The Dreamers

18.

They sleep like children, mouths open, cheeks flushed. Breathing as rhythmic as swells on a sea.

No longer allowed in the rooms, their mothers and fathers watch them through double-paned glass. Isolation—that’s what the doctors call it: the separation of the sick from the well. But isn’t every sleep a kind of isolation? When else are we so alone?

They do not, these sleepers, lie perpetually still. The slow sweep of an arm across a sheet, the occasional wiggling of toes—these motions excite the parents, as do the rare moments when their children seem to speak in their sleep, the way a dreamer of a terrible dream might speak out in the night, her voice echoey in her throat, as if trapped at the bottom of a well.

Caleb arrives at the hospital still sleeping his wide-eyed sleep. He arches his back against the restraints of the stretcher. A doctor leans over him like an exorcist.

In that somnambulant state, Caleb has been wheeled through a thicket of camera crews, who called out questions to the paramedics as they passed. The flailing of Caleb’s arms and that glazed stare on his face will soon travel the world via satellite.

When finally his sleep turns quiet, he is placed in isolation with the others. He lies just a few feet away from Rebecca, whom he has known for only a few weeks but in whose body a small part of him has secretly remained.

In the days since Rebecca arrived at the hospital, the doctors have come no closer to understanding her condition, but in another realm, more ordinary, a complex progress has been made: that cluster of cells has burrowed into the wall of her womb and is hooking itself up to her bloodstream. The nutrients that are right then sliding into her stomach through a tube in her nose are now feeding not one being but two. No bigger than a poppy seed, and yet, so much is already decided—the brown eyes, the freckles, the slightly crooked teeth. Her sense of adventure, maybe, her affinity for language. A girl. It is all of it packed into those cells, like a portrait painted on a grain of rice.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the glass, Rebecca’s family hold their Bibles to their chests and watch the soft movement of her eyelids, that delicate flutter. A few feet away, Caleb’s foot twitches slightly beneath the sheets. For now, their secret sleeps with them.

That same night, a sudden breaking of glass is heard in the hospital hallway. A dull thud. One of the nurses has collapsed on the floor. The linoleum where she landed is streaked with dark blood. So are her scrubs. It takes some time to locate the source of all that spatter: the vials she was carrying when she fell.

In the end, it’s just like the others—the sleep has spread to her.