The Dreamers

26.

On the afternoon of the seventeenth day, in the lakeside sunroom of the nursing home, where Nathaniel has spent so many hours sitting beside Henry, a ninety-year-old woman dozes off in her wheelchair. The noise of her breathing, wheezy as usual, but strong and steady, keeps the staff from disturbing her. Why not let an old woman sleep? The television runs all afternoon. The bougainvillea scrapes against a hundred-year-old window. The sun drifts across the lake. She is still asleep at dusk, her head against her shoulder, as the dinner plates begin to clink in the cafeteria. She seems to awaken slightly when the nurses lift her into her bed. She says something about her children. And this rousing, this brief opening of the eyes, delays the call to a doctor. Even much later, when she fails to wake in the morning, it takes a few hours for anyone to realize that it’s the sickness. This is a place where to die in one’s sleep is considered the best way to go.

After that, new procedures are put in place: the nursing home is closed to visitors.

Nathaniel receives this news that same afternoon, from a security guard, stationed in the parking lot.

“It’s only one case,” says the guard. He seems to want to console. “But just to be safe.”

Nathaniel writes Henry’s name on the white paper bag in which an almond croissant is cooling. “Can you make sure he gets this?” he says, and hands the bag to the guard.

As he drives out through the front gates, he feels only the tiniest ping of worry. To him, this thing still seems overblown. Didn’t they put the campus on lockdown twice last year, and both times were false alarms? Hysteria—that’s the real disease of this era.

His walks in the woods grow longer each day, the dry crunch of boots on pine needles. These trees, too, are going to sleep, in a way—sent there by drought and bark beetle. It’s been happening for years, he tells his students, this ravaging, but no one talks about it, this other, slower wasting. These trees live and die on glacial time, their journeys so slow as to be almost imperceptible to humans. While one root creeps across the soil beneath a field, our history unfolds at high speed.

His classes have been canceled for two weeks. There is a lot of day to fill.

But on this afternoon, an idea comes to Nathaniel with a gust of relief: there is a pipe under the bathroom sink that needs fixing. Here is something that needs doing.

At the hardware store, the man behind the counter wears a white hospital mask, blue latex gloves.

“We’re out of masks,” he calls to Nathaniel as soon as he steps inside. “No more gloves, either.”

He can feel it everywhere in town, this buzz of panic and gloom. They almost want it, don’t they, the drama and the thrill?

“I’m just looking for a stop valve,” he says. It’s the tiniest part, seven dollars apiece, but without it, one leak in one sink could drown a whole house in water.

The man behind the counter is surprised, and disappointed, maybe, that anyone, at a time like this, would be working on a problem so ordinary.

It was Henry’s house, this house, before it was theirs, the kind of place Nathaniel never would have picked out for himself, all these small rooms, one leading to another, and each one packed tight with furniture: wingback chairs and grandfather clocks, mahogany bureaus filled with tablecloths. Persian rugs. Victorian wallpaper. Candlesticks.

They used to argue about the streams of newspapers that flowed into the house, and the travel magazines, the journals of poetry from France and Italy, the boxes of sheet music and the fountain pens, found at estate sales and garage sales and antiques stores. Henry kept a cocktail glass for every kind of drink, and always more and more books, stacked geologically on the dining table and the living room floor and on the landing at the top of the stairs. His cookbooks were always spilling out of the kitchen cabinets, the pages stained with the wine and olive oil of thirty years of evenings.

But there is no relief in the stark glare of the dining table, now naked of Henry’s clutter. And none either in the neat sheets of the bed, never piled, these days, with Henry’s clipped articles or his half-read books, his reading glasses lost somewhere in the blankets.

“Wow,” said Nathaniel’s daughter the last time she visited. “It looks like no one lives here.”

To get at the pipe under the sink, he must lie on his back, his legs spread out on the tile, his shoulder jammed into the wall. It’s an antique, this sink, something Henry brought home one summer, more for its beauty than its function. Something about the lines, he’d said. The silhouette. And the mahogany cabinet that stands beneath it.

Inside that cabinet, behind the vitamins and the aspirin, pushed to the far back corner, remains the bottle of secobarbital that Henry got ahold of in the weeks after his diagnosis. Something awful runs in Henry’s genes. His father had it, an uncle. He knew what was coming for him. “When I can’t remember your name,” he told Nathaniel again and again, “give me these.”

But the bottle remains unopened in the cabinet. No good reason but this one: every human being has certain things they can do and certain things they cannot.

The pipe is crusted in rust. This is a harder job than he thought.

While he works on the sink, the voices of public radio stream out through the speakers of a refurbished antique RCA that Henry bought online: ten more cases, they are saying now, five more suspected.

It is hard for Nathaniel to say if it is this reference to the sickness that makes him feel suddenly a little tired, or just the time of day—he always gets sleepy in the afternoons.

He makes himself some coffee. He keeps working. When he finally gets the part loose, it’s a surprise to feel the cold thread of water landing on his forehead. It takes a moment to understand why it’s happening. He forgot to shut off the water—that’s the problem. It’s a little alarming to forget to do something so simple and so crucial. But the proof that he must have is at his feet: a little puddle is forming on the bathroom tile, and growing.

Now is when the phone begins to ring: it’s one of Henry’s doctors.

The voice of this doctor, though—it sounds different—as if the voice belongs to someone else, but he knows that the person on the phone is Dr. Chavez, the same doctor Henry has had all along.

“I have some news,” says the doctor. Nathaniel sits down on the bed. There is a certain kind of dread that destroys the world with its force. “We really weren’t expecting it.”

Henry’s voice has been gone from his head for months. Henry, the great talker, the reciter of poetry, has gone silent. But now a corresponding sensation suddenly grips Nathaniel: he can no longer assemble in his mind the memory of Henry’s face.

“At first,” says the doctor, “I thought there’d been a mistake. I thought maybe the nurses had mixed up the patients.”

He has sometimes wished, these last few months, that he had done what Henry asked of him. It was supposed to be quick: ten minutes to sleep, four hours for the rest. A quiet release for them both. But now, the more familiar feeling rushes in: a desperate fury to keep Henry alive.

“Is he all right?” he asks.

“I want to warn you,” says the doctor. “We think this is related to the sickness, so there’s no telling what else is coming, but for now, he has a counterintuitive symptom that we haven’t seen in the others.”

Nathaniel’s mouth has gone dry. He can hardly breathe. He waits.

“About an hour ago,” says the doctor, “well, Henry, he started speaking.”

So much of the rest of the day will always be blurry in his mind, the drive back to the nursing home, the guard letting him in, a special circumstance, the doctor’s explanation, full of hesitations and caveats, how there is no way to know if this period of alertness will last, but the wobble of excitement in the doctor’s voice, his use of that word—extraordinary. But what Nathaniel will always remember, as vividly as anything else in his life, is that warm look on Henry’s face, the old expression he has forgotten about until now, the way his eyes fasten on Nathaniel as they have not done in months. This moment makes rational every irrational thought he’s dismissed since Henry got sick: that he might return one day, as if from a walk or a trip, that he might, in some way, wake up. Maybe this is what kept Nathaniel from giving him those drugs. This day makes meaning of that betrayal: It was all for this day, see? It was for this, Henry. For this.

Here is Henry, looking a little younger, somehow, than before he got sick, though a little frailer, too, and he is wearing that old red shirt he used to love. There is a slowness to his words, a slur, but still: “Nathaniel,” he says, relief in his eyes. Those are Henry’s arms reaching out for him. That’s Henry standing up from the chair, the press of his big chest against his. He says something else, but it’s hard to understand the words. He tries again: “Nathaniel,” he says. “Where have you been?”

Biology is full of paradoxical reactions. Certain drugs excite the ordinary brain but calm the hyperactive. Tranquilizers can sometimes agitate instead of soothe. Certain antidepressants have been known to hasten suicide.

Nathaniel cycles through examples—associations in place of an explanation—as he packs a box for Henry. Books, mostly. That’s what he’s asked for so far. Books, and chocolate and tea.

They will be studying his case for years, of course, thinks Nathaniel. Henry: one of a handful of people in Santa Lora in whom the virus produces the exact opposite effect as in the others, a heightening of consciousness instead of the loss of it.

Four cases have surfaced so far in the nursing home. An unused wing now serves as a makeshift isolation unit. While the other three lie sleeping in their beds, Henry, in a white mask and blue gloves, walks the echoing halls. His long legs, his long arms—he was always the tallest in any room. And now here he is, looking his age again, which is twenty years younger than the other residents. He walks a little slower, maybe, and slightly hunched in the shoulders, but mostly, he is just like before. He hums and he grumbles. He quotes Emily Dickinson to the nurses.

“I feel fine,” he keeps telling them, his speech sounding clearer every day. “I feel just the same as I ever did. Tell them, Nathaniel,” he says. “Don’t I seem fine?”

But there are some famous cases of the catatonic inexplicably coming to, only to slip away again. He needs to be monitored. That’s what the doctors say. He cannot go home.

He is allowed this much at least: to walk with Nathaniel in the garden, where one hillside is planted with marigolds, where honeysuckle laces the fence, the lake visible just beyond it. This view—this has always been a consolation.

“I moved your desk back the way you like it,” says Nathaniel.

This is November, but the day is sunny and warm.

“What was I like?” asks Henry. “What was I like all this time?”

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.