“Here—” he repeats, trying to crook an arm under my shoulder. My hair gets yanked loose from its ponytail and spills onto his T-shirt. He shifts us around until my earlobe is pressed against the bony plate of his clavicle, where I can hear his heart drumming.
“Sleep!” he commands.
“Okay. Okay.” I take a shuddery breath. “Why?”
“Because I said so,” he says, viscous and triumphant. From his slur, I can hear how the medicines are dragging him under, too.
“You sleep for as long as I say, got it?”
“I will, Mr. Harkonnen.”
This consent is easy to offer. Nothing troubles me at all now.
“Good.” He faces me on the grass, eye to eye under the pillow-white moon. “Night.”
The following dawn with Baby A’s father is one of the strangest of my life. How a person who so evidently hated me for months can now relate to me with such natural solicitousness is as bewildering as any flower opening in the desert. Whatever waters fed the blossoming of this affection are invisible to me. It’s got to be some misdirection of the profoundest kind. Misplaced tenderness for Baby A, maybe, or for his wife, Justine. I wake up to a gray-flying sky, the sun not yet risen, and Mr. Harkonnen offering me a sip of water from his canteen. He takes the corner of his shirt, moist with dew, and rubs the dirt from my face.
I receive this kindness as best I can.
It’s strange to see Mr. Harkonnen in daylight. We are our sober selves again, thank God. Dori, her memory, is caged as pressure in my ribs. Whatever came unravelled last night feels neatly spooled this morning. I exhale, feeling safer and safer as the sun inches up.
“How did you sleep?” he whispers.
“I slept beautifully. Thank you. And you?”
“I slept good,” he grunts, suddenly bashful. “That lime stuff was killer, whatever we were drinking. I feel well rested.”
“Did you dream?”
“If I did, I don’t remember.”
“Me, neither.”
Mr. Harkonnen nods, as if this is the bridge he’s been waiting for.
He tells me he has a proposition for me, regarding dreams.
“I want you to make me a promise,” he says. “Let’s draw up a contract, right here. If you are going to continue to draw sleep from my daughter, I want you to swear that you’ll give exactly that amount, every time. A matching donation. For as long as she gives, you give, too. You don’t rest again until I say you can.”
The sun shivers free of the distant pines.
“Of course,” I hear myself say.
We shake on this.
He nods twice, flushed and seemingly satisfied. With my free hand I peel a blade of grass from his stubbled chin. I find that I’m exhilarated by our contract’s terms.
We stand up in the dirt. We laugh a little, to drain a pus of awkwardness. I feel the strangest happiness. Tight muscles spasm everywhere in my arms, and an alkaline taste I can’t name coats my throat. Mr. Harkonnen swallows. He has not released my palm.
Then I wish for whatever is flowing between us to remain unnamed, formless, unmeted into story or ever “experienced” in the past tense, and so concluded; I don’t want to say it, I don’t even want to try to understand it, and so begin to mistake it for something else, and something else after that, paling shadows of this original feeling, something inaudibly delicate that would not survive the passage into speech.
Shadows windmill over Felix’s face. Like he’s been caught out, all of a sudden, in some extra-dimensional autumn. Where are the falling leaves coming from? Clouds go racing over the field. Down below, our hands are still clasped. I’m relieved, relieved. I don’t feel like a slave to the contract. I don’t feel that Mr. Harkonnen tricked or frightened me into it. Each time I stare down at our handshake, I feel the same vertigo, a dislocation that is much stranger than mere anticipation, as though I’m being catapulted forward in time, rocketed to my death, perhaps, or to some absolute horizon, where I get a glimpse of my own life massing into form, and a thrilling feel for all that will happen to me now, all that I cannot know, haven’t yet done, haven’t spoken, haven’t thought, will or won’t. Just entering the contract does this. No matter what happens next, I’ll have one constant now, won’t I? Thanks to Felix, my dreams will be twinned to the dreams of his baby. The simple algebra of our arrangement feels like a ladder that he is holding out to me.
“I will not let you down,” I tell Mr. Harkonnen. “I won’t quit.”
He gives me a tight smile, a look I recognize from my own mirror as the winched contentment of a recruiter; the pitch is finished, the contract inked and under way.
“All right. Better get us home.”
Overhead, the sun is fully risen. A flock goes rowing over the pines, and this species I do recognize: they are Pennsylvania starlings. A hundred common gray-black birds, frequent visitors to our childhood backyard. They go shirring through the goggled blues of the May sky, the azure pools of air between the white clouds, moving east, each bird uniformly lit by the round sun. We walk under them, retracing our steps. Eventually Mr. Harkonnen drops my hand, but the world we return through feels solid and good.
Mr. Harkonnen drops me off a block from the Mobi-Office; I’m afraid my colleagues will recognize his brown and turquoise sedan and get the wrong impression. We did spend the night together, but that true statement is so misleading that I think it’s worse than a lie. It’s 7:02 a.m. But I see that as early as I am, I’m still not the first staffer to punch in.
Jim
“Hey,” says Jim.
“Hello,” I say.
Donor Y
The Tuesday following my strange dawning with Mr. Harkonnen, an alert calls every staffer into the trailer. We fish-gape around Rudy’s computer. Headquarters does a live broadcast from the D.C. offices, so that we learn about the Chinese orexins and electives fractionally faster than the rest of America.
Breaking news: several dozen patients suffering from the orexin-disruption have sought treatment at the Sanya Hospital in Hainan Province, China. This medical milestone delivers a quiet shock to all of us in the Mobi-Van. Naively, we now realize, we believed the dysfunction was bounded by our hemisphere, peculiar to American sleepers. But here is proof that nobody is quarantined by geography—that anybody, anywhere, might become an orexin.
It gets worse.
Fourteen Chinese insomniacs in Hainan Province have also tested positive for the Donor Y nightmare. These people received sleep transfusions from an unknown source. The Corps was unaware of the existence of Chinese sleep clinics offering REM-transfusions for cash. Initial reports suggest that the fourteen Chinese men and women infected with the Donor Y — prion now exhibit an “extreme sleep aversion” similar to what we’ve seen with American elective insomniacs.
Presently, our doctors know so little about how the nightmare is spreading that they can only describe symptoms, guess at causes. But it’s clear that my assurances were wrong. His dream is unchained, hopping bodies. The nightmare contagion is uncontained.
Jim calls me into his office.
“Are you avoiding me, Trish?”
“Ha-ha. That would be a ninja-feat, wouldn’t it, Jim? Avoiding you in this trailer.”
“We barely speak.”
I touch my throat, as if to suggest I have a common cold. At the same time, I feel this to be an accusatory gesture; Jim must know, of course, that his secret is the obstruction.