The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

  * * *

  —

  Caleb arrives at the hospital still sleeping his wide-eyed sleep. He arches his back against the restraints of the stretcher. A doctor leans over him like an exorcist.

  In that somnambulant state, Caleb has been wheeled through a thicket of camera crews, who called out questions to the paramedics as they passed. The flailing of Caleb’s arms and that glazed stare on his face will soon travel the world via satellite.

  When finally his sleep turns quiet, he is placed in isolation with the others. He lies just a few feet away from Rebecca, whom he has known for only a few weeks but in whose body a small part of him has secretly remained.

  In the days since Rebecca arrived at the hospital, the doctors have come no closer to understanding her condition, but in another realm, more ordinary, a complex progress has been made: that cluster of cells has burrowed into the wall of her womb and is hooking itself up to her bloodstream. The nutrients that are right then sliding into her stomach through a tube in her nose are now feeding not one being but two. No bigger than a poppy seed, and yet, so much is already decided—the brown eyes, the freckles, the slightly crooked teeth. Her sense of adventure, maybe, her affinity for language. A girl. It is all of it packed into those cells, like a portrait painted on a grain of rice.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the glass, Rebecca’s family hold their Bibles to their chests and watch the soft movement of her eyelids, that delicate flutter. A few feet away, Caleb’s foot twitches slightly beneath the sheets. For now, their secret sleeps with them.

  That same night, a sudden breaking of glass is heard in the hospital hallway. A dull thud. One of the nurses has collapsed on the floor. The linoleum where she landed is streaked with dark blood. So are her scrubs. It takes some time to locate the source of all that spatter: the vials she was carrying when she fell.

  In the end, it’s just like the others—the sleep has spread to her.

  19.

  The lake: now muddy and shrinking in the sun, but once a glittering, uncanny blue. It was Little Pine Lake in the language of the tribe that once used these waters for healing rituals. It was Lake Restoration when it was printed in cursive blue letters on the brochures for the sanitarium, now repurposed as a nursing home. The lake was renamed again, along with the whole fledgling town, by a later developer, who longed for a Spanish-sounding name and who built the whole downtown in mission style to match his invented saint: Santa Lora.

  Most of the tourists and the weekenders have always stopped thirty miles before they get to Santa Lora Lake—they swim and they boat in the larger, more famous lake down the road.

  But this small lake, along with the mountains around it, dominates the logo of Santa Lora College, inscribed on signs, imprinted on T-shirts, embroidered on jackets and hats.

  * * *

  —

  Nathaniel first looked out on these waters thirty years ago, as a young biology professor, his daughter squirming in the arms of his wife, their marriage already foundering, only one year in. This was supposed to be a temporary job, a stopping place. He would have left years ago if it were not for Henry, the surprise of falling in love in middle age. The unexpected simplicity of focus: him. And this lake is where they liked to walk together, he and Henry, in the three decades that followed.

  * * *

  —

  This lake is where Sara and Libby learned to swim, in the shallow waters marked off by buoys each summer, and patrolled by teenage lifeguards. It is this lake that shimmers in the background of one of the few photographs these girls have ever seen of their mother: her dark hair blowing across her face, a bouquet of daisies in her hand, her wedding dress, cream-colored, knee-length. In the picture, she is clutching a pair of heeled sandals with one finger, while their father stands beside her in a simple gray suit, both of them barefoot and smiling in the sand, as if their whole lives, as they say, are ahead.

  * * *

  —

  There is less of this lake than there used to be. Every year it recedes, revealing more of what it has swallowed over the decades: cans as abundant as seashells, pieces of beach chairs and coolers, a skeletal, half-buried Model T.

  But this lake, and the families of ducks that glide across its surface every spring, still charmed Ben and Annie on their very first day in Santa Lora, and Mei, too, and her parents, at the end of their campus tour.

  This lake has put out forest fires, its water scooped up, pelican-like, by specially designed helicopters and then dropped on the flames in the hills.

  And this lake still provides a quarter of the water that runs through the pipes of Santa Lora. This is the source of the rumors that now begin to spread through town: maybe that water is contaminated.

  But the facts are these: on the fourteenth day, a researcher at a government lab in Los Angeles isolates the Santa Lora pathogen in a petri dish. The source of the troubles, it turns out, is not madness or poison or bacteria. Santa Lora is being haunted by a force neither alive nor dead: a virus. One previously unknown to science. And this virus does not swim in the waters of the evaporating lake. Instead, this bug travels like measles and smallpox and flu. This thing—it flies.

  * * *

  —

  Airborne: at the hospital, this news confirms what the staff has suspected for days. Two doctors and four nurses now lie sleeping alongside their patients. The ventilation system has been turned off.

  And on this, the fourteenth day, the hospital closes its doors. A quarantine.

  Locked inside are twenty-two sleepers, sixty-two other patients, forty-five visiting family members, thirty-eight doctors, nurses, and other staff, and one psychiatrist from Los Angeles: Catherine, trapped with all the others, a hundred miles from where her daughter sleeps.

  20.

  That same night, a cloud of smoke is spotted wafting from the woods outside of town. It is windy this night. It is dry. Santa Ana winds are pushing west from the desert: fire weather.

  As on so many nights before this one, the flashes of fire trucks light up the streets of Santa Lora. Emergency radios crackle with the news of yet one more wildfire burning these ancient drought-dried woods. In a town already worried, the crack of sirens wakes the healthy from their dreams.

  But not the baby, who is snoring, by then, in her crib, an hour past when she usually wakes up to eat. And not Ben, either, who has fallen asleep on the rug while watching her breathe through the slats of her crib. And not Annie, who joined him there sometime later, draping a blanket over his body before closing her eyes beside him.

  Ben and Annie: in how many places these two have lain side by side. On various twin beds all through college—legs tangled as they breathed each other’s breath. On that basement air mattress at her parents’ house, where she used to sneak down to join him, after her parents went to bed. In those sleeping bags in Mexico, the summer after college, when they were so young and so serious that they spent their evenings like this: Annie trying again and again to explain to him string theory, Ben reading aloud from Proust. Together, they have slept the sleep of too much whisky and too much wine, the jetlag sleep of their first afternoon in that hostel in Rome, the daytime dozing in hammocks, years later, on her family’s back porch in Maine, and the naked napping of so many Sundays in Brooklyn. There was the restless, jealous sleep the year before last, when Annie started working late with her advisor. There was the going-to-bed-mad sleep when she insisted that nothing had happened, but that she needed time to figure things out. There was the lonely insomniac sleep of the two weeks she then spent at her parents’ house without calling, Ben alone and sleepless in their studio, and then the hard sleep of grief and relief when she decided she wanted to come back, and asked, could he forgive her? They’ve slept the brief shoulder sleep of so many car rides and train rides and planes, the beach sleep in Mexico, those sunburns on their honeymoon, the sleep of bad dreams and good dreams
, the dreams they’ve shared and the dreams they haven’t, and all the dreams they never remembered and never would, so many of which have traveled through their minds while their two heads have lain not more than a few inches apart.

  And now, for the past three weeks, they’ve been sleeping this new kind of sleep, clipped but deep—such steep efficiency—because who knew when the baby might open her eyes and call out?

  But on this night, in spite of the sirens, the baby does not wake. On this night, the baby does not cry.

  Instead, all three remain as they are, deep in their separate sleeps, lights off in the baby’s room, minds speeding off in distant directions, even Grace’s, whose unknowable dreams send her eyelids fluttering and her lips shuddering and one arm quivering lightly in her crib.

  * * *

  —

  One house over, Sara and Libby wake up fast. So do the cats.

  “Dad,” the girls call out in the dark, while the sirens scream outside.

  But they know what to do. They know where to go. This is something that happens a few times a year. Fire season. Soon they’ll be waiting out in the truck while their father hoses down the roof. A single ember can travel for a mile on the wind and set a house like theirs on fire.

  “We can’t leave the kittens,” says Libby.

  She is trying to gather the kittens up, but they overflow her skinny arms. Two have already squirreled beneath her bed, the hairs on their backs sticking up, their white tails inflated like dusters, tiny eyes flashing in the darkness.

  Sara rushes to her father’s room at the end of the hall. He sleeps with his window open, no matter the season—his whole room is vibrating with the wail of the sirens and with the staticky voices of the police radio he keeps always by his bed.

  “Dad,” she says. She is suddenly shy in the doorway.

  By the low glow of the streetlight, she can see his silhouette, the way he’s lying on his side in that wide old bed, how quiet he is in the dimness.

  A gust of dry wind sends the curtains whipping into the room.

  “Daddy?” she says.

  She switches on the lights: his eyes are closed, his face is slack. With two fingers, she pulls back the sheets. She pokes him on the shoulder, which is bare and a little bony. He has grown so skinny these last few years.

  “Wake up,” she whispers.

  How strange to touch his face, to smell the old sweat on his skin, the staleness of his breath as he snores.

  Libby runs in behind her, wiping her hair from her face. “You guys have to help me get all the cats,” she says. “They’re running everywhere.”

  “He’s not waking up,” says Sara.

  It is Libby who shouts into his ear—no response. It is Libby who pinches his arm.

  “Be careful,” says Sara. “Don’t hurt him.”

  But his face registers no pain.

  And it is Libby who leans up close to his face, her curls falling across his forehead as she bends to make sure he is breathing.

  “It’s the sickness, isn’t it?” says Libby. Her eyes are already watering.

  By now, they should be downstairs with their bags, shoes on. At the earliest sign of a fire in those woods, their father likes to get out of town—it’s a dangerous corridor, what with only the one road out. The safest place to be is away, and the safest time to go is before anyone else thinks they should.

  They are starting to smell the smoke.

  This bedroom is the wrong place to be in a fire. The third floor, the most dangerous place.

  “We can’t leave him up here alone,” says Libby.

  The sirens cry on. Sara looks out the window. It’s too dark to see where the smoke is coming from or how near or far its source.

  A terrible calmness is descending on her. A series of decisions needs to be made. He would want them to leave and get somewhere safe—she is sure. Downstairs, at least, ready to run if they need to. But she will not do it.

  “We’re not going to leave him,” she says. “We’re gonna stay right here, no matter what.”

  Outside, the eucalyptus trees are bending hard in the wind, their branches scratching against the roof as if for ballast.

  “Think of how many wildfires there have been since this house was built,” says Sara, leaning close to her sister. “Think of how long it’s been here and stayed standing.”

  And so they sit that way in their nightgowns, holding their father’s slack hands, waiting for whatever will come.

  * * *

  —

  Three streets over, the sirens wake Nathaniel from a troubling dream.

  In the dream, he and Henry are thirty years younger—they have only recently met, two young professors. Nathaniel’s daughter is a two-year-old girl, stacking blocks on the rug in that tiny apartment that Nathaniel rented after the divorce. In the dream, Henry is looking for something. He is searching the apartment. Frantic. Nathaniel understands without it being said what Henry is searching for: some kind of poison. And what Henry wants to do with the poison is drink it. What Nathaniel cannot understand is why. Henry is begging for Nathaniel’s help, begging. He can’t live like this, Henry keeps saying, but Nathaniel cannot follow the thinking: live like what? He cannot, in the dream, understand the source of Henry’s suffering. Eventually, he follows Henry through a doorway that leads, somehow, to the living room of Nathaniel’s grandmother’s house in Michigan, and Nathaniel has a sudden certainty that the poison is hidden inside the grandfather clock that ticks in the corner. But he will not tell Henry where it is. Why not? Henry keeps asking. His face is young but his eyes are pained like an old man’s. Why won’t you do this for me?

  When Nathaniel wakes, his whole body is tense. He is sweaty in his sheets.

  Had he dreamed this dream in a different time, he might have considered it prophecy. Or perhaps, at certain moments in history, he would have taken it as a message from God.

  If he had dreamed it fifty or a hundred years ago, the era of Freud, the leading experts might have argued that the dream is not about Henry at all, not really, but about Nathaniel’s own childhood, some repressed sexual desire from infancy, the dream’s true meaning concealed from his conscious mind, and in need of analysis.

  And yet, those who favored Jung in that same era might have read it differently still, insisting that a dream cannot be so simply reduced. Not everything is about desire. And as Henry liked to say to his literature students, the poem is the poem—you can’t translate it. They might point out, too, the presence in the dream of certain archetypes from the collective unconscious: the father figure, the child, the clock.

  But these are ideas from a different time.

  These days, science doesn’t take much interest in dreams.

  For Nathaniel, professor of biology, this dream of Henry is merely an upsetting distraction. It will remain unexamined. He rushes to think of something else.

  On this night, the night of the fire, it is easy to find a different focus. It is almost a relief: the smell of smoke in the air, the scream of the sirens, the fact that there is work to be done.

  He is soon standing out in the yard, spraying his roof with the hose.

  * * *

  —

  At the hospital, the smell of smoke goes undetected. Twelve hours into the quarantine, a more pressing danger is floating through these fluorescent halls. A fifth nurse goes under. And an old man, admitted for pneumonia, now sleeps with the others in the isolation wing.

  There are not enough beds for the families trapped in the hospital, so they sleep on the floor in the halls. At this late hour, no one can tell by looking who among them might be sick and who well.

  Certain small problems are already threatening to grow larger: two toilets have stopped flushing, and the usual shipment of cafeteria food has not arrived—the truck driver too spooked by the news to appr
oach the building.

  Inside, Catherine keeps her mask tight, her hands in double gloves, her psychiatric training leaving her only slightly more prepared than the others. One thought keeps beating in her mind: if this sickness takes her away, her daughter will not remember even one wisp of her days with her mother. It seems suddenly selfish to have brought her into this world alone.

  She tries to write a note to her, in case—to read when she’s older. But she is unable to put down on that page anything more than the biggest, most obvious thing: You were loved.

  * * *

  —

  In the gym, no one is sleeping. Twenty-six kids are awake in the dark, four fewer than the day before. A belief has spread among some of them that sleep itself is the poison, the cause and not the effect. How can you catch it if you never close your eyes? Mei is lying in her cot, shaking beneath her blanket. They are stiff, those blankets, as rough as old coats. She is holding her phone to her chest like a cross. Someone is whispering in one corner. Someone is crunching candy in the dark.

  Into this wide space, the sirens rise quietly, muffled by the windowless walls. But the faint scent of smoke soon slips into the gym.

  “Do you smell that?” says the voice of one of the boys on the other side of the room. Mei can see his silhouette against the green glow of the exit sign. He is pressing his hands to the door, feeling for heat.

  There is a rising of voices as the word travels through the room: fire. The smack of bare feet hitting the polished wood floor.

  “We need to get out of here,” someone is saying.

  The voice of the guard out front calls into the room: “Everyone stay calm,” he says, as always, from a great distance. Those guards are afraid to breathe the same air as the kids. “The fire is way up in the woods, but we’re keeping an eye on it.”