The Dreamers

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?