The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, two policemen come to the door.

  Sara watches them from the widow’s walk, afraid to find out why they have come—in their white masks and their green gloves, tucked tight beneath the cuffs of their uniforms.

  The knocking on the door sets off the dogs.

  “Daddy,” Sara calls to her father. He is sitting at their bulky old computer, waiting and waiting for a page to load. “The police are here,” she says.

  “Just ignore them,” he says, as if they are salesmen who will go away on their own.

  They keep shifting their weight on the porch, these police. They keep looking around, as if eager to get away. Behind them, on the other side of the street, the frame of the nurse’s house leans forward like a shipwreck. After so many weeks, the caution tape has frayed in the wind, and the birds have built a nest in the stove, which stands, rusting, in the open air.

  The police knock again.

  Sara can hear the dogs whining and scratching at the door from the inside. Maybe the police can hear it, too, that whining and that scratching.

  At some point, the knocking stops. She watches, flush with relief, as the policemen step down off the porch, and then stand for a moment in the weeds that have overtaken the front yard. One of them says something into his radio.

  Instead of walking back to their car, they disappear around the side of the house. Then comes the creak of the side gate, the terrible crunch of their shoes in the gravel that leads to the backyard.

  The knocking starts again, this time at the back door.

  “Hello?” they call. “Hello?”

  Sara listens from the kitchen, hidden by the boarded-up windows. But she can hear the swish of the static on their radios outside.

  She is not prepared for what comes next: the creak of the back door, the cry of its hinges, the way the thin crack of sunlight beneath the door explodes to the shape of the whole doorway. Her father must have left it unlocked in the night, which is not like him, to make a mistake like that, not like him at all.

  “Oh,” say the police when they see Sara, the way she is squinting in the kitchen in pajamas. It’s too late for her to hide.

  “Oh,” one of them says again. He is a dark figure in the doorway. Sunlight blazing around him. “We didn’t know if anyone was home.”

  The dogs begin to jump up on their tan police pants, friendly tongues lolling out of their mouths, but the policemen are backing away, as if the dogs, too, might be contaminated.

  One of them is holding the door open. He is using only two gloved fingers to do it, and he is leaning way back as if for access to fresh air.

  “Is Thomas Peterson here?” the other one asks. It sounds like a stranger, the way they say his name. No one calls him Thomas.

  “If you know where he is,” says the one holding the door, his voice softened by the mask, “it’s very important that you tell us.”

  She is not sure what the right answer is, or if this is a time when a lie is right. She settles on silence, and for a moment, the only sounds are the panting of the dogs and the squeak of their black police shoes as they dodge the leaps of the dogs.

  One of the men finally crouches down to talk to her, as if she is a much younger child.

  “Listen,” he says through his mask. He is looking past her, searching the living room over her shoulder. “He wasn’t supposed to go home yet. He might still be sick.”

  She wonders if they know about the slowness of his walk, the strange writing. She wonders if they know how little he has been sleeping.

  “It was too soon,” he says to her.

  But she will not watch her father leave again.

  “He’s not here,” she says finally, her voice scratching from so long without speaking.

  The two men look at each other. She can see only their eyes over the tops of the masks, but their eyes are where the skepticism floats.

  “Have you been staying here alone?” one of them asks, which seems to raise a new threat.

  An answer comes in the form of her father’s footsteps on the stairs behind her. He walks differently—that’s another thing that has changed. He takes smaller steps than before, a wobbly stride, almost like a limp.

  “You don’t have a right to be on my property,” he says to the police. He is wearing the same clothes as yesterday.

  They just want to monitor him for a while, they say, the doctors.

  “That’s why they sent us here,” one of them says.

  “I’m not going to the hospital,” he says.

  “It’s a matter of public safety, sir,” says the one holding the door.

  “It’s not safe for you or your daughter,” says the taller one.

  “I’m not going to be some guinea pig,” says her father.

  And this is how the conversation ends: he closes the door and locks it. Then he goes back upstairs to the computer.

  It is a surprise when the police really do leave, that after all that, words are enough to chase them away. Before they get into their car, she watches them pull their green gloves off, one glove at a time, dropping them into a trash bag.

  There is a feeling that they will be back, or that someone else will. It’s a feeling of a leak plugged only temporarily.

  * * *

  —

  That night, a sound familiar but hard to place drifts up from the kitchen after midnight. A soft sandpaper scrape. And then again: scrape, scrape, scrape. She knows, from the occasional cough, that it’s her father down there. She is not sure he should be left alone.

  The smell confirms it at the same moment as the sight: her father at the kitchen table, a lit match burning between his fingers.

  “What are you doing?” she asks.

  On the table beside him is a scattering of burnt-out matches, a whole pack from the basement, used up in a night—it isn’t like him to waste.

  “This thing did something to my brain,” he says.

  He watches the flame for a while and then gently shakes it out. He drops it in the pile with the others.

  “What are you doing?” she asks again.

  He takes a sip of beer. He pulls a fresh match from the box and begins again, the slow striking of the match to the box, too slow, at first, to make the match light. But he keeps at it, a determined, careful scrape.

  The helicopters are still thumping outside in the dark, but she knows from the news that the reporters are wrong about which house is his—they think that the man who woke from the Santa Lora sickness lives in an old white house a few blocks away, a place abandoned for years, since before Sara was born, wildflowers growing up through the planks of the porch. Maybe it’s the boarded-up windows that make them confuse that house for theirs, that lead the helicopters to hover over that other roof and not theirs. But after she has watched the footage all day, that other house, a stranger’s house, a dead man’s house maybe, begins to take on a feeling of familiarity for her, the way, in a dream, a place you have never been can somehow stand in for home.

  Finally, the match blooms in his hand. He lets it burn for a few seconds. Then he shakes it out again.

  “I had these dreams,” he says. “While I was sick. Dreams that were like no dreams I’ve ever had before.”

  He takes another drink of beer. It is not his first, she can see. Two other cans are sitting on the counter.

  “What were they about?” she says.

  “What do you mean?” he says, as if she is the one who brought it up. This is the way he has been since he got home, his mind always running on some second, unknown track.

  “The dreams,” she says. “What did you dream about?”

  He rubs his bald head. His fingers move slowly, as if tracing an alien terrain.

  “I need to ask you something,” he says. He looks r
ight at her. A layer of stubble has grown where his beard used to be. “Was there a fire while I was gone?” he says. “Was there a fire at the college library?”

  “There was one in the woods,” she says, and it seems amazing that he could know about that somehow, though he slept through the whole thing. “On the night you got sick.”

  But he shakes his head in frustration as if he has been trying to get this point across to her for hours.

  “No, no,” he says. “I’m not talking about a brush fire. I mean in the building. Was there a fire in the library? On the second floor,” he says. He is closing his eyes as if remembering. “Or maybe the third?”

  “I don’t think so,” she says.

  “I had this dream,” he says. “That there was a fire at the library, and somehow, the fire—it woke up all the sick.” He takes a sip of his beer. He swallows hard. “The fire,” he says, “it worked like some kind of cure.”

  After that, he goes quiet again. He goes back to his matches, lighting them one by one. Every once in a while, a look comes into his face that she has not seen before—spooked but satisfied, as if to say, Aha, there it is, that’s it.

  “I’ve been having this strange feeling,” he says. “Ever since I woke up, I’ve been having this feeling that things are happening out of order.”

  He scrapes another match. It doesn’t light. He tries again.

  “Like just now,” he says. “When you came into the kitchen, I had the sensation that you were standing beside me, but that was before you walked in.”

  It’s like everything’s out of order, he says, like there’s something wrong with the sequence, as if the future were coming before the past.

  She understands already how powerful his imagination is. After trauma, she’s heard, people sometimes have hallucinations.

  He picks up another match.

  “Sometimes,” he says, “I see the flame before I strike the match.”

  48.

  The library: on the hundreds of metal bookshelves, now shoved flush against the wood paneling and the floor-to-ceiling windows, the ten thousand volumes now gathering dust in low light contain all the usual products of human thought.

  In the Classics section, a visitor could read about the oracles of ancient Greece and Rome, how the people of those eras believed that dreams could sometimes reveal the future.

  One floor down, in the Psychology section, one might eventually discover that Carl Jung, at a certain point in his life, became convinced that he had dreamed of his wife many years before he met her.

  On another part of that same floor, in Philosophy, one could entertain the theory that if you could truly understand the complexity of reality, you could also accurately predict the future, since every moment of the future is set in motion by the events of the past—the whole system simply too complex for the human mind to model.

  Upstairs, in Physics, one could find journal articles theorizing that the concepts of past, present, and future are artificial constructs, that in fact all three may exist at once, simultaneously, in different dimensions.

  In Linguistics, one would find a similar intuition reflected in the grammar of certain languages. In Mandarin, for example, verbs operate entirely in the present tense. There is no special tense for the past or the future.

  Time, said Saint Augustine, exists only in the mind.

  But no one is reading any of the books in this library. At least one slim hardcover is right now being used to stabilize a wobbly army cot, where a small boy lies sleeping alongside a hundred other sick in the cavernous main reading room.

  And even if one were to read every book in these stacks, certain mysteries would persist.

  Think of William James, one floor down, back in Philosophy, who once compared any attempt to study human consciousness to turning on a lamp in order to better examine the dark.

  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 sa
ying, 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?”