The chalkboard lists the evening specials:
Medicines, a thousand of them, to induce sleep.
Medicines to stay awake—sunlight bulleting through an elective insomniac’s brain.
“In here,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “Ladies first.”
It’s very easy, I discover, to comply with him. Since strapping into his sedan, I’ve felt unworthy of objecting to anything that’s happening. Once the tent’s flaps close, I find myself crowding as near as I can comfortably get to Mr. Harkonnen’s sweat-damp left side. What a crowd. Near the flaps, a trio of twenty-somethings are sharing a pint of some dubious medicine. Tangerine bubbles fizz over the rim. Bubbles are rising in every glass in the joint, Mr. Harkonnen points out, marine blue and dark pink and lurid violet. So these aren’t your standard soda mixers, but some self-catalyzing enchantment. Threads of limber color rise to meet the insomniacs’ parched lips, as if, inside their pint glasses, these medicines are already doing the work of dreaming for them. Up and down the wooden bar, insomniacs sit a breath away from one another on the high, rickety stools. The way they booze as a unit makes me think of Vikings rowing in a longship. Lifting their glasses, slamming them down. Fighting the waves, I assume, inside their bodies.
SINK — AND — SWIM is the name of one of the advertised soporifics.
But the bartender-pharmacist keeps splashing grapey black and auroral fluids into alternating glasses, and you get the sense some tide is truly turning. In this Night World, the two groups are generating their own countercurrent. They laugh, gulp, swallow, they even seem to blink to one rhythm.
I doubt it’s my right, as a healthy sleeper, to read the scene this way, and to be enchanted by the Night World’s unlikely friendliness; but I am anyhow.
The footage I best remember, from local television depictions? This same fairground looked like a refugee camp. Dozens of bone-thin bodies swarming the bonfires, flumes of red flame in metal cans, their shoulder bones jutting rhythmically through the free blankets from the Night World dispensary, like big cats on the prowl.
Next to us, a woman’s head is rolling on a man’s shoulder, her sheepy curls tossing on his navy sleeve like a cloud at anchor. I think she’s an elective who Donor Y infected. Her eyes are milky and ewe-blank, hugely dilated; she jumps when she yawns. “Keep me up,” she demands, and this scarecrow of a man bellies around on the barstool to face her, tucking his shirt into his waistband; obligingly, he strokes her moist forehead, the angry rash on her cheeks and chin, the cuticle-width scar under her left eye. Trying to keep her in this world with him, awake. He’s an orexin, I think—someone who wants only to sleep—and he’s not looking so hot himself: eggy eyes, poached by his illness, skin like white wax. On a calendar, I bet these two are in their early thirties. The whole time his fingers brush her pimpled hairline, he’s murmuring something into her earlobe, like her face is a story he’s reading to her. Her Braille memoir. He reads on, and with each syllable, her smile widens. With his big thumbs, he prizes her eyelids open. This he does for the exhausted, terrified woman with a clinical tenderness and focus—one species of sufferer trying to help another. I’m holding my breath. The man catches me watching, winks.
Are they a couple? I ask.
The man smiles.
“Sure. Met her five minutes ago, when I sat down here. You’re invited to the wedding.”
Recipients and donors. Donors and recipients. Variations of this couple's exchange are happening with a hothouse spontaneity up and down the bar: people with equal but opposite afflictions, propping each other up.
This is my beautifully stable impression of Night World culture for maybe two more minutes; then something explodes near my head. Blue medicine leaks in an Arctic smear down the cabinet door. Whatever it is smells faintly of garlic. So much for romance. Near the tent flaps, a fight has broken out: two gizzardy LD-ers are haggling over their bar tab. It seems they have goaded each other into consuming two thousand dollars’ worth of some placebo-slush. They dispute the bill in hoarse screams: “That was your round, Leonard!” Napkins wag from their hands, covered in scrawl, two rival accounts of their debts to one another—a bar tab that seems to stretch back to the Big Bang.
Mr. Harkonnen returns with our drinks. To avoid the brawl, we retreat farther into the tent, choose stools next to a dark oak cabinet.
“Got us the cheap stuff,” he says.
“Okay. Thank you.”
Shooting Stars is the name of my medicinal cocktail.
I don’t ask what it does. Three sips in, my expectations go colorless. Then I find myself leaning against Mr. Harkonnen’s left shoulder. Mr. Harkonnen smells like nothing unexpected: generic deodorant, Old Spice aftershave. These odors are like flung harpoons—they sail out of the Night World and back across the highway, wrenching whole continents of normalcy into this dark tent: malls and supermarkets, non-lethal sunsets, jarred tomatoes, orderly hedgerows, carpet cleaner, kitty litter, everybody’s junk mail piling up on tables, geese flapping across meridians on their winter-spring cycle… and soon I’m having to close my eyes to fight a supreme dizziness, as many times and seasons collide inside my chest. I take another long gulp of the cocktail. This time, the effect is immediate. Heat radiates outward until my skin feels ready to burst, until my skeleton is both holding me upright on the barstool and also dissolving, inside me, into melting vertebrae, a million memories unstoppered in my brain, rising up my spine, flowing down, my body too small to contain them, shrinking even as the dizzy light expands in all directions, and no way to protect myself against the assault, this onslaught of sound and light, and nowhere to release it, all the aggregating echoes, Dori’s voice, our father’s, a thousand other whisperers…
I blink twice, rub my eyes: incredibly, the Night World tent is still here. I study my watch, relieved that I can read the numbers: three minutes have elapsed since we sat down. Beside me, Mr. Harkonnen is eating green pistachios out of an ashtray. He smiles at me. His face looks placid, in the illegible and alien way that stingrays’ bellies look placid as they smooth along glass walls.
“That was an intense drink,” I say, frowning down at my lap.
“Still is.”
“Was it supposed to wake us up?”
“You bet.”
I rub my tingling ears.
“Are you, ah, feeling it?”
“I’m drinking a virgin medicinal cocktail, actually.”
“Oh. So…”
“Just gin.”
Mr. Harkonnen leans back against the side of the medicine cabinet. His arms are flung gregariously behind his head. I blink down at our shoes, my head still spinning.
“I thought we should have a private talk,” he says. “Away from the house.”
I gaze up at him from behind my glass. Some disturbed dreamer has scratched Screams from the raven-lunged in a vitreous green ink onto the wooden bar. The tent’s droning moonlamps make it feel as though we’re all boozing inside a tremendous bug zapper.
“Things have become tense,” he adds. “Around the household.”
“You’re fighting with Justine?”
“We’re fighting, yes.”
“About Baby A?”
“No, about the recycling. What do you think?”
He tips his drink back, motions for me to follow suit.
“We were a happy couple, a happy family, can you imagine that? Six months ago that was our status: happy. But then you show up—”
“You can stop.”
“Oh, she won’t hear of it now. ‘Divorce me, then,’ she says. ‘Take me to court. We’re going to cooperate with them, it’s the right thing to do…’ ”