The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

  “Why is she moaning like that?” her mother asks. “Is she trying to talk?”

  * * *

  —

  One night—or it seems to her like it’s night—Matthew whispers something in her ear: I’m sorry.

  It may as well be I love you. And she has the idea that she can say it, too, not with words but with thoughts instead, or with the sound of her breathing in and out, like a code that only he will hear.

  That same night, or maybe another one, or maybe the middle of the day, Matthew climbs into her cot, and after that, he sleeps there with her for a long time until it becomes the main thing she knows, her surest truest fact: his body curled against hers.

  45.

  There is no one part of the brain in charge of keeping track of time. In the conscious brain, the system of timekeeping is loose and diffuse and subject to distortions of various kinds: love, for example, and grief, and youth. In the mind, time dilates, and time contracts. Different days travel at different rates.

  But certain other parts of the body keep time with more precision. At the beginning, we all grow at a certain, fixed rate.

  Thus, as Rebecca begins her seventh week of sleep, ten fingers begin to flower, and ten toes. A pair of tiny nostrils opens in a nose. The eyelids are starting to form. The skull, at this moment, is translucent like a jellyfish. And inside it are blooming the earliest passageways of a brain.

  Soon, the reproductive organs will coalesce. The ovaries will begin to fill with eggs, and those eggs will travel with this tiny girl—if she survives—for the whole rest of her life.

  The air in Rebecca’s room is still. Her only movements are the occasional shifting of her head in sleep, and the cyclical fluttering of her eyelids, her eyes darting beneath them in a way suggestive of dreams.

  But soon, hidden inside her, those feathery limbs will begin to move. The arms will bend. The knees. The hands will meet and come apart. A thumb might make its way into the mouth. A million neurons will emerge every minute.

  A blood test has finally revealed her secret to the doctors, who take it as a worrying surprise. There is no way of knowing how the virus might affect the fetus, or if they can keep Rebecca’s body well enough for the baby to grow to full term. From then on, the nurses treat her with extra care.

  While Rebecca sleeps, and while the nurses change in and out of their suits, and while, outside, the soldiers go on and off shift, and while the world watches the continuing coverage of the Santa Lora sickness, the small developments of one minute human being go on unfolding at a perfectly predictable rate, like the intricate ticking of the most delicate clock on earth.

  46.

  The news travels quickly. It is a rumor, really, at the start. A development more shocking, in a way, than all the facts that have come before it. Seven weeks in, news like this is difficult to believe. But it is true: one of the sleepers has woken up, only the second to open his eyes since the outbreak began.

  * * *

  —

  At first, says the nurse, she assumes she is mistaken. It can be hard to see through the rippling plastic of the masks. But a second look, at that man in the corner, four rows in, shows that she is right: his eyes are open. And it’s not only his eyes. It’s the way he is suddenly shifting around in his sheets, his movements so different from all the other sleepers, more purposeful, more direct. He whips his head back and forth. He is looking around.

  His cot is one of two hundred cots set up in the college dining hall. There is a sleeper in every bed. There is an IV in every arm. The sight of one of them sitting up like this—it is as startling as it would be to see a corpse rise up from the dead.

  Not described in any of the early reports is how the nurse feels in that first moment: a pang of fear she cannot quite explain.

  The man begins to speak.

  Often, they mumble and they moan, but this is different. This is speech. How alien it is to hear this man’s voice, hoarse at first, but his first word so crisp and so clear: “Hello?” he says. “Hello?”

  He raises his head. He turns it quickly. He pulls the wires off his body. He waves his arms in front of him, as if he is blind, which, it turns out, he is, in a way—his glasses have been lost during his long weeks of sleep.

  All the nurses soon gather around him, a clutch of yellow suits, the sound of Gore-Tex boots.

  A contagious disease, they say. You have contracted a contagious disease. It is hard to tell if he can hear them, their voices echoey through the plastic. It is hard to tell if he understands what they are saying.

  He has pale green eyes that shine blankly at them.

  Later, these nurses will confide to one another about the strange sensation they experienced as they spoke to him, as if they were attempting to communicate with a traveler from some faraway land.

  The man speaks quickly. His words tumble too fast to be discerned. And also there is this: he is shouting. He is shouting something about a fire.

  “Did they put it out?” he shouts. “Is it out?”

  You were dreaming for a long time, they tell him.

  “There was a fire,” he shouts again. “At the library. The whole place was on fire.”

  His voice grows louder and louder, but the sleep of those around him continues undisturbed.

  He calls for water.

  “Please,” he says. He keeps pulling at his beard. “I’m thirsty. I’m so thirsty.”

  He drinks and drinks. He drinks so much water that the water comes right back up, splashing the rubber boots of the nurses, as if, after a while, a body grows to prefer even the worst of circumstances to any sudden change.

  “A fire,” he shouts again. “It was a huge fire.”

  The nurses nod together in their yellow suits. They are volunteers, these people, flown in from other states after most of the local nurses slipped under. They want to be comforting, but the man will not be comforted. One of the nurses touches his shoulder with her gloved hand.

  “And my girls,” he shouts. “Where are my girls? Where are they?”

  There is no mention of relatives in his chart. It seems possible that these girls, like the fire, are part of some deep and indecipherable dream.

  He asks for pen and paper. This is how he spends the next few hours: writing in a notebook with the speed and urgency of a person facing his death.

  * * *

  —

  What a shock it is to receive the message after so many weeks in quarantine in the hospital: she is needed on the campus, Catherine, one of the few psychiatrists left awake in Santa Lora, and the only one who witnessed the waking of the first boy. His body on the pavement—it still glows bright in her mind.

  She is escorted the three blocks from the hospital to the dining hall by two soldiers, her first time outside in more than a month. The weather has changed in that time. December. Dead leaves drift across the empty sidewalks as they walk, the seasons more apparent up here in the mountains than they are in Los Angeles, where her daughter, thank God, has been released from quarantine into the care of Catherine’s mother.

  In the time they have been apart, her daughter has learned to count to twenty, and to put her own shirts on. Her bangs, she knows from their nightly video calls, have grown into her eyes.

  * * *

  —

  The patient, when Catherine gets there, is writing in a journal—they have moved him to a separate room in the dining hall.

  She wants to be more careful this time, after what happened with the first boy. She approaches this man quietly.

  “Do you know,” she asks him, “how long you’ve been asleep?”

  The man does not answer right away. He looks into the distance, the way one might if looking out over a vast remembered space. The other boy did that, too, Catherine remembers, as if the world inside his head were more arresting than the one outside
of it.

  A sudden burst of suspicion comes into the man’s face.

  “You can’t keep me here,” he says. “You can’t keep me.”

  “It’s normal to feel disoriented,” says Catherine through her mask.

  Often, the comatose have the feeling afterward that they have been unconscious for only a short time, a few hours, maybe, or a single night. It can be traumatic to learn how much time has passed.

  Catherine notes several unusual symptoms in the man, not present in the other boy: a tendency for palilaic speech, the repetition of certain words and phrases. And also the shouting, megaphonia, as the textbooks would call it. The patient seems unaware of both symptoms, as if his perception of the world is out of scale with ours.

  “I’m not answering any more questions,” says the man. He does not speak for the rest of the day, but he goes on with his writing late into the night.

  Only later that evening does Catherine discover one more eccentric symptom, familiar only from case studies she read in medical school: the pages of the man’s notebook are filled with miniature writing, the letters so small that they are legible only with a magnifying glass.

  From what she can read when the man briefly dozes off, his writings are marked by delusion and confusion, and in particular, a conviction that he has been asleep for much longer than five weeks.

  47.

  Six A.M.: a barking of dogs in the yard, the clink of the chain on the back door.

  Three floors up, alone in the house, Sara goes stiff in her bed, as if whoever is out there might sense the small movements of a twelve-year-old girl through the walls. She is sleeping again in one of her mother’s sweaters.

  Now the crunch of footsteps in the dirt. Now a rattling of the side door.

  The dogs go on barking and barking—she does not even know most of their names, each one rescued by Libby, hungry, from the street, but thank God for their loyalty, thank God for their noise.

  Now the scrape of metal on wood. Something is being dragged across the loose boards of the back porch.

  She wishes for her sister like a prayer. And in the darkness of the bedroom, still shadowed with the dolls they once imagined had the power to talk, she almost believes it: that some similar magic might call Libby back from wherever she sleeps.

  She tiptoes to the window. Her hands shake as she pulls back the corner of the curtain.

  The kittens are agitated, too, the littlest one pacing and pacing the floor, the others waiting deep under Sara’s bed.

  When she peeks out through the boards on the bedroom window, what she sees in the early morning dark is a man standing on a trash can. It’s not the neighbor, this time. It’s someone else, this man who is right now reaching up toward the second-floor window.

  He calls out to the dogs to be quiet—and this is when she recognizes him, his voice.

  He arrives like a stranger and a thief, but here he is: her father.

  * * *

  —

  At first, it’s a relief. Of course it is. Of course. Here is her father, sitting at the kitchen table. Here he is: alive and awake.

  He keeps saying her name. “Thank God,” he says. “Thank God.” She does not remember a look like that showing up on his face before, a relief that seems somehow explosive.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says. He is a little out of breath.

  His head has been shaved clean. His beard is missing.

  He does not say much at first, as if there is not much to say, as if, after five weeks, he simply woke up and walked home.

  “I don’t know what happened to my key,” he says. “Do you know what happened to my key?”

  His skin is very pale, and he is squinting through a pair of borrowed glasses. He looks even skinnier than usual in a loose green T-shirt she has never seen before. But it’s him. It’s him. Those are his arms resting on the kitchen table, and those are his tattoos, the intricate wolf with the yellow eyes and the blocky black spider on his elbow, and her mother’s name fading gray on his forearm beside the birth dates of both of his girls. This cataloguing of his body feels necessary because there is something about him—there is something about him that is different.

  “Do you know what happened to my key?” he says again.

  His fingernails have grown long like a woman’s but ragged, the thumbnail so long that it is starting to curl.

  “What happened to your hair?” Sara asks. “What happened to your beard?”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  His skin is so pale, and that bare chin—she tries at once to look and not look, as if a section of his face has been removed. A phantom impulse rises in her: to point it out to her sister.

  “You’re okay,” he says. “Right?”

  “Are you?” she says.

  By now, the sun is coming up. There is a quiet comfort in that milky light, the way it streams through the cracks in the boards so like the way it would on a more ordinary morning.

  “Where’s your sister?” he asks. He glances toward the stairs.

  She cannot look at his face while she tells him, so she looks out the window instead, toward the dogs. Every word of the story must be pushed, one by one, over the hard knot in her throat.

  Her father seems confused by what he hears.

  “You already told me that,” he says. “Didn’t you? You already told me she got sick.”

  “What do you mean?” she says, her eyes going blurry.

  “We talked about her, earlier,” he says.

  She is afraid to say no, but he can see the truth on her face. It is hard to know what to say.

  “Never mind,” he says, rubbing the bald ridges of his head. He has a mole up there she has never seen. “Never mind.”

  She has the urge to replace the confusion that follows with a nice, clear idea: “If you got better,” she says, “then she’ll probably be okay, too, right?”

  Her father stays silent. He looks like a man struggling to make mathematical calculations in his head.

  She brings him a soda, the cool reassuring pop of the tab beneath her fingers. She brings him the nail clippers, too, leaves them on the table beside him. There is a certain confusion in the room about who is the caretaker and who the one in need of care.

  * * *

  —

  Now that her father is home, she is suddenly aware of how the house has gotten away from her—that’s the way it feels—like weeds taking over a garden. The kitty litter is pebbling out of the bathroom, and there is the clamor of dishes in the sink, the scatter of soda cans, and all those forgotten cereal bowls, licked clean by the cats.

  But her father does not seem to notice any of it.

  He does not ask whose dogs these are, wagging and whining and lapping water all over the linoleum.

  “Can you get these dogs out of the kitchen?” he says, and that’s all he says about them. “I have a lot to figure out.”

  Thank God he does not think to go down to the basement, where, if he did, he would discover what those dogs have done to the neat stocks of toilet paper and the cereal boxes, the many jars of preserved carrots they’ve cracked on the cement.

  Her father spends that first day right there at the kitchen table, bent over an unfamiliar spiral notebook.

  “What are you writing?” she asks after a while.

  “I don’t know exactly,” he says. “I’m just trying to sort some things out.”

  He hardly moves all day, as if his body has grown used to it: the motionlessness of sleep. And when he does move, he moves slowly, as if pushing through a thicker kind of air. His pen inches across the page, leaving a trail of tiny words.

  This is only the first day, thinks Sara, an uneasiness creeping through her. Maybe he’s still waking up.

  Chloe skids across the linoleum when she sees him fo
r the first time, a hiss.

  “That’s Daddy,” says Sara as Chloe’s tail puffs up like a duster. “He’s your favorite, remember?”

  Maybe it’s the baldness of his head that bothers her, or that bare chin. Or maybe it’s the unhealthy color of his skin. Whatever it is, Chloe stays away, her path to her water bowl arcing unnaturally wide.

  On television, the same headline is running on all the news channels: “Man Awakens from Santa Lora Sickness.”

  “I think they’re talking about you,” she calls to her father from the living room.

  But he stays at the table and goes on with his writing. From a distance, he looks as if he is performing the careful work of a clockmaker.

  The news channels do not seem to have much information about him, no picture, no name, no sense of his condition.

  “Can you find me another pen?” her father calls from the kitchen, shaking his pen in the air, his mind having drained it of ink.

  Among the many things her father fails to notice that day is the way her mother’s belongings are spread out around the house, those attic boxes now gutted in the living room, the treasures spilling out: the wedding pictures and the cassette tapes, her collection of turquoise jewelry, all the objects they’ve been lovingly studying, like clues to an old mystery, and her tarnished silver charm bracelet, which is right now revolving around Sara’s small wrist, clinking lightly against the table.

  Sara uses the last of the bread from the freezer to make tuna fish sandwiches for dinner, but her father leaves most of his on his plate.

  All day, the nail clippers sit on the table beside him, untouched. All day, the scrape of his nails on the soda can.

  “You should go to bed,” he says finally, the kind of thing no one has said to her in weeks. And it is appealing, in a way, to be told that and to do it, these the normal words of a father to a daughter.

  Much later, in the middle of the night, she can still hear him down there, not sleeping, moving around in the kitchen.