“I think I stepped on something…”
“I’d keep walking,” said Mr. Harkonnen, swallowing, his voice a thick buzz in my ears. “If I were you.”
“Will you look for me, will you check—”
“It’s okay, Trish.”
And this is a real gift: the sound of my name. Connected to that stem, memories spread their wings, and I recollect who I’ve been, before the purple sleep cocktail, before the Night World parking lot and before my knock on the door which turned Mr. Harkonnen’s daughter into Baby A, before the sleep crisis, and even before Dori’s last day.
Very gratefully, I keep pace with him.
Remember this, I instruct myself.
Mr. Harkonnen steers me towards a small shack in the center of the field. It looks like a boat at anchor in this strange Atlantic. Night World staffers mill around it, grabbing blankets, chatting with groups of insomniacs.
“Do you know about the Legend of the Poppies?” a young attendant asks us with mechanical charm, tugging her black ponytail around her collarbone. She is the Valet, I realize, taking cash for the bedrolls and the blue inhalers, directing bodies to their pallets among the red flowers.
“I do,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “You told me. But tell her.”
With the mechanical cheer of any waitress, she beams at us each in turn.
“According to Greek legend, the poppy flower was the gift of Hypnos, the god of sleep, to help Demeter to dream again. Demeter was exhausted by the search for her lost daughter, whom Hades had taken to be his bride in the underworld. Now, Demeter was so tired that she could no longer make the harvest grow. But his poppies cast a spell on her. She slept, and when she woke, the corn was growing green and tall again.”
Mr. Harkonnen fishes for his wallet, tips her a buck.
“Yup. Thanks. That’s a rough night for Mom. The devil’s got your daughter.”
This female attendant is a tall Asian girl who is the same age as our Slumber Corps interns. She wears a long white coat and a white dress, for “atmosphere maintenance and heightened visibility,” she says. Behind her, the wind is picking up. It plows the fields. Each gust obliges the worst kind of devotion from the mutely chattering blossoms, grinding them against the soil, knocking their red heads around. The wind could do this to us, too, at any instant, it seems to want us to know, and the thousand poppies nod their agreement.
Suddenly I am overcome by drowsiness.
Mr. Harkonnen, beside me, lets out a shuddering yawn.
Women wander the poppy fields, in white nightgowns, carrying vessels of water, or some other transparent liquid. In calm, emotionless voices, they begin to halt the unsteady pilgrims and to ask them questions:
“Would you like a sip of the supplemental poppy tea, dear?”
“Would you like sheets and a pillow? We can sleep you on plot seven, or for forty-five dollars we can upgrade you to plot twelve, directly under the moon…”
It’s funny: Who in their lifetime, pre — Insomnia Crisis, could ever have imagined shelling out that kind of money to unroll a rubber mat in dirt? But just hearing the soothing voices as they recite the Poppy Fields’ menu of pricey sorceries is enough to implant these desires in me. Hungers appear in my mind, like coins flipped into a wishing pool.
America’s great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively, to a body like mine, and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end. Forty-five dollars for the moon-plot? Put it on the card. What a steal.
“No,” says Mr. Harkonnen. “You know what? No, thanks, miss.”
He grabs my arm and then we’re hurrying away. Red poppies lisp after us; if their magic works, we must be resistant to it. Neither of us keel over into slumber. We have to walk through these sections of the Poppy Fields with great care, because the shapes humping the grass are people.
Maybe ten minutes beyond the Poppy Fields, when the “enchanted” flowers have ebbed back into scraggly, depopulated weeds, Mr. Harkonnen stops to rub his eyes on his sleeve. “Too many people there tonight.” His shoulders punch up at the sky, some martial shrug. “No privacy. Even if we paid the big money, I figured there would be some watcher there, lying a row away from us.”
But that is not our problem any longer. Currently, we are moving parallel to the woods. There are a million visible stars, miles of dark. We seem to be the only two people.
Why did you bring me here? I do not ask him.
Abby—Baby A—she’s a hero, I do not reassure him.
Instead I say:
“Mr. Harkonnen—Felix—do you think the elective insomniacs have a choice?”
He grunts, picking his way across the unlit grass.
“Yes. Some of them go to the hospital for help, and some come here to die.”
“Do you think I gave you a choice?”
“Who do you think you are, girl? We chose. We’re choosing. Only you assholes sure rigged the game up good. Now, if you hadn’t shown up at our door in the first place… but let’s walk.”
We wander off into the shadows far beyond the “All Sore-Eyes Welcome!” sign, through uncut grass that brushes at my bare ankles; his hand drops to the small of my back, I take his arm, we are stumbling. All of this proceeds with a sultry inevitability, with a logic that mimics the odd chordal progressions of dreams, and for the first time in a long while I feel utterly relaxed. He frog-marches me far beyond the fairgrounds until I let him see that I’m not going to stumble; then he loosens his grip. Still he doesn’t let go of my arm. Wherever we are now, we’ve missed the dividing line that separates the fairgrounds’ unkempt margins from the nature preserve. Together we ford rivers of cattails, until the fever pitch of the Night World is entirely erased by distance, silence. The only sound is the occasional scream of some nocturnal hawk, which rips through the deep quiet of the sky like a skunk stripe drawn through black fur. We have to clamber over several enormous logs, Mr. Harkonnen grunting and slipping, offering me a hand. In the dark, these felled trees look as frighteningly misplaced as the bodies “sleeping” in the Poppy Fields. They make a lateral map of the woods as it must have been, before some storm. At one point, I look up and I see a spreading V pushing over the pines, many dozens of wings pulsing far above our heads; only it must be a very odd flock, because no shape resembles any other. Their wingspans, too, are irregular, some short and some long. Gaping up, I watch them multiply—what sort of flock is this, for what purpose are so many different birds gathering? It’s too dark to even guess at their names. Silvery light seems to pour from their wings, although I know this watershed must be an illusion caused by the mediating stars. Starlight liquefies and streams as the black shapes cross the Pleiades. They arrow over the trees so swiftly that before I can point out their bladed and scissoring bodies to Mr. Harkonnen, they are gone.
At last, when I am swaying on my feet, he stops.
“Here.”
“Here’s good. Sure.”
“Now, lay down.”
Overhead, two hawks carousel around. It’s years since I’ve been this close to the green perfume of any woods.
“Stay put. No—Jesus, knock that off.” He rolls his eyes. “Are you stupid? That’s not why I brought you here.”
I misunderstood. I assumed he needed a transfusion of something straightforward, something on the level of what I did with Jeremy. I rebutton my blouse.
Mr. Harkonnen lies down in the grass beside me, grunting. Then he maneuvers my head onto his chest, makes a vise of his bicep. I cry out from surprise, just once, and a tawny blur streaks out of the scrub and runs past my cheek in the dirt. It’s the fastest mouse in the world, I think, and then realize that my eyes are streaming.