The Dreamers

46.

The news travels quickly. It is a rumor, really, at the start. A development more shocking, in a way, than all the facts that have come before it. Seven weeks in, news like this is difficult to believe. But it is true: one of the sleepers has woken up, only the second to open his eyes since the outbreak began.

At first, says the nurse, she assumes she is mistaken. It can be hard to see through the rippling plastic of the masks. But a second look, at that man in the corner, four rows in, shows that she is right: his eyes are open. And it’s not only his eyes. It’s the way he is suddenly shifting around in his sheets, his movements so different from all the other sleepers, more purposeful, more direct. He whips his head back and forth. He is looking around.

His cot is one of two hundred cots set up in the college dining hall. There is a sleeper in every bed. There is an IV in every arm. The sight of one of them sitting up like this—it is as startling as it would be to see a corpse rise up from the dead.

Not described in any of the early reports is how the nurse feels in that first moment: a pang of fear she cannot quite explain.

The man begins to speak.

Often, they mumble and they moan, but this is different. This is speech. How alien it is to hear this man’s voice, hoarse at first, but his first word so crisp and so clear: “Hello?” he says. “Hello?”

He raises his head. He turns it quickly. He pulls the wires off his body. He waves his arms in front of him, as if he is blind, which, it turns out, he is, in a way—his glasses have been lost during his long weeks of sleep.

All the nurses soon gather around him, a clutch of yellow suits, the sound of Gore-Tex boots.

A contagious disease, they say. You have contracted a contagious disease. It is hard to tell if he can hear them, their voices echoey through the plastic. It is hard to tell if he understands what they are saying.

He has pale green eyes that shine blankly at them.

Later, these nurses will confide to one another about the strange sensation they experienced as they spoke to him, as if they were attempting to communicate with a traveler from some faraway land.

The man speaks quickly. His words tumble too fast to be discerned. And also there is this: he is shouting. He is shouting something about a fire.

“Did they put it out?” he shouts. “Is it out?”

You were dreaming for a long time, they tell him.

“There was a fire,” he shouts again. “At the library. The whole place was on fire.”

His voice grows louder and louder, but the sleep of those around him continues undisturbed.

He calls for water.

“Please,” he says. He keeps pulling at his beard. “I’m thirsty. I’m so thirsty.”

He drinks and drinks. He drinks so much water that the water comes right back up, splashing the rubber boots of the nurses, as if, after a while, a body grows to prefer even the worst of circumstances to any sudden change.

“A fire,” he shouts again. “It was a huge fire.”

The nurses nod together in their yellow suits. They are volunteers, these people, flown in from other states after most of the local nurses slipped under. They want to be comforting, but the man will not be comforted. One of the nurses touches his shoulder with her gloved hand.

“And my girls,” he shouts. “Where are my girls? Where are they?”

There is no mention of relatives in his chart. It seems possible that these girls, like the fire, are part of some deep and indecipherable dream.

He asks for pen and paper. This is how he spends the next few hours: writing in a notebook with the speed and urgency of a person facing his death.

What a shock it is to receive the message after so many weeks in quarantine in the hospital: she is needed on the campus, Catherine, one of the few psychiatrists left awake in Santa Lora, and the only one who witnessed the waking of the first boy. His body on the pavement—it still glows bright in her mind.

She is escorted the three blocks from the hospital to the dining hall by two soldiers, her first time outside in more than a month. The weather has changed in that time. December. Dead leaves drift across the empty sidewalks as they walk, the seasons more apparent up here in the mountains than they are in Los Angeles, where her daughter, thank God, has been released from quarantine into the care of Catherine’s mother.

In the time they have been apart, her daughter has learned to count to twenty, and to put her own shirts on. Her bangs, she knows from their nightly video calls, have grown into her eyes.

The patient, when Catherine gets there, is writing in a journal—they have moved him to a separate room in the dining hall.

She wants to be more careful this time, after what happened with the first boy. She approaches this man quietly.

“Do you know,” she asks him, “how long you’ve been asleep?”

The man does not answer right away. He looks into the distance, the way one might if looking out over a vast remembered space. The other boy did that, too, Catherine remembers, as if the world inside his head were more arresting than the one outside of it.

A sudden burst of suspicion comes into the man’s face.

“You can’t keep me here,” he says. “You can’t keep me.”

“It’s normal to feel disoriented,” says Catherine through her mask.

Often, the comatose have the feeling afterward that they have been unconscious for only a short time, a few hours, maybe, or a single night. It can be traumatic to learn how much time has passed.

Catherine notes several unusual symptoms in the man, not present in the other boy: a tendency for palilaic speech, the repetition of certain words and phrases. And also the shouting, megaphonia, as the textbooks would call it. The patient seems unaware of both symptoms, as if his perception of the world is out of scale with ours.

“I’m not answering any more questions,” says the man. He does not speak for the rest of the day, but he goes on with his writing late into the night.

Only later that evening does Catherine discover one more eccentric symptom, familiar only from case studies she read in medical school: the pages of the man’s notebook are filled with miniature writing, the letters so small that they are legible only with a magnifying glass.

From what she can read when the man briefly dozes off, his writings are marked by delusion and confusion, and in particular, a conviction that he has been asleep for much longer than five weeks.