The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

  Every ordinary thing turns ominous. A black bulldog wanders leashless in the street. Somewhere nearby, a teakettle whines for many hours. A trickle of water runs all day through the gutter, as if someone somewhere has collapsed while watering the lawn.

  On the third day, when Annie’s friend does not arrive when she said she would, and when she does not answer her phone, Ben does not need to be told why.

  * * *

  —

  After that, he sets up a system with his mother—he will call her every morning. “If I don’t call you by eight,” he says, “call the police.” But time with a newborn is shifty. The hours roll away. On the third day, Grace wakes up wailing and spitting up, and he forgets to call his mother—something is happening to his memory, some kind of disintegration. Two hours pass before he looks at his phone. Ten missed calls and a message: his mother has called the police.

  “Thank God,” she says when he finally calls her back, and that rush of relief in her voice, like some kind of high—he understands it right then for the first time in his life: the special suffering of loving a child. “So,” she says, her breathing still quick in the phone. “What did you say when the police showed up?”

  “They didn’t,” he says.

  Two days later, a police officer arrives with a crew of workers in blue suits.

  “We have a report,” says the officer, “that there might be a sick man here, and that there might be a newborn baby alone in this house.”

  “That was two days ago,” says Ben.

  The police officer sighs through his mask. His eyes look tired and red.

  After that, Ben leaves the windows open all the time. His mind is fertile with visions of a terrible future. If the windows are open when he goes under, maybe some good stranger will hear his baby crying before the dehydration takes her away.

  * * *

  —

  In a surge of the kind of unlikely luck that is just as possible in a disaster as it is in daily life, Ben eventually tracks Annie down. Someone on the phone at the hospital can finally confirm that she is a patient, his Annie. But not in a regular room. She has been moved to the campus library, says the woman on the phone, which has been converted into a ward. No one can enter the building, which, like the hospital, is quarantined and guarded, but, says the woman on the phone, the thing about the library, she says, as if passing on a secret that is not hers to share: there are floor-to-ceiling windows.

  When he gets there with the baby, he finds a small group of people already crowded near those windows, just normal people in white paper masks, a few children, holding hands with their parents. Soon the soldiers will fence off this whole area, but for now, on this day, it is still possible to press two hands against the tinted glass and peek in.

  Here is what he sees inside: maybe fifty beds, lined up in rows, someone sleeping in each one, a few nurses or orderlies in blue suits moving between the beds. The old lamps and the tables have been pushed to one side of that vast room, the books looking down from their shelves.

  He does not see her right away, but soon he notices someone in the far corner with curly brown hair. And he knows immediately that it’s her. He takes a sharp breath that jolts the baby on his chest. “There she is,” he whispers to the baby, his lips making contact with her bald head as he speaks. It is upsetting to see Annie that way, lying flat on her back, the tubes, but it is also a relief. It’s her, it’s Annie, and she looks like herself, the way she looks on the rare mornings when he wakes before she does. It is a comfort to know where she sleeps.

  He pulls the baby out of the carrier and holds her up to the window to see, her little legs curling up under her like a bug. A newborn’s eyes cannot see more than four feet into the distance, say the books, but by now, he has stopped trusting those books. Babies know so much more than the experts think—he is sure. There is a difference between what is not true and what cannot be measured.

  “Do you see her?” he says. “Do you see?”

  But even then, even as he stares at Annie’s body, even as he knows for certain that this is her, that this is his wife’s hand lying on her lap, that this is his wife’s hair falling in her face, even then, with the proof of her right there, the same questions bob back to him anyway: Where are you? Where have you gone?

  * * *

  —

  But also, somehow, there is this: walks with the baby at sunrise when he can spend not one more minute in the house, her little body zipped into his fleece and her eyes squinting shut in the sunshine, the crunch of his footsteps in the woods.

  He spends all day telling her the words for things. Those are the mountains, he says as they walk. This is a lake. This here is a hummingbird, hovering over the neighbor’s bougainvillea, and that buzzing up there, that’s called a helicopter, and it is hovering, too. And the sky, that sky, so clear of clouds and blue. Blue. That’s what we call that color: blue. She stares at everything as if in amazement. She begins to babble. That little voice. This is the voice of his daughter. A surprising feeling sometimes surges in his chest, quick and bittersweet, a little guilty, even, given the circumstances, but what other word for it is there but this: joy.

  He tries to commit it all to memory, every small smile and every new trick—this is how he misses Annie most, as the person who would want to know the baby at this level of detail, the contents of her diaper, the long-awaited burp, that thing she does with her toes, the scale of the love expressed in minutiae. He tries writing it down, but it is all whooshing past him. It would take as long to retell it as it does to live through it. The only way to preserve these days for Annie would be to preserve every hour, every minute. In one way, at least, this time is just like any other: it goes.

  35.

  In the beds in the hospital and in the cots in the library, and in the giant tents rippling across the college quad, and in the cots set up in the dining halls, and in the cots set up in the classrooms, and in the brand-new tents, a second wave, built from supplies meant for use in Liberia or New Guinea, and in the special tents set up for the soldiers who themselves have now begun to slip under, and in anonymous beds in anonymous houses now scattered throughout Santa Lora—the dreamers go on dreaming.

  There is a feeling that the town is emptying out, though no one is going anywhere. The sensation persists among the survivors, though, a feeling of exodus, as if we can all sense without knowing it, like lights in the periphery, the consciousness flashing in other people’s heads.

  At this point, it becomes hard to keep an accurate count of cases. A thousand, they think. Maybe more.

  The hair grows. The fingernails curl. There are not enough workers to keep the toenails clipped or the faces shaved. And besides, these tasks are dangerous to perform with hands wrapped in three pairs of latex gloves.

  More of them are dying than before. Malnutrition. Dehydration.

  If a bedsore appears and fails to heal, there is not always someone nearby to notice.

  The Victorians famously feared being mistaken for dead and then buried alive, but now the opposite begins to happen in Santa Lora—some of the people lying so quietly in those cots are mistaken instead for alive.

  36.

  Observant watchers might have noticed them by now: a scattering of civilians working alongside the National Guard. There they are, unloading boxes of food at the high school, their jeans stark blue against the green of fatigues. And there they are again, setting up cots in the campus chapel. Among these volunteers are two college kids, faces never quite clear, rushing here and there.

  But one of their mothers notices, in the background of a news photo—isn’t that her daughter, that girl handing out masks? It is a relief to see her alive. And who is that boy beside her, unpacking those boxes of plastic suits?

  * * *

  —

  Mei: a loose string pulled taut. There is so much confusion in Santa
Lora, but some facts are obvious: they are awake, Mei and Matthew. They are alive. And they have two hands for helping and two feet for walking and a desire to do whatever they can. And it is like desire, like a craving, somewhere deep: to put themselves to use.

  Matthew’s dark eyes above his mask, the echo of his voice through the paper, the way he always knows exactly what is right and what is wrong, as if nuance were a conspiracy made up by the weak—it feels good to be near him. They move in only the one direction: to wherever they are needed. They are always together, always, as if operating as a single unit, the way his arms tense, for example, as he lifts her up by the hips to peek into windows to search for the sleeping and the dead.

  She keeps forgetting to charge her phone. She keeps forgetting to call her parents—she has no idea that her mother has joined the group of other parents and relatives camped out in cars a few miles outside of town, waiting and waiting for news. But can it really be true that a week has already passed since she spoke to her mother? Time here is as slippery as it is in a dream.

  They are only eighteen years old, but the past has fallen away. The future has shrunk down to this, like a shadow foreshortened suddenly at midday.

  They run errands for whoever needs help. They use the last of the gas in the SUV to bring food from the high school to the nursing home. They find the sick in houses and in cars, sometimes slumped on sidewalks or benches.

  One day, they wander past the Humane Society, and hear the dogs howling and whimpering through the walls. Mei is the one who spots, through the window, a man passed out at the front desk. The doors are locked.

  They do not discuss what to do—Matthew simply picks up a trash can and throws it through the glass.

  The cats cry out when they hear the window shatter.

  Who knows how long these animals have gone hungry? Matthew throws open the cages. Two dozen cats and dogs spill out the front doors, while Mei empties big bags of food onto the sidewalk.

  As they’re leaving, two men wander in through the broken glass and then rush out with boxes under their arms.

  “Probably drugs,” says Matthew. “Horse tranquilizers and shit. But who are they harming?”

  On another day, they come across a section of sidewalk oddly darkened by water. The sun is out. The air is dry and clear. They can’t tell, right away, where the water is coming from. But when Mei steps into the yard of the nearest house, the grass is swampy beneath her feet. The water, they see, is quietly streaming out of an open window.

  Through the screen, they discover this uncanny sight: the ripple of standing water, knee-deep, in a living room. A hidden flood.

  That water, they know, may as well be blood—the people inside might have drowned in their sleep. How quickly human spaces, unattended, come to rot.

  “Maybe no one’s home,” says Mei. Books and papers float on the surface, furniture knocking like boats. “Maybe this happened after they left.”

  “Or maybe they’re inside,” says Matthew.

  There he is: her boy. He is already kicking off his sandals, swinging one leg over the windowsill. The sound of a splash. Mei hangs back, a pang of admiration and fear. It might be contaminated, that water. From inside, he opens the front door and releases a gush of water out onto the porch.

  “Come on,” he says. And she comes.

  Inside is the soft sound of running water. It is coming down the stairs in a thin but steady stream.

  Parts of the ceiling have caved in. Through those holes, they look up and see the walls of an upstairs bedroom, water pouring around the edges like a sinkhole.

  “I don’t think it’s safe to be in here,” says Mei.

  But Matthew is already heading for the stairs.

  He is a little excited, a chance to save a life.

  “We have to see if anyone is here,” he says.

  But Mei’s fear comes washing back: this is too much. She has the sensation that something terrible might be hidden in this water, creatures unseen. Or bodies. Unconscious, a person can drown in only a few inches of water.

  “We should call the police,” she says, but she knows as she says it that this is an idea from a different time—who knows when they could make it here?

  Soon, like jumping off a cliff, she takes a deep breath and she follows him up those stairs. The carpet is spongy beneath her bare feet. Water is dripping down the wallpaper.

  “It’s the sink,” Matthew calls down to her. She hears the squeak of a fixture turning off. “It was leaking from a pipe under the sink.”

  Mei kicks into something hard, a laptop submerged.

  “Holy shit,” says Matthew. “Look.”

  On an antique four-poster bed, as if floating on a raft, a man with white hair and glasses is lying, fully clothed, on his back. He looks so alone, this man—the shape of his life suggested by the fact that two strangers have found him before anyone else has.

  Mei leans down toward him and hears no breathing. She puts a hand on his chest, and there it is, the relief of that rising and falling.

  “He’s alive,” she says.

  Matthew turns him over and gently moves his limbs back and forth, an idea they have that this needs to be done to prevent sores.

  On the floor all around the bed are journals, the ink mostly leached off the pages, smears of blue and black ink, the letters lifted away.

  “Wait,” says Mei. “I think this is my biology professor.” Those classes are beginning to seem hazy, but she liked him, this professor, his obsession with trees.

  By now, they have driven dozens of sick to the medical tents. This professor of biology makes one more.

  * * *

  —

  When they sleep, they sleep in the tent, as if that big house has become a source of two kinds of contaminants, not just the sickness but something else, too, a kind of decadence in a time of suffering.

  But they sleep as little as possible—there is so much work to be done. And the nights are for doing, too. Everything is urgent. Everything is new, even the way he reaches for her in the dark, his mouth finding hers so quickly, the press of his body against her. There’s no talking. No lights. There is almost no thinking. Here is the same clarity that drives them all day.

  After that, they sleep hard, not waking for hours, the sleep of the young and the tired, and of bodies exhausted from purpose. The stutter of helicopters no longer wakes them from their dreams. They have learned to sleep through the sirens, too, and the rumblings of Humvees. They sleep through the worry, also, which floats free in this town like a sound.

  Meanwhile, in the woods that loom over the tent, the crickets perform their own ancient rituals while the bark beetles hollow out the trees, slowly, slowly felling them.

  In another time, under the watchful eyes of the girls of the dorm floor, Mei might have wondered what it was that was happening between them, whether she and Matthew were a real couple or not. But she is not thinking much about any of that. They are connected like this: two people in peril every day. Here he is beside her. Here is his hand, laced in hers at the end of the day. Here is his hip pressed into hers in the night. What does it matter what they call it? How about this, she thinks, as she floats off to sleep one night, nursing the kind of grand idea she would never speak aloud: a love for the end of the world.

  37.

  Every tensed muscle must eventually relax. Adrenaline cannot flow unending. At a certain point, a new feeling begins to dominate these long homebound hours: boredom.

  This is how it comes to be that Sara and Libby resurrect one of their oldest games, to go exploring in their own house, to open the drawers they are not allowed to open, to comb the closets they are not supposed to enter. Their father is a keeper of secrets, and there is usually some small thing to find.

  It does not need to be said out loud what kind of treasure they are really after: traces
that their mother once lived in this house. This is how they have learned most of what they know of her days on earth. She wore pastel nail polishes and faintly silver eye shadow; she once bought eight jars of baby food and one bottle of wine at Ralphs; she once bought a book about Italian painters from the used-book store; she once took a watercolor class at the college; she was once prescribed antibiotics for pneumonia and was late to pay the bill. She once got a speeding ticket. She had a library card. A driver’s license. She kept a photograph of the girls in her wallet.

  “I know you’re going to say we shouldn’t,” says Libby, suddenly cheerful with possibility—or risk. “But let’s check the attic.”

  The attic: the only time that little door has ever creaked open is for the few moments it takes for their father to set the mousetraps in the corners. Those mice—or else the possibility of some creature much worse lurking up there—have always kept them clear of the attic.

  But on this day, Sara surprises her sister. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  The door is locked but Libby knows where their father keeps the key. The door sticks a little in its frame, but one hard push and it flies open.

  It is smaller than Sara thought, this attic, and a little brighter, too. Sunlight is streaming in through a dusty oval-shaped window, the light catching on the fluttering wings of moths.

  Mouse droppings litter the floorboards. There is a stink in the air.

  But this, too: a stack of cardboard boxes, sealed shut. Libby goes straight for them, as if she knows just what she is looking for.

  Maybe Sara has seen these boxes, too, years earlier—because when Libby slides one of them toward her, it does not surprise her to see what is written on the side, in their father’s handwriting, all caps: the letters of their mother’s name. MARIE.

  “Did you know these were here?” says Sara.