The Dreamers

32.

From the window of the third floor of the hospital, now sealed for ten days, Catherine watches helicopters come and go—with supplies and with food. Garbage is piling up on the streets below.

There is something monstrous about the suits that she and the other healthcare workers now wear when in the isolation ward, the way the plastic distorts the faces of the doctors and the nurses, the way it muffles their voices. They look larger in those suits. Less human. People get spooked.

At the back doors of the hospital, sleepers have begun to appear slumped alone against the glass, abandoned like newborns or drug addicts, notes pinned to their shirts. Rumors are flourishing: anyone exposed will be detained.

Seventy miles away in Catherine’s townhouse in Los Angeles, Catherine’s daughter and her daughter’s babysitter are quarantined, too. This is a precaution, in case Catherine brought the virus back home—on her clothes, maybe, or on her skin, or in the very air she breathed as she kissed her daughter’s cheeks after those first few visits to Santa Lora.

She should have been more careful, she keeps thinking.

Her phone conversations with her daughter always end the same way: Okay, but Mama, now can I go outside?

She has begun to misbehave, says the babysitter, in unfamiliar ways. She pulls on the curtains. She throws her food on the floor. She runs in circles through the house.

The babysitter, so patient otherwise, has begun to sound weary on the phone.

On the following Sunday, Catherine spots from the window a small church congregation meeting outdoors, having dragged the pews out into the parking lot to limit the airborne spread.

There is something about it, those families in their pews, those Bibles in their hands, the faint strains of their hymns floating in the open air—tears come into Catherine’s eyes. She has never been away from her daughter so long.

One night, Catherine watches a crowd of people swarm a helicopter at the high school nearby, as it tries to land with a shipment of food.

After that, one of the ER doctors pulls her aside:

“We’re moving the opioids out of the pharmacy,” he says. He is very thin, this doctor, a new beard spreading across his face. He speaks quickly. None of the staff are sleeping much. The lack shows in this man’s eyes. “Now that the town is cut off,” says the ER doctor, “street drugs aren’t going to be able to get in, either. It’s only a matter of time before they come looking here.”

“Who?” says Catherine. But she knows who he means. He speaks of them like animals. But she wants him to say it.

“Addicts,” he says.

Addiction is not her specialty, but she often sees it in her patients. And why not? Those drugs soothe the same parts of the brain that mental illness sets on fire.

“If there’s going to be violence in this hospital,” says the ER doctor, “that’s how it will happen.”

She can see it in this doctor’s eyes, how clearly he can picture it: the drug-addicted, like zombies, overrunning the hospital. Worry, she often reminds her patients, is a kind of creativity. Fear is an act of the imagination.

“From now on,” says the ER doctor, “you and I are the only ones who will know the exact location of these drugs.”

More and more doctors fall sick.

Catherine finds herself performing procedures she has not done since medical school. How strange the sewing needle feels in her hand, the coarse thread, as she stiches up a cut on the forehead of a young boy, after he slips near one of the overflowing toilets. And how odd is the heft of a newborn’s head at the moment he finally slips out of his mother and into Catherine’s gloved hands—while the only obstetrician in the hospital goes on dreaming in the isolation ward.

A few days later, Catherine finds the ER doctor slumped in an office chair in what was previously the waiting room. It is less and less surprising, how suddenly this sleep takes over the body, though his breathing seems even slower than the others’.

Two orderlies in blue suits are moving him to the isolation ward, when a bottle of pills falls from his pocket.

“Wait,” says Catherine. “It’s not the sickness,” she says. It’s OxyContin. An opium sleep. No wonder he knew so clearly what others might do.

For this, at least, there is a cure, a temporary one, anyway: one shot of naloxone in the thigh. He opens his eyes, awake and embarrassed. He avoids her after that.

That night, Catherine gets a call from her daughter’s babysitter.

“She has a fever,” says the babysitter. Catherine’s breath catches. The sickness, they have come to understand, starts that way, too. If something happens to her daughter, it will be Catherine’s fault, she is certain.

“I didn’t want to worry you,” says the babysitter. “But she fell asleep a few hours ago, and I’m having trouble waking her.”

Now it is Catherine’s turn to imagine the worst in florid detail.

A crazy simplicity cuts through everything else: she must get home to her daughter.

She will leave this hospital, which no one has left for two weeks. She will leave this town, surrounded by soldiers and military vehicles.

She peels off her gloves and rushes downstairs.

She does not even make it past the front door. There are guards, of course. This is not a voluntary quarantine.

Catherine spends the whole night on the phone with the babysitter. On the small screen of her phone, her sleeping daughter looks just like the sick do. Sometime after midnight, she realizes with a burst of panic that she cannot remember the exact color of her little girl’s eyes. People comment on it, an unusual shade of hazel, but she cannot picture it. She cannot remember her own daughter’s eyes.

Finally, at 3 A.M., relief: her daughter opens her eyes and asks the babysitter for water.

This is not the sickness, then, just an ordinary childhood fever.

The sound of her daughter’s little voice on the phone releases in her a tenderness for the whole world, for everyone, awake and asleep, in this hospital. It feels like a drug spreading through her body. It feels like the moment her daughter was born.