The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

  “You were,” she says.

  He is suddenly furious.

  “I’m not the one who wanted to use the donor milk,” says Ben. “I always thought it was weird using milk from strangers—who knows what they put in their bodies?”

  It means something to Annie, breast milk, something profound that he does not understand and that does not include him.

  In her silence, he goes further.

  “You could have tried harder to feed her,” he says, which, even as he says it, seems not true at all, a thing he has never thought before until now. “Maybe if you could just commit to something for once.”

  Maybe then, he says, we wouldn’t be in this situation. But regret is pooling in his mind already. He is afraid to finish the thought, which is a substitute, anyway, for the thing he really means: I am afraid for our baby girl.

  “Fuck you,” says Annie.

  These words are followed by a silence that lasts the rest of the night.

  He wishes she would yell, but she does not yell. And it feels as if he cannot speak, either.

  Later, Annie goes to sleep in Grace’s room. Ben wants to sleep there, too, beside his wife and his baby, but the door is closed. He cannot imagine turning that knob.

  This has always been her harshest punishment: to make him sleep alone. He lies awake for a long time before sleep and then wakes quickly, after only a few minutes, to the intense smell of the tea she drinks at night—mint and eucalyptus—the smell of his wife coming to bed. But the scent fades too quickly to be real, an olfactory hallucination, a doctor once called it—he has had them all his life. This is the truth: Annie is not in the room. Here he is, alone in their bed.

  * * *

  —

  Meanwhile, on that same night, in another part of town, the swirling sounds of an organ are streaming out into the street. A row of bridesmaids stands shivering outside a church. Every wedding after this one will be canceled or postponed. But this one goes through, the last vows to be said in this town.

  The bride has been feeling woozy all day. It’s normal, her mother says. Just nerves. And anyway, she was up so late the night before, finalizing the seating arrangements, after a long day of work—a nurse in a doctor’s office. No wonder she feels so tired. She does look a little pale, the bridesmaids agree, but two smears of blush put the color back into her face, and an extra layer of concealer hides the gray beneath her eyes.

  But whoever shares her lipstick that day, whoever borrows her eyeliner, whoever kisses her cheek that night or dances too close or clinks her flute of champagne, whoever touches her hand to admire the ring, whoever catches the bouquet at the end of the night—all of them, every one, is exposed.

  This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love.

  24.

  In the annals of infectious disease, there is a phenomenon known as a super-spreader: a person who, by some accident of biochemistry or fate, infects many more people than the other victims do.

  Rebecca, it turns out, still suspended in sleep, holds exactly this kind of sway.

  Unlike the other families, Rebecca’s relatives remain at her side: her mother sleeps in the bed beside hers, and her father lies unconscious as well. Over there in the corner rest her two teenage brothers, curled like children in their beds. All of them, now, are snaked through with tubes.

  If they were awake, this family—keepers of so many memorized verses—they might think of Matthew, Chapter 9, when a father whose daughter has just died comes to Jesus and asks for his help, and how, before healing her body, Jesus says to the mourners around the daughter, “Go away. The girl is not dead but asleep.”

  Meanwhile, in that same room, there swims one more, too young yet to dream. A sesame seed—that’s what the books would say if Rebecca were reading them. Already the cells are organizing themselves into layers. Soon the organs will begin to form. In a week, that speck of a heart will divide into chambers. In two weeks, the contours of the face will begin to emerge. In three, the first sprouts of hands and feet.

  Only one thing is needed now: time.

  25.

  And then everything accelerates, as if the increase in cases has caused a quickening of time.

  All of this in one day:

  A man in a wrinkled suit slips out of consciousness during the sermon at Santa Lora Lutheran, but a few always doze in those pews, so it is only afterward that anyone realizes what is wrong.

  A woman who cleans houses discovers two bodies in the master bedroom of a renovated Victorian on Alameda. “They’re dead,” she whispers into the phone, but they are soon reclassified, this dean and his wife: joined not yet in death but in sleep.

  A florist’s van speeds into the lake at midday, no brakes. The driver makes no attempt to escape. Ten dozen roses drift for hours on the water before gradually washing up on the beach.

  The stories soon multiply, as stories often do: the jogger found splayed on a sidewalk while his infant wails in a stroller, the park ranger, curled and hypothermic, in the woods on a rarely used trail, and the story, perhaps apocryphal, of the fisherman who falls asleep at the wheel of his boat, way out in the middle of the lake, his dog barking in the moonlight while the boat drifts farther and farther from the shore, never to be seen again.

  The sickness wafts through the ventilation systems of the YMCA and the high school. And it spreads through the intensive care unit of the hospital.

  Certain connections are being made: how the florist delivered bouquets to the wedding of a nurse, how the dean might have bought an orchid from the florist that week.

  * * *

  —

  The story now begins to blaze across the national broadcasts. Now is when the details surge to the tops of home pages, crackling through millions of news feeds all over the world. The headline is posted and reposted and commented upon: “Mysterious Sickness Continues to Spread Rapidly Through California Town.”

  The appetite for information exceeds what information there is.

  Politicians—from mayors to the president—rush to fill the vacuum with press conferences, while talk show hosts devote whole hours to the subject. There is something like thrill beating hard in their voices. Hear the click-click of a roller coaster inching up an incline. Already, the arguments are starting. How to handle this thing, what to do. Questions are being raised: Why didn’t the CDC respond sooner? Are the health workers wearing the right protective gear? And how could the authorities lose track of twenty-six kids being held in quarantine?

  26.

  On the afternoon of the seventeenth day, in the lakeside sunroom of the nursing home, where Nathaniel has spent so many hours sitting beside Henry, a ninety-year-old woman dozes off in her wheelchair. The noise of her breathing, wheezy as usual, but strong and steady, keeps the staff from disturbing her. Why not let an old woman sleep? The television runs all afternoon. The bougainvillea scrapes against a hundred-year-old window. The sun drifts across the lake. She is still asleep at dusk, her head against her shoulder, as the dinner plates begin to clink in the cafeteria. She seems to awaken slightly when the nurses lift her into her bed. She says something about her children. And this rousing, this brief opening of the eyes, delays the call to a doctor. Even much later, when she fails to wake in the morning, it takes a few hours for anyone to realize that it’s the sickness. This is a place where to die in one’s sleep is considered the best way to go.

  After that, new procedures are put in place: the nursing home is closed to visitors.

  Nathaniel receives this news that same afternoon, from a security guard, stationed in the parking lot.

  “It’s only one case,” says the guard. He seems to want to console. “But just to be safe.”

  Nathaniel writes Henry’s name on the white paper bag in which an almond croissant is cooling. “Can you make sur
e he gets this?” he says, and hands the bag to the guard.

  As he drives out through the front gates, he feels only the tiniest ping of worry. To him, this thing still seems overblown. Didn’t they put the campus on lockdown twice last year, and both times were false alarms? Hysteria—that’s the real disease of this era.

  * * *

  —

  His walks in the woods grow longer each day, the dry crunch of boots on pine needles. These trees, too, are going to sleep, in a way—sent there by drought and bark beetle. It’s been happening for years, he tells his students, this ravaging, but no one talks about it, this other, slower wasting. These trees live and die on glacial time, their journeys so slow as to be almost imperceptible to humans. While one root creeps across the soil beneath a field, our history unfolds at high speed.

  His classes have been canceled for two weeks. There is a lot of day to fill.

  But on this afternoon, an idea comes to Nathaniel with a gust of relief: there is a pipe under the bathroom sink that needs fixing. Here is something that needs doing.

  At the hardware store, the man behind the counter wears a white hospital mask, blue latex gloves.

  “We’re out of masks,” he calls to Nathaniel as soon as he steps inside. “No more gloves, either.”

  He can feel it everywhere in town, this buzz of panic and gloom. They almost want it, don’t they, the drama and the thrill?

  “I’m just looking for a stop valve,” he says. It’s the tiniest part, seven dollars apiece, but without it, one leak in one sink could drown a whole house in water.

  The man behind the counter is surprised, and disappointed, maybe, that anyone, at a time like this, would be working on a problem so ordinary.

  * * *

  —

  It was Henry’s house, this house, before it was theirs, the kind of place Nathaniel never would have picked out for himself, all these small rooms, one leading to another, and each one packed tight with furniture: wingback chairs and grandfather clocks, mahogany bureaus filled with tablecloths. Persian rugs. Victorian wallpaper. Candlesticks.

  They used to argue about the streams of newspapers that flowed into the house, and the travel magazines, the journals of poetry from France and Italy, the boxes of sheet music and the fountain pens, found at estate sales and garage sales and antiques stores. Henry kept a cocktail glass for every kind of drink, and always more and more books, stacked geologically on the dining table and the living room floor and on the landing at the top of the stairs. His cookbooks were always spilling out of the kitchen cabinets, the pages stained with the wine and olive oil of thirty years of evenings.

  But there is no relief in the stark glare of the dining table, now naked of Henry’s clutter. And none either in the neat sheets of the bed, never piled, these days, with Henry’s clipped articles or his half-read books, his reading glasses lost somewhere in the blankets.

  “Wow,” said Nathaniel’s daughter the last time she visited. “It looks like no one lives here.”

  * * *

  —

  To get at the pipe under the sink, he must lie on his back, his legs spread out on the tile, his shoulder jammed into the wall. It’s an antique, this sink, something Henry brought home one summer, more for its beauty than its function. Something about the lines, he’d said. The silhouette. And the mahogany cabinet that stands beneath it.

  Inside that cabinet, behind the vitamins and the aspirin, pushed to the far back corner, remains the bottle of secobarbital that Henry got ahold of in the weeks after his diagnosis. Something awful runs in Henry’s genes. His father had it, an uncle. He knew what was coming for him. “When I can’t remember your name,” he told Nathaniel again and again, “give me these.”

  But the bottle remains unopened in the cabinet. No good reason but this one: every human being has certain things they can do and certain things they cannot.

  The pipe is crusted in rust. This is a harder job than he thought.

  While he works on the sink, the voices of public radio stream out through the speakers of a refurbished antique RCA that Henry bought online: ten more cases, they are saying now, five more suspected.

  It is hard for Nathaniel to say if it is this reference to the sickness that makes him feel suddenly a little tired, or just the time of day—he always gets sleepy in the afternoons.

  He makes himself some coffee. He keeps working. When he finally gets the part loose, it’s a surprise to feel the cold thread of water landing on his forehead. It takes a moment to understand why it’s happening. He forgot to shut off the water—that’s the problem. It’s a little alarming to forget to do something so simple and so crucial. But the proof that he must have is at his feet: a little puddle is forming on the bathroom tile, and growing.

  Now is when the phone begins to ring: it’s one of Henry’s doctors.

  The voice of this doctor, though—it sounds different—as if the voice belongs to someone else, but he knows that the person on the phone is Dr. Chavez, the same doctor Henry has had all along.

  “I have some news,” says the doctor. Nathaniel sits down on the bed. There is a certain kind of dread that destroys the world with its force. “We really weren’t expecting it.”

  Henry’s voice has been gone from his head for months. Henry, the great talker, the reciter of poetry, has gone silent. But now a corresponding sensation suddenly grips Nathaniel: he can no longer assemble in his mind the memory of Henry’s face.

  “At first,” says the doctor, “I thought there’d been a mistake. I thought maybe the nurses had mixed up the patients.”

  He has sometimes wished, these last few months, that he had done what Henry asked of him. It was supposed to be quick: ten minutes to sleep, four hours for the rest. A quiet release for them both. But now, the more familiar feeling rushes in: a desperate fury to keep Henry alive.

  “Is he all right?” he asks.

  “I want to warn you,” says the doctor. “We think this is related to the sickness, so there’s no telling what else is coming, but for now, he has a counterintuitive symptom that we haven’t seen in the others.”

  Nathaniel’s mouth has gone dry. He can hardly breathe. He waits.

  “About an hour ago,” says the doctor, “well, Henry, he started speaking.”

  * * *

  —

  So much of the rest of the day will always be blurry in his mind, the drive back to the nursing home, the guard letting him in, a special circumstance, the doctor’s explanation, full of hesitations and caveats, how there is no way to know if this period of alertness will last, but the wobble of excitement in the doctor’s voice, his use of that word—extraordinary. But what Nathaniel will always remember, as vividly as anything else in his life, is that warm look on Henry’s face, the old expression he has forgotten about until now, the way his eyes fasten on Nathaniel as they have not done in months. This moment makes rational every irrational thought he’s dismissed since Henry got sick: that he might return one day, as if from a walk or a trip, that he might, in some way, wake up. Maybe this is what kept Nathaniel from giving him those drugs. This day makes meaning of that betrayal: It was all for this day, see? It was for this, Henry. For this.

  Here is Henry, looking a little younger, somehow, than before he got sick, though a little frailer, too, and he is wearing that old red shirt he used to love. There is a slowness to his words, a slur, but still: “Nathaniel,” he says, relief in his eyes. Those are Henry’s arms reaching out for him. That’s Henry standing up from the chair, the press of his big chest against his. He says something else, but it’s hard to understand the words. He tries again: “Nathaniel,” he says. “Where have you been?”

  * * *

  —

  Biology is full of paradoxical reactions. Certain drugs excite the ordinary brain but calm the hyperactive. Tranquilizers can sometimes agitate instead of soothe. Certai
n antidepressants have been known to hasten suicide.

  Nathaniel cycles through examples—associations in place of an explanation—as he packs a box for Henry. Books, mostly. That’s what he’s asked for so far. Books, and chocolate and tea.

  They will be studying his case for years, of course, thinks Nathaniel. Henry: one of a handful of people in Santa Lora in whom the virus produces the exact opposite effect as in the others, a heightening of consciousness instead of the loss of it.

  * * *

  —

  Four cases have surfaced so far in the nursing home. An unused wing now serves as a makeshift isolation unit. While the other three lie sleeping in their beds, Henry, in a white mask and blue gloves, walks the echoing halls. His long legs, his long arms—he was always the tallest in any room. And now here he is, looking his age again, which is twenty years younger than the other residents. He walks a little slower, maybe, and slightly hunched in the shoulders, but mostly, he is just like before. He hums and he grumbles. He quotes Emily Dickinson to the nurses.

  “I feel fine,” he keeps telling them, his speech sounding clearer every day. “I feel just the same as I ever did. Tell them, Nathaniel,” he says. “Don’t I seem fine?”

  But there are some famous cases of the catatonic inexplicably coming to, only to slip away again. He needs to be monitored. That’s what the doctors say. He cannot go home.

  He is allowed this much at least: to walk with Nathaniel in the garden, where one hillside is planted with marigolds, where honeysuckle laces the fence, the lake visible just beyond it. This view—this has always been a consolation.

  “I moved your desk back the way you like it,” says Nathaniel.

  This is November, but the day is sunny and warm.

  “What was I like?” asks Henry. “What was I like all this time?”