The Dreamers

43.

The second floor of the college library is where the youngest sick now sleep.

Here, in the makeshift pediatric ward, they sleep in cat shirts and ballet skirts. They sleep with feeding tubes taped to pink cheeks. They sleep with IVs peeking out from the sleeves of fire truck pajamas. Some sleep with stuffed animals in the crooks of their arms, put there by who knows who, a worn elephant, a floppy rabbit, a plastic baby nestled in the arms of a toddler. Some sleep with notes pinned to their clothing: their names and their phone numbers and PLEASE HELP. Some sleep, like Libby, with eyes half open to the ceiling, their little bellies rising as they dream.

Maybe their parents sleep in other rooms—in the hospital or on other floors of this library, or in the tents on the lawns outside. Or, maybe, their parents have ceased to sleep. Wherever they are, those parents are not here.

The bookshelves, pushed to the sides of the room, loom over the children’s cots while doctors and nurses in blue plastic suits check vitals, one by one.

A kind of sacredness suffuses this library. It is quiet here, except for the small sounds of their snores, the occasional cough, the steady beep and whir of the monitors, which track the workings of their little beating hearts.

But there is a certain amount of chaos here. Always, there are one or two workers wearing less protection than they should, by accident or ignorance or a shortage of the proper gear. Volunteers sometimes carry sick children right into this room with only gloves on their hands and thin paper masks, the rest of their skin exposed to contaminated air.

This is how Mei and Matthew end up in here, carrying the girl through the big double doors and up the stairs, after many hours of waiting for someone else to do it. They are suddenly breaking their last remaining rule: to stay outside the wards.

“Let’s go,” says Mei, as soon as they have left the girl in the care of a nurse.

But Matthew hesitates, mesmerized by what he sees: there must be a hundred children sleeping in here, and only a few nurses and doctors to care for them. He is suddenly alive with the work there is to do here.

“Matthew,” Mei says. “We need to leave.”

But instead, he heads toward a nearby bed. A young boy is sleeping there; his IV has come unhooked. It’s a quick fix, but no one has yet noticed.

“Come on,” says Mei. She is hot with fear.

But Matthew will not leave, even when the nurses try to shoo him out.

“I’m leaving,” says Mei.

“So then go,” he says.

And she does. Out in the sunshine, the open air, a mix of relief and guilt comes to her. He can be so infuriating, this boy, so brave and so rash—what good will it do if they get themselves sick?

It is late that night before Matthew comes back to their tent in the yard. She wakes to the sound of the zipper coming open.

“Please don’t do that again,” says Mei.

But Matthew is vibrating, electric with a day of doing the most vital work.

“Think of how many years of life are ahead of those kids,” he says. “Their lives are worth so much more than the adults’.”

“We don’t have the right masks or suits to be working in there,” says Mei. “We’re not trained.”

He sighs hard and lies down beside her. A sticky silence comes into the tent.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says. “I think you’re too attached to me.”

A lump rises instantly in her throat. It is a surprise how close these feelings are to the surface.

“Aren’t you attached to me, too?” she says. She reaches for his hand. He pulls it away.

“Let me ask you something,” he says. She can tell by the way he says it that he is heading toward something abstract, some example from philosophy he read in a book. It can be tiring, late at night, this constant talk of logic, this daily parsing of ethics.

“If I was drowning,” he says. “And two strangers were also drowning nearby. And if you had to choose to save either me or the two strangers, who would you choose?” he says. “Me? Or the strangers?”

“What do you think?” says Mei.

She knows what he wants her to say. But it’s not true. Him—she would save him. Of course she would. She has not dared, these weeks, to say the word love out loud, but it feels like the right one.

“But that’s the wrong choice,” says Matthew.

A set of sirens zooms by outside, the faint flashing of red lights on his face.

“Two lives are always worth more than one,” he says. “It shouldn’t matter that you know me.”

“I don’t just know you,” she says. He can be so cold sometimes. “I guess you’re saying you wouldn’t save me?”

“See?” he says. “This is why I think love is unethical. I don’t believe in it.”

It is a shock to remember that she has only known him for a few weeks. There is a feeling of the ground falling away.

He gives more examples, but she has stopped listening. At least it is dark in this small tent—he can’t see her tears. But they are coming fast and hard. She can’t hide it for long. Maybe she doesn’t know him at all, this boy, who does not, at this moment, reach over to comfort her, even now, as she begins to sob.

“This is what I mean,” he says. “You’re too attached.”

A sudden longing for her parents blows through her, an old memory from a lonely childhood: how at least her parents would always care what happens to her.

“Why are you being so mean?” she says finally.

He answers by unzipping the tent.

“You’re missing the point,” he says as he climbs out onto the grass like he is trying to shake her off of him, get free.

Next she hears the sound of his feet crunching quickly on dried leaves as he rushes off somewhere, leaving only the noise of the crickets in the woods, the distant thrum of helicopter blades, and in her, the longing to be somewhere else.

After that, she cries so hard her head hurts. She thinks to call her parents, but she can’t bring herself to try. She is all alone in a strange place. A kind of numbness follows.

She finally drifts into sleep, or something close to it.

That’s when it happens, an unfamiliar feeling: some kind of presence is with her in the tent.

“Matthew,” she says or tries to say.

But Matthew is not here. Some kind of dark figure is here with her. This figure, like something human and not human—now it’s climbing up onto her chest. Something is pressing down hard on her whole body. Something is pinning her arms.

She tries to scream, but nothing comes. Her throat is closing up.

Her entire body, she understands now, has slipped out of her control, like some kind of paralysis.

It is hard to think past the immense pressure on her chest, but there is the tiniest sense of the larger possibility, that maybe this is it: the sickness. Maybe this is how it starts.