The Dreamers

36.

Observant watchers might have noticed them by now: a scattering of civilians working alongside the National Guard. There they are, unloading boxes of food at the high school, their jeans stark blue against the green of fatigues. And there they are again, setting up cots in the campus chapel. Among these volunteers are two college kids, faces never quite clear, rushing here and there.

But one of their mothers notices, in the background of a news photo—isn’t that her daughter, that girl handing out masks? It is a relief to see her alive. And who is that boy beside her, unpacking those boxes of plastic suits?

Mei: a loose string pulled taut. There is so much confusion in Santa Lora, but some facts are obvious: they are awake, Mei and Matthew. They are alive. And they have two hands for helping and two feet for walking and a desire to do whatever they can. And it is like desire, like a craving, somewhere deep: to put themselves to use.

Matthew’s dark eyes above his mask, the echo of his voice through the paper, the way he always knows exactly what is right and what is wrong, as if nuance were a conspiracy made up by the weak—it feels good to be near him. They move in only the one direction: to wherever they are needed. They are always together, always, as if operating as a single unit, the way his arms tense, for example, as he lifts her up by the hips to peek into windows to search for the sleeping and the dead.

She keeps forgetting to charge her phone. She keeps forgetting to call her parents—she has no idea that her mother has joined the group of other parents and relatives camped out in cars a few miles outside of town, waiting and waiting for news. But can it really be true that a week has already passed since she spoke to her mother? Time here is as slippery as it is in a dream.

They are only eighteen years old, but the past has fallen away. The future has shrunk down to this, like a shadow foreshortened suddenly at midday.

They run errands for whoever needs help. They use the last of the gas in the SUV to bring food from the high school to the nursing home. They find the sick in houses and in cars, sometimes slumped on sidewalks or benches.

One day, they wander past the Humane Society, and hear the dogs howling and whimpering through the walls. Mei is the one who spots, through the window, a man passed out at the front desk. The doors are locked.

They do not discuss what to do—Matthew simply picks up a trash can and throws it through the glass.

The cats cry out when they hear the window shatter.

Who knows how long these animals have gone hungry? Matthew throws open the cages. Two dozen cats and dogs spill out the front doors, while Mei empties big bags of food onto the sidewalk.

As they’re leaving, two men wander in through the broken glass and then rush out with boxes under their arms.

“Probably drugs,” says Matthew. “Horse tranquilizers and shit. But who are they harming?”

On another day, they come across a section of sidewalk oddly darkened by water. The sun is out. The air is dry and clear. They can’t tell, right away, where the water is coming from. But when Mei steps into the yard of the nearest house, the grass is swampy beneath her feet. The water, they see, is quietly streaming out of an open window.

Through the screen, they discover this uncanny sight: the ripple of standing water, knee-deep, in a living room. A hidden flood.

That water, they know, may as well be blood—the people inside might have drowned in their sleep. How quickly human spaces, unattended, come to rot.

“Maybe no one’s home,” says Mei. Books and papers float on the surface, furniture knocking like boats. “Maybe this happened after they left.”

“Or maybe they’re inside,” says Matthew.

There he is: her boy. He is already kicking off his sandals, swinging one leg over the windowsill. The sound of a splash. Mei hangs back, a pang of admiration and fear. It might be contaminated, that water. From inside, he opens the front door and releases a gush of water out onto the porch.

“Come on,” he says. And she comes.

Inside is the soft sound of running water. It is coming down the stairs in a thin but steady stream.

Parts of the ceiling have caved in. Through those holes, they look up and see the walls of an upstairs bedroom, water pouring around the edges like a sinkhole.

“I don’t think it’s safe to be in here,” says Mei.

But Matthew is already heading for the stairs.

He is a little excited, a chance to save a life.

“We have to see if anyone is here,” he says.

But Mei’s fear comes washing back: this is too much. She has the sensation that something terrible might be hidden in this water, creatures unseen. Or bodies. Unconscious, a person can drown in only a few inches of water.

“We should call the police,” she says, but she knows as she says it that this is an idea from a different time—who knows when they could make it here?

Soon, like jumping off a cliff, she takes a deep breath and she follows him up those stairs. The carpet is spongy beneath her bare feet. Water is dripping down the wallpaper.

“It’s the sink,” Matthew calls down to her. She hears the squeak of a fixture turning off. “It was leaking from a pipe under the sink.”

Mei kicks into something hard, a laptop submerged.

“Holy shit,” says Matthew. “Look.”

On an antique four-poster bed, as if floating on a raft, a man with white hair and glasses is lying, fully clothed, on his back. He looks so alone, this man—the shape of his life suggested by the fact that two strangers have found him before anyone else has.

Mei leans down toward him and hears no breathing. She puts a hand on his chest, and there it is, the relief of that rising and falling.

“He’s alive,” she says.

Matthew turns him over and gently moves his limbs back and forth, an idea they have that this needs to be done to prevent sores.

On the floor all around the bed are journals, the ink mostly leached off the pages, smears of blue and black ink, the letters lifted away.

“Wait,” says Mei. “I think this is my biology professor.” Those classes are beginning to seem hazy, but she liked him, this professor, his obsession with trees.

By now, they have driven dozens of sick to the medical tents. This professor of biology makes one more.

When they sleep, they sleep in the tent, as if that big house has become a source of two kinds of contaminants, not just the sickness but something else, too, a kind of decadence in a time of suffering.

But they sleep as little as possible—there is so much work to be done. And the nights are for doing, too. Everything is urgent. Everything is new, even the way he reaches for her in the dark, his mouth finding hers so quickly, the press of his body against her. There’s no talking. No lights. There is almost no thinking. Here is the same clarity that drives them all day.

After that, they sleep hard, not waking for hours, the sleep of the young and the tired, and of bodies exhausted from purpose. The stutter of helicopters no longer wakes them from their dreams. They have learned to sleep through the sirens, too, and the rumblings of Humvees. They sleep through the worry, also, which floats free in this town like a sound.

Meanwhile, in the woods that loom over the tent, the crickets perform their own ancient rituals while the bark beetles hollow out the trees, slowly, slowly felling them.

In another time, under the watchful eyes of the girls of the dorm floor, Mei might have wondered what it was that was happening between them, whether she and Matthew were a real couple or not. But she is not thinking much about any of that. They are connected like this: two people in peril every day. Here he is beside her. Here is his hand, laced in hers at the end of the day. Here is his hip pressed into hers in the night. What does it matter what they call it? How about this, she thinks, as she floats off to sleep one night, nursing the kind of grand idea she would never speak aloud: a love for the end of the world.