The Dreamers

49.

Certain real events are familiar only from the horrors of our dreams. And so, when smoke begins to pour into the main reading room of the library, drifting out over the bodies of a hundred sleeping sick, the same word rushes into the minds of more than one of the nurses: nightmare.

There will be much discussion later about the silence of the smoke alarms, offline for reasons no one can explain—whether tampered with, or simply unplugged to accommodate the heart monitors and the EEG machines.

Some will blame the masks, designed to filter out the smallest microbes on earth—but also the fine dust that swirls inside of smoke. If they had not been wearing masks, maybe the nurses and the doctors would have smelled the fire before it spread.

In the long minutes before the fire crews arrive, there is no time to argue over whom to rescue and whom to leave behind. Instead, people make their own choices. And who can blame the health workers if some of them carry out their own sick friends and family before attending to any of the others?

Ten blocks away, Sara is feeding the cats when the fire engines begin to wail. The sound sends the cats leaping from her lap and Sara rushing up to the widow’s walk to check for signs of forest fire. But through the wavy glass of the windowpane comes instead an uncanny image—it is just as her father described it: a thick cloud of smoke is surging not from the woods in the distance but from the windows of the college library.

“Daddy,” she calls out, a tightness coming into her chest. “Daddy,” she calls again, but he does not answer. Her heart begins to pound. “It’s just like your dream.”

A snowy quiet. A cool, calm bliss—this is how the sleep has come to be for Mei.

But now, an interruption. Something is pulling her away. Loud noises. Shouting.

She has the sensation that she is waking up in her childhood bedroom, but the idea falls away immediately—this room is enormous.

Also: some kind of urgency is thumping in this place. People are moving quickly.

It is painful to listen after so long in silence.

It is hard to open her eyes. All she can do is squint. A crust has formed on her eyelashes. It is impossible to say whether the haze of her vision is a cloudiness of her corneas or of the room.

Her thinking is cloudy, too, slow and prone to stalling, but an important word does drift across her mind, tentative and abstract: fire?

People are coughing around her. Glass is breaking. Her throat begins to ache.

And then: Matthew appears across the room.

She has the feeling that she has not seen him in a long time. But here he is, running, as usual, those long legs, that frenetic way he has of moving. He is good in a crisis. One thing is different: his face is full of worry. When he gets close to her, he shouts something she cannot quite understand and keeps running. Then he sprints away, farther into the building, without touching her.

After that, she loses track of him, but he will take care of her. He will do whatever needs to be done. This is what she’s thinking as she sinks back into the quiet relief of sleep.

There exists in the annals of medicine a rare phenomenon performed by the otherwise catatonic. In cases of emergency, someone previously immobilized may suddenly awaken—and regain miraculous abilities: to stand or to scream or to run. A hand, long dormant, may suddenly accomplish some necessary task: grab hold of a bedrail, perhaps, in the last seconds before a fall from a bed.

On this day in Santa Lora, some similar effect is observed in a small number of the sleepers.

Ben: first, he is at a party with Annie. It’s at some kind of hotel, this party. Or not a hotel, a loft. In Brooklyn, maybe, or maybe not. But the loft is filled with furniture that reminds him of his grandmother’s house in Wisconsin. That silky cream-colored couch from the sixties. They are drinking punch, he and Annie, out of tiny crystal glasses. How weird, she is saying, that they have the same couch! It’s a Halloween party—that’s why Annie is wearing that vest and that tie, that floppy black hat, khaki pants. Everyone loves her costume. She is Annie from Annie Hall, which is perfect for her—that’s what their friends are saying. Perfect. It is very crowded, this party. And it is very loud. The punch tastes like gin and rosemary and a little like smoke, and people are having a very good time—this is the main thing Ben knows as he stands beside Annie, his hand on her hip, as if the goodness is built into the room itself, as if it’s suffusing the air and the drinks, these minutes, her costume, that couch.

But then, a sudden sound quiets the party. It’s like something breaking, like the snapping of wood. The feeling of an old ship cracking in a storm. Are they on a ship? Yes, a ship. It has been a ship all along.

Holy shit, someone is saying, it’s the floor. There’s some kind of problem with the floor.

Annie squeezes his hand hard, so hard that it hurts. That’s when the whole middle of the floor just falls away like a sinkhole, and Annie—

His eyes flutter open.

For a moment, all he can hear is the sound of his own gasping, his own heart thudding in his ears. A surge of relief washes over him—it was only a dream.

But above him now looms an unfamiliar ceiling, dark wood and very high, a vast room, dimly lit. And also, there is this: people are shouting.

Someone leans over him. A firefighter.

In that moment, as if the visual parts of his brain are suddenly doing the work of smell, the yellow of that firefighter’s coat triggers an associative burst—he is suddenly aware of the smell of smoke in the air.

He tries to sit up, but something is holding him down, as if he is tied to this bed. He remembers then about the sickness. He must have caught it like Annie.

Where is his baby? he asks. But no one is listening.

“Where is she?” he says. “Where is my baby?”

A thick smoke is filling the room. His throat is beginning to burn. All his confusion is distilled down to this: to get away from this smoke. It is a complicated procedure, this unhooking of tubes from his body. The firefighter helps free him from the cords and then disappears into the gloom.

The lights flicker and then flash off. A little sunlight is streaming in from somewhere, dim through the gathering smoke. He begins to cough. The idea comes to Ben that this is a library, a library crowded with beds.

He can’t stop coughing now. And soon he is crawling along the floor with the others. His body is stiff and sore, but he keeps moving, oddly aware of its separate parts, as if the parts are operating just slightly out of synch, how the one hand moves before the other, his knees on hard wood. It is hard to find the exit through the smoke, but people are calling into the room from outside, strangers, strangers are calling to him, and the truth of it, that strangers would help other strangers, makes his eyes fill with tears, right there in the dark and the smoke: Here, here, they are shouting through the dusk, the door is over here.

Later, Ben will forget almost all of these details, how he finally got out—onto the lawn and into the sun with the other survivors. He will forget the way people looked at him, the shock to see him awake, he and the few others, skinny in hospital gowns, IVs still hanging from some of their arms. Perhaps the mind can only catalogue from any given day a fixed amount of experience. It is what happens next that he will always remember—in almost photographic detail—from the events of this day.

There is a woman out there—she is standing barefoot in the grass. And this woman—she looks a little like Annie. But he knows that it happens, how longing can do that, conjure the shapes of loved ones in the faces of strangers. This reminder of Annie—it is a part of the waking up, he knows, the familiar groove of missing her.

But the way this woman is standing, a little hunched, and the way she is chewing on her hair—he keeps looking.

She turns a little. Her profile comes into view. And there, on that woman’s face, is a little notch in her nose, just like the one Annie has, from when she broke it as a teenager. Annie. She is standing in the sunshine in a hospital gown, a fire blanket wrapped around her shoulders, looking skinny and a little unwell, unsteady on her feet, her face smudged gray from the smoke. But it’s her. It really is Annie. There she is, squinting up at the sky, as if in disbelief. There she is, awake.