new people? My God, can’t you folks find another body to snatch here? Another of these universal donors? You’re telling me my kid’s the only one?” We both picture her then: somebody else’s daughter, playing Wiffle ball, riding her yellow bike to school, sleeping like a champ. “Go scout new talent, why don’t you?” he growled. “Scour the nursing homes. Find a hundred-year-old man. I don’t want my daughter’s first birthday to be in a Sleep Van.”

Baby A’s supply cannot meet the increased demand. Her tiny body can produce only so many hours of sleep per week. Hundreds less than we need, it turns out, at the Sleep Banks.

When I schedule my next visit to 330 °Cedar Ridge Parkway, I am deliberate about choosing a time when I know that Felix Harkonnen will not be home. Mrs. Harkonnen invites me in. She brings out a plate of sugar cookies and switches the television on, which permits us to crouch like spies on the orange sofa and whisper to one another, safely enclosed inside a bubble of background noise.

“Tell me about your sister,” says Mrs. Harkonnen.

“You want to hear it again?”

“Can you stand to tell it again?”

“Okay.”

I am certain that Mrs. Harkonnen has no desire to hear another word about Dori; she is pushing me to make some reciprocal give, I think. Asking for a trade.

“Go on—” she prods. “I’m all ears.”

She leans back on the cork soles of her slippers, her robe flapping open. I can see a swirl of mauve moles on her collarbone, her nursing bra biting into her pale left breast.

“This was my sister,” I tell her, extracting the photograph from my bag.

Unconsciously, half-consciously, I know we are both participating in the illusion that my sister is the one they will be helping; I brandish her photograph before Mrs. Harkonnen’s eyes, then my own, letting the spell set. Dori’s suffering I describe so freshly that anyone could be forgiven for forgetting that it’s over, forever.

“We need to live as one body, don’t we, Trish?” she asks me, her blue eyes widening inches from my face.

Mrs. Harkonnen and I have never talked religion, or gotten into her family background, but I suspect that something must have shattered her in a complementary way, to make her such a perfect match for my sister’s story. Maybe she, too, lost a sister. Maybe she belongs to a strict sect that advocates the gift of one’s every breath to strangers.

But all of my assumptions, Justine Harkonnen reverses. The physics of giving and receiving, as I understand them, seem not to apply here. Even to a Van filled with Slumber Corps evangelists, her faith in the rightness of sleep donation is alarming. She gives what we demand, with blue eyes scrubbed of any misgivings. We all find this upsetting, I know it, although there’s not much room to say so. Nurse Carmen speaks her name with a censuring wonder. Nurse Luisa, who has three little boys, won’t make eye contact with Mrs. Harkonnen any longer. A good mother, the nurses nervously agree, should be growing more upset with us, more worried for her baby’s health, angrier about our chronic requests—not less.

I stay with the Harkonnens in the Sleep Van. Milk darkens a quarter-inch circle around Mrs. Harkonnen’s left nipple, an involuntary seepage of which she seems wholly unaware; underneath the giraffe-print blanket, black sleep gushes out of her daughter.

There are natural laws that govern the flow of dream and substance from body to body, laws that determine the passage of electricity through tissue, the routes taken by ruby marrow and iodine crystals and colorless vibrations. Laws to order every visible and invisible migration.

And I feel certain there must be a second set of laws, inscrutable but real, that governs exactly how much a particular individual can give to and receive from another. Some hydrology of human generosity. Because there are these gifts we can make to one another freely, reflexively, with no sting of loss; and there are gifts we fight to relinquish, beg to get.

Mr. Harkonnen grabs me while the nurses adjust the baby’s silver helmet. Nurse Carmen, frowning, flicks at a gummed tube.

“You have pushed beyond the limits of what she can spare,” growls Mr. Harkonnen.

“We have not,” I say sadly.

I show him the chart:

PATIENT’S WEIGHT: Nineteen pounds

MAXIMUM IN ONE SLEEP DRAW: Six hours

MAXIMUM IN A 30−DAY PERIOD: Fifty-four hours

“Well, what did you take just now?”

“Six hours.”

His eyes search my face.

“You’re sure it’s safe for her to give that much?”

Oh, I have no idea. Safety is nothing we can guarantee to a donor; that’s why I collect the signatures.

“These days, the science is so advanced! Trust me: our sleep doctors know every vital detail pertaining to your daughter. They will take only what her body can afford to give, I absolutely promise you.”

Midway through the draw, there is some hiccup; a green light blinks on above the monitors and we all wince, even the nurses. Which is a frightening thing to witness, this neon beeping registering on the nurses’ napkin-smooth faces—something akin to watching stewardesses flinch at mid-flight turbulence. Then the regular rhythms resume, draining more sleep from her chest. The Sleep Van fills with the odd slick smell, and the proprietary gurgle of the machine.

In her womb, Baby A was formed inside a tidaling generosity. Glucose, oxygen, proteins, fats: all transferred from the mother’s bloodstream to the bloodstream of the baby.