Sleep Donation

Intermission: Faith Transfusion

You start to feel like it’s all Ponzi.

I have to go into the Storches’ private office in the trailer, to let the brothers administer to me:

I want to know, do they think I should do my pitch a different way?

Jim scowls up at me from his office chair with good-natured bemusement, as if he’s trying to locate the humor in a very bad joke. Rudy speaks in a tone like knuckles clenching:

“The Donor Y furor is negatively affecting your pitching. Is that the problem?”

Yes, I say. One of them.

There is micro-sleep; there is also micro-arousal. The brain’s partial awakening. At the cerebral disco, parts of the brain are always lighting up, going dark. I’m waking up, I tell the Storches. When I pitch, I am in two places at once—asleep, awake—merged with Dori, but also observing myself from above. There I am, far below, in a mall parking lot; I stagger backwards as if shot. But I can also see beyond my body now, to the faces of my recruits. I can hear the threat encoded in my pitch. People go sheet-white, their heads shaking to the Dori-rhythms. Children hide behind their parents’ legs, but they watch me, too, and they know that if their parents do not give sleep, if they “choose” not to donate, they, too, might die in this same juddering, blood-sputtering, irremediably conscious way.

“And the problem is, what, that you feel guilty?”

I nod.

“Don’t. Problem solved.”

“It’s this Donor Y bullshit. She’s scared, Rudy.”

“What would really be a nightmare for us? If you quit pitching, at a time when we need every minute we can get of REM-sleep.”

Jim is pacing now, so agitated he won’t look my way.

“If a take-down of our charity was something you planned, Donor Y?” says Jim, addressing the wavy blankness of a window. “Mission accomplished.”

Does Jim talk to Donor Y, too? Is he the imaginary target for all of Jim’s anger? This fills me with a great sorrowful surprise. We have a phantom in common. I wonder how he appears to Jim, if he is a bearded terrorist, if he is an insane person, if he is perfect evil. Whoever he turns out to be, his dream has spawned actual fatalities. Thirty-two “suicides” have been linked to the Donor Y nightmare. (“Suicides” is another term being hotly debated at this moment, since many of the Donor Y−infected appear to have scaled ladders and jumped from catwalks and rooftops in a somnambulatory fugue). He incubated all those deaths, not one life.

Then Rudy brightens, turning to me.

“Have you seen your zeros this month? With the Baby A aggregates? That will be cheering. Get those percentages for her, Jim—”

Worse, I’ve started to hear my doubts in Dori’s voice. She was always smarter than me, in school, outside of school. If she were here, I would ask her what to do now. She’s not a word-talker, not anymore, but her pressure inside my rib cage translates quite clearly: This is how you turn a gift into extortion.

“I think I have to try and find another way of pitching…”

“Baby,” cautions Jim, “you need to calm down, now.”

“And I don’t want to terrify…”

“Oh,” says Rudy. “Edgewater.”

Jim’s face unpetals, revealing some depth of emotion beneath his initial affectionate dismissal, his Storchy I’m-on-your-side smile. Rage, I think.

“Jesus, Trish,” Jim murmurs. “We’re already so fucked here.”

Behind Jim, the trailer windows are flatly sparkling. At this hour, they are black rectangles. It’s unnerving to look out, see nothing.

“I hate that I’m always scaring everyone. Bullying them into giving.”

“Don’t be. That’s not helpful.”

“That’s a waste of your talents.”

“Your energies, baby. They’re finite.”

“Take that fear and put it out there.”

“Put it in them—”

“Get the hours, Edgewater. People are dying.”

“You’re one of the most valuable members of our team, Edgewater.”

“Look: we want donors to feel good about the gift they are making. But let’s just say, hypothetically, that they feel bad, or scared. Does that change the quality of the gift, Edgewater? No.”

Doesn’t it matter how you ask the question? Or if the tone of your request is closer to a fist than to an open palm? Can the nature of the request corrupt the purity of the gift, the donated sleep? How stupid. How could it. A unit of sleep is a unit of sleep, say my bosses. People have free will, they give if they want to, don’t if they don’t.

I nod, relieved. What they say washes over me, washes in. Oh, let it, I think. Stop making everything wrong.

“What better cause can you imagine?”

“Do the math on that.”

“You’re doing good work, Trish.”

“Keep up the good work, Edgewater.”

“Thanks, guys.”

This is what I want to believe, and now, with their assistance, believe again.