The Dreamers

14.

On her fourth visit to Santa Lora, as she is leaving the hospital parking lot, Catherine gets a call from one of the nurses inside.

“It’s one of those sick college kids,” the nurse is saying again and again. She is out of breath. “One of those kids,” she says. Catherine can hear a commotion in the background. “One of them—he woke up.”

The boy is found wandering the hall in his hospital gown, IVs trailing behind him. He is barefoot on the linoleum, eyes squinting in the fluorescent lights, while in the rooms around him, the other sick go on sleeping.

But the parents: the parents jump up from their chairs and crowd out into the hall, to watch this boy walk, as if he has risen from the dead. Catherine can feel the hope radiating out of their bodies.

But he doesn’t look right, this boy. He is eighteen years old, but he is walking like an old man. His gait is slow, his limbs stiff. There’s a slight stoop in his posture.

He keeps shaking his head, as if trying to figure something out. When he speaks, his voice comes out in a whisper.

“This doesn’t make sense,” he says. He is looking around. He fingers the stubble on his chin.

“You’re in the hospital,” says Catherine, the one psychiatrist in the building. “You’ve been unconscious for four days.”

A skepticism flashes on the boy’s face.

“It’s been a lot longer than that,” he says.

You have to be gentle with delusions. It can be better not to argue.

It’s natural, she tells him, to feel confused. But confusion—this is not quite the right word. This boy’s words hum with a strange confidence.

“It’s been a long time since I was here,” he says. There’s a weariness in his face.

“What do you mean?” says Catherine.

But he stops talking. She has the feeling as he speaks that he is only thinking out loud. An odd sensation comes to her: he is treating her as if she is a hallucination, some figment of a dream.

She guides him back to his room. He asks for water. One of the nurses brings a cup.

For now, he sits calmly on his bed.

Catherine steps out of the room to call home. A change of plans: she won’t be home tonight, she tells the babysitter, who is accustomed to this kind of thing, Catherine’s overnight shifts a part of their arrangement. Her daughter gets on the phone: “When are you coming home, Mama?” Her voice is so sweet and so clear. A surge of longing comes into Catherine, her eyes blurring with unexpected tears. This boy’s parents, she remembers—someone should call his parents.

The other doctors are conferring in a cluster down the hall.

When she comes back, the boy’s room is empty.

“I asked you to watch the door,” she says to the orderly at the nursing station. She is used to the protocols of the psychiatric ward, but this is a regular hospital, not set up for supervision.

“I did,” says the orderly. “He didn’t come out of that room.”

In the boy’s room, a sudden breeze is rustling the blinds—the window is open. This room, she remembers, is on the third floor.

A terrible certainty comes into her mind, as the other doctors flood into the room behind her: whatever was happening inside that boy’s mind will remain locked forever beyond anyone else’s reach.

She pauses at the window, afraid of what she will see, knowing without knowing: and there he is, three floors below, facedown on the sidewalk, his hospital gown pooling out around his body.

The soles of his bare feet are as white as the moon. His blood shines beneath the streetlight. And his neck—obvious even from this height—is broken.