Half my drink is gone, I note. Mr. Harkonnen keeps slipping in and out of focus on the barstool. My muscles, they’re melting. Tiny knots untwist themselves throughout my body. What I somehow continue not to say:
[Jim Storch sold your daughter’s sleep.]
What would Felix Harkonnen do if he knew this?
Just imagining the conversation makes my gut cramp. How will I pitch it? I’ll tell him I had no idea my boss had brokered this sale with the Japanese researchers. I’ll emphasize my ignorance; I’ll tell him, too, that Jim Storch seems to genuinely believe that the illegal transfer of Abigail’s sleep was both justified and necessary. I find that I badly want to defend Jim to Mr. Harkonnen, to explain that my boss believed he was acting in everyone’s best interests, regardless of whether or not this is true. I want to restate Jim’s grandiose, beautiful claims for Mr. Harkonnen. He called his deal the only way forward.
What if Jim’s right?
I squeeze shut. Eyes closed, I try to imagine it: Jim’s decision in transit. The Baby A sleep units travelling over the Pacific into the right hands, the capable hands of these Tokyo researchers.
If his scheme fails, the Harkonnens need never know. If his scheme works, and they do achieve synthesis, and manufacture artificial sleep, a faucet of unconsciousness, an inexhaustible dream well, “sleep for all,” the realized goal, my God, then we’ve got an outcome straight out of a comic book, or the New Testament: the Harkonnens sacrifice their infant’s sleep, Jim Storch takes a bold risk, I keep shut, the Japanese team gets her sleep on tap, all the terminal insomniacs are saved, et cetera, et cetera, in a daisy chain of gorgeous goodness, fortune. And why not? Why couldn’t it happen, just like that? Religions spore out of such stories. Movies starring Denzel Washington are made of far less.
“Slow down. You’ve got the hiccups.”
Mr. Harkonnen swings an arm around, thumps my back. With his brown hair slicked back like that, with his house-musk of baby powder and Old Spice, and his spatulate hands with their dirty thumbnails, he’s got a mammalian sweetness to him in the speakeasy’s neon den. His automatic tenderness must come from taking care of Abby. Whenever Mr. Harkonnen burps the baby, he looks like a gentle, enormous beaver. His gesture is well-timed with my secret thoughts to make me want to tell him everything; and then, not a second later, to make me scared of losing everyone. Not just Rudy and Jim and my life in the Corps trailer, but the Harkonnens.
I stare at Mr. Harkonnen. A chalky taste rises that I want only to swallow. Easiest to believe Jim’s calculations, Jim’s predictions. Why not? He is an empirical savant, Jim. He made his fortune as a businessman.
But it’s useless to pretend that I can still trust Jim. Any minute now, I’m going to tell Mr. Harkonnen. As scared as I am, I don’t see how it can be avoided. Dori’s working in me, on me, dissolving the capsule around the secret. I must tell you something very upsetting, Mr. Harkonnen. .
Will Mr. Harkonnen keep the secret? If I explain to him that the ensuing scandal really could undermine the entire institution? Actually kill people, according to Jim’s assessment? I can’t imagine that he will respond to the news with silence, or forgiveness.
Mr. Harkonnen is staring at me with a strangely avuncular expression; he hands me a green pistachio, crunches into his own. “There,” he says, like everything’s settled. “Let’s go for a walk. I’d like to show you the Poppy Fields. They’re really something. They’re way out beyond the tents. Do you know, ever since our field trip to Ward Seven, I’ve been coming out here every other night. Justine thinks I’m working late. And she’s not wrong.”
His grin is a further mystification, exposing a black back tooth.
“I am.”
“Why?” Then a startling answer occurs to me. “Are you sick, too?”
“No. it’s not that. After that night at Ward Seven, I just wanted to see these people for myself. Solo, you know. Without my wife. Without a chaperone.”
I giggle, terrified.
“It’s been quite an education.”
“For me, too, Mr. Hark—”
“Good. We’re just getting started. The night is young.”
Something tightens in the air between us and I find that I’m pushing away from the bar, and from the empty glasses and the cracked pistachio hulls and the unslept faces. I have to stand to avoid falling off the barstool. I hold on to the bar’s edge, blinking hard into the moonlamps. Felix is studying my eyes. I amend my plan, watching him watching me, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that my plan amends itself, spontaneously inverts: Who is helped, if the father knows about the sale?
No one, says Jim.
Out loud, I make the easier apology:
“About Ward Seven? I’m really, really sorr—”
“Don’t!” he roars. When the bartender-pharmacist looks over, he laughs: this is all in good fun, ma’am. He needn’t worry. Under her wig, her yellow-brown eyes regard us with a hilted intelligence, halted judgment. All of Night World seems to sparkle with a similar neutrality. Dulled gazes like swords in scabbards. Then we are back on the boardwalk, joining others on their slow bar crawl under the stars.
The Poppy Fields
The Poppy Fields have been widely reported on: a special strain of poppy which releases an “aromatic hypnotic,” sometimes called an “olfactory blanket.” Poppies are trendy, if that word can be applied to foredoomed miracle cures. All over the country, Night World gardeners are pruning the flame-bright poppies beneath the moon. The gardeners’ headlamps reveal a wilderness of faces, insomniacs whose bloodshot eyes are even redder than the poppies. They lie on bedrolls and grain sacks in parallel rows, breathing in the flowers.
We reach the edge of the boardwalk, step off into grass.
In the distance, the woods wall us from the city. Pines span the horizon, nearly black in color at this hour, with the pointy, standard look of fence-posts. A wooden sign with an arrow reads: FIFTY YARDS TO THE POPPY FIELDS.
Behind us, the fairgrounds waver like some hallucinatory reef: the calm anemone billowing of the Night World tents, the barkers’ poles like red coral, the electric green spokes of the Dream Wheel. At this distance, even the screams of the insomniacs receiving Oblivion Prods contribute to this illusion, their faraway cries transformed by repetition into an implacable background, like waves crashing on rocks.
And then we are mid-calf in acres of flowers. “The Placebo Fields,” we joke in the Mobi-Van—but, my God, it is hard to hold on to your cynicism when you actually see them. Under the moon, the poppies look as bright as jewels on the sea floor. We wade through hundreds of them, the scarlet buds drumming against our shins, and I find it’s almost frightening to bend the stems back, to graze the petals with my fingers. This is no mirage. But it’s a shock to find this sea at our city’s edge, and to find myself navigating it with Mr. Harkonnen. Who knows if the poppies’ fragrance is a real insomnia cure? I realize that I don’t smell a thing. But my thoughts shrink to a whisper, and soon I start to feel like I’m sleeping already.
Pain tickles my heel.