The Dreamers

27.

One hundred twenty cases balloons to 250 in two days. Two-fifty soon cascades to 500.

But with the hospital closed to new patients, these newly sick are spread out in giant tents instead, as if they’ve been felled on a battlefield in some distant place.

Along with supplies, volunteers are flown in from other places to give the only treatment there is: keeping the hearts beating and the bodies hydrated and fed. It’s a lot of work to perform manually every task the waking body does on its own. There are not enough monitors. There are not enough beds. There are not enough workers to turn the bodies back and forth in the sheets.

The story is everywhere now. Television commentators are circling Santa Lora on maps of California: this place is only seventy miles from Los Angeles and only ninety miles from LAX, which might as well be a neighborhood in New York or London or Beijing.

Something needs to be done, that’s the feeling. Something big.

On the eighteenth day, three thousand miles away, watchers of the morning news shows awaken to a series of aerial images of the town of Santa Lora, California.

From the cockpit of a helicopter, the campus of Santa Lora College looks serene: sixteen brick buildings, lit with orange lights, parking lots empty of cars. The lake, or what is left of it, shines in the moonlight, its former waterline not so obvious in the dark. Beyond that, the streets fan out in a grid. Swimming pools, covered over for winter. Station wagons parked in driveways. An ordinary town in the middle of the night—except for a long line of military trucks clogging the one road in and out. And also this, visible only faintly through the trees: a line of soldiers standing in the woods.

For now, the people of Santa Lora are sleeping soundly, the healthy and the sick alike. Hours will pass before most of them will hear the words that people in Maine and Pennsylvania and Florida are learning right now: cordon sanitaire, the complete sealing off of an infected region, like a tourniquet, not used in this country for more than a hundred years.

From the air, all the streets look the same, the houses packed close like teeth, the artificial lawns indistinguishable from the real grass gone brown from the drought. But on one of those streets, under one of those roofs, a baby is crying in the dark.

One floor up, Ben wakes to the noise, knowing that his wife is with her already, that soon his daughter will go quiet in her arms.

He dozes, a half-sleep. But the crying wakes him again.

He turns in his bed. He begins to wonder if this crying is different from the crying of all the other nights, more urgent, maybe a kind of screaming. The sickness floats up into his mind—what if this is how it starts?

Now he’s up. He’s out of bed. His heart is beating fast. The way to slow it down is to see her. He wants to see his baby right away. But her room is empty. They’re downstairs, he realizes—that’s where the crying is coming from. The kitchen.

“Poor little nut,” he says in the dark when he gets there, which is a way of greeting his wife, who he knows is in there, somewhere in that blackness, probably pacing like she does, the baby curled in her arms, or else she’s rocking her in that special way they learned from a book. They haven’t spoken much since their fight, but he forgets all that now. “How long has she been awake?” he asks.

But there’s no answer. The crying gets louder. This is when his foot bumps against something plastic—the warble of a bottle rolling across the floor.

His fingers run along the wall for the light switch, and the click of that switch is proof that a baby’s cry is the truest communication there is: something is wrong.

Through his squinting, he sees that his wife is lying on the linoleum. Her eyes are closed. Her limbs are still. His baby is curled awkwardly on Annie’s chest, her tiny face bright red from the crying, squinting in the bright light, her blanket coming loose around her feet.

He lifts her, their baby, and presses her to his chest. In his arms, she quiets immediately.

But the relief is brief. There is a bruise spreading across his wife’s forehead. Her eyelids are twitching madly, as if she is dreaming a terrible dream.

He calls her name. He squeezes her shoulder. He does not hear the helicopters whirring in the air above the town.

He thinks to press a piece of ice into Annie’s hand, like they did in birthing class, as a small simulation of labor pains, a way to practice the breathing—Annie hated it. She could not tolerate it for more than a few seconds. Maybe it will wake her now. But this time, the only detectable reaction is in the ice, which melts swiftly in the warmth of her palm, while Annie goes on dreaming some unstoppable dream.