The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

  Five now lie sick.

  For now, they are alive, but the future is receding farther from them every second, time itself rushing forward without them.

  On this afternoon, a minister arrives in Rebecca’s room. He and her family hold her hands in theirs, while the sound of prayer floats through the room. A laying on of hands.

  Does she feel it in a dream, the pressure of their palms on her shoulders, her forehead? Can she sense their hopes in that touch? Who can say? She sleeps right through it all.

  No one knows then that something else, too, more ordinary, is also brewing in Rebecca’s body, an invader of a different sort. Only later will anyone discover that a secret cluster of cells is already floating free inside her—too small yet to be called an embryo, but multiplying quickly—as it prepares to anchor in her womb.

  9.

  In an earlier time, they would have burned everything they owned, but chemicals now do the cleansing work of fire. Bleach: the usual smells of the dorm must have survived somewhere beneath it, all that cologne and the popcorn, the spilled beer and the cigarettes, but Mei can smell only this one thing from her room, the bleach, as clear and harsh as fluorescence.

  With the bleach come new rules for everyone on Mei’s floor. No leaving. This is the main thing. Just for now, they say, just to be safe. No visitors, either. And no class.

  No work, either. The dean Mei babysits for sounds annoyed on the phone. Who will watch her daughter? Mei is not explaining this right. She is not being clear. This dean makes her nervous, with her big house and her shelves full of books, and it seems somehow embarrassing to mention the sickness. When she tries again, the dean softens: Wait, you live on that floor?

  * * *

  —

  Mei can tell that the college is not sure what to do. An uneasy feeling: to discover that the adults are no more prepared than the kids are.

  No one says where the students from the other floors will go. But Mei can see what is happening from her window. They stream from the dorm like ants, the unexposed, ten floors down, burdened by huge loads. All day, the skid of suitcases on pavement. All day, the distant voices drifting in through the screens, a line of buses waiting at the curb. It is what it looks like: an evacuation.

  Some of those leaving look up at the tenth floor as they go, but most keep their heads low, their eyes averted, as if what is happening up on that floor is too intimate for the others to see.

  No one is using the word quarantine, but Mei looks it up. From the Italian, quaranta giorni, forty days. Forty days: the period that ships were once required to wait before entering the port of Venice—time enough, they hoped, for a contagious disease to burn itself out.

  * * *

  —

  On the first day of the confinement, two men from the dining hall bring a cart full of sandwiches for dinner. They wear white paper masks, these men, their voices muffled like surgeons’, and Mei can tell what they’re thinking, from the way the one holds the elevator while the other sets the boxes on the carpet, as if they have planned this maneuver in advance: how to spend the fewest possible seconds in contaminated air.

  Already the floor feels smaller than before, too small. And it seems to Mei that the kids are multiplying. Their hands on the doorknobs. Their fingers flicking the light switches. Their bare feet on the carpet, their spit in the sinks, stray hairs floating everywhere in the air.

  It is hard to feel hungry. Mei concentrates on the chewing, the cold lettuce of the sandwich against her teeth, while the other girls chat and complain.

  It obsesses them immediately: what they cannot do and whom they cannot see. “It would be easier if we were used to being apart,” says one girl, whose boyfriend, she is saying, lives in a different dorm.

  Already the days seem longer than before, only twenty-four hours deep, as if the passage of time requires some movement through space and here they all are, stopped in one place.

  Mei’s mother calls again.

  “You’re calling too much,” says Mei. She covers her mouth while she chews, as if there is anyone with her to see.

  “I’m just worried,” says her mother. “I’m so worried.”

  But her voice, like that, so urgent, so thin, brings the opposite of comfort, like the constant touching of a tooth when it’s sore.

  “I’m fine,” says Mei.

  She is aware of her voice as she speaks, the way it echoes against the bare walls, as if amplified. She’s been allowed to bring only one bag from her old room to this one; the old room, where Kara got sick, is now sealed shut with yellow tape. There is nothing here to soften the sound, those lonely acoustics of an empty room.

  “Do they know yet what it is?” her mother asks again.

  Out in the hall, Mei can hear one of the boys, a runner, jogging from one end of the floor to the other, again and again, an improvised track. Weird Matthew, the others call him, to distinguish him from the other Matthew. But running seems as good a use of time as any other.

  “I told you,” says Mei. “I don’t know.”

  She can hear her mother breathing into the phone.

  “I love you,” says her mother, but there is a stiffness to it. They are not the kind of family who says it out loud. The words feel extreme between them, a registering of danger more than tenderness.

  “Me too,” says Mei.

  After that, she listens for a while to the sound of the boy running in the hall. He is training for a marathon, she overheard him say once. He likes to run barefoot, like the Kenyans, he says, like the ancient Greeks, like humans were meant to do. Now his footsteps land on the carpet. There’s a moment’s shadow each time he passes her door, coming close, fading, then coming back again, like the intermittent ticking of a clock.

  * * *

  —

  On the second day of the quarantine, a message appears in the parking lot, ten floors down from the window of the study lounge. In giant white letters, made of chalk or flour, someone has spelled out the name of a girl, Ayanna, and something else, too, a code, maybe, or an abbreviation, stark and bright against the asphalt. A boy is squinting in the sunshine nearby, waiting for his work to be seen.

  Mei can feel the hours in those letters, the planning and the labor, the bending of that boy’s back. No back has ever bent that way for Mei.

  “What a waste of time,” says Weird Matthew, the runner. He is standing at the window, too, barefoot and sweaty, gulping water from a thermos. “Right?” he says.

  A nearby window scrapes open in its frame. Ayanna in pajamas, the girl from Barbados, is waving wildly at the boy. Ayanna in V-necks and jeans, pink toenails in flip-flops, white teeth and smooth skin, that simple, effortless beauty. The sweet, appealing lilt of her accent. All the boys are in love with her, and maybe so are the girls, who forgive her for her loveliness—because what makes her so radiant is not only her looks but her warmth, the plain kindness that seems to glow from her cheeks. She is the only girl who is friendly to Mei in the hall.

  When he sees Ayanna, the boy in the parking lot stands up and waves back with two hands, like a man in need of rescue by a helicopter. Ayanna shouts something down to him, but he can’t hear it. He cups his hand to his ear. Soon they are talking on their phones instead but still waving, as if two tin cans have been strung between them.

  Mei watches them from the window until a sadness comes into her, as quick as adrenaline. She closes the curtains.

  She calls her old friend Katrina. She should have gone to Berkeley, with Katrina, she sees now. Or else CalArts, like she wanted to, where she could have majored in what she really wanted to: drawing or painting or both. What a bummer, Katrina says, when Mei tells her about Kara and the others, and Mei feels right then that her old friend is floating away. It doesn’t sound like her, this word, bummer. Everyone is floating away.

  * * *

  —<
br />
  That same day, two new doctors arrive on the floor. One is some kind of specialist, in from the East Coast. She wears green scrubs and green gloves and a thick, cream-colored mask that looks fresh from a package, crisp and clean.

  She studies their eyes. She looks at their throats. She listens to the beating of their hearts. She does not seem at all relieved by the fact that everyone on the floor has woken up well.

  “The incubation period could be long,” she says, as if their bodies are instruments for the measurement of time, which, in a way, they are. “The longer it takes to present itself,” she says, “the farther it could spread.”

  When it is Mei’s turn to be examined, the doctor hands her a mask like her own, elastic loops dangling.

  “From now on,” she says, “wear this at all times.” Her manner is lab-like, as if she is handling hazardous chemicals instead of people.

  Mei is watching her face the way she watches flight attendants during turbulence: if they keep pouring the coffee, she knows things are fine—some kinds of tumult frighten only the unaccustomed or the untrained. But this doctor’s face, so tense and so tight, suggests that expertise is having the opposite effect.

  “And there should be no physical contact of any kind,” says the doctor. “No kissing,” she adds. “And no sex.”

  A heat comes into Mei’s cheeks. Sometimes she still feels like a child.

  A second doctor follows the first, a different kind, a psychiatrist, maybe, or something like it.

  This doctor asks questions about Kara’s mood before she died. “Do you know,” she says, “if your roommate had recently received any upsetting news?”

  “I didn’t know her very well,” says Mei.

  “Did she ever express any dark thoughts?”

  “Not to me,” says Mei.

  And what about the others? this doctor wants to know.

  Mei shakes her head.

  “I didn’t know them either,” Mei says.

  * * *

  —

  After that, they all look more like patients than before, with masks stretched tight across their faces. The paper feels hot against Mei’s cheeks. You can feel yourself breathing, and it’s hard not to think about it, how precarious that rhythm, as if those masks have made the sickness more likely, instead of less.

  Meanwhile, a new affliction begins to spread in the dorm—a boredom like Mei has never known.

  She spends a long time staring out the window of the study lounge, at the lake shimmering in the distance as it shrinks away in the sun. The receding water has left the sand littered with fragments of a hundred lost things: sailboats from earlier decades, sunken for years, an ancient truck, rusted down to a silhouette. There is something suddenly unsettling about this landscape, which seemed so romantic to her before, how the woods that line the slopes around the lake are diseased and dried out, and how the trees stay standing long after death, branches blackened by fire or their trunks eaten away from the inside by beetles, as her biology professor has explained. But they go on standing, like headstones.

  She thinks suddenly of Kara, of the girl’s body—her bones. How ludicrous it seems in this time that the troubles of a body can still shut off a mind.

  “What are you looking at?” asks one of the other girls, after a while, as if Mei has found some secret diversion that should be shared and not hoarded.

  “Nothing,” says Mei.

  She watches, bit by bit, as a wind rises and blows the chalk letters of Ayanna’s name all away.

  This is when a boy’s voice floats up behind her.

  “Imagine a runaway train,” he says. That’s it—no other introduction.

  “What?” she says.

  It’s Matthew, Weird Matthew, in red running shorts, bare feet. His mask is hanging lopsided on his face.

  “Imagine there are five people tied to the tracks,” he says.

  “Oh God,” says the other girl in the study lounge. “Not this stupid train thing again.”

  Mei has seen it from a distance, an odd quickness in the way this boy speaks, the way he moves, as if his body must run every day in order, sometimes, to be still.

  “The train is going straight for the people,” he says.

  He’s still sweaty from all his running in the hall. She can see it in the curls of his hair, dark and clumped, and in the spots on his shirt. She can smell it.

  “Why are they tied to the tracks?” she asks.

  “That’s not the point,” he says. He is staring at her while he talks. She can’t quite look into his eyes. She notices then that there are holes in the armpits of his shirt.

  “Now imagine there’s a lever near the tracks,” he says. “If you pull that lever, you can save the people by diverting the train to another track.”

  But here is the catch: someone is tied to the other track, too.

  “If you flip the switch,” he says, “you save five people. But you kill one.”

  Matthew’s whole body is vibrating, as if with a kind of energy he cannot contain. It’s coming out in this way: a stream of words to a girl he’s never spoken to before.

  “Do you pull the lever?” he wants to know.

  It feels good to sink into a problem so distant. This might already be the longest conversation Mei has ever had on this floor.

  “Do I know the people?” she asks.

  The question seems important, but Matthew shakes his head like it isn’t, like it isn’t important at all.

  “I guess I’d have to flip the switch,” she says.

  “Right?” he says. He looks like her answer—this agreement—has given him some kind of release.

  A commotion is suddenly rising in the hall. The nurses have arrived to take their temperatures again.

  Matthew keeps talking.

  “But what if there’s no lever?” he says. “What if the only way to stop the train is by throwing something heavy onto the tracks? And what if the only heavy thing that’s nearby is a really fat man?”

  She can see where this is going.

  “Do you push the man onto the tracks?” he asks.

  This one is easy.

  “No,” she says. “No way.”

  “But isn’t it the same as pushing the lever?” he says. “Either way, you’re killing one person to save five.”

  “I don’t think it’s the same at all,” says Mei.

  One of the nurses rushes into the study lounge: “Hey,” she says through her mask, her green scrubs swishing as she walks, her green-gloved finger wagging. “That’s too close, you two. Five feet apart at all times.”

  Mei steps back but Matthew stays where he is, as if he hasn’t heard her or he doesn’t care.

  * * *

  —

  The other kids lie around all day in the halls, waiting for something to happen, to change, or at least for the next meal to come. After only a few days, they have turned sleepy and sluggish, but who can say what is causing it: the sickness or the stillness?

  They talk endlessly of the weather. The sky is enormous, and the sun so appealing, and the leaves translucent in the afternoon light. They pop the screens from the windows, no matter the flies. They hang their arms out over the sills, just for the feel of the outdoors on their skin.

  Mei can imagine what it must look like from the outside, all those heads in the windows, like victims of a fire. But then again, there’s no need to imagine it—two news vans have set up in the parking lot and are showing the footage live on national television. Kids crowd around their flat-screens to see. That’s us, they say, pointing. That’s us. We’re on TV.

  But the excitement does not last. The boredom returns faster every time. How swiftly it comes over them, the feeling that this containment will never end.

  On the third day, one of the boys finally breaks the monot
ony. It is the guitarist, this time, Drunk Todd, they call him. He is a late sleeper anyway. No one notices until noon.

  They can hear him breathing from the stretcher as he floats down the hall on his back, those paramedics like rowers, and his eyelids as pink as a child’s. He is the first to leave the floor in three days.

  The others take the news quietly this time, as if they have lived their whole lives with this kind of peril. They are seventeen or they are eighteen, but some skills come fast, like a universal grammar, just waiting to be put to use.

  * * *

  —

  The study lounge that same afternoon: Mei is reading in there when Ayanna puts her head down on the table. It is just the two of them in the room, that quiet camaraderie of two readers in one space. And it is such a subtle thing, the way Ayanna sets her book down beside her, taking time to mark her place, the way she rests her head on her arms, slowly, carefully. There is no fainting. No collapse. Her mask remains in place, white and neat on her face.

  “Are you okay?” asks Mei, from across the room, her heart beginning to pound.

  It seems such a violation to wake someone you barely know. Mei touches her shoulder. She whispers her name. A square of sunlight shines on Ayanna’s back.

  “Are you okay?” Mei asks again. This is when Ayanna mumbles reassuringly. She nods slightly. She does. It is the nod that Mei will remember, and the relief.

  Mei goes back to her chair by the window.

  The door to the study lounge swings open. It’s Matthew. She is aware of a brief burst of gladness at the sight of him, this strange boy. Maybe he has another question for her. Maybe he wants to know what she thinks.