Baby A
The suburbs are rain-wet and green. Those white flowers look even more abundant than before, if that’s possible. They could be sentient, almost, wagging their lunar tongues at us from glittering gutters and construction sites. The Van pulls around a familiar corner, parks. The moon really is inexpressibly bright.
Does it matter if we mean what we say, if the mere fact of the utterance saves lives?
I am thinking about Jim, what to do about him.
Tonight Baby A’s blue eyes flutter open in the catch-crib; a nurse adjusts the flow of the ultra-sedative, and she falls into REM sleep within seconds. It’s a free-fall, accelerated by our medications; she descends through the uppermost levels into deep sleep, our monitors confirming “delta-wave,” and it’s from this vacant corridor of being, beyond the reach of language, image, or memory, that Abigail Harkonnen produces the lifesaving blackflow, the cure for insomnia, sleep piped in from her last home, perhaps, whatever “stasis in darkness” precedes even the womb.
After the draw is done, I bike straight home. It’s a little after one a.m. I’ve locked the bike and I’m heading to the apartment when I notice headlights come on at the end of the street. A car rolls slowly towards me, blinding me. A brown sedan with turquoise doors.
“Get in,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “We’re going on a field trip.”
Night World
Night Worlds, in some regions of America, are now referred to as “Eyesores.” Apparently, not even terminal insomniacs can resist the urge to pun. A sign is visible from the highway: “All Sore-Eyes Welcome!”
In our county, the Night World is located at the exit for the old fairgrounds, which have been converted into a midnight solarium. A sapphire penumbra rings the entire complex of tents and shanties. After a silent twenty minutes, Mr. Harkonnen parks in an overgrown field; he walks around and opens my door. He steers me, holding tight to the flesh of my upper arm; for balance, I grab ahold of his wrist. His thick fingers around my arm feel like a blood pressure cuff. We moth along towards the light in this odd physical arrangement, swinging our free arms. Dozens of jalopies and motorcycles have been abandoned here, their chrome-plated wheels swallowed in the weeds like jewel-toned ruins. Some of these are luxury vehicles: BMWs, Jaguars. There is something perversely cheering to me about the fact that tonight, rich insomniacs must have gotten lonely enough to disable their alarms and leave their marble enclaves, coming down the mountain to a Night World.
Two months after the Donor Y contagion, there are those who need sleep and those who fear it. If there is friction between these two terminal camps—envy, resentment, suspicion—I don’t feel it. “Celebration” is definitely the wrong word for what we’re seeing: the pack of slack, exhausted bodies, leaning on silver fenders. But I hear laughter. True hoots and back-claps. Little-bird sounds of cheeks kissed in greeting. It’s what you might call a heterogeneous mix of revenants (and I think for some reason of our great-aunt’s AA meetings, the weak greenish light and hurt savage smiles, decades-sober alcoholics and freckled young drunks gathered in a church basement around a coffeepot). Old orexins, new electives. Have these faces been awake for days, weeks, months? Years? It’s a surprisingly tough call. Insomnia ages you overnight—this is a new Oil of Olay cliché minted by the beauty industry, which is really pushing those day-to-night creams now. We pass four girls in a huddle who could be sisters. Those eyes. Wound-tight flesh. Hair in strings. Cyan networks of veins around their temples, like some cruel Greek crown. Teeth eroded to a monochrome gray. Three black girls, one ghost-white girl. Electives, infected with the Donor Y nightmare, I’d guess, given what we overhear:
“Look, if you do fall asleep? You gotta try to stay awake inside the dream.”
People are symptoms of dreams—
This was our favorite line of poetry, me and my sister, in the lone college class we ever took together, before her professors finally joined forces to insist that she take a medical leave of absence. Dori picked it out, of course, and let me tag along in the wake of her mature aesthetic. It was a generous hand-me-down, her taste in poetry; she also gave me her favorite green leather jacket, her Fender Starcaster, and the leftovers of her beauty products. I was the heiress to all the unused crazycolors in her eye shadow three-packs, you know, the freak blue Maybelline smuggles in between the taupe and the gray, which Dori always said was like the strawberry you’re forced to buy in Neapolitan ice cream; plus Dori’s prostitute-on-holiday blusher, Dori’s pressed powder that looked like ancient silicate from Planet of the Apes. I threw it all away after her death, which I now have come to regret. Words I guess are her more durable artifacts. Only how did the rest of our poem go?
People are symptoms of dreams / Bombs are symptoms of rage—
Dori, with her ancient face at twenty: “It’s a real mind-fuck. I won’t be beautiful again, will I?” And before I could answer, “Shut-up, shut-up, shut-up. I’m sorry. That was a shitty thing to ask. Don’t lie. Trish? Let's get the mirrors out of here, okay. .”
Mr. Harkonnen and I pass the group of teenaged girls. We fall in step with an older crowd. Veterans, I’m assuming. LD-ers with the telltale features: desolated eyes and cheek hollows, nacreous skin. The Night World is a ten-minute walk west of here. I remember this hike from grade school; yellow schoolbuses parked and spilled kids into these same fields. Mr. Harkonnen and I are moving at twice the speed of the insomniacs around us. I’m tempted to stagger, fake a limp. Out of some misguided solidarity? To protect these sick ones from my health? Sometimes, at Sleep Drives, I will catch myself unconsciously adopting the accent of the immigrant family I’m recruiting, mangling my own English, falling in step with the foreign family’s rhythms. In any case, Mr. Harkonnen won’t let me fall back. He races us along.
The boardwalk is only lit at intervals. Wide orange planks alternate with stripes of raw night. Fifty yards ahead of us, shadows acquire genders, features, then slide back into anonymity. We step onto the wooden platform and walk through a cracked neon rainbow that buzzes twelve feet above us. It’s the old entrance to the county fair. A relic from more innocent times, pre−Night World; resuscitated by some insomniac electrician. Now a grim arcade spills before us: stalls that advertise midnight barbers, disbarred sleep doctors, bartender-pharmacists. Dark green and purple tents ripple across the grass like Venus flytraps, their bright flaps swallowing people. Kiosks hawk antidotes to thought, to light: “BEST QUALITY LULLABIES.” “OBLIVION PRODS.” “DR. BOB BRAIN’S HATCHET—CUT THE ELECTRICITY ONCE AND FOR ALL.” The boardwalk unwinds for seeming miles, and I know from adolescent explorations that eventually these fairgrounds dissolve into a true woods, a nature preserve of spruce and pines.
When I tell Mr. Harkonnen that this is my first visit to a Night World, he is unaccountably pleased.
We draw up to one of the speakeasy tents.