The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

  A thick smoke is filling the room. His throat is beginning to burn. All his confusion is distilled down to this: to get away from this smoke. It is a complicated procedure, this unhooking of tubes from his body. The firefighter helps free him from the cords and then disappears into the gloom.

  The lights flicker and then flash off. A little sunlight is streaming in from somewhere, dim through the gathering smoke. He begins to cough. The idea comes to Ben that this is a library, a library crowded with beds.

  He can’t stop coughing now. And soon he is crawling along the floor with the others. His body is stiff and sore, but he keeps moving, oddly aware of its separate parts, as if the parts are operating just slightly out of synch, how the one hand moves before the other, his knees on hard wood. It is hard to find the exit through the smoke, but people are calling into the room from outside, strangers, strangers are calling to him, and the truth of it, that strangers would help other strangers, makes his eyes fill with tears, right there in the dark and the smoke: Here, here, they are shouting through the dusk, the door is over here.

  Later, Ben will forget almost all of these details, how he finally got out—onto the lawn and into the sun with the other survivors. He will forget the way people looked at him, the shock to see him awake, he and the few others, skinny in hospital gowns, IVs still hanging from some of their arms. Perhaps the mind can only catalogue from any given day a fixed amount of experience. It is what happens next that he will always remember—in almost photographic detail—from the events of this day.

  There is a woman out there—she is standing barefoot in the grass. And this woman—she looks a little like Annie. But he knows that it happens, how longing can do that, conjure the shapes of loved ones in the faces of strangers. This reminder of Annie—it is a part of the waking up, he knows, the familiar groove of missing her.

  But the way this woman is standing, a little hunched, and the way she is chewing on her hair—he keeps looking.

  She turns a little. Her profile comes into view. And there, on that woman’s face, is a little notch in her nose, just like the one Annie has, from when she broke it as a teenager. Annie. She is standing in the sunshine in a hospital gown, a fire blanket wrapped around her shoulders, looking skinny and a little unwell, unsteady on her feet, her face smudged gray from the smoke. But it’s her. It really is Annie. There she is, squinting up at the sky, as if in disbelief. There she is, awake.

  50.

  As the newspapers will later report, arson is suspected. Matches are found in the basement, the torn pages of books used for kindling. The setter of the fire is never found.

  But many of the sleepers survive. Most are carried out in their sleep.

  The big news, though, is this: fourteen of them wake up and walk out.

  It’s amazing, everyone agrees, miraculous, even. There is a great appetite for the miraculous. Among these survivors is a husband and wife, the Romeo and Juliet of Santa Lora, as several news outlets soon take to calling them in place of their real names: Ben and Annie.

  Another survivor is an eleven-year-old girl, who, as the media widely reports, was carried out by her own father, himself only recently recovered, who rushed to the building when he saw the smoke, calling her name until he found her: Libby.

  The media pays less attention to the sleepers who do not survive. There are nine of them. The cause of death is smoke inhalation, the gradual dissipation of oxygen from the blood, which, once, was thought to cause unusually vivid dreams.

  Among these dead are two nurses, a CDC specialist in infectious disease, and the dean of the College of the Arts and Sciences.

  Also on the list is a Santa Lora College freshman from San Diego: Mei Liu, age eighteen.

  Her body is found too late by firefighters in a far corner of the smoky reading room of the library, still prone in her cot, curled beneath a blanket, saline still draining into the main vein of her swiftly whitening arm. She slept right through it, her parents are assured. She passed away peacefully, they say, in her sleep.

  In the days after the fire, one story is circulated more than any other—people love when a crisis brings out the goodness in others: as smoke filled the library, one student, a college freshman and heir to the Baker & Baker pharmaceutical family, Matthew Baker, rushed inside and saved a baby from the fire. The story is shared again and again, how he grabbed the very youngest of the sick, the one who had the most life left: an infant, nine weeks old, wrapped in blankets, who went on sleeping all the while.

  This story stands above the rest, this hero of Santa Lora, as proof of what human beings are capable of—who among us does not love a simple song?

  51.

  They report only minor residual symptoms, Ben and Annie. A mild dizziness, in her case. A slight impairment of his peripheral vision. They notice nothing else at first.

  A year earlier, or two years, or any number of years before this one, their reunion would have felt different, like a wild piece of luck, miraculous, some might say, like a rising from the dead.

  But in this particular year of their lives, they do not feel lucky. They feel almost no gratitude, as they hold tight to one another’s hands or lean into the warmth of one another’s arms. Each of them is entirely preoccupied with someone else. He is a father. She is a mother. Their child is sick.

  * * *

  —

  The college dining hall is where the youngest surviving sick are moved after the fire. Here is where—after much waiting and calling and calling again, and much signing of paperwork—Ben and Annie find their baby.

  They see her lying in a clear plastic bassinet. She is swaddled in unfamiliar blankets, her little mind locked in that deep, unreachable sleep.

  A feeding tube is taped into her tiny nostril.

  “She’s so much bigger than the last time I saw her,” says Annie, her eyes continuously welling with tears.

  Already, she is holding her up in her arms, the tubes dangling behind her. Even in sleep, the baby resettles her head on her shoulder, as if the memory of her mother resides entirely in the muscles of her neck.

  Masks are suggested, and gloves. But it would be impossible, with gloves on, to wipe the crust from their daughter’s eyes, or to rub Vaseline on her dried and cracking lips. There is a tremendous need to touch her skin.

  She is two weeks older than the last time Ben saw her. Just the continued fact of her body, just her existence, is proof of the work of other people, those nurses, now swishing through the room in protective suits, how they have cared for her every day since he last saw her, and the college student they will never meet who rescued her from the fire.

  She could have died—this is the knowledge that lights every moment with her now. The things that could have happened but did not are just as crucial to a life as all the things that do.

  A few other mothers and fathers lean over some of the other children, or they sit, like Ben and Annie, in plastic chairs beside their cots. But most of the children lie here alone save for the nurses—and not enough of them—who turn them and wash them and fill the feeding tubes and change the diapers.

  * * *

  —

  One of the last dreams Ben dreams before waking from the sickness goes like this: He and Annie are in a boat, a canoe. The sun is shining on her back, which is bare except for the strings of her green bikini. They are floating in some kind of bay. He does not know where. They paddle out to a small island on which grows a single pine tree. They leave the canoe and the paddles on the small beach and walk up to the tree, where they drink the beers they have packed in a cooler and watch the other boats drift by in the sun. There is an intense feeling of happiness, as the light glitters on the water, and something else, too: possibility. A lightness.

  But suddenly someone is shouting at them from a passing boat.

  “Hey,” they say, “is this your canoe?”

&nbs
p; And there it is, their canoe, floating empty in the middle of the water. The tide must have come in, they realize as they swim out to catch the boat and collect the drifting paddles. Like all the other dreams, there is something about this one that does not feel like a dream at all. It feels—how else can he put it—real. Here is that feeling again: that what he is seeing is the future.

  In those first few days after waking, the dream hangs over Ben, a kind of background noise to his days in this converted dining hall.

  He wants to tell Annie about it.

  But it seems suddenly too intimate to mention, and too ridiculous, too. He keeps quiet. The act of matching words to the experience saps his belief.

  Instead, he can only say this: “Did you have any weird dreams?” he asks her.

  She does not look up from the baby.

  “No,” she says. “I didn’t dream at all.”

  She feels so far away these days, like a stranger sitting across from him on a train.

  * * *

  —

  On the second day, an older baby nearby begins to whimper in his sleep. His face is wincing. His diaper, Annie soon discovers, has leaked. Ben calls for a nurse. After a few minutes of waiting, the boy moaning, Annie changes it herself. There are certain circumstances under which the changing of a diaper is a sacred act.

  * * *

  —

  One day a small boy in a bed nearby opens his eyes. The movement of those eyelids, the white around his eyes, sends hope surging through the whole place.

  “I want my mama,” he says. He is calm for a moment, as if the request will be granted. “I want my mama.”

  But when she does not appear right away, he begins to cry.

  Ben tries to comfort him, but he will not be comforted.

  Finally, the mother is located and brought to his bed.

  “He asked for me?” she says when he jumps into her arms. “With words?”

  Not quite two years old, this boy, says the mother, had not yet begun speaking in sentences.

  But now listen to him:

  “Mama,” he says, “I had a bad dream.”

  But Ben and Annie’s baby sleeps on. They cut her nails. They bathe her body. They sleep on the linoleum beside her bassinet.

  Ben thinks more and more about his dreams. So strong is his feeling that those dreams were premonitions that they begin to frighten him. One thing was missing from those dreams: his baby. If those dreams were of the future, where was she?

  52.

  In a famous experiment, a geologist once subjected himself to eight weeks alone in a lightless underground cave. Among other things, he wanted to test the accuracy of his own internal clock. He woke and slept as he pleased. He marked his days in a notebook. Without the ticking of clocks or the rising and setting of the sun, his body’s rhythms soon fell out of synch with the earth’s. At the end of the experiment, he was sure he had spent only thirty-five days underground, but sixty days had passed at the surface.

  * * *

  —

  Libby: she sleeps for three weeks but she dreams of a single afternoon.

  She wakes with a smile on her face, a calmness. She yawns and stretches in her sheets.

  With the opening of those eyes comes an elation that Sara has never known before. Nothing is more potent than relief.

  “How do you feel?” Sara asks her sister.

  Libby has awakened in her own bedroom, where their father brought her after the fire—during the first minutes of chaos when no one was guarding the patients. He and Sara have been tending to her for a day without the help of doctors or nurses.

  “I had the most amazing dream last night,” says Libby.

  Her voice is hoarse. Her curls are tangled. She does not seem to understand how much time has passed.

  “What kind of dream?” says her father, an odd intensity to his voice.

  Libby meets eyes with Sara, their old habit.

  “What happened to your beard?” asks Libby.

  “Those dreams,” says their father. “Those were not normal dreams, okay? What did you see?”

  The hair on his head is starting to grow back, but it’s coming in white instead of brown. And he is just as skinny as he was on the day he woke up.

  “It was about our mom,” says Libby. There’s an unfamiliar quiet in her voice, a reverence. “We were by the lake.”

  But her father is shaking his head.

  “No,” he says, his hand up, like a stop sign. “That’s not the kind of dream I’m talking about. What else?”

  “Just that,” she says.

  He keeps asking if she’s sure, and she is, and then he disappears downstairs.

  “How long did I sleep?” Libby asks once he’s gone.

  “Three weeks,” says Sara.

  Libby’s reaction is almost physical, as if the wind has been knocked out of her chest.

  “It felt like just a few hours,” she says. “Like a nap.”

  The cats have collected around Libby, cuddling in the sheets of her bed.

  “You were there, too,” says Libby. “In the dream. We were down at the lake with her.”

  If Libby closes her eyes, she can remember everything about those minutes: the lavender cables of their mother’s sweater, her fingernails, chipped with pale peach polish.

  “And these earrings,” says Libby, picking up a pair of silver hoops from a scattering of jewelry on the nightstand. “She was wearing these earrings.”

  There was a newspaper spread out on a picnic table by the lake. Finger paints set out.

  “We were making handprints with the paint,” says Libby. “And she was painting a little picture of the lake with her fingers.”

  The air smelled like barbecue. Someone was grilling down on the beach. Their mother had a certain way of wiping her hair from her face with the back of her hand.

  “You were wearing a sunflower-shaped barrette,” says Libby. “And a white sundress.”

  Their mother handed them milk in plastic cups, a ziplock bag of Goldfish.

  “I started to throw the paint, and she said: ‘Girls, I’ve told you three times.’ ”

  The blue paint drying in the creases of her palms, the sound of the birds, the voices of other children splashing in the water.

  “Do you remember a day like that?” says Libby.

  “No,” says Sara.

  “I think it was real,” says Libby, a distant afternoon recovered, intact, from the deep.

  Libby was so young when their mother died—she has never before remembered anything about her.

  “It can’t be,” says Sara, suddenly filled with envy. “You were too young to remember.”

  But she makes Libby tell her the whole thing again, in even more detail, until the time it takes for the telling far exceeds any minutes they spent, once, years ago, by the lake.

  Libby lowers her voice. “What did Daddy dream of?”

  “He dreamed there would be a fire at the library,” says Sara.

  “Don’t talk about that,” her father calls from the other room.

  Sara whispers: “And then there really was a fire there.”

  An uneasiness comes into Libby’s face.

  “What happened was just like your dream,” says Sara. “Right, Daddy?”

  He shakes his head. He is adamant. “In my dream,” he says, “no one died.”

  * * *

  —

  While the Humvees continue rumbling down the streets of Santa Lora, their father checks and rechecks the supplies in the basement, obsessed with new worries.

  He had other dreams, too.

  “The oceans moved a hundred miles inland,” he says. “Los Angeles was swallowed. The ocean came all the way to the base of these mountains.”

  He takes a sip of bee
r. He swallows hard.

  “And then today,” he says, “this news comes out: the biggest ice shelf in Antarctica is about to collapse. Do you see what that means?”

  They wait for him to explain.

  “It’s happening,” he says. “The dreams I had. They were all real.”

  Sara at once believes it and does not believe it. She has not yet heard the rumors circulating that some of the other survivors claim to have seen glimpses of the future, too. But isn’t the future always an imaginary thing before it comes?

  53.

  A tiny heart goes on beating in the dark. A spinal cord coalesces. Electricity begins to flow through the synapses of a brain. Bones form, the beginnings of teeth. Eyelids. The first flapping of hairline arms, the minute flowering of fingernails. The knees and the wrists—they begin to bend.

  Rebecca, ten weeks in, goes on sleeping all the while. Her cheeks, flushed with extra blood, now take on a certain fullness as her chest rises and falls beneath the hospital sheets. A surge of hormones is responsible for the extra oil in her skin, and the nurses—sheathed in their masks and their suits—like to point out the one nice thing in this dark place: she really does have that pregnancy glow.

  * * *

  —

  That same week, inside one of the vast medical tents on campus, the professor of biology opens his eyes in the quiet middle of the night. Above Nathaniel looms a bright white ceiling, fluorescent lit. He is not at home—this is Nathaniel’s first thought. The air smells like soil.

  He is lucky, says the first doctor—his was a mild case. Only three weeks. That’s their best guess, anyway. “Some kids brought you in,” he says through his mask. “A boy and a girl carried you here.”

  He is too weak to sit up, at first, but he asks about Henry, if Henry is here somewhere, too. It takes hours for the answer to come back to him: no, there’s no patient here by that name. He borrows a phone. He calls home. No answer.