The Dreamers

45.

There is no one part of the brain in charge of keeping track of time. In the conscious brain, the system of timekeeping is loose and diffuse and subject to distortions of various kinds: love, for example, and grief, and youth. In the mind, time dilates, and time contracts. Different days travel at different rates.

But certain other parts of the body keep time with more precision. At the beginning, we all grow at a certain, fixed rate.

Thus, as Rebecca begins her seventh week of sleep, ten fingers begin to flower, and ten toes. A pair of tiny nostrils opens in a nose. The eyelids are starting to form. The skull, at this moment, is translucent like a jellyfish. And inside it are blooming the earliest passageways of a brain.

Soon, the reproductive organs will coalesce. The ovaries will begin to fill with eggs, and those eggs will travel with this tiny girl—if she survives—for the whole rest of her life.

The air in Rebecca’s room is still. Her only movements are the occasional shifting of her head in sleep, and the cyclical fluttering of her eyelids, her eyes darting beneath them in a way suggestive of dreams.

But soon, hidden inside her, those feathery limbs will begin to move. The arms will bend. The knees. The hands will meet and come apart. A thumb might make its way into the mouth. A million neurons will emerge every minute.

A blood test has finally revealed her secret to the doctors, who take it as a worrying surprise. There is no way of knowing how the virus might affect the fetus, or if they can keep Rebecca’s body well enough for the baby to grow to full term. From then on, the nurses treat her with extra care.

While Rebecca sleeps, and while the nurses change in and out of their suits, and while, outside, the soldiers go on and off shift, and while the world watches the continuing coverage of the Santa Lora sickness, the small developments of one minute human being go on unfolding at a perfectly predictable rate, like the intricate ticking of the most delicate clock on earth.