According to preliminary reports, this man claims he had no idea that he was infected with a nightmare at the time of his donation. He is pleading innocent to the charges that he deliberately sabotaged our nation’s sleep supply. He agrees to a polygraph test and insists that he has never had the nightmare himself. He’s been sleeping soundly, apparently, for months. So Donor Y may turn out to be exactly what I feared the most: a good soul. Another human capsule, as clueless as the rest of us about his mind’s contents.
Baby A
“Please help me,” I say when she answers the door. “Is Felix home?”
“Trish!” she mouths silently. Pantomiming, which means the baby is sleeping. “Oh dear, what’s wrong? Don’t worry.”
She hugs me on the front porch, and I hug her back, for a length of time that would feel unnatural with anybody but Justine Harkonnen. I try to record, to preserve in my skeleton, in my muscle memory, exactly how this feels. I figure there’s a real chance that thirty minutes from now I’ll be back on the lawn. Ousted from the Harkonnens’ lives for good, or even, it’s occurred to me, in the back of a police car—didn’t we steal their child’s sleep for profit? Felix must be home—the turquoise and brown car is baking in the sun. Strays weave around its tires like material shadows. There is a universe where I never tell the Harkonnens what I know about Jim. Or how I tried to use my dead sister, like tongs, to get something supple and alive out of them. I rest my head on Justine’s shoulder; instinctively, her hand flies up to pat my back. A driver in a passing car might think we are dancing in place. Through the doorway, I can see Mr. Harkonnen rocking Baby A, who is sleeping for herself this afternoon. Only her head pokes out of the sling, which makes Abigail look like the crinkled face in the moon. Deep inside me, I feel Dori stirring, her dead eyes opening to peer out through mine. Dori, in life, was honest “to a fault,” as they say. She’s dead, I mostly believe that, but we all pray, don’t we? To ourselves, if not to some provident Eye in the clouds.
In the doorframe, Mrs. Harkonnen is smiling, shining, with that innocence that we of the Slumber Corps love and abhor in her. With those wide-sky eyes, all blue, and a faith that precedes knowledge, Mrs. Harkonnen ushers me into her home. She says in a whisper, so as not to wake her baby daughter, “Come in, Trish. Whatever’s wrong, we’ll get to the bottom of it. I’m sure we can figure this out.”
The Whistle — Blower’s Hotline
The good news, or the mixed news, it might be fairer to say, is that I will not be performing this information-transfusion for the first time.
Last night, I called the hotline. Actually, I called the hotline about a hundred times. I couldn’t speak, and I couldn’t speak, I lost track of how many times I dropped the call, and then the seventieth or the eleven hundredth time that I dialed this hotline, for no reason I was able to discern, I heard myself begin.
After the phone clicked down, I woke up to what I’d done.
Maybe I will take that leave of absence now, after all.
I slumped, cored and cold, the way I used to feel after Drives. I sat watching the gray phone where it levitated on the wall, but no human from the Corps called me back; I wonder who picks up these messages.
All that dial tone I ingested must have come roaring out of me. To get the whole thing across properly, with all its nuances, I had to call back several times, resuming where I’d left off. When I finished, the scraped white moon was out. Near the end of my transmission, I heard myself, insanely, thanking the chittering machine for recording so much tape, and I felt a quakey relief, thinking that at last I was rid of it, that events would now rush to meet us, but at least I’d been honest, or as honest as I could be, starting with my first association with the Harkonnens. I leaned my head against the wall, listening to the droning silence. I exhausted myself with speculations about whether I’d set the wrong or the right outcome in motion. Unsurprisingly, last night I couldn’t sleep. I wondered what, if anything, would happen as a result of the phone call—if even now some dream or nightmare was massing into our future, gathering like weather, becoming real. But I also thought, with the sly old happiness, No matter what tomorrow brings, you can be sure of at least one thing, Edgewater: tonight you’ve given Dori’s story to a stranger.
About the Author
Photo: Michael Lionstar
Karen Russell is the author of Swamplandia!, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and two collections of short stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a New York Times bestseller, and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. She is the recipient of a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, and she was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40,” The National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35,” and Granta’s “Best of Young American Novelists.” She lives in New York City.