The Dreamers

31.

The day after the start of the quarantine, Mei and Matthew join the crowd that forms at the barricades of Recuerdo Road in Santa Lora. They stand side by side in sweatshirts and jeans, white masks on their faces, blue gloves on their hands. Mei is looking around. She is nervous. Matthew stares straight ahead.

This is Mei’s idea, this turning themselves in. Something unfamiliar is blooming in her, something big, like duty.

But Matthew has agreed. He has thought it over. “This is the greatest good for the greatest number,” he says.

For Mei, it is less a thought than a feeling, almost physical, as if it is the muscles in her stomach that know most clearly the right thing to do.

Two rows of barricades stand at the point in the road where the state forest land ends and Santa Lora begins—with a scattering of cabins in the woods. The old sign hangs nearby: WELCOME TO SANTA LORA.

Only two months earlier, Mei came in on this same road, her mother’s Volvo packed with new sheets and new clothes and a mini-fridge still in its box. In her head, so much hope and longing, her new life so close at hand.

The crowd here is loud with need, for supplies and for food, but most of all for information. A man here is asking about his daughter. A woman is looking for her husband. “They took him away in an ambulance,” she says. “No one will tell me where he is.”

Every one of these questions is met with the same response from the two soldiers posted behind the fence: the slow shaking of their heads.

They wear fatigues and big boots, sunglasses. They would help if they could, they say, through their crisp white masks, and they do look sorry, like boys, is what they look like, but with big black guns at their sides.

“You should all go home,” one of them calls out through his mask. “That’s the safest place to be.”

“But we don’t live here,” shouts a woman in a wrinkled business suit. She is with a group of nine or ten people who were here for a conference, she says. “We’re stranded,” says the woman. This is the moment when Mei notices that she is barefoot, the same woman she saw the day before. “Where are we supposed to go?”

Two news helicopters are swirling overhead. All the channels have dropped the story of the escaped college kids in favor of the bigger headline: for the first time in American history, a tourniquet has been applied to an entire town.

Matthew calls out to one of the soldiers. “Excuse me,” he says. “Excuse me.”

“Hey,” shouts a man from somewhere nearby. “There’s a line.”

An hour of waiting produces nothing. A line of wispy clouds drifts in the sky. A dog walks alone in the road, his leash dragging behind him. Whose dog is this? people call out to the crowd. Whose dog is this? They keep asking until that dog wanders out of sight, his tags jingling unread, his leash still flapping behind him. It is hard not to wonder what happened to the person whose hand let go of that leash.

When it is their turn to talk to the soldiers, Mei and Matthew fare no better than the others.

“Who told you to come here?” says one of them, as if they have asked him for some kind of favor. “We can’t help you here.”

“But we’ve been exposed,” says Matthew. “We’re trying to do the ethical thing.”

The one soldier meets eyes with the other, like Matthew might be some kind of nut.

The soldier hands them a yellow flyer and taps with one gloved finger the same number that Mei called earlier.

“They said to come here,” says Mei.

“Call again,” he says. “I guess.”

Suddenly someone is shouting nearby. There is the clanging of metal on pavement.

“Hey,” shout the soldiers. “Stop.”

A man is trying to climb over the barricades.

A woman in the crowd is calling after him: “Sayyid,” she shouts. “Come back.”

“Stop where you are,” shouts the soldier closest to Mei. He does not point his rifle. But if anyone were really looking closely, which no one is at this moment, he or she might notice the way his hand tenses against the barrel.

“You can’t trap us here,” says the man. He has an accent, Mei can’t tell from where. “What about all your talk of human rights?”

He is wearing a gray suit, this man, and dress shoes. He already has one leg over the fence.

The woman keeps calling after him from somewhere in the crowd.

“Sayyid,” she says. “What are you trying to do?”

And now another voice joins hers, a boy’s: “Daddy, stop.” He says. “Please. Come back.”

The woman switches her pleading to a different language: Arabic, maybe, but Mei can’t say for sure.

The activity attracts the helicopters. They circle tight and low.

The man is wandering now between the two sets of barricades, as if lost in an empty moat. He looks dizzy. He is beginning to cry.

On the other side of the barricades, the woods loom, and the mountains—twenty square miles of state forest stretch out on both sides of this road.

He keeps going, this man. He begins to climb the second set of barricades.

“Stop where you are,” say the soldiers, but he does not stop.

The reflective yellow lines of the road are sparkling in the sun beneath the man’s shoes. He climbs up over the second set of barricades.

The soldiers half catch him and they half don’t, and Mei can see, as the man lands hard on the asphalt, that these soldiers are afraid to touch him.

They are pointing their guns at him.

“Don’t hurt him!” shouts the woman. She is wearing a green silk scarf at her neck, beige pants, gold earrings. A boy, maybe eleven or twelve, stands by her side. “Please,” she calls to the soldiers. “He’s not acting like himself. He’s a professor.”

The man keeps coming toward the soldiers.

“I need to leave here!” he shouts. “You have to let us go.”

“Sir,” they say, “please.” And then more gently: “Go home.”

“I am five thousand miles from home,” he screams. “I have fled my home. And now you treat us no better than where we came from.”

The woman is shouting. She is crying as she pleads with the soldiers.

Certain experts will later suspect that the virus affects the brain in subtle ways even before the onset of sleep. The waking consciousness, in some cases, takes on certain qualities of the dream state. Heightened activity in the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain. Decreased activity in the cerebral cortex, charged with reasoning. Increased impulsiveness. Some will say later that these effects may have contributed to what happened on this day.

The soldiers are backing away from the man, but he keeps going and going, as if the way to make them understand is to shout the words up close to their faces, as if, by grabbing hold of that one’s uniform, he will finally make himself clear.

The crack of the shot comes crisp and cold. That sound—it sucks all the other noise from the world. The man goes right down.

Mei’s hand darts down for Matthew’s hand, but already he is moving forward. He is surging toward the barricades.

“Shit,” says the soldier who shot the gun. “Shit, shit, shit. I told him,” he keeps saying. “I told him to keep away. Didn’t I tell him?”

The other soldier is crouching over the man. He is calling for help on his radio. Cell phone videos will capture three people from the crowd, Matthew among them, jumping the two sets of barricades to help, and also the woman, who will turn out to be the man’s wife, and the boy, his son, climbing the barricades to get to the man, the boy ignoring his mother’s pleas. She is sobbing, speaking to her son in a language only the two of them, in this crowd, understand.

From where she is standing, Mei cannot see the man’s face, but she can see the shine of his blood on the asphalt. Something is happening in Mei’s chest. She can’t take a deep breath.

Into this moment comes a small rumbling at high altitude. An airplane is cutting across the sky, the events on this road too small to see from those windows, as if the passengers up there and the people down here are operating on two different scales of experience.

What a relief it is—and a horror—when the man begins to scream.

He is soon taken away by an ambulance. His wife and his boy go with him. Mei has a feeling that something more needs to be done for them, but they’re gone—there’s no way to help them now.

Matthew is talking to one of the other men who tried to help, one of the group of stranded business travelers.

“Our hotel was evacuated in the middle of the night,” he says. “That was two days ago. We spent last night on the floor of the bus station.”

“We have nowhere to go,” says the woman without shoes. She is carrying a pair of heels in her hand.

“How many of you are there?” Matthew asks. A stab of fear comes into Mei. She knows what he’ll say next.

Ten, they say. No, nine, someone corrects.

“You can stay with us,” says Matthew.

“What if they’re sick?” Mei whispers.

Matthew’s face stays hard and straight, unreadable.

“What if you are?” he says.

She can hear her mother begging her not to take any risks. They think it was in the hotel ventilation system—that’s what they’ve said. They have probably all been exposed.

They are sales reps, these people, whose suitcases now fill the living room while they take turns in the showers, in the master and the guest, and in the little girl’s bathroom, too. Mei thinks of it too late—how maybe just rinsing their bodies there will contaminate the girl’s bath toys, her tiny boats, those letters made of foam. A wild panic beats in her chest. She must remind herself that little Rose is far away, for now, floating on a cruise ship with her parents.

At first, they sit around watching the footage of the shooting on television.

“You can’t say they didn’t warn him,” says one of the guys, in a red polo shirt, a company logo embroidered on the pocket.

Matthew is shaking his head. He is pacing around.

“I’m just saying,” the man says. “They wouldn’t have shot him if he listened.”

“Did you know,” says Matthew, “that in 1930, in Hawaii, the government quarantined a Chinese neighborhood and then set the whole place on fire?”

“Is that true?” says one of the women. She is wearing two sweatshirts, but she is holding her arms like she’s cold.

“Let’s talk about something else,” says the guy in the polo shirt.

The house has plenty of wine, and Matthew keeps opening up bottles. Everyone is eager to drink. Just the taste in Mei’s mouth makes her feel better, even before it hits her blood.

Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore that this big house belongs to someone else, as if this patch of wooded earth has been cut loose from the rest of the world, and from all its rules of cause and consequence.

They drift out onto the back porch, and Mei can see the woman next door watching them there. She might call the owners, this woman. But Mei surprises herself: she does not care.

After a while, one of the women asks Mei and Matthew how they met. “I always like to hear how couples get together,” she says.

A sudden awkwardness surges between them—isn’t that the one feeling that, when shared, widens the gap between two people instead of closing it?

“We’re not a couple,” says Matthew, as if it’s a crazy thing to say.

Mei can feel her face turning hot.

“Oh,” says the woman.

In the quiet that follows, moths buzz and flutter against the lights. A Humvee rumbles by. Matthew goes in for more wine, and then appears on the porch with the autographed guitar back in his arms again.

One of the sales reps begins to smoke.

Maybe, in a photograph, it would look like a small party on a back porch, the long light, the late fall, a kid playing guitar in one corner.

There is not much food left in the Sub-Zero, and all the stores, they’ve heard, are closed.

“I know where we can find something,” says Matthew. There’s a jolt of excitement in his words, the crackle of a boy accepting a dare.

The porch swing sways in his wake as he stands and then hops over the wooden railing. He lands beside a row of trash cans—the lids come right off in his hands.

“Whoa,” says the loudest of the sales reps from the porch. “I don’t think we’re quite at that point yet.”

“I do this all the time,” says Matthew, his bare feet in the grass, his bare hands already untying a white trash bag. There are holes in his sweatshirt.

That look on the sales reps’ faces, the way they all turn their heads slightly away, as if they can smell the garbage from the porch—it’s not something she wants to see aimed at Matthew. She watches him instead, the way he leans his head deep into the bag, his hands at work at a delicate task. His nickname from the dorm floor rushes back to her: Weird Matthew.

Half a loaf of bread emerges, still snug inside its package. One thin line of mold is the only imperfection on a plastic-wrapped block of Parmesan cheese.

The sales reps refuse to eat any of it. Mei, though, she takes it. And it tastes fine, that bread. It tastes better than fine.

“You know what this whole thing reminds me of?” says one of the sales reps. “That sleep aid we used to sell,” he says. “Remember?” He has the beginnings of a mustache, this guy, more than a stubble, more like sparse grass. “There was one case where a guy slept for twenty-four hours straight.”

“Wait,” says Matthew. He sits up fast. He seems suddenly angry. “Are you guys, like, Big Pharma?”

“Here we go,” says the guy in the red polo.

The others nod in their folding chairs. That’s what the meeting was for, they say: pharmaceutical sales.

Whatever Matthew says next is drowned out by the wailing of a helicopter, which briefly lights and then darkens the yard.

“This just does not seem real,” one of the women says. She is shaking her head. She is drinking the wine.

Matthew has gone silent. There he is on the porch swing, arms crossed, staring into the woods.

“None of this seems real,” the woman says again. “You know?”

“Maybe it isn’t,” says Matthew from the porch swing, its chains creaking as he sways. “Maybe none of this is real.”

Oh, Matthew. If only she could rescue him from the way this woman is meeting eyes with the others. He does not see it, or he does not care. But these are not Mei’s kind of women, anyway—how many hours have gone into the shaping of those eyebrows, the pale pink sheen of those fingernails?

“Like a hoax?” says the woman.

“Have you read Descartes?” says Matthew.

“No offense, dude,” says the loud guy. “But I don’t think any of us are in the mood for that kind of dorm-room bullshit tonight.”

Matthew stays quiet, arms crossed. Mei can feel a fury rising off him like heat.

“Please don’t ask me how I know this table is really here,” says the guy. He knocks his knuckles on the patio table. His teeth are red from the wine. “Please don’t ask me how I know that the blue you see is the same blue I see.”

Matthew leans back on the porch swing. Already she has come to know that look, a way of smiling that signals unhappiness.

“Let me ask you something else, then,” says Matthew. “How does it feel to get rich off the backs of sick people? How does it feel to be part of a system so fucked up that kids are going without their EpiPens and asthma inhalers because your companies have decided to raise the price by a thousand percent—just because you can?”

“I love college students,” says the first guy. “Talk to me in ten years, dude.”

Matthew says nothing. He just gets up and goes inside.

“Anyway,” says Mei, but she can think of nothing much to say, except this: “How long have you all worked together?”

“Us?” one of the women says. “We all just met on Tuesday.”

This news astounds her. How lonely it feels to discover once again how quickly other people can bond.

At a certain point, one of the women dozes off in her chair. It is an uneasy sight, and the loud guy is soon tapping her shoulder. What a relief it is to see her open her eyes.

She is slow to come around. She yawns and asks for more wine.

“I was dreaming that everything was moving backwards,” says the woman. “Like time itself was moving in reverse. In the dream, the guy popped up after he got shot. Then the soldiers shouted at him. Then he climbed backwards over the barricades and disappeared into the crowd.”

Later, the sales reps set up in the living room, having declined the bedrooms, as if this were the sort of danger that calls for safety in numbers, instead of the exact opposite thing. They use their sweatshirts as pillows once the pillows run out. They are quick to turn out the lights but slow to put away their phones, leaving only the odd glow of their faces, lit white by the screens, as they wait on their backs for sleep.

Mei and Matthew linger last on the porch. A breeze is working its way through the woods, setting the wind chimes ringing.

“I don’t think we should sleep in the house with them,” he whispers.

A soft sound is coming from inside: one of the sales reps is weeping.

“Let’s sleep out here,” he says, nodding toward the backyard. “I found a tent in the garage.”

A tent. An odd sensation keeps flooding back to her—that this day is taking place somewhere outside of normal time. Not even the strangest possibility can be ruled out.

“We can set it up in the yard,” he says.

She worries what the sales reps will think, but there’s an urge to want what Matthew wants. It feels good to agree. And so here they are in the backyard, Mei pointing a flashlight at the ground while Matthew unrolls the tent.

It seems brand new, this tent, fresh with the smell of the packaging, not like her own family’s tents, so dusty and worn out from use.

“Fucking rich people,” says Matthew. “They always have a bunch of shit around that they never bother to use.”

Where does he come from, she wonders, with his shabby sweatshirt, his worn-out backpack?

“What did you mean, earlier?” Mei whispers, as he spreads the tent flat on the grass. He is reading the directions. “About things not being real?”

“You’ve probably heard it before,” he says, without looking up.

She waits for him to say more.

“When we’re dreaming,” he says, “we can’t tell that we’re dreaming. Right?”

“Okay,” she says.

“So if we can’t tell that we’re dreaming when we really are dreaming,” he says, “then, theoretically, if we were dreaming right now, we would have no way of knowing that.”

These words in his voice—they’re like live current, the electricity of big ideas.

“But actually,” he says, “some philosophers think that the whole argument is a moot point. They think that consciousness itself is just one big delusion.”

Something bold and brave is surging in her: “I like the way you talk about things,” she says.

But he does not look up. Maybe it was the wrong thing to say.

He is still staring at the tent poles, studying the directions, squinting in the light of the flashlight. Somewhere a siren screams. The helicopters go on swirling through the air.

“Do you need some help?” she says.

“I guess so,” he says. He hands the instructions to her. But she does not need them: she knows what to do, from years of family trips. She is soon feeding the poles into the sleeves while he holds the flashlight.

“I haven’t been completely honest with you,” he says.

Her whole body goes tense. A prickling on her skin. She is suddenly aware of the chill in the evening air.

“What do you mean?” she says.

She doesn’t know what to do except to keep working on the tent. There’s the shuffle of nylon against nylon. All at once, the tent is up, like a ship in a bottle.

“Have you heard of Baker & Baker?” he says.

Television commercials come into her head: pharmaceuticals.

“Yeah?” she says.

“That’s my family,” he says, like it’s some kind of confession. “I grew up in a gated community. I went to boarding school. My whole life has been paid for by dirty money.”

It’s true she had not pictured it, this boy in a ratty sweatshirt, old shoes. But there’s something about him: he is all present, no past. As if nothing he can do can surprise her.

“But I don’t want that life,” he says. There’s a kind of desperation in his voice, as if he expects her to be angry. “I think it’s wrong to live that way.”

Now she wonders what he would think of how her family lives, of her father the accountant and her mother the teacher, a Volvo parked in the driveway.

She shows him where to put the stakes for the tent. Together, they hammer them into the ground.

He’s in the tent now, kneeling, as he rolls out a sleeping bag inside. He drops the flashlight inside, so that the tent lights the lawn blue like a lantern. It is not very big, this tent, and she likes the idea of them crouched inside it together, that nearness.

He sits down on the grass. He looks up at the sky. He seems so sad sitting there, this mysterious boy.

She sits down next to him. Suddenly his face is close to hers.

A sudden kiss. She does not even think of how they shouldn’t be doing it. It’s quick and fast. It’s shy.

And then he is saying something about the stars, how they can’t see them anymore because of all the emergency lights, and how his dream is to just live in the woods somewhere and sleep under the stars.

“I want to live on the same amount of money that the poorest people in the world do,” he says. “That’s my goal. I think that’s the most ethical thing.”

Everything in his mind is either one thing or the other. Right or wrong. There’s a thrill in that clarity.

He motions for her to crawl into the tent.

She sees now how it will happen, how there’s no need to discuss it in advance, as if she can feel it already, the warmth of his arm beside hers before they fall asleep.

But then suddenly he is up and out of the tent again and standing in the grass.

“You sleep in the tent,” he says. “I’ll sleep out here.”

In the morning, none of the sales reps wake up.

A mass suicide is what it looks like, their bodies splayed out in the living room, their hair hanging over their faces, their mouths slightly ajar, saliva pooling on the planks of the floor. But if you listen closely, you can hear the sounds of their living: the slow breaths of deep sleep.

One of their phones keeps ringing. There is a lot of information in that sound, the way it rings so often that it is hard to tell when one call ends and the next begins: the ringing of a person gone crazy with worry. But here in this room, no one is stirring.

There is something terrible about the way the sun streams in over their faces, as if the sunlight were a part of it—and isn’t it true that the sun has turned ominous lately, parching the land deeper and deeper into drought?

According to the experts, there is no way to distinguish by sight alone between the sickness and sleep, but Mei can tell right away what this is. It’s a deep settling in, a blankness of the face, and they look younger, somehow, than they did the night before, this the kind of knowledge that can never be captured in the results of an experiment or in the lens of a camera, the human mind the only instrument subtle enough to register it.

If, somehow, the sales reps could see up through their dreams, here is what they would find, refracted, at the surface: A boy and a girl with white masks on their faces, bent over their nine bodies in the vast living room of strangers. The press of the boy’s fingers—in kitchen gloves they’ve found under the sink—searching their wrists for the beating of their hearts. The sensation of liquid running down their chins as the girl drips water from a child’s sippy cup into each drying mouth. They would hear the sound of the boy’s voice getting angry in the other room: But we’ve been waiting all day for an ambulance. And finally, the feeling of someone, that same boy, lifting each one up by the armpits, while the girl holds tight to their legs, the swing of their bodies like sandbags. Then the smell of leather seats. Then the makeshift click of seatbelts over their slumped bodies. The crank of a garage door. The turning of an ignition. The bump of the old streets beneath the tires, their heads swinging forward or back with the turns in the road. And maybe: a glimpse of pine trees, the mountains, the wide sunsetting sky, their bodies so long attuned to the rising and setting of that same sun—but suddenly no longer.