The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

  “Okay,” she says.

  “So if we can’t tell that we’re dreaming when we really are dreaming,” he says, “then, theoretically, if we were dreaming right now, we would have no way of knowing that.”

  These words in his voice—they’re like live current, the electricity of big ideas.

  “But actually,” he says, “some philosophers think that the whole argument is a moot point. They think that consciousness itself is just one big delusion.”

  Something bold and brave is surging in her: “I like the way you talk about things,” she says.

  But he does not look up. Maybe it was the wrong thing to say.

  He is still staring at the tent poles, studying the directions, squinting in the light of the flashlight. Somewhere a siren screams. The helicopters go on swirling through the air.

  “Do you need some help?” she says.

  “I guess so,” he says. He hands the instructions to her. But she does not need them: she knows what to do, from years of family trips. She is soon feeding the poles into the sleeves while he holds the flashlight.

  “I haven’t been completely honest with you,” he says.

  Her whole body goes tense. A prickling on her skin. She is suddenly aware of the chill in the evening air.

  “What do you mean?” she says.

  She doesn’t know what to do except to keep working on the tent. There’s the shuffle of nylon against nylon. All at once, the tent is up, like a ship in a bottle.

  “Have you heard of Baker & Baker?” he says.

  Television commercials come into her head: pharmaceuticals.

  “Yeah?” she says.

  “That’s my family,” he says, like it’s some kind of confession. “I grew up in a gated community. I went to boarding school. My whole life has been paid for by dirty money.”

  It’s true she had not pictured it, this boy in a ratty sweatshirt, old shoes. But there’s something about him: he is all present, no past. As if nothing he can do can surprise her.

  “But I don’t want that life,” he says. There’s a kind of desperation in his voice, as if he expects her to be angry. “I think it’s wrong to live that way.”

  Now she wonders what he would think of how her family lives, of her father the accountant and her mother the teacher, a Volvo parked in the driveway.

  She shows him where to put the stakes for the tent. Together, they hammer them into the ground.

  He’s in the tent now, kneeling, as he rolls out a sleeping bag inside. He drops the flashlight inside, so that the tent lights the lawn blue like a lantern. It is not very big, this tent, and she likes the idea of them crouched inside it together, that nearness.

  He sits down on the grass. He looks up at the sky. He seems so sad sitting there, this mysterious boy.

  She sits down next to him. Suddenly his face is close to hers.

  A sudden kiss. She does not even think of how they shouldn’t be doing it. It’s quick and fast. It’s shy.

  And then he is saying something about the stars, how they can’t see them anymore because of all the emergency lights, and how his dream is to just live in the woods somewhere and sleep under the stars.

  “I want to live on the same amount of money that the poorest people in the world do,” he says. “That’s my goal. I think that’s the most ethical thing.”

  Everything in his mind is either one thing or the other. Right or wrong. There’s a thrill in that clarity.

  He motions for her to crawl into the tent.

  She sees now how it will happen, how there’s no need to discuss it in advance, as if she can feel it already, the warmth of his arm beside hers before they fall asleep.

  But then suddenly he is up and out of the tent again and standing in the grass.

  “You sleep in the tent,” he says. “I’ll sleep out here.”

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, none of the sales reps wake up.

  A mass suicide is what it looks like, their bodies splayed out in the living room, their hair hanging over their faces, their mouths slightly ajar, saliva pooling on the planks of the floor. But if you listen closely, you can hear the sounds of their living: the slow breaths of deep sleep.

  One of their phones keeps ringing. There is a lot of information in that sound, the way it rings so often that it is hard to tell when one call ends and the next begins: the ringing of a person gone crazy with worry. But here in this room, no one is stirring.

  There is something terrible about the way the sun streams in over their faces, as if the sunlight were a part of it—and isn’t it true that the sun has turned ominous lately, parching the land deeper and deeper into drought?

  According to the experts, there is no way to distinguish by sight alone between the sickness and sleep, but Mei can tell right away what this is. It’s a deep settling in, a blankness of the face, and they look younger, somehow, than they did the night before, this the kind of knowledge that can never be captured in the results of an experiment or in the lens of a camera, the human mind the only instrument subtle enough to register it.

  * * *

  —

  If, somehow, the sales reps could see up through their dreams, here is what they would find, refracted, at the surface: A boy and a girl with white masks on their faces, bent over their nine bodies in the vast living room of strangers. The press of the boy’s fingers—in kitchen gloves they’ve found under the sink—searching their wrists for the beating of their hearts. The sensation of liquid running down their chins as the girl drips water from a child’s sippy cup into each drying mouth. They would hear the sound of the boy’s voice getting angry in the other room: But we’ve been waiting all day for an ambulance. And finally, the feeling of someone, that same boy, lifting each one up by the armpits, while the girl holds tight to their legs, the swing of their bodies like sandbags. Then the smell of leather seats. Then the makeshift click of seatbelts over their slumped bodies. The crank of a garage door. The turning of an ignition. The bump of the old streets beneath the tires, their heads swinging forward or back with the turns in the road. And maybe: a glimpse of pine trees, the mountains, the wide sunsetting sky, their bodies so long attuned to the rising and setting of that same sun—but suddenly no longer.

  32.

  From the window of the third floor of the hospital, now sealed for ten days, Catherine watches helicopters come and go—with supplies and with food. Garbage is piling up on the streets below.

  There is something monstrous about the suits that she and the other healthcare workers now wear when in the isolation ward, the way the plastic distorts the faces of the doctors and the nurses, the way it muffles their voices. They look larger in those suits. Less human. People get spooked.

  At the back doors of the hospital, sleepers have begun to appear slumped alone against the glass, abandoned like newborns or drug addicts, notes pinned to their shirts. Rumors are flourishing: anyone exposed will be detained.

  * * *

  —

  Seventy miles away in Catherine’s townhouse in Los Angeles, Catherine’s daughter and her daughter’s babysitter are quarantined, too. This is a precaution, in case Catherine brought the virus back home—on her clothes, maybe, or on her skin, or in the very air she breathed as she kissed her daughter’s cheeks after those first few visits to Santa Lora.

  She should have been more careful, she keeps thinking.

  Her phone conversations with her daughter always end the same way: Okay, but Mama, now can I go outside?

  She has begun to misbehave, says the babysitter, in unfamiliar ways. She pulls on the curtains. She throws her food on the floor. She runs in circles through the house.

  The babysitter, so patient otherwise, has begun to sound weary on the phone.

  * * *

  —

  On the following Sun
day, Catherine spots from the window a small church congregation meeting outdoors, having dragged the pews out into the parking lot to limit the airborne spread.

  There is something about it, those families in their pews, those Bibles in their hands, the faint strains of their hymns floating in the open air—tears come into Catherine’s eyes. She has never been away from her daughter so long.

  * * *

  —

  One night, Catherine watches a crowd of people swarm a helicopter at the high school nearby, as it tries to land with a shipment of food.

  After that, one of the ER doctors pulls her aside:

  “We’re moving the opioids out of the pharmacy,” he says. He is very thin, this doctor, a new beard spreading across his face. He speaks quickly. None of the staff are sleeping much. The lack shows in this man’s eyes. “Now that the town is cut off,” says the ER doctor, “street drugs aren’t going to be able to get in, either. It’s only a matter of time before they come looking here.”

  “Who?” says Catherine. But she knows who he means. He speaks of them like animals. But she wants him to say it.

  “Addicts,” he says.

  Addiction is not her specialty, but she often sees it in her patients. And why not? Those drugs soothe the same parts of the brain that mental illness sets on fire.

  “If there’s going to be violence in this hospital,” says the ER doctor, “that’s how it will happen.”

  She can see it in this doctor’s eyes, how clearly he can picture it: the drug-addicted, like zombies, overrunning the hospital. Worry, she often reminds her patients, is a kind of creativity. Fear is an act of the imagination.

  “From now on,” says the ER doctor, “you and I are the only ones who will know the exact location of these drugs.”

  * * *

  —

  More and more doctors fall sick.

  Catherine finds herself performing procedures she has not done since medical school. How strange the sewing needle feels in her hand, the coarse thread, as she stiches up a cut on the forehead of a young boy, after he slips near one of the overflowing toilets. And how odd is the heft of a newborn’s head at the moment he finally slips out of his mother and into Catherine’s gloved hands—while the only obstetrician in the hospital goes on dreaming in the isolation ward.

  * * *

  —

  A few days later, Catherine finds the ER doctor slumped in an office chair in what was previously the waiting room. It is less and less surprising, how suddenly this sleep takes over the body, though his breathing seems even slower than the others’.

  Two orderlies in blue suits are moving him to the isolation ward, when a bottle of pills falls from his pocket.

  “Wait,” says Catherine. “It’s not the sickness,” she says. It’s OxyContin. An opium sleep. No wonder he knew so clearly what others might do.

  For this, at least, there is a cure, a temporary one, anyway: one shot of naloxone in the thigh. He opens his eyes, awake and embarrassed. He avoids her after that.

  * * *

  —

  That night, Catherine gets a call from her daughter’s babysitter.

  “She has a fever,” says the babysitter. Catherine’s breath catches. The sickness, they have come to understand, starts that way, too. If something happens to her daughter, it will be Catherine’s fault, she is certain.

  “I didn’t want to worry you,” says the babysitter. “But she fell asleep a few hours ago, and I’m having trouble waking her.”

  Now it is Catherine’s turn to imagine the worst in florid detail.

  A crazy simplicity cuts through everything else: she must get home to her daughter.

  She will leave this hospital, which no one has left for two weeks. She will leave this town, surrounded by soldiers and military vehicles.

  She peels off her gloves and rushes downstairs.

  She does not even make it past the front door. There are guards, of course. This is not a voluntary quarantine.

  * * *

  —

  Catherine spends the whole night on the phone with the babysitter. On the small screen of her phone, her sleeping daughter looks just like the sick do. Sometime after midnight, she realizes with a burst of panic that she cannot remember the exact color of her little girl’s eyes. People comment on it, an unusual shade of hazel, but she cannot picture it. She cannot remember her own daughter’s eyes.

  Finally, at 3 A.M., relief: her daughter opens her eyes and asks the babysitter for water.

  This is not the sickness, then, just an ordinary childhood fever.

  The sound of her daughter’s little voice on the phone releases in her a tenderness for the whole world, for everyone, awake and asleep, in this hospital. It feels like a drug spreading through her body. It feels like the moment her daughter was born.

  33.

  At the center of that hospital, in the wing where the first patients are now tended by nurses in Level 4 Tyvek suits, beneath the sheets of one particular bed, beneath the thin cloth of the hospital gown, and beneath the smooth skin of the belly of one young woman: a tiny heart begins to beat. It is a secret, fluttering, hummingbird beat, four weeks in the making.

  Rebecca experiences none of the emotions she otherwise would, pregnant by accident at eighteen—the panic, the disbelief, the excruciating need to make a decision.

  Ten feet away, dreaming in another hospital bed, Caleb feels none of that, either.

  The whole thing, too young yet to call a fetus, has grown to the size of a pea.

  A face is beginning to surface from the tissue of the head, the earliest components of eyes. Those eyes: they will show her everything she will ever see. Passages are forming that will one day become the inner ear. Those ears will deliver every voice, every note of music, every drop of rain, she will ever hear in her life. Already, there is an opening that will later become the mouth, the same mouth that, if mother and child survive, might ask, someday, what God is and why we need the wind, or where she was, anyway, before she was inside her mother’s belly.

  In the room, the monitors hum and whir. The suits swish as nurses and doctors come and go, performing the same diagnostic tests they have been doing from the start: the massaging of the sternum, the tickling of toes. No change.

  Nutrients travel through a plastic tube up through one nostril, then down her throat and into her stomach.

  Meanwhile, Rebecca sleeps and sleeps, the conscious brain, it turns out, as superfluous to the process unfolding inside her as the sunflowers that are right now wilting on the windowsill beside her.

  34.

  He sleeps when she sleeps. He wakes when she wakes, which is six times or eight times or ten times a day. And every one of these wakings is also a remembering, a collecting again of the facts: Ben is alone with his six-week-old baby.

  Wherever he goes, he is the man with a newborn curled up on his chest. You should stay home, he is told again and again. That’s the safest place to be. But he has to go out, for formula and for diapers—they’ve started handing out supplies at the high school.

  No one can tell him where his wife is. Not the operators who answer the phones at the hospital. Not the soldiers outside the emergency room. Not even the paramedics, on that first night, sheathed in blue suits and white masks—as they lifted Annie up from the kitchen floor, her fingers fluttering slightly, the way they always do when she sleeps—could say exactly where it was she would go.

  The morning after, when the nurse comes to take the baby’s temperature, she wears plastic goggles and a full-body suit. The baby cries and cries. Already the baby can recognize what is ordinary and what is not.

  That nurse never comes again.

  Every so often, a Humvee drifts down the street. An ambulance roars by. The neighbors come and go from their houses, tense and watchful. But all Ben can see is the face of
his baby. All he can hear is her crying. The only way she will sleep is in the bend of his arm, her lips going loose against a bottle. All his clothes smell like urine and sour milk and the sweet stink of her diapers. There is no time to take a shower. There is no time to wash his face. Dirty laundry litters the floor.

  One of Annie’s colleagues stops by those first few days with formula and wipes. “Doesn’t it seem like no one knows what they’re doing?” she says, arms crossed, voice shaking a little. “I don’t think they know what the hell they’re doing.”

  They are not very close, this woman and Annie, but they have lived in this town for only three months, and you ask whoever you can.

  Annie, Annie, Annie: her name sounds suddenly sacred—and strange—rendered somehow extraordinary by not saying it thirty times a day. Come home, he whispers, like a prayer.

  He calls his mother in Ohio every day. She wants to fly out, but it’s no use, he tells her, whispering into the phone, while the baby dozes on his chest. “They would never let you in.”

  It has been decades since he has felt this way about his mother, the simple need for her presence. “You should have let me come when she was born,” she says, but he and Annie had decided in advance that they wanted to be alone with the baby for a while before letting their parents come. He sees now that this was a teenager’s notion of what it is like to be an adult. “If I had come when she was born,” says his mother, “then I’d be trapped there with you now and could help.”

  Sometimes, he is so tired that it does not sound so bad: to fall asleep and not wake up.

  Scraps of news from public radio drift through the house between feedings. Six hundred cases and counting. Seven hundred. In Los Angeles, seventy miles away, the stores have run out of masks; people are stockpiling food in case the sickness spreads.