The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

  To those who believe in the fixed meanings of dreams, the loss of teeth is significant, symbolic of anxiety or fear. They would say that the dream presaged what will happen in the morning and maybe everything that happens after that. But he is always trying to lure his students away from those kinds of readings, asking them to be more expansive in their thinking, less obvious, less easy, more true. All they want are the answers, those kids, a grand order of things, as if every story were only code for something else.

  * * *

  —

  He is awake at the time of the accident, as he will later tell the police, in bed but not asleep. The baby’s breathing is slow and steady in her crib, and Annie lies beside him, one bare leg stretched out on the sheet.

  Six in the morning, everything quiet, that earliest, faintest light.

  Into this silence there comes a sudden boom, as loud as thunder but nearer. It rattles the windows in their frames. Some sounds trigger a kind of vision. An image comes to mind.

  “What was that?” says Annie, sitting up fast in the dimness. He can tell she isn’t sure whether she dreamed it or really heard it. Car alarms are ringing outside.

  He reaches for the light, but no light comes. The power is out. His hands are shaking. Grace begins to cry.

  He goes to the window in his boxers. Something has happened across the street, where the nurse lives. It is hard to see through the smoke.

  “What is it?” Annie asks again.

  Through the drifts of smoke, he can see that the house no longer stands. The walls have caved in, leaving a pile of blackened wood in which small fires burn. The lawn is scattered with debris.

  “It’s the house across the street,” he says. “It looks like there was some kind of explosion.”

  Already, neighbors are coming out into the street, hands over their mouths, a few running toward the lot with garden hoses, water streaming. In the air, scraps of paper are fluttering away in the breeze.

  “An explosion?” says Annie.

  The utility pole on the corner has snapped. Electrical wires are hanging like garland in the trees. They hear sirens in the distance.

  Later, while the firefighters do what they can, and the police keep the people away, Ben and Annie stand around with the other neighbors in bathrobes, Ben with the baby in his arms, her eyes wide and serious, as if she, too, senses the mood. The sun is rising around them, while every dog on the street is barking and speculation is spreading through the crowd. A faulty hot water heater, maybe, or a stove left on too long. “That could do it,” says one of the older men. “A gas stove left on for many hours.”

  Everyone hopes that the nurse was not at home. Maybe she was at work, they say, the overnight shift. But they can all see her car right there in the driveway, the windshield cracked and smudged black.

  “First those college kids getting sick,” says one of the older women. “And now this.”

  Some try to look for luck in the situation: “At least the fire didn’t spread to the other houses,” they are saying, the way people sometimes do. There is a comfort in thinking up something worse than what is.

  Through all of this, the two girls next door stay inside. Ben can see them up in the widow’s walk, watching the street from above, their faces faintly red from the flashing of the fire trucks across the street.

  At the same time, their father is doing some kind of work on the exterior of the house. He is standing up on a ladder, thick beard, no shirt, the sound of hammer and nail.

  Annie is the first to notice him. “My God,” she says. “I think he’s boarding up the windows.”

  He looks like a man at sea up there, closing the hatches of a ship, as if preparing for a storm that no one else can see.

  12.

  The tenth victim is found in his bed with the eleventh: two boys, roommates, sleeping secretly on one twin mattress. These boys in their boxers, long-limbed and pale, who pretended so much interest in the girls of the tenth floor, now sleep through the lesson made so instantly clear to the others: how disease sometimes exposes what is otherwise hidden. How carelessly it reveals a person’s private self.

  The twelfth is discovered slumped in one of the showers, warm water streaming over her bare skin. Her body is blocking the drain, and this is what the others notice first, a tide of water pooling on the carpet in the hall. She is lucky, they say, that she didn’t drown in that sleep. But as she is carried away, under cover of a towel, she does not look lucky. Her dark hair drips down the hall as she sleeps, fingers pruned, the checked pattern of the bathroom tile imprinted on the pale skin of her thigh.

  But the girls—the ones who are left—notice something else about her, too, a small flickering of her eyelids. The idea spreads quickly: like the others, she is dreaming. It seems important, this dreaming, as if these girls live in some other time, when what you saw in your sleep could still be taken for some kind of truth.

  * * *

  —

  By now, experts in contagious disease have begun to fill the rooms of the bed-and-breakfasts of Santa Lora.

  These are scientists who have floated down the Congo to reach villages hot with hemorrhagic fever or swabbed the saliva of bats in the remotest caves of southern China. They have suffered their own bouts of malaria while finishing their doctorates in the jungles of Zaire, and they know how it feels to breathe like an astronaut in a full-body biohazard suit. It is with some surprise that these travelers now turn their attention to a patch of earth they have not been watching, the soft belly of America, the small town of Santa Lora, California, population 12,106.

  They do not, these experts, believe the cause of the sickness could be psychological.

  Instead they suspect meningitis, which is not so rare a flower in the halls of college dormitories, where it travels in kisses and the steam of hot showers. Or encephalitis lethargica, another strange sleeping sickness that haunted the early twentieth century. But the symptoms don’t quite fit.

  It isn’t bird flu or swine flu or SARS. It is not mononucleosis.

  What they do know is that this sickness is unusually contagious, like measles: you can catch measles if you walk through a room ten minutes after an infected person has coughed a single cough.

  Meanwhile, the afflicted go on sleeping a deep and steady sleep, their bodies now fed by plastic tubes taped into their noses, their skin kept clean by the gloved hands of strangers.

  No one wants to say so right away, but already an idea is creeping into the minds of some of these scientists, like a premonition coming true: this sickness might be something new.

  13.

  On the twelfth day, Halloween, the weather finally turns, the first rain in three months. Big fat drops in the woods, a murmur in the trees, the unfamiliar smell of it soaking the pavement. And the California ground—it’s too dry to absorb it.

  So rare is rain that it seems somehow ominous to Sara as she watches it from the widow’s walk of their house, the way it pools in that nurse’s bathtub across the street, which stands oddly intact amid the wreckage of the explosion, exposed to the air and the sky, the yellow caution tape glistening in the wind.

  Sara has added to her worries this new one: a house can spontaneously blow up. “That nurse probably had the sickness,” her father keeps saying. She and Libby watched the firefighters pull her body, beneath a sheet, from what was left of the house. “She probably had the stove on when she fell asleep.”

  But no one else is talking about the sickness.

  Outside, life on the street flows on. A woman in a blue windbreaker is walking her poodle. The man next door, the one with the baby, is dragging his trash cans across the driveway. Sara’s school bus has already drifted past her window without her, packed with kids in costumes, like any other Halloween.

  “Put this pot up in your room,” says her father, in the red flannel shirt he’s been wear
ing for three days, his old jeans, no shoes. Their house is full of leaks.

  In their bedroom, Libby is hunched over the floor. A wet spot is blooming in the ceiling above her head. She slides the pot beneath the leak.

  “It’s dripping all over your script,” says Libby.

  Already the pages of Our Town are sticking together with rain, the yellow highlighter bleeding across the front page. Sara had been spending her lunch periods at rehearsal instead of sitting alone on the quad.

  Libby helps her spread the pages of the script out to dry.

  The phone begins to ring

  A face comes into Sara’s mind: Akil. But it’s stupid to think of him calling her now. It is ten in the morning on a Tuesday. She knows right where Akil will be—she can see him without being there: chewing on his pencil in pre-algebra, one foot bouncing on the carpet beneath his desk, three rows over from hers, always finished with his work before anyone else.

  The phone rings again. She answers it.

  “Is this Sara?” says a woman on the line. Voices like this make her nervous. That crispness.

  “Who’s calling?” she says.

  Libby is watching her from the doorway, mouthing to her: Who is it?

  “Is your mother or father at home?” says the voice on the phone. It’s the attendance office from school.

  “Dad,” she calls. “You forgot to call the school.”

  She can feel it like a heartbeat, the distant buzz of the school bell ringing through the day. She senses her shadow self moving through her school hours: the daily quizzes in pre-algebra, the shouting in the cafeteria line, the hiding out in the bathroom during the break between classes. Three rehearsals of Our Town have taken place without her.

  It bothers her to think of Amelia, the understudy, speaking the lines that Sara has memorized. “Her?” Amelia had said when they found out Sara had gotten the part. “Seriously?” she said out loud to her friends. A terrible thought had flashed in Sara’s mind at that moment—that Mrs. Campbell might have given Sara the part because she felt sorry for her.

  Downstairs, she can hear her father talking to the woman on the phone.

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you,” he says.

  He is not allowed on campus anymore because of a misunderstanding the year before. It’s not illegal to carry a gun, he always says, but it’s not allowed on school grounds. Mrs. Chu noticed it beneath his coat during a parent-teacher conference. From the slip of that gun into her teacher’s view grew a sequence of visits from a social worker.

  “You should all watch out,” her father is saying now to the woman on the phone, his voice louder than before. “You’re going to be lucky if you survive this thing.”

  After that, Sara hears the phone click into its cradle.

  “No one in this town knows a goddamn thing about what’s coming,” he says to himself or maybe to the girls. His mind is like that: always mired in a terrible future.

  * * *

  —

  He has laid them out like laundry: the three gas masks that usually hang in the basement. One for each of them—Sara, Libby, and their father. They haven’t left the house in a week.

  A germ, their father has told them, can float free in the air. It could be anywhere. All you have to do is breathe it in.

  “What if this is like last time?” Libby whispers to Sara.

  Last time: the solar flares, six months earlier. Those flares, their father said, would cause a geomagnetic storm that would knock out power all over the world for weeks or months, or maybe forever, and no one knew about it, he said, because the media was under some kind of gag order, which is a thing that happens all the time in this country, and if you don’t believe that, you’re just being naïve. He had kept the girls home on that day, in case of violence or looting. Sara was too scared to eat, as they waited for the radio to snap silent, for the auroras to streak the California sky. But the lightbulbs went on glowing, steady as stars, and the sky kept clear and quiet. “We got lucky today,” their father finally said, as they climbed the stairs to their bedrooms that night, the danger apparently past. “But it’s good to be cautious.”

  * * *

  —

  They are eating peanut butter sandwiches at the kitchen table when they hear a knock at the door.

  “Don’t open it,” says their father, his chair scraping hard on the linoleum. He reaches for his gas mask. They’ve had them for a while, these masks, but there has never been a reason to wear them. Hers and Libby’s are smaller than his, specially made for kids, and he let the girls decorate them, so that their names shine in puffy paint, gold glitter against the dark green rubber of the masks.

  “Get upstairs,” he says to the girls. The knock comes again, louder this time.

  They watch from the stairs as their father fits the mask to his face, tightening the straps before getting close to the door.

  He opens it, but only a crack, the chain snapping taut across the opening. Sara feels a rush of embarrassment for her father in that mask, the way the strands of his beard hang below it, like a plant, overgrown. These are their private preparations on view to a stranger.

  On the doorstep, it turns out, is a policeman, and Sara is sure she sees the future in his uniform: he will take her father away.

  “Is everything okay in here?” says the policeman.

  From the bedroom window, the girls can see the top of his hat, his tan shirt spotted with rain, his car parked out front.

  A strange sound is coming from the house next door, drowning out what her father is saying to him. Some kind of sawing. Sara looks out the window—it’s the professor, on his porch, cutting off the top of a pumpkin.

  Her father’s voice is rising now, echoey through the mask: “I didn’t threaten anyone,” he says to the policeman.

  “Well,” says the policeman, his words slow and careful, a pair of handcuffs clinking on his belt. “This woman from the school felt concerned by what you said.”

  The sawing next door slows to a stop. The professor is watching the policeman. His wife is out there, too, with the baby. Stop staring, Sara wants to say.

  “This is bullshit,” says her father, and Sara wishes she could go down there and calm him, drain all that sharpness from his voice. He does things a hard way when usually there are easier ways. But she could translate, maybe, like the children of immigrants, explain what he really means. “I was trying to warn her,” he says. “Do you even know what’s going on?”

  The policeman nods. His face is as calm as snow. Yes, he says, he is aware of the situation at the college.

  Libby picks at the wallpaper while they listen. You can see the different layers of it, like tree rings, the velvety green paisley from when this house was new, and then all the later sheets on top of that, each one less ornate than the last, their family’s money fading away through the years, all those layers leading somehow down to this: a policeman standing on their doorstep and saying these words: “Are your children here? I’d like to speak with them, too.”

  “You don’t have any right,” says her father.

  But she and Libby are already peeking down the stairs.

  “Are you girls okay in here?” the policeman calls when he sees them.

  “We’re fine,” says Libby.

  “Yeah,” says Sara. “We’re fine.”

  The rain is getting heavy, the ringing of drips in the pots around the house.

  “You should be careful what you say to people,” says the policeman. A sudden surge of hope comes to Sara. “Okay?” he says.

  What a relief it is to see the slow turn of that man’s shoulder, and then the back of his uniform as he walks across the yard in the rain, the beautiful rumble of his engine starting up.

  And then her father is back inside, the door locked again, his gas mask lying flat on the table, his
lungs breathing the safe air of the house.

  * * *

  —

  At dusk, like fireflies, the trick-or-treaters start to fill the sidewalks, first the younger ones, pressed into parkas and trailed by their parents, wet leaves clinging to shoes and capes, and then the older ones, quick as burglars, pillowcases slung over their shoulders.

  “Jesus,” says their father, looking out through the boards on the windows. “This thing is going to spread through the whole town tonight.”

  She can almost picture it as it happens, the disease jumping from one person to the next, through the grazing of hands in a candy bowl. She once watched a show about a murder, where the police used a special kind of light to make invisible traces of blood glow green in the dark. A seemingly clean room proved suddenly streaked. She pictures the sickness like that, too, a trail of green snaking through the town.

  When their doorbell rings, there’s no question of answering it. “They’ll go away,” says their father. “Turn out those lights.”

  Anyway, they have no candy to give.

  From her bedroom window, Sara can see two boys from her class on her porch. They are dressed like skeletons, one with a knife sticking out of his chest. The boys always dress up like that, she has learned, as if they don’t know that the scariest things are invisible.

  If she and Libby had been allowed to go trick-or-treating this year, they would have gone as they always do, as fancy ladies from another time, wearing their relatives’ dresses from the attic, pinned up to fit them, the hems dirtier every year.

  The boys ring the bell again. Sara hopes they don’t know that this is where she lives. Finally, the boys give up and move on to the new neighbors’ house, where two jack-o’-lanterns glow against the night and where the front door swings open again and again, the woman standing in the doorway with the baby in her arms—they’ve dressed her up as a pumpkin.