The Dreamers

44.

First is the feeling of hands—Matthew’s—as he lifts her up from the bed. Now the echo of his voice calling her name. Mei, Mei, wake up, Mei, wake up. She is aware of a shift in the light. A breeze on her skin. He has carried her out into the yard.

It is not at all how she imagined it would be, this sleep: a twilight more than a night. The waking world is somehow seeping through.

He will take her to the campus, she knows, like they have taken all the others. But this time, those arms hanging from their sockets—those are hers. And that head lolling back, that hair streaming over the face—it’s hers.

Her eyes are closed, and yet, somehow, she can see—or she sees without seeing, without needing to see. She knows the way the cracked sidewalk glints in the sun. She can picture the ragged line of the mountains against the sky. And the clean waft of eucalyptus in the air gives rise in her mind to the spidery image of that exact tree.

One other fact glows clear in her head: the pleasure of Matthew’s attention and concern.

At some point, they arrive at the college, her body still draped in his arms. Now the cool of old buildings, the murmur of many voices, the scent of bleach in the air.

“How long has she been like this?” someone says, voice muffled, as through a mask. Someone official.

A sudden urgency swells in her. I can hear you, she wants to say, but she can’t, or she doesn’t. I’m here, she thinks, but she cannot seem to make use of her voice. I’m here.

“I don’t know when it started,” says Matthew. He is out of breath. He is talking fast. She has not heard him like this before: afraid. “I think she’s been asleep for twelve hours,” he says. “Maybe longer.”

His bare hand, unprotected, brushes the hair from her face. His goodness comes into her like electricity through his palm.

Next comes the cold penny of a stethoscope on her chest, and then her spine sinking slowly into a cot.

She will try speaking again in a little while, she decides, just a little later, when she is not quite so tired as she is now.

She has a confusing sensation that she is surrounded by books, old ones. Maybe she smells it in the air—that mustiness, the decay of thin pages. Or maybe she hears someone say it through her sleep: that they have brought her to the library, one floor down from the children’s ward.

She is aware of certain gaps. She has lost hold of the passage of time. Each moment floats alone, disconnected from any other.

At one point, an old story floats up, murky, into her head, from a book she read once or a movie, or just an article she saw somewhere, years earlier, about a man paralyzed in an accident. Everyone thought he was brain-dead, but he wasn’t. No one knew he was in there, still thinking and noticing and longing to connect—for years. Locked in, they called it.

A sudden terror washes through her. Can Matthew sense it, somehow, this fear? Maybe this explains why he always seems to return to her bed at these moments, his warm hand squeezing hers.

Other times are inexplicably peaceful, a gliding, everything white and distant, as if somehow leached of meaning and consequence.

There might be a feeding tube in her throat—there must be. But if there is, it is painless. And because her hands no longer move in accordance with her will, it is easy to avoid running her fingers around the plastic tube that must be taped to her cheek.

She is sometimes aware of her legs moving slightly, but she is not in control—they move like reeds drifting in a mild current.

She is sometimes a child again, walking on the beach with her parents or helping her grandmother with the cooking, while her grandmother tells stories she only half understands in Chinese. But sometimes, instead, Mei is the grandmother, retelling those stories to her own grandchild.

She can hear the other sleepers, the snores and the breathing, a moan or a shout—the noise of their nightmares and their dreams. And otherwise: the crinkle of plastic suits, the squeak and the drone of carts rolling across the hardwood floors, the helicopters chopping in the distance.

And always, there is the musty smell of the old books rising up from the stacks around her, like soil, like roots, like the trees they once were. Maybe she is not in the library but on the shady floor of a forest. Maybe she is asleep in some unrecoverable woods.

At some point, her mother arrives. What a surprise it is to hear her voice—and a relief. How did you get in? she wants to ask her but cannot.

“What’s wrong with her eyes?” her mother asks, and keeps asking. “What happened to her eyes?” Mei worries that her eyes have been disfigured in her sleep, as if gouged out or removed. When she tries to open them, she understands suddenly and with a terrible certainty what has happened: the skin of her eyelids has grown down over her eyes.

And her mother, she realizes, is not here in this room. Of course she’s not. She is on the phone. Someone must be holding a phone up to her ear. Or else her mother is on speakerphone—maybe that’s why her voice is warbling like that. Or she might be on the radio, even. Her mother’s voice might be coming from the television on the other side of the room. Or through some deeper channel, as if through her brain, her blood.

“Why is she moaning like that?” her mother asks. “Is she trying to talk?”

One night—or it seems to her like it’s night—Matthew whispers something in her ear: I’m sorry.

It may as well be I love you. And she has the idea that she can say it, too, not with words but with thoughts instead, or with the sound of her breathing in and out, like a code that only he will hear.

That same night, or maybe another one, or maybe the middle of the day, Matthew climbs into her cot, and after that, he sleeps there with her for a long time until it becomes the main thing she knows, her surest truest fact: his body curled against hers.