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.
Field Trip
When the Storches return from their D.C. leadership retreat, they are almost unrecognizably gung ho. In our trailer, they mandate enthusiasm for the zillion Corps initiatives. “Field Trips” being one of these:
49n: “In the interests of greater accountability, we want to show Slumber Corps’ donors the direct impact of their sleep donations.”
Proposed venues: the regional sleep banks; the sleep hospices; our downtown hospital, where donors can visit Ward Six, Orexins, and Ward Seven, Elective Insomniacs.
“I vote Ward Seven,” says Rudy. He uses that verb as a courtesy, as if we have equal say in the matter. “You chaperone, Edgewater. We want the Harkonnens to meet the electives.”
“We’re allowed up for that? Non-family?”
“It’s all arranged. It’s a Meet and Greet. You introduce Justine and Felix to the Baby A wait-list.”
“That way, you know, obverse-reverse? They’ll understand exactly what Baby A’s sleep means to these people.” Jim beams at me. “Show them. She’s a miracle. She’s the best hope for these electives.”
Rudy adds, “Don’t fuck it up.”
“Right,” I say.
Rudy lends me his Prius.
The Harkonnens are standing on their lawn when I arrive.
Nobody sits next to me.
Somehow, I got it into my head that Mrs. Harkonnen wanted to meet the electives. That she had a maternal curiosity about these people wait-listed for her daughter’s sleep. So it’s a shocker when Mrs. Harkonnen in her pretty new dress, with its flouncy hemline, the pink and blue flowers, turns from Mr. Harkonnen to me in the boss’s car and says, “You might have to hold my hand, both of you.”
“She’s afraid,” Mr. Harkonnen translates. When he’s forced to talk to me now, whatever he says, it’s like a hoof stirring turf: red blood floods his face. We’ve known each other for four months, me and Mr. Harkonnen. He has never suggested that I call him Felix.
“I’m not afraid, Felix. I just don’t want to embarrass anybody.”
She undoes her seat belt. I hear the click, I panic.
We’re still three miles from the hospital, I tell Justine.
Then she wraps her arms around my headrest, launches forward in a whisper:
“Trish? I do worry that I might get a little emotional.”
“Emotional?”
And in the seconds and minutes that follow, I start to realize how wedded I’ve become to my fantasy of this woman. To me, she is a superhuman. Freakishly calm, freakishly generous, freakishly strong, in her opaque convictions. I check the rearview for confirmation of this impression. In the backseat, Justine’s face looks grainy-white, her shoulders slump. Her face is terrified.
I park the Prius in the Visitor Lot. Ward Seven may be new, but the Visitor Lot looks unchanged to me. There’s a Honda in my old spot, in the shade of the lone tree; years ago, I tell Justine, that’s where I liked to park when I came here to see Dori.
Ward Seven opened without ceremony, no ribbon-cutting, a week after the mass-infection of Flight 109. Seventy-nine people in our city received transfusions of the tainted sleep. Seventeen of them now do their sleeping here. These people have checked themselves into Ward Seven because they are terrified of falling into the dream, and too frightened to sleep at home. They badly want to live; and so, with the aid of hypnotics, under the doctors’ supervision, they get sent back into the hell of the REM-cycle. It’s an unspeakably brave act, say the sleep doctors who work with this population. To ask for that help. To accept the monstrous costs. “Do I wake up rested?” I heard a patient laugh bitterly on the radio. “Are you crazy? Every night is a rematch with his nightmare. But they tell me if I don’t dream at all, I’ll die.” In the Mobi-Van, we have photocopies of several of the Ward Seven electives’ authorization forms, to show our donors. It’s very moving to me, to see their signatures on the consents.
On Ward Seven, there is a glass partition.
“Look at them,” Mrs. Harkonnen breathes.
The room behind the glass is so dark, it takes a moment to see what’s caught Mrs. Harkonnen’s eye. Short beds bracket the shadows. Orderlies walk along the aisle, misting the patients’ heads like cabbage rows, attaching the electrodes that will monitor their sleep. These patients are also research subjects, who submit nightly to polysomnography, who offer up their infected sleep for study.