The Dreamers

53.

A tiny heart goes on beating in the dark. A spinal cord coalesces. Electricity begins to flow through the synapses of a brain. Bones form, the beginnings of teeth. Eyelids. The first flapping of hairline arms, the minute flowering of fingernails. The knees and the wrists—they begin to bend.

Rebecca, ten weeks in, goes on sleeping all the while. Her cheeks, flushed with extra blood, now take on a certain fullness as her chest rises and falls beneath the hospital sheets. A surge of hormones is responsible for the extra oil in her skin, and the nurses—sheathed in their masks and their suits—like to point out the one nice thing in this dark place: she really does have that pregnancy glow.

That same week, inside one of the vast medical tents on campus, the professor of biology opens his eyes in the quiet middle of the night. Above Nathaniel looms a bright white ceiling, fluorescent lit. He is not at home—this is Nathaniel’s first thought. The air smells like soil.

He is lucky, says the first doctor—his was a mild case. Only three weeks. That’s their best guess, anyway. “Some kids brought you in,” he says through his mask. “A boy and a girl carried you here.”

He is too weak to sit up, at first, but he asks about Henry, if Henry is here somewhere, too. It takes hours for the answer to come back to him: no, there’s no patient here by that name. He borrows a phone. He calls home. No answer.

Here marks the beginning of a period of confusion, not uncommon among the survivors, he is told by the doctors. Now marks the start of a slowly bubbling dread.

At home, he finds a black X spray-painted on the front door. Inside, he discovers a house transformed, as if by the flow of time as well as by water. The wallpaper is peeling like eucalyptus bark. Mold is already growing in the corners. The rugs weep like sponges beneath his feet. The coffee table is crooked, the dining chairs overturned, as if every object in the house has been lifted by water and then set down again when the water receded. A vague recollection comes into his mind—at some point, he was trying to repair the bathroom sink. The offending pipe is still dripping, taped up by someone else’s inexpert hands.

He calls Henry’s name. “Hello?” he says. “Henry?” But the house is quiet. He half expects to find Henry drowned on the rug. “Hello?”

Instead, he eventually locates Henry back in the nursing home, hunched in an armchair, trapped once again in his stupor. It is hard to make sense of it—seeing him that way again.

“We’ve been trying to reach you,” says one of the doctors there.

“How did he get back here?” Nathaniel asks.

“What do you mean?” says the doctor. There is no mention of Henry’s extraordinary awakening.

That slack face. Those blank eyes. If you ask him his name, he makes no attempt to reply.

The facts as others will see them are clear to Nathaniel immediately: that he only dreamed Henry back to life, that his great awakening was only a wish Nathaniel wished in his sleep. And yet, something in him resists the idea, as if this is only one interpretation of the events.

The memory of Henry’s return feels nothing at all like a dream. Those few days are as clear as any other memory. Clearer, even.

“Did you have any weird dreams?” his daughter asks over the phone—she has flown down from San Francisco, but the nearest she can get is the next town over. “They keep saying that dreams are a part of it.”

“I didn’t have any dreams,” says Nathaniel. The truth is too embarrassing to admit.

He sets up giant fans to dry out the house. He makes a call to the insurance company. He goes back to his work in the woods.

But a heaviness lingers in his limbs, a weariness—and no diagnostic test can register whether it’s a symptom of the sickness or of grief. The darkest moods sometimes descend after periods of unexpected light.

He begins to research the work of one of his old colleagues, a proponent of an outlandish thread of physics: how maybe everything that could have ever happened has happened—each permutation unfolding in its own parallel universe.

He goes to sleep alone each night, and each night, he dreams of nothing.

In the thirteenth week, the hair starts to grow. The eyebrows. Marrow begins to fill the bones.

And in the other beds of the same wing of the hospital where Rebecca goes on sleeping, some of the first to get sick—the other girls of the dorm floor—begin to open their eyes. One has dreamed of a long and glittering future. One has dreamed of a series of tragedies. One complains of nightmares so extreme that the ordinary waking world is an extravagant relief.

At the end of that week, officials in Santa Lora report a new milestone: no new cases in seven days. Here is the moment they have been waiting for. A virus can only burn for so long—only a certain percentage of any population is susceptible to any given germ.

That same week, in the children’s ward, Ben returns to the bassinet one day to find that in the minutes he was gone, everything has changed: their baby has opened her eyes.

Annie is holding her in her arms—that look on her face, that simple, silent joy. The baby is staring up at her like she did on the day she was born, her eyes a slightly darker blue. Her return is even more precious than her arrival—he understands this time what it means to have his daughter with him in the world.

Later that week, back home in their bed, while Annie gives the baby a bottle, Ben finally tries to tell her about the dreams.

“They were like premonitions,” he says. Worry comes over Annie’s face. “I know it sounds weird,” he says.

But he goes on. He begins with the dream about the canoe and the paddles, the way they floated out into the water while he and Annie were drinking beer under a tree.

“Are you all right?” she says. She shifts the baby in her arms.

“I know,” he says. “But listen.” He half closes his eyes to remember, shutting out the low light of the bedside lamp. “In the dream, we are somewhere where there’s water. And trees. Pine trees that grow right up near the water.”

Annie begins to laugh a little, a low and nervous laugh. It was a mistake, he suddenly knows, to tell her any of this.

“That’s not the future,” she says. “That’s the past.”

It is as difficult to believe what she is saying as it would be to grasp the idea that time moves backward as easily as forward.

“That was Maine,” she says. “The summer after college. You don’t remember that? We tell that story all the time.”

He tells her about another dream, the party where the floor begins to buckle.

“That was Halloween at Rob’s old place in Brooklyn,” she says.

He understands what she is saying. But it does not seem possible. Maybe the sleep has confused her mind even more than his.

They go through the dreams one by one while, outside, a light snow begins to fall, catching in the low glow of the streetlight.

“You just dreamed we were young again,” says Annie.

The baby is watching his face now. He feels a sudden longing to be alone with his daughter, to tell her and not Annie about the meaning of his dreams.

“Your daddy loves looking back,” Annie says to the baby, who stares, blinking. “He’s always so sure that things were better before than they are now.”

Ben doesn’t tell her any more about it. That night, he lies awake for a long time, unable to fall asleep.

Maybe there will always be evenings like this one when he lies down beside his wife and misses the wife from his dreams.

By the seventeenth week, the bones of the inner ear have hardened. And into these ears begin to flow the sounds of Rebecca’s beating heart, the swish of shared blood traveling through the umbilical cord, the slight sloshing of amniotic fluid as she turns in her sleep, and, maybe, the muffled voices of the nurses and the periodic beep of the fetal heart monitor.

With the remaining sick dwindling, and no new cases in four weeks, the CDC announces the end of the outbreak of what will forever be known, should it appear again, or even if it doesn’t, as the Santa Lora Virus.

The last case ever reported is in an eighty-nine-year-old man in the nursing home—and then, like the passing of a storm, the virus disappears.

But where does it go? Perhaps it recedes back to wherever it came from—the woods, maybe, some animal carrying it through the underbrush. The researchers return to their labs in different states to keep studying the virus, in case it someday returns, which, they all agree, it will. In a year or in ten years, or a hundred. It might mutate by then, turn milder perhaps, or it might go the other way, a pestilence moving across the country—how much quieter that ending would be, a whole world drowned in sleep, than all the other ways we have to fall.

A federal judge orders the lifting of the cordon sanitaire. The barricades come down. Relatives and reporters flood into Santa Lora. Survivors pour out, the superstitious ones never to return again.

After four months in the quarantined hospital, Catherine is finally allowed to go home to Los Angeles.

But when she walks into her house, her daughter hides behind her grandmother’s leg. How excruciating it is, not to see her little face. But Catherine feels it, too, this upsetting nervousness, the feeling of meeting someone new.

She kneels down as if her daughter is one of her patients. “Can I give you a hug?” she asks.

Her daughter shakes her head. She is wearing a green dinosaur T-shirt that Catherine has never seen.

“You look different,” her daughter says, peeking out for a moment. And it’s true: Catherine has grown thin during the time away.

At least there is this, a comfort and a sadness: her daughter will not remember any of this. Whole years of her life will pass before anything more than flashes will register in her long-term conscious memory.

But Catherine will always worry that this time will stay with her child somehow, this period of separation from her only parent, the way the root of a tree grows around a rock in its path, or a broken bone without a splint heals crookedly beneath the skin.

At twenty weeks, the part of the hypothalamus responsible for the circadian rhythm begins to regulate the rate of the heartbeat and the tides of certain hormones in a pattern that matches almost exactly the length of a day on earth.

Caleb wakes four doors down from Rebecca. He does not pass her room. He does not touch her hand. He does not know what lives inside her, growing, as he leaves Santa Lora with his parents, who have camped out all these weeks right outside the barricades, waiting for news of their son.

Rebecca sleeps on with eighty-five others, the last of the sleepers consolidated now into one wing of the hospital.

At twenty-eight weeks, the brain becomes complex enough to be startled by sudden noises and to turn the head in the direction of voices. At this age, the brain begins to dream. But of what? The sensation of floating, perhaps, the subtle shifts of light and dark? Or perhaps brains so young dream dreams unimaginable to us, beyond the reach of science and language, unrecorded and unrecoverable.

Soon the mouth begins to open and close. The lungs are growing fast, in preparation for the task of converting the air of this planet into something the body can use.

The schools reopen.

Sara goes back to eating lunch alone each day on the quad. What a relief it is to one day spot Akil, finally back at school.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hi,” he says. There is a heaviness in the way he speaks. He does not need to tell her that he had the sickness. She can see it, somehow, in his face.

“Is your family okay?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says. “We’re okay. And yours?”

She nods.

Often, they eat lunch side by side, while the other kids careen around the quad. There is a comfort in sharing a silence. The spring flowers have returned, pink roses near the science lab, marigolds along the gym. Dandelions are everywhere in the grass.

One bright blue day at the end of lunch, the woods looming in the distance beyond the playground, Akil tells her about what happened to his father.

“He could have died,” he says.

Instead, he walks with a slight limp and a long scar on his hip.

“I can’t get rid of this weird feeling,” says Akil. “That it’s all still in the future.” There is always the sense, he says, that one day soon, his dad will be taken to jail in Egypt, that they will have to leave everything behind, and that on another day soon, he will be shot by American soldiers right here in this American town.

The bell rings. The other kids begin to stream toward the classrooms. But Sara stays right where she is beside him, listening.

“I know that it all already happened,” says Akil. “I know that. But that’s not how it feels. It feels like it’s all coming up ahead, and always will be, around and around again.”

Rebecca sleeps through the early contractions. She sleeps through the insertion of a needle between two rungs in her spine. She sleeps as the anesthesia spreads through the tissues in her body.

She sleeps while, in another room, the obstetrician and the nurses don Tyvek suits and Tyvek hoods. She sleeps while, thus protected, they rub her belly with iodine, in preparation for the cesarean.

Even the scalpel does not disturb her sleep.

She does not wake when the obstetrician, with double-gloved hands, having sliced through the layers of her skin, spreads apart the muscles of her abdomen. She sleeps while this same doctor cuts through the wall of her uterus, and while the nurses sponge the resulting blood. She sleeps through the prying of the baby from her body—like pulling a tooth from its bed. She sleeps through the baby’s first moments outside.

It is the quietest birth anyone remembers.

Everyone is hoping for a cry, but no cry comes. Rebecca sleeps through the good news: that the baby is breathing, at least. And she sleeps through the bad news, too: that her baby, like her, is sound asleep. The Santa Lora Virus, it turns out, can travel across the placenta.

After the cord is cut and clamped, and the baby weighed and wrapped and the nasal passages cleared, one of the nurses thinks to move Rebecca’s hand to the baby’s forehead, a pantomime of a mother meeting her child.

Rebecca sleeps while they sew up the incision. She sleeps while they cauterize the wound.

She sleeps when they settle the baby on her chest. And, when they move the baby to her breast, and when the baby begins, somehow, to nurse in its sleep—Rebecca sleeps through that moment, too.