The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

  A door opens—someone walks into the room. A nurse, maybe. She is wearing a yellow plastic suit, this nurse. The suit covers her whole body, even her shoes, like in a movie, thinks Rebecca. The nurse behaves as if Rebecca is not in the room. Instead, she leans over something in the far corner. A crib, Rebecca sees now, a clear plastic crib on casters. Inside the crib, swaddled in a cream-colored blanket with pink trim, a newborn baby lies sleeping in a little pink cap. Rebecca’s first thought is this: Who is that baby?

  But now the nurse comes to Rebecca. Now she is saying something through her mask. She is shouting to someone else, someone outside the room.

  “She’s awake,” the nurse is saying. She is calling to someone else down the hall. She is pointing at Rebecca. “The mother is awake.”

  It is hard to understand what it means. But a panic is rising in her chest.

  More people rush in—all wearing those yellow suits.

  Already a deep sense of absence is welling in her, a loss: Where is her son? she asks.

  But they do not seem to understand what she is saying. “My son,” she says again. “Please ask him to come right away.”

  It is hard to talk. It is hard to make herself clear.

  But no one is answering her, and a dark thought comes into her mind. “Is he okay?” she whispers, her eyes already filling with tears.

  “You had the sickness,” says one of the nurses. “You’ve been unconscious for almost a year.”

  Rebecca hears the words but cannot understand them.

  “It’s normal to feel confused,” says the nurse.

  At some point, Rebecca’s mother walks through the door, just like that, her mother, back from the dead, as if she’s been waiting in that hallway all these years. And not just alive but younger, her mother as she was thirty years ago, in middle age, when Rebecca left for college. Her red hair, her white teeth. She rushes to Rebecca’s bed. “My God,” her mother keeps saying. She takes hold of her hand. “My God.”

  And it is good to see her face—that joy, that relief. It feels good to see her mother after so many years moving through the world without her. But it’s frightening, too, a visitation from the dead.

  “Where’s my son?” Rebecca asks her.

  But her mother does not seem to understand the question. “I don’t know what you mean,” says her mother. “You’ve had a baby girl,” she says. “Look.”

  “Did something happen to my son?” Rebecca says again, a sob growing in her throat.

  There is fear now on her mother’s face. Her eyes flash back at the nurses.

  “The doctor,” says her mother. “She says that you might have had some strange dreams.”

  57.

  For years after Rebecca wakes, acquaintances will comment that she has a sense of wisdom beyond what is common in someone so young. Left unsaid, perhaps, a certain tiredness, too.

  It takes her months to believe that she is a girl of nineteen and not a woman many decades into life. How uncanny, it seems to her, that the baby girl on her lap is hers.

  And her son: his absence informs every moment of her life. No one can understand it—how she could cling so tightly to a dream. But for her, her son is a truth as certain as anything else: she knew him for forty years. Sometimes, for a moment, she is sure that she sees him on the street. The sound of his voice, the shape of his face—these are as crisp and as dear to her as her daughter’s small fingers, her round cheeks.

  There is no grief like the grief for one’s child.

  Rebecca’s doctors find the intricacy of her delusion uncanny; whole decades persist in her mind, a whole life. Her symptoms align with several known psychiatric disorders: the delusion that her baby is not her baby, that her body is not her body, a difficulty distinguishing between reality and dream.

  A generalized murkiness also remains. A certain slowness of thought, a confusion in her memories.

  “Isn’t that to be expected,” says her mother, “after so long unconscious?”

  Although her mother caught it, too, and her father, her brothers, none slept as long as Rebecca or recall such realistic dreams. The specialists still cannot explain much about the nature of the sickness, or about what it might have done to her brain.

  The main thing, say her parents, is to be grateful. Think of the others. Think of the dead. “Give thanks in all circumstances,” that’s what her father says. “For this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.”

  She does not keep in touch with anyone from those days, not even Caleb. How expert we are at looking away from what we would rather not see.

  Unmarried with a child—she never would have predicted that it would happen this way or that there would be so little judgment from her parents. If they had any objection, she does not recall it. A gift from God, they say. This girl, your girl, is a gift. No matter how she got here. They leave it at that. They do not ask. And the exact circumstances of her making—so scandalous in her mind that she would have thought it would break the family apart—have drifted away from her thoughts.

  But a sensation persists: that pieces are missing. The brain is a mystery, say her doctors, and it takes time to heal. It will get easier—that’s what her mother says. We’ve come through something terrible, she says, but we’ve come through.

  Certain thoughts Rebecca keeps to herself, like how can anyone say for sure that the other life was the dream, and not this one? By what instrument can she ascertain that these moments right here—with her girl on her lap, looking up so sweetly, those cheeks, her first tooth—are not part of a strange and pleasant dream she is dreaming in old age?

  But some things are simple: She holds her baby girl just like she once, long ago, held her son. She sings her the same songs she sang to him. She loves her with that same madness. Or with more, maybe, her love suffused, this time, with the loss of the other one.

  * * *

  —

  A year after the lifting of the cordon sanitaire, Nathaniel leaves his house for the last time.

  He is brief in the final email he sends to his daughter—they are going to seek some kind of treatment for Henry, experimental, he says, but promising. The unproven, he says, should not be confused with the impossible.

  He checks Henry out of the nursing home. They drive to the airport. They fly from Los Angeles to Mexico City, and then on to a smaller town farther south, where an anesthesiologist has promised that he can induce with drugs the same dream sleep that the Santa Lora Virus did.

  A needle is inserted into Henry’s veins. And then a second one is inserted into Nathaniel’s. He holds Henry’s hand as it happens. It takes less than a minute for the sleep to overcome them both.

  And this is where they lie even now, side by side in a clinic in the mountains of Mexico, tended by nurses, hearts beating, lungs breathing, eyes closed to this world.

  And who are we to say that they are not, these two, together somewhere even now, in the woods behind their house, those trees as healthy as they were thirty years ago, or in the old chairs on their back porch, drinking Henry’s favorite Irish whisky, now discontinued. Who are we to say that they are not right now dreaming a better world?

  * * *

  —

  The college reopens. Classes resume. Kegs can once again be seen rolling up the ramps of fraternity houses.

  But it will be years before enrollment returns to previous levels. A petition circulates to have the town of Santa Lora renamed.

  The virus persists not only in the freezers of Level 4 labs of this country, but also in the form of empty houses in Santa Lora, and lost pets, untended gardens, the station wagons abandoned in the parking lots of the supermarket and the church, eventually towed one by one, also the dead patches of grass, shaded for too many weeks by the medical tents on the lawns. It lingers also in the weariness in some people’s faces, a slowness of gait, and s
omeday, perhaps, a sunken fishing boat will emerge in the middle of the lake, whenever that water finally dries up completely.

  * * *

  —

  Some dreamed of their youth. Some dreamed of old age. Some dreamed of days that might have been—all the lives they did not live. Or the lives that, in some other world, they did. Many dreamed of lovers, former and continuing. Some dreamed of the dead.

  One man reported dreaming again and again of being trapped inside an elevator—he had the feeling that this tedium continued for years. This sort of thing turns out to be common in the dreams, these distortions of time, as if each dream contained its own unique physics.

  Past, present, future—a physicist might say that these distinctions are illusions anyway. The human brain is subject to all kinds of misperceptions, and the waking mind not always more attuned to reality than the dreaming one.

  Some of the children dreamed exquisitely beautiful worlds, the shadows of which will appear in their drawings for years. And what the infants dreamed we will never know, but perhaps those visions will live secretly in their habits and in their desires, their sense of what is familiar and what should be feared.

  Researchers will be studying the virus for years—why some survived it and why some didn’t, and why it receded when it did. But the content of the dreams will be of little interest to science, just as a neurologist has no use for the soul.

  Left almost entirely unstudied are the most famous claims—that some dreamers saw visions of the future. Anecdotal evidence suggests that certain dreamed-of events have indeed come to pass: the end of the drought and the deaths of several relatives. A rumor circulates around the elementary school that one of the fathers saw the library fire in his dreams.

  These stories bring certain kinds of travelers to the streets of this town, in search of the mystical power of the Santa Lora sleep. Searchers and seekers, they camp out in the woods or in vans by the lake.

  And as they wander the streets of Santa Lora, these hopeful travelers might notice, on many nights, a man on a porch swing with a baby resting on his lap, his wife sometimes beside him and sometimes not.

  Ben: he will never escape the sensation that what he saw in his dreams—all those good days with Annie—was the future and not the past. Even later, when he understands that it must be true that those days have already come and gone, it does not feel true, the way those who argue that there’s no such thing as free will continue to deliberate carefully over big decisions.

  The more time that passes, what begins to seem uncanny to Ben is the fact that all the days ahead are such a darkness, that all of us move through our hours as if blindfolded, never knowing what will happen next. How can he send his daughter out into a world like that?

  But even an infant’s brain can predict the rough path of a falling object in flight.

  And so, maybe, in a way, Ben can see what’s coming:

  His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel afraid.

  The sun will warm her face. The earth will ground her body.

  And her heart—now thrumming strong and steady, against her father’s chest, as he rocks her to sleep on a porch swing one evening in early summer, at the very start of a life—that heart: it will beat, and it will someday cease to beat.

  And so much of this life will remain always beyond her understanding, as obscure as the landscapes of someone else’s dreams.

  Acknowledgments

  I’m very glad to have this chance once again to say thank you to the people who helped make it possible for me to write this book.

  For years of friendship and insight—on writing as well as life—thank you: Alena Graedon, Nellie Hermann, Nathan Ihara, Tania James, Susannah Kohn, Dina Nayeri, and Maggie Pouncey. For particularly generous support of this book, I especially want to thank Karen Russell.

  For various kinds of support and good times, thank you to Sara Irwin, Heather Sauceda Hannon, Shiloh Beckerly, Kelly Haas, Liz Guando and Dan Guando, Rachel Burgess, and Jack Hostetter and Carrie Loewenthal Massey.

  For an endearingly weird non-book-club book club, thank you, Brittany Banta, Jenny Blackman, Hannah Davey, Meena Hart Duerson, Paul Lucas, Devin McKnight, Finn Smith, Pitchaya Sudbanthad (and Nathan Ihara and Casey Walker).

  For their wisdom and generosity, thank you, Jim Shepard, Karen Shepard, Dani Shapiro, and Michael Maren.

  Thank you again to my teachers, whose insights continue to guide my work as a writer and as a teacher: Aimee Bender, Nathan Englander, Mary Gordon, Sam Lipsyte, Mona Simpson, and Mark Slouka.

  Thank you to my wonderful and talented colleagues at the University of Oregon: Daniel Anderson, Lowell Bowditch, Jason Brooks Brown, Marjorie Celona, Geri Doran, Garrett Hongo, and Brian Trapp. Thank you also to all of my students, whose work continually challenges and inspires me. Thank you to Julia Schewanick for smoothing the way.

  Thank you to Amelia Duke, who made it possible to leave the side of a newborn baby for a few hours at a time to finish revising this book—and to do so without the slightest bit of worry.

  I feel extremely fortunate to have such a kind and brilliant editor, Kate Medina. Thank you, Kate, for putting so much thought and so much care into these pages.

  Thank you to the rest of the Random House team, especially Anna Pitoniak, Erica Gonzalez, London King, Gina Centrello, Susan Kamil, and Evan Camfield. Thank you also to copyeditor Deb Dwyer for a particularly thorough and thoughtful read.

  Thank you to Suzanne Baboneau at Simon & Schuster UK for your continued enthusiasm.

  Thank you to Eric Simonoff at WME for your encouragement, savvy, and freindship. Thank you also to the rest of the amazing WME team, especially Laura Bonner, Tracy Fischer, Jazmine Goguen, Alicia Gordon, and Lauren Szurgot.

  I am also grateful to have come across the following books in my research, all of which were crucial: Awakenings by Oliver Sacks, Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar, Spillover by David Quammen, A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit, The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, Dreamland by David K. Randall, and, from the Oxford Very Short Introduction series: Sleep by Steven W. Lockley and Russell G. Foster, Dreaming by J. Allan Hobson, Freud by Anthony Storr, Jung by Anthony Stevens, and Consciousness by Susan Blackmore.

  And now to my family:

  For treating me like a sister, thank you, Liz Chu and Kiel Walker. For love and enthusiasm—and many hours of crucial babysitting—thank you, Cheryl Walker and Steve Walker.

  Thank you to my parents, Jim Thompson and Martha Thompson, for all your love, help, interest (and babysitting!)—and for being my biggest fans.

  Thank you, sweet Hazel, for your amazing brain, your enormous personality, and for generally enlarging my life—as well as this book. (I added a newborn to this story when you were eleven days old.) Thank you also to tiny, mysterious Penny for big smiles and inspiration and for sleeping so soundly on my chest while I finished this book.

  Lastly, thank you, Casey, to whom I owe so much it’s hard to settle on the right words, so I’ll just say this: for everything.

  About the Author

  KAREN THOMPSON WALKER is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Age of Miracles, which has been translated into twenty-seven languages and named one of the best books of the year by People, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Financial Times, among others. Born and raised in San Diego, she is a graduate of UCLA and the Columbia MFA program. Walker lives with her husband, the novelist Casey Walker, and their two daughters in Portland. She is an assistant professor of creative writing a
t the University of Oregon.

  KarenThompsonWalker.com

  Instagram: @karenthompsonwalker