The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

  Henry saw his own father this way. And his uncle. He must know what he was like.

  “It was like you were gone,” says Nathaniel.

  There are certain thoughts he does not want to think. Among them: when tides recede, they always rush back in.

  “I should be angry with you,” says Henry. “You didn’t do what you promised.”

  Nathaniel waits, but he knows what he means. He cannot look into his face, so he watches the lake instead. In the distance, a sailboat drifts, as if nothing remarkable were happening in the town of Santa Lora.

  “But I’m not,” says Henry. “I’m not angry.”

  These words—they are the exact right thing. Some kinds of trees require the blast of a forest fire to break open their seeds.

  Henry’s voice softens to a whisper. “I have an idea,” he says. A surfacing of an old rebelliousness, as familiar as the warmth of Henry’s hand in his. “Let’s leave.”

  The surprise is how easy it is.

  No one stops them. No security guard comes running after them. No police. They just open the gate. They just get in the car, and they go.

  * * *

  —

  They do not listen to the news. They do not follow the protocols for contagious disease. If Henry offers him a sip of whisky from his glass, Nathaniel takes it. They do not sleep in separate beds.

  Every day, Henry’s walk is more steady, his voice more sure. Here is Henry sitting in his wingback chair with a book. Here Nathaniel, making him tea. Here is Henry, walking at his side in the woods.

  These woods: If classes were in session, today is the day Nathaniel would have done his lecture on the pheromones of trees. It’s a way of catching the attention of the undergraduates for a minute with the counterintuitive news that trees, so silent and so still, have ways of reaching out to one another, lines of communication, systems of warning. There is something satisfying in it, that the plain reality of the universe reads to us like magic. Henry might go further. He would point out how much our brains are limited by what we believe already—how once, when people expected to see ghosts, ghosts were what they saw.

  Henry’s presence in the house, and in these woods, triggers a second longing, too, a profound need for his daughter to be here, and not just as she is now—a grown woman in San Francisco, whom he calls on the phone to say, yes, yes, it really is amazing—but also as she was once: a six-year-old girl in blue butterfly barrettes, trailing behind him and Henry, as she did on so many evenings back then, out in these same woods, reciting the names of the trees like a catechism, ponderosa, manzanita, white oak, her pockets bulging with pinecones.

  His daughter, as she is now, the grown woman in San Francisco, does not seem to understand what he is trying to tell her on the phone. “He’s cured?” she says. “How is that possible?” She has a lot of questions that he does not want to consider.

  A rush of anger comes over him, washing everything else away.

  “Just leave it,” he says to her. “Just leave it alone.”

  * * *

  —

  It is on the third or fourth day that Nathaniel’s mind begins to feel a little foggy. He and Henry are out on the porch drinking whisky, the way they used to, and Henry is telling a complicated story about a man in Key West in the 1930s. He was in love, this man. He was in love with a dead woman.

  “At first, he tended her grave,” says Henry, leaning back in his chair. “Then he removed her body and kept her in his house for years.” Seven years, he keeps saying. “He kept embalming her body. She was like some kind of doll.”

  It is hard for Nathaniel to remember the start of the story or why Henry is telling it. There it is, that fogginess again. A confusion. For the first time, Nathaniel worries that he might be getting the sickness, too.

  “Are you all right?” asks Henry. His hand is on his back.

  How cruel it would be to fall sick just as Henry got well. But there is no law in nature against cruelty. In fact, Henry would argue, with his Victorian rooms and his seminars on Thomas Hardy, it seems, at times, to run in that direction.

  Nathaniel’s confusion is accompanied by something else, too, a strange noise. “Like water,” he says to Henry. “Do you hear that? Like water dripping somewhere.”

  But Henry does not hear it. The house is dry. The sun is out. But the sound persists, unnerving, inexplicable: like the light sloshing of water against a boat, always there and growing louder.

  27.

  One hundred twenty cases balloons to 250 in two days. Two-fifty soon cascades to 500.

  But with the hospital closed to new patients, these newly sick are spread out in giant tents instead, as if they’ve been felled on a battlefield in some distant place.

  Along with supplies, volunteers are flown in from other places to give the only treatment there is: keeping the hearts beating and the bodies hydrated and fed. It’s a lot of work to perform manually every task the waking body does on its own. There are not enough monitors. There are not enough beds. There are not enough workers to turn the bodies back and forth in the sheets.

  The story is everywhere now. Television commentators are circling Santa Lora on maps of California: this place is only seventy miles from Los Angeles and only ninety miles from LAX, which might as well be a neighborhood in New York or London or Beijing.

  Something needs to be done, that’s the feeling. Something big.

  * * *

  —

  On the eighteenth day, three thousand miles away, watchers of the morning news shows awaken to a series of aerial images of the town of Santa Lora, California.

  From the cockpit of a helicopter, the campus of Santa Lora College looks serene: sixteen brick buildings, lit with orange lights, parking lots empty of cars. The lake, or what is left of it, shines in the moonlight, its former waterline not so obvious in the dark. Beyond that, the streets fan out in a grid. Swimming pools, covered over for winter. Station wagons parked in driveways. An ordinary town in the middle of the night—except for a long line of military trucks clogging the one road in and out. And also this, visible only faintly through the trees: a line of soldiers standing in the woods.

  For now, the people of Santa Lora are sleeping soundly, the healthy and the sick alike. Hours will pass before most of them will hear the words that people in Maine and Pennsylvania and Florida are learning right now: cordon sanitaire, the complete sealing off of an infected region, like a tourniquet, not used in this country for more than a hundred years.

  * * *

  —

  From the air, all the streets look the same, the houses packed close like teeth, the artificial lawns indistinguishable from the real grass gone brown from the drought. But on one of those streets, under one of those roofs, a baby is crying in the dark.

  One floor up, Ben wakes to the noise, knowing that his wife is with her already, that soon his daughter will go quiet in her arms.

  He dozes, a half-sleep. But the crying wakes him again.

  He turns in his bed. He begins to wonder if this crying is different from the crying of all the other nights, more urgent, maybe a kind of screaming. The sickness floats up into his mind—what if this is how it starts?

  Now he’s up. He’s out of bed. His heart is beating fast. The way to slow it down is to see her. He wants to see his baby right away. But her room is empty. They’re downstairs, he realizes—that’s where the crying is coming from. The kitchen.

  “Poor little nut,” he says in the dark when he gets there, which is a way of greeting his wife, who he knows is in there, somewhere in that blackness, probably pacing like she does, the baby curled in her arms, or else she’s rocking her in that special way they learned from a book. They haven’t spoken much since their fight, but he forgets all that now. “How long has she been awake?” he asks.

  But there’s no answer. The crying gets loud
er. This is when his foot bumps against something plastic—the warble of a bottle rolling across the floor.

  His fingers run along the wall for the light switch, and the click of that switch is proof that a baby’s cry is the truest communication there is: something is wrong.

  Through his squinting, he sees that his wife is lying on the linoleum. Her eyes are closed. Her limbs are still. His baby is curled awkwardly on Annie’s chest, her tiny face bright red from the crying, squinting in the bright light, her blanket coming loose around her feet.

  He lifts her, their baby, and presses her to his chest. In his arms, she quiets immediately.

  But the relief is brief. There is a bruise spreading across his wife’s forehead. Her eyelids are twitching madly, as if she is dreaming a terrible dream.

  He calls her name. He squeezes her shoulder. He does not hear the helicopters whirring in the air above the town.

  He thinks to press a piece of ice into Annie’s hand, like they did in birthing class, as a small simulation of labor pains, a way to practice the breathing—Annie hated it. She could not tolerate it for more than a few seconds. Maybe it will wake her now. But this time, the only detectable reaction is in the ice, which melts swiftly in the warmth of her palm, while Annie goes on dreaming some unstoppable dream.

  28.

  The crackle of a loudspeaker, the hum of recorded static: the words are sticky and indecipherable, too distant to make out as they drift, like airport announcements, out over the sidewalks and the streets of Santa Lora, and in through the windows of the empty houses, and in through the windows of the big white house, where, once, in a different time, Mei was a babysitter but where, on this morning, she is just waking up, alone in a king-size bed.

  “Are you hearing this?” calls Matthew from the hall. She pulls on her jeans and opens the door. It’s a surprise to smell the toothpaste on his breath as he rushes past her toward the window—for a moment, it’s all she can think of: his nearness.

  They can’t see it, at first, whatever is making the noise, but the echoing voice is accompanied by a grinding sound, and it’s growing—something is moving slowly toward them.

  Words begin to emerge from the static. Health department, she hears. Isolation. Mandatory.

  “The whole town?” Mei asks.

  “I’m surprised it took them this long,” says Matthew.

  A Humvee, painted to match a desert, is rumbling past porches and porch swings and artificial lawns—with a loudspeaker mounted on its hood.

  “The military,” says Matthew. “Of course.”

  On the sidewalk, two little boys, their shadows tall in the autumn sunshine, are running alongside the Humvee, as if this were the ice cream truck lumbering down their street, kicking up dried leaves as it goes.

  The message repeats. Food and water will be distributed. A website is mentioned.

  “It’s just the National Guard,” says Mei. “Like for hurricanes.”

  All along the street, doors are swinging open. People are stepping out of their Craftsmans to stand on their porches, hands pressed over their mouths.

  There is a feeling that this morning is passing into history, a sudden shifting of scale—far from a story about one floor in one dorm at one college.

  If you’re sick, says the recording, or if you see someone who’s sick, call 911 right away.

  Four soldiers are riding inside the Humvee, in white masks and sunglasses, shooing the kids from the truck. If they smile at the boys, it is hard to tell through the masks.

  “They shouldn’t be here waving their guns around,” says Matthew. He is on his laptop already, looking for more news, and it’s everywhere, this new news, these new words: cordon sanitaire.

  “They’re not waving their guns,” says Mei, though she can see them, the guns, long and black and resting in their laps.

  Do not gather in large groups, says the message. Avoid public places. If you think you’ve been exposed, call the following number.

  “Do you know that the American government once quarantined a Chinese neighborhood for typhoid, and then set the whole place on fire?” says Matthew.

  “They’re not going to set us on fire,” says Mei.

  “They did it before,” he says. “Hawaii, 1930.”

  “Maybe someone finally knows what they’re doing,” says Mei.

  “I can’t believe how naïve you are,” says Matthew. His skin is smooth beneath the little hairs starting to grow on his chin.

  All along the street, neighbors are clustered on porches, arms crossed as they talk in their driveways, as if they need to hear the news in more than one person’s voice, the way any kind of faith leans partly on what other people think.

  “They have no idea what’s going on,” Matthew says near her. She can feel him resisting the urge to call out to those people, to shout from the window. This boy: a certain kind of logic runs in him like a compulsion. But something stronger than logic is keeping these people bunched together.

  To Mei, it’s the empty porches that look ominous—in how many of these quiet houses are people sleeping already, their bodies dehydrating as they dream?

  Her phone begins to ring.

  “I thought you turned that off,” says Matthew. “If someone tracked our phones, they could find us.”

  It’s her mother: “Where are you?” she says.

  “I’m fine,” says Mei.

  “We got a call from the police,” says her mother.

  The Humvee is shrinking in the distance now. The recording is fading away on the wind.

  “You need to be somewhere where they can take care of you,” says her mother. She can tell by the scratch in her mother’s voice that her mother is about to cry.

  It is at this moment that Mei sees something almost as surprising as the Humvee: a small group of people in rumpled business suits trudging down the sidewalk with suitcases. Their coats are slung over their arms. They walk slowly, wearily, as if they’ve been walking these streets for days. The wheels of their suitcases are ticking over the cracks in the sidewalk. Some kind of plastic ID badge swings from each of their necks.

  Together, on this residential street, these travelers, steering their luggage past driveways and fire hydrants, look like the incongruous images seen sometimes in dreams.

  “What if you get sick?” says her mother, but it is easier to worry about the people outside instead, as they walk slowly, slowly, down the street. One of the women outside is walking barefoot in her business suit. Where are her shoes? Mei wonders, but that’s the thing about strangers: you don’t get to hear their stories.

  29.

  Two weeks: that’s how long it has been since the girls have left the house, except to water the vegetables in the garden in the middle of the night and, once, with flashlights, on the night their father was taken away, to inspect the giant X painted on the side of the house.

  They keep the curtains closed. They keep their voices low. They have an idea that the helicopters might have telescopic sight.

  News of the quarantine has not reached their ears. They keep the television going all day and all night, but never on news channels. Infomercials or cooking shows—it doesn’t matter. What they like best, these girls, alone in this big house, is to hear from a distance the soothing sounds of voices coming from another room.

  Everything they need is in the basement: peanut butter and tuna fish and macaroni and cheese, crackers and cereal and granola bars for a year. They have canned vegetables and canned fruit. They have toilet paper—stacks and stacks of toilet paper—and also the shelves of all those rarer things, each one an act of their father’s imagination, just waiting to prove clairvoyance: radiation suits, a Geiger counter, capsules of potassium iodide. Maybe they should be sleeping in the cots down there instead of in their bedroom upstairs, but there are spiders in this basement, and that one bare bul
b, the smell of soil coming up from the earth. They never pictured sleeping down there without their father.

  They do not know where he was taken or when he’ll come home, or if, but the only way to tolerate living alone in this house is to expect him to return at any moment.

  On this morning, Sara is washing out the smell of urine from the sheets he last slept in. There is a kindness in not telling. There is love in covering up.

  It is only as she is closing the lid of the washing machine that the danger occurs to her: Could she catch it from breathing in that smell? Now she’s at the sink. Now she’s washing her hands. She washes her hands for five minutes.

  Libby is in the kitchen with the cats, handing out scraps of turkey.

  “Don’t give them our food,” says Sara. She dries her hands on her jeans.

  “But we’re all out of theirs,” Libby says.

  They’ve been a good distraction, the cats, the four kittens skating across the wood floors, the two older ones always howling for food. One of the babies keeps throwing up on the rug. Another one pees on the stairs. But it feels good to take care of them—the way it is possible to disappear inside someone else’s need.

  “We must have more food for them somewhere,” says Sara. But then she remembers: her father’s survival plans do not include the cats.

  One of the kittens steals a piece of turkey right out of the mouth of another; he swallows quickly as if it might be taken back. There’s a scuffle on the linoleum, a sudden hiss.

  “We have to get them more food,” says Libby.

  “We can’t go out,” says Sara.

  But she is soon turning the lock on the safe in the basement and pulling two twenty-dollar bills from the envelope her father keeps interred there.

  “We’re bringing these,” she says as she stuffs the two gas masks into her backpack. “And the gloves.”