The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

Also this: it is spreading.

  “Have people died?” Libby asks. She is the calm one, the balm, easy with a faith in the goodness of things. She isn’t quick to get scared, but here she is, scared.

  “Listen to me,” says their father, squeezing their shoulders hard, too hard. They step back. “I don’t want you girls going outside,” he says. “Not for a few days, at least. Okay? We’re all going to stay right here in the house.”

  Then he stands up fast, like he’s just remembered something else. He rushes down the stairs to the basement. They can hear him down there, an urgent sorting and shuffling.

  “What about school?” Libby whispers, and Sara feels suddenly much older than her sister, just the year but it matters, and she can hear it, the difference, in that question. School is the least of their worries. Whatever needs doing, Sara thinks, it will be Sara, and not her sister, who will do it.

  Their father returns to the kitchen with three white pills in his hand.

  “Take this,” he says, dropping one into Sara’s hand. He goes to the counter to cut Libby’s in half. She can’t swallow big pills.

  “What are they?” asks Sara.

  “Antibiotics,” he says. “Now go to bed.”

  * * *

  —

  Bedtime: they can hear the mice moving in the attic. The sounds upset the kittens, who wander the floor in circles, heads turned up to the ceiling, white throats exposed as they cry.

  The sounds upset the girls, too.

  “Dad,” they call down from their bedroom.

  No answer. They can hear the clicks of his fingers on a keyboard, the beep and shudder of their old computer connecting to the Internet.

  If you bang on the ceiling with the butt of a broomstick, the mice quiet down for a while. This is their father’s trick, and you can see the proof of it on the ceiling, the marks of the broomstick, moons and half-moons, stamped into the plaster from all those nights before this one, a time-lapse map of a small migration, from one side of the room to the other.

  “Dad,” Libby calls again. “Dad, come up here.”

  Sara can see him without looking, his eyes in the blue light of that ancient monitor, the waiting and the waiting as webpages load through the telephone line.

  “What is it?” he says finally, his voice far away.

  “The mice,” the girls shout together.

  In the silence that follows, Sara can picture his face, going tight with the effort of patience.

  “You’re just going to have to live with it for tonight,” he says.

  It’s a scratching sound, like the scrape of a fingernail digging into a wall, like a tiny prisoner, trapped somewhere in the house, as if a thousand days of scratching will finally break him out.

  “Let’s leave the lights on,” says Libby. She is curled beneath a yellow quilt, handmade—by their mother, maybe, or maybe not. They are always on the lookout for things that might have been hers.

  Most of what they do know comes from a newspaper article they once found folded in their father’s desk drawer: one morning in June, a jogger came across a three-year-old girl, crying in the front yard of a house. An even younger girl was standing in the doorway, her diaper overfull. Sara has memorized every detail: how this jogger found an uneaten lunch in the kitchen, macaroni and cheese in three bowls, and a woman lying unconscious on the floor. Asthma is the one thing Sara knows for sure that she has inherited from her mother.

  They stay awake a long time on this night, listening to the workings of the mice. Sometimes a big fear can magnify the smaller ones.

  Soon the morning will come, but they will not get dressed for school. They will not walk to the bus stop. When their teachers call attendance, no one will answer to their names. Sara will not speak her lines in the dress rehearsal for Our Town, or practice—in that last scene—taking Akil’s arm in hers and walking off the stage.

  Sara is used to not sleeping. She is a dreamer of bad dreams, dreams that keep her mind moving for hours—an afterglow. But it’s weird to see her sister awake, too, so late. Libby is staring at the ceiling, eyes wide.

  Something needs to be said in that room, but there is no one to say it. Sara finally does it herself.

  “Don’t worry,” she says to her sister. Her voice doesn’t feel like her voice, the tremor that comes before a lie: “It’ll be okay,” she says. “I think everything’s going to be fine.”

  6.

  Infectious disease is not the only thing that can spread. On the fifth day, a specialist in psychiatric disorders is called in from Los Angeles.

  She has seen this kind of thing before—how one girl can sometimes feel the feelings of another, a different kind of contagion, the way a yawn sometimes jumps from mouth to mouth. A certain kind of empathy. A hundred cheerleaders once fainted this way on a football field in Dallas—and only one of them turned out to be ill.

  It’s a two-hour drive from the neuropsychiatric hospital downtown, in her five-year-old Volvo, Goldfish crumbs crunched into the leather, her daughter’s Legos rolling back and forth across the backseat.

  She is Catherine to her colleagues, Katie to her family, Dr. Cohen when she walks the halls of her locked ward.

  The city gives way to the suburbs as she drives toward Santa Lora, the suburbs to miles of lemon groves. A long succession of switchbacks finally delivers her up into the mountains and the shade of a thick pine forest.

  The radio stations fall away. Her cell phone goes silent. And then the road twists through forty more miles of uninterrupted woods.

  What a relief it is when a motel appears beside the road. But the windows are boarded up. A faded sign still advertises COLOR TVS.

  But finally, a lake glitters through the trees. The woods crack open. A campus comes into view, college kids spread out on lawns, the grass browned to the color of wheat. Santa Lora.

  The hospital, when she gets there, is no bigger than the motel.

  * * *

  —

  The patient is asleep on her back, one arm resting on her stomach. The room is dim. The blinds are drawn. Catherine knows from the chart that her name is Rebecca. She has been asleep for sixty hours.

  The girl’s mother—she must be the mother—is sitting beside the bed, her eyes bloodshot, overwide. Mothers: talking to the mothers is the worst part of her job.

  “Can I open these?” Catherine asks, but she does not wait for an answer. She pulls the cord, and sunlight fills the room.

  This mother seems relieved to have heard that this affliction might be psychological, as if the failings of the mind are any less destructive than those of the body.

  “You mean she might not have a real sickness?” says the mother.

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” says Catherine.

  The girl’s blood pressure, the internists have told her, is normal. Her pulse, too. It was the same with the first girl, they say, the one who died. No symptoms beyond the deep sleep. This girl looks as if the slightest noise might wake her, or the faintest feather of a touch.

  Catherine has seen patients rendered similarly lifeless by catatonic depression or by sudden traumatic news. When one’s life seems broken beyond repair, there remains one last move: a person can at least shut her eyes.

  Catherine has forgotten this girl’s name, but it feels too late to ask. “Does she have any history of anxiety?” she asks. “Or depression?”

  The mother shakes her head hard. But the parents, Catherine has learned, never know what is really going on.

  A Bible has been pressed into the crook of the girl’s left arm, as if its messages can be transmitted to the soul through the skin.

  A tiny sound comes from the girl’s mouth.

  The mother jumps up. “Rebecca?” she says.

  The girl’s eyelids begin to flutter.

  In a healthy human
being, Catherine knows, this motion of the eyes beneath the lids would indicate REM sleep, the state most conducive to dreaming. But Catherine cannot say for sure without tests what is happening inside this girl’s brain.

  She orders an MRI. She will be back in two days, she says.

  * * *

  —

  Catherine’s daughter is asleep by the time she gets back to Los Angeles, the babysitter reading on the couch. But that night, like every night for the past month, her daughter wakes screaming after midnight. Nightmares are common at her age.

  It takes a while to calm her.

  “Mama,” she whispers into Catherine’s ear, her cheeks lit by a night-light shaped like the moon. “I think there’s something wrong with my eyes.”

  “What do you mean?” she says.

  Her three-year-old arms are wrapped tight around Catherine’s neck.

  “When I close my eyes,” says her daughter, “I see something scary.”

  “Those are dreams,” says Catherine. “Like we talked about.”

  What a crazy thing to do, her own mother had said: to have a baby on her own—and on purpose. Every one of her days hums with the possibility that she might be doing it wrong.

  But also there is this: the secret pleasure in these minutes right here, that warm little body pressed into her chest, her hot breath on her neck, and the simplicity of the cure—a talk and a hug in the dark.

  “This time,” says her daughter, “I dreamed there were snakes coming out of my skin.”

  “Wow,” says Catherine. “That would scare me, too.”

  One of her patients used to see that same image, but while she was awake. On an MRI, the dreaming brain looks almost identical to the brain of a schizophrenic.

  It strikes her again, how many of a child’s fears are just rational responses to the facts of everyday experience.

  Two songs and a back rub—and then her daughter is asleep again.

  Catherine is back in her own bed when she hears a new message ping on her phone: a third girl from the same dorm floor has lost consciousness in Santa Lora.

  7.

  At sunrise, a professor of biology takes a walk in the woods of Santa Lora.

  His white hair is cut close to his head. He wears a ten-year-old jacket. Hiking boots. Nathaniel—that’s his name.

  No dog. No phone. Just a thermos full of coffee and an empty plastic bag.

  The sky is clear. The air is cool. The woods are ringing with birdsong: blue jays and Steller’s jays and chickadees.

  At a certain bend in the trail, a log has been carved into a bench. Here is where, a few hours from now, Nathaniel will bring his freshman biology seminar, to point out certain features and phenomena of trees: the intricate root structures of pines, how the bark beetle has worked with the drought to kill so many here, and then, the highlight, the zombie tree.

  He calls it that for the kids, this ancient stump. No trunk, no branches, no leaves, just a hollowed-out stump, and yet, somehow, this stump lives on. The bursts of green in the grain of its wood—chlorophyll—are proof of ongoing life, as if this remnant of a tree is at once alive and also dead. “How can that be?” the kids will want to know, or the bright ones will, the few really interested ones. He has been bringing his classes here for years. It comes as a surprise to most of them, that trees have certain ways of communicating with one another, that they send chemical messages through the air, and that they sometimes help their neighboring trees survive. “This stump’s relatives are keeping it alive,” he will say. “They’re delivering nutrients to its roots.”

  On this day, Nathaniel also comes across a familiar scattering of dark glass in this spot. Beer bottles. This is what he has brought the plastic bag for.

  He doesn’t blame the kids for the drinking. Or for wanting to do it out here in these woods—among the ponderosas and the manzanitas, the white firs and the cedars, instead of sitting around on the particleboard furniture of their dorm rooms. He gets it: the mountains, the stars. There is a privacy in wilderness. But the trash—come on, these kids are old enough to pick up their own trash.

  He is bending down to pick the glass from the dirt when he notices someone lying a few feet off the trail. A boy in an army jacket, dark jeans, tennis shoes, is nestled, facedown, in dried leaves.

  “Hey,” says Nathaniel. “Hey, kid.”

  He crouches down. He shakes the boy’s shoulder. The smell of alcohol is floating off the boy’s skin, accompanied by the loud snores of drunken sleep. He zips up the kid’s jacket. He turns the kid’s head to the side—at least he won’t choke if he vomits in his sleep.

  At home, he calls the police: “There’s a kid passed out drunk in the woods,” he says. He tells the operator exactly where to find the boy. “Probably just needs to sleep it off, but thought you guys should know.”

  * * *

  —

  A bowl of oatmeal. A glass of orange juice. The rattle of pills against plastic: high blood pressure. It might be stress-related—that’s what Nathaniel’s daughter thinks. Grief, she says over the phone from San Francisco, is a kind of stress. So is age, he argues. Decay comes eventually for every living thing.

  He opens a small notebook. Someone else might call it a journal, but not Nathaniel. It is slim and small in his hands, a line-a-day diary, the kind that stretches five years: one line reserved for each day. What is the point of that? Henry used to say to him. What can you say in one sentence? But it is a comfort to do it, a mysterious distillation, like gleaning salt from the sea, like the perfection of the simplest chemical equation. He writes quickly, without too much thought—that’s the point, the habit, the doing: “Went to see Henry yesterday. His cough seems better.”

  A shower, a sports coat, a pair of dark socks.

  His car keys are rattling in his hand and his lecture notes packed in his bag when he finally stops to look at his email.

  Now is when he opens a message marked urgent: a student in his freshman seminar, Kara Sanders, has died of an unknown illness, possibly contagious, and two other students are exhibiting the same symptoms. More details to follow.

  Her name brings no face to his mind. He feels a little guilty for it, but it is early in the year. He doesn’t know them yet. There is something familiar about it, though, the feeling of waste. Things are always happening to these kids: suicides, overdoses, drunk driving. It seems worse than it used to be. Is it worse?

  His inbox is filling up with a series of campus-wide alerts about precautions and symptoms. Classes are canceled, one says. Campus is closed until further notice. They tend to overreact to these things, to see a larger pattern where there isn’t one. A shooter on campus last fall turned out to be someone holding a water gun. The smell of gas is almost always just someone boiling water in a dorm kitchen. A freak case of meningitis is often the only one. But okay, he’s not in charge of these things, so he sends his students an email reiterating: today’s class is canceled.

  After that, the house is quiet, too quiet, the echoing scuff of his shoes on the wood. A brief disorientation: what to do, now, with the day.

  But soon he is standing quietly in line at the bakery, where no one is yet talking about the sickness, and then he’s driving the two miles to the nursing home, with an almond croissant wrapped up on the passenger seat for Henry.

  It has a certain grandness to it, this place, Restoration Villa, with its fountains and its porticos, and the way it overlooks the lake. It was once a sanitarium for the wealthy and tubercular, a history that in other circumstances would have appealed to Nathaniel, and to Henry. But a point comes in every visit when Nathaniel begins to read in the small movements of Henry’s face a coded message aimed at him: How could you leave me in this depressing fucking place?

  On this morning, nothing here will seem amiss: the metallic slide and click of the patients’ walkers in the hallway, the l
ow laughter of the nurses, the televisions running like ventilators in the other rooms. He will spend the morning reading to Henry from Henry’s favorite sections of The New York Times while Henry sucks on small pieces of the croissant like lozenges. In this way, Nathaniel will come across a small news story in the back pages, a little surprised, to see that this event in Santa Lora, like a pebble, is making traces in distant waters. People love a tragedy when it’s happening far away: an odd sickness has surfaced on a campus in a small California town.

  “She was one of my students,” he will say to Henry.

  And Henry will turn his head at this news. He will aim an unreadable expression at Nathaniel. His mind is like a school of fish, obscured by dark water. Once in a while, though, something tugs on the line.

  * * *

  —

  That night, Nathaniel’s daughter will call from San Francisco. He will let the call go to voicemail. “It’s me, Dad. I saw the news and just wanted to make sure you’re okay.” He will send her an email: “Yes, all fine here. Love, Dad.”

  8.

  Rebecca: still sleeping, five days deep, one arm strung with an IV of saline.

  If her eyes were to blink open on this particular day, she would find a heart monitor beside her and four white walls, and two baskets of flowers and one Mylar balloon, and the crosses, so many crosses, brought here by her parents, along with the Bible. In the chair beside the bed, she would find her mother, her mouth covered by a paper mask, her eyes tired, forehead wrinkled. She might hear the faint clicking of knitting needles as her mother busies her hands, or else the soft sound of her voice, so weary, on the phone: “No, not yet, they still don’t know what it is.”

  But on this day, like the others, Rebecca’s eyes stay shut.

  For days, her blood has been leaving her veins in vials, drawn again and again by the nurses—more tests. Doctors come and go with no news, while in other rooms, a few other mothers huddle over their own sleeping children, just watching them breathe, as if they are newborns again with lungs still new to the task. They look so healthy, these kids, their young bodies so sturdy in their beds, pink color in their cheeks, their chests rising and falling, as steady as metronomes.