“It’s a donation.” I swallow. “Nobody can force you.”
“So she thinks—ha!”
Mr. Harkonnen has finished his virgin sleep cocktail. Angrily, he shakes the drained glass. His tongue darts around to catch the last clear droplets. The tongue’s froggy orbit around the edge of the glass seems many evolutionary leaps removed from the wounded intelligence in Mr. Harkonnen’s black eyes.
“She thinks that one day you will stop asking.”
“But we will! When the neuroscientists figure out a way to synthesize what she produces naturally…”
“Ha!”
For the duration of his laughing fit, Mr. Harkonnen stares down at the bar with a face of social horror, the bulge-eyed consternation of a man who is trying to discreetly cough up a bone into a cloth napkin; eventually, he regains control of his voice.
“And how old will my daughter be then?” he asks calmly. “Ten? Twenty?”
She’ll be dead. This thought is nothing I will. It blows into and through me, part of a leaf-swirl of my worst fears. To erase it, I imagine Baby A at twenty, laughing, a bright-eyed college freshman.
“She’ll be a lot younger than ten, I bet. The scientists are working around the clock—”
Mr. Harkonnen snaps for the bartender.
“We’d like to try one of your specials.”
“Of course. What is your desired State of Vigilance? Or Depth of Sleep?” asks the bartender-pharmacist.
“Sleep for us, this time—”
The bartender-pharmacist winks at Mr. Harkonnen. With her tiny, fox-perfect teeth, she tears a blank envelope.
Service is democratic, I gather, in a Night World. Nobody here prescreens, or hands around eligibility questionnaires. The bewigged bartender-pharmacist, smoothing her magenta bangs, is happy to take our money. Eighty-four dollars for two drinks. Purple powder seems to float inside the dark glass, coagulating into tiny countries.
“You’ll be out cold,” I observe to Mr. Harkonnen.
He grins at a dim corner of the tent.
“So will you, though. Bottoms up.”
My body tenses, anticipating a second onrush of light. But three sips in, and this time I feel like a bone on sand, powdery and solid, too, and very still. Some protection is in the process of repealing itself. This is scary at first, but soon its absence feels like a relief. The heaviness of sentience, heavy history and caution—the drink drains it away. Shards are winking on the sand inside me and I find I have no desire to collect them, to dig or to investigate. I am strangely unbothered by the parched bar, the evaporating sea of reason, the flecks of thoughts, their disconnection.
“This is a good one,” Mr. Harkonnen says. “Sort of limey. Do you taste lime?”
It doesn’t last too long, that first hit of the soporific. A second later, I sober up; the waves come back, and I’m myself again, thinking my thoughts, albeit in a dangerously relaxed state.
Somehow it seems we’re talking about Baby A.
“I manage the YMCA. Soccer, baseball. For every boy, there is a season. I wanted a boy, until she came.” He smiles down at the bar, squeezing his fists together; it’s a funny gesture, and I wonder if he’s keeping something for or from himself. “And then I forgot that I ever wanted different.”
Until who came?
“Abigail!” I blurt out.
Mr. Harkonnen lifts an eyebrow.
“Baby A,” I correct, looking down.
“You got privileges, huh? Teacher’s pet? What else do you know about us?”
“I’d never betray her real name to anybody, sir.”
“So we’re back to ‘sir’ now.”
He takes a long drink.
“Go ahead. Call her Abby. Make her a baby.”
His grin hardens until his face looks wind-chapped.
“Baby A—that always sounded to me like some damn sports drink. .”
I’m scared, and I think he is, too. Light from the moonlamps is reflected in Mr. Harkonnen’s eyes, tiny weather vanes spinning in each black pupil, and returning his stare I am dizzily aware that our night could go in any number of directions.
“What did your boss tell me? The tall one—who’s that again?”
“Jim. Or Rudy. They’re twins. ‘Tall’ doesn’t narrow it down.”
“He said you got the highest number of recruits.”
I feel myself darken. “Thanks to my sister. Her story.”
“So that’s the game, huh? You franchise your sister.”
“I don’t want to talk about her here.”
But his eyes gleam, he is taken by this idea.
“Sure. I get it now. You franchise her pain. Dori Edgewater. Well, it worked, didn’t it?” He grins at me with slack, fish-pale lips. “She’s famous. Everybody knows her, your sister. Just like everybody knows my daughter.”
Two hunchbacked men are fighting in the corner with their barstools lifted over their heads, the chair legs facing outward like spiny antlers, so that they look like enormous beetles charging one another; Night World bouncers in their ominous uniforms arrive to break it up. Jacked electives, reports the bartender-pharmacist. This altercation happens in the shallows, near the flaps. At our depth of the speakeasy, nobody so much as blinks.
I wait for Mr. Harkonnen to accuse me now:
You do what he did, he’ll add, to them. You are just like Donor Y.
Or what else might he say, regarding Dori?
She’s dead. She’s dead. What’s it going to take? Do you want me to ice a cake with that? Your sister’s dead. Everything you’ve done, you’ve done for yourself alone.
But Mr. Harkonnen’s focus seems to have rolled inward, onto his own failures:
“Justine is too damn good for her own good. She has no defenses. And Abby? Poor kid, I’m sure she’ll take after her mother. Assuming she makes it out of preschool. You think I can protect either of them, from what they turned out to be? My wife is a far better person than I am. That’s why I married her.”
I open my mouth intending to agree with him—to compliment the virtue of Mrs. Harkonnen.
Then I think I have my own hiccup of insight into Mr. Harkonnen’s dilemma. He got more goodness than he bargained for, maybe, when he married her. Some flood he cannot dam or drain or control. Unfortunately for Felix Harkonnen, the same currents of goodness that originally drew him to his wife, we at the Corps have also discovered.
“I’d better shut up,” he says after a while. “Drank too much.”
But a minute later, he grabs my arm.
“Tell me this,” says Felix, whose first name I’ve yet to say aloud.
“If your sister—Dori—were alive today, and she were the universal donor? What would you do, huh? How much would you let them take from her?”
“If it were me, sir, I promise you, I’d let them—”
“But say it’s not you, in this scenario. Say it’s Dori.”
I don’t answer.
To our left, there is a burst of muted applause; people are whispering that an orexin-woman is genuinely asleep. Two men have lifted her up, and with infinite care they are transporting her through the smoky speakeasy. It’s quite something: the crowd falls into a silence that pulses with energetic longing, and people move around her dangling feet with the reverence due a new saint. Watching even one woman nod off into sleep has changed the tent’s entire atmosphere. Now the air feels almost musky with group credulity, the group’s decision to blink an apparition into reality. Her feet wave at us as she is carried from the tent, her entire body limp. If you were a cynic, you might assume this woman was a plant; her stunt-recovery, if that’s what we’re watching, seems to be very good for business. Medicines miracle around the bar, everyone buying everyone rounds. Nobody talks. Crickets are singing beyond the tent flaps, you can hear them in the silence. At one of the kiosks, they were selling a specially bred cricket with emerald wings as an “organic lullaby-machine.” The woman next to me has one in a ruby-tinted jar on the bar, its red legs fiddling away.