Sleep Donation by Karen Russell

Author:Karen Russell [Russell, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

DONOR Y

Four a.m., the morning after Ward Seven.

Can’t sleep. Can’t sink into sleep.

My diet of zeros doesn’t seem to be working anymore.

Something else to hate you for, Donor Y.

BABY A

I want to learn Baby A’s name.

This desire has been growing in me for days now, spiking with the Donor Y crisis, and tonight I feel crazed with it—actually, feverish. Donors under the age of eighteen are assigned a letter at random, an “Alpha-Nym,” by our system. Most parents slip up at some point, blurt out their child’s full name. Not the Harkonnens. “Baby A,” they say smoothly, tucking her identity into this blanket. Mrs. Harkonnen may well have told me her daughter’s name at our first meeting in the grocery store parking lot, but I didn’t know to pay attention back then.

As crazy as it sounds, I keep feeling that if I knew her true name, I could protect her better. I’ve heard strangers refer to “Baby A” as if she is some inorganic compound, a designer sleep drug. All night, people dial the hotline and beg me to get them wait-listed for the “Baby A cure.” Anyone in America who has a bad dream calls in, which means the phones never stop ringing. I go hoarse shouting down their doubts: “No,” I say, “the helmet is safe, the tubes are sterilized. No, there is zero chance that you will contaminate the nation’s sleep supply, as he did.” I promise my recruits that the Donor Y crisis has precipitated important policy changes, exhaustive safety rubrics for the Sleep Vans, expensive rounds of testing for nightmare prions. All this public paranoia, I say, obscures the statistics: sleep donation has never been safer.

I don’t feel great about this, myself.

“How do we really know it’s safe for these people to donate?” I ask Jim and Rudy.

“We don’t know.”

“We can’t know.”

“That kind of epistemic murk is unavoidable, Edgewater.”

“Error, of course, is inevitable in some proportion of the cases.”

“We should describe the Donor Y tragedy as a freakish exception—which it is.”

“But it’s unrealistic to expect perfection from any human institution, Trish.”

“And from any human, period.”

“You know this.”

Boy, do I.

“We need to accept the world as it is, honey, not as we wish it to be,” Jim says, with a self-regarding puff on the wish and the be. Jim, I’m told, was a theater major at his Midwestern college. He often projects these Page-a-Day aphorisms from his diaphragm, as if he were still auditioning to be Jean Valjean in Les Mis.

But the need is quantifiable, uncontestable, and growing. People are drowning in light, fully awake. Children are propped on pillows, foaming soft sounds, singing a terrible music without words. We show videos of them at drives, which get incredible sleep-yields. Moms who see it are ready to strip down in the nearest Sleep Van and give us five years of sleep on the spot. Some of the youngest orexins became insomniacs at age two; they have no memories of sleeping. Cued by some off-screen producer,

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