The Dreamers

28.

The crackle of a loudspeaker, the hum of recorded static: the words are sticky and indecipherable, too distant to make out as they drift, like airport announcements, out over the sidewalks and the streets of Santa Lora, and in through the windows of the empty houses, and in through the windows of the big white house, where, once, in a different time, Mei was a babysitter but where, on this morning, she is just waking up, alone in a king-size bed.

“Are you hearing this?” calls Matthew from the hall. She pulls on her jeans and opens the door. It’s a surprise to smell the toothpaste on his breath as he rushes past her toward the window—for a moment, it’s all she can think of: his nearness.

They can’t see it, at first, whatever is making the noise, but the echoing voice is accompanied by a grinding sound, and it’s growing—something is moving slowly toward them.

Words begin to emerge from the static. Health department, she hears. Isolation. Mandatory.

“The whole town?” Mei asks.

“I’m surprised it took them this long,” says Matthew.

A Humvee, painted to match a desert, is rumbling past porches and porch swings and artificial lawns—with a loudspeaker mounted on its hood.

“The military,” says Matthew. “Of course.”

On the sidewalk, two little boys, their shadows tall in the autumn sunshine, are running alongside the Humvee, as if this were the ice cream truck lumbering down their street, kicking up dried leaves as it goes.

The message repeats. Food and water will be distributed. A website is mentioned.

“It’s just the National Guard,” says Mei. “Like for hurricanes.”

All along the street, doors are swinging open. People are stepping out of their Craftsmans to stand on their porches, hands pressed over their mouths.

There is a feeling that this morning is passing into history, a sudden shifting of scale—far from a story about one floor in one dorm at one college.

If you’re sick, says the recording, or if you see someone who’s sick, call 911 right away.

Four soldiers are riding inside the Humvee, in white masks and sunglasses, shooing the kids from the truck. If they smile at the boys, it is hard to tell through the masks.

“They shouldn’t be here waving their guns around,” says Matthew. He is on his laptop already, looking for more news, and it’s everywhere, this new news, these new words: cordon sanitaire.

“They’re not waving their guns,” says Mei, though she can see them, the guns, long and black and resting in their laps.

Do not gather in large groups, says the message. Avoid public places. If you think you’ve been exposed, call the following number.

“Do you know that the American government once quarantined a Chinese neighborhood for typhoid, and then set the whole place on fire?” says Matthew.

“They’re not going to set us on fire,” says Mei.

“They did it before,” he says. “Hawaii, 1930.”

“Maybe someone finally knows what they’re doing,” says Mei.

“I can’t believe how naïve you are,” says Matthew. His skin is smooth beneath the little hairs starting to grow on his chin.

All along the street, neighbors are clustered on porches, arms crossed as they talk in their driveways, as if they need to hear the news in more than one person’s voice, the way any kind of faith leans partly on what other people think.

“They have no idea what’s going on,” Matthew says near her. She can feel him resisting the urge to call out to those people, to shout from the window. This boy: a certain kind of logic runs in him like a compulsion. But something stronger than logic is keeping these people bunched together.

To Mei, it’s the empty porches that look ominous—in how many of these quiet houses are people sleeping already, their bodies dehydrating as they dream?

Her phone begins to ring.

“I thought you turned that off,” says Matthew. “If someone tracked our phones, they could find us.”

It’s her mother: “Where are you?” she says.

“I’m fine,” says Mei.

“We got a call from the police,” says her mother.

The Humvee is shrinking in the distance now. The recording is fading away on the wind.

“You need to be somewhere where they can take care of you,” says her mother. She can tell by the scratch in her mother’s voice that her mother is about to cry.

It is at this moment that Mei sees something almost as surprising as the Humvee: a small group of people in rumpled business suits trudging down the sidewalk with suitcases. Their coats are slung over their arms. They walk slowly, wearily, as if they’ve been walking these streets for days. The wheels of their suitcases are ticking over the cracks in the sidewalk. Some kind of plastic ID badge swings from each of their necks.

Together, on this residential street, these travelers, steering their luggage past driveways and fire hydrants, look like the incongruous images seen sometimes in dreams.

“What if you get sick?” says her mother, but it is easier to worry about the people outside instead, as they walk slowly, slowly, down the street. One of the women outside is walking barefoot in her business suit. Where are her shoes? Mei wonders, but that’s the thing about strangers: you don’t get to hear their stories.