The Dreamers

6.

Infectious disease is not the only thing that can spread. On the fifth day, a specialist in psychiatric disorders is called in from Los Angeles.

She has seen this kind of thing before—how one girl can sometimes feel the feelings of another, a different kind of contagion, the way a yawn sometimes jumps from mouth to mouth. A certain kind of empathy. A hundred cheerleaders once fainted this way on a football field in Dallas—and only one of them turned out to be ill.

It’s a two-hour drive from the neuropsychiatric hospital downtown, in her five-year-old Volvo, Goldfish crumbs crunched into the leather, her daughter’s Legos rolling back and forth across the backseat.

She is Catherine to her colleagues, Katie to her family, Dr. Cohen when she walks the halls of her locked ward.

The city gives way to the suburbs as she drives toward Santa Lora, the suburbs to miles of lemon groves. A long succession of switchbacks finally delivers her up into the mountains and the shade of a thick pine forest.

The radio stations fall away. Her cell phone goes silent. And then the road twists through forty more miles of uninterrupted woods.

What a relief it is when a motel appears beside the road. But the windows are boarded up. A faded sign still advertises COLOR TVS.

But finally, a lake glitters through the trees. The woods crack open. A campus comes into view, college kids spread out on lawns, the grass browned to the color of wheat. Santa Lora.

The hospital, when she gets there, is no bigger than the motel.

The patient is asleep on her back, one arm resting on her stomach. The room is dim. The blinds are drawn. Catherine knows from the chart that her name is Rebecca. She has been asleep for sixty hours.

The girl’s mother—she must be the mother—is sitting beside the bed, her eyes bloodshot, overwide. Mothers: talking to the mothers is the worst part of her job.

“Can I open these?” Catherine asks, but she does not wait for an answer. She pulls the cord, and sunlight fills the room.

This mother seems relieved to have heard that this affliction might be psychological, as if the failings of the mind are any less destructive than those of the body.

“You mean she might not have a real sickness?” says the mother.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” says Catherine.

The girl’s blood pressure, the internists have told her, is normal. Her pulse, too. It was the same with the first girl, they say, the one who died. No symptoms beyond the deep sleep. This girl looks as if the slightest noise might wake her, or the faintest feather of a touch.

Catherine has seen patients rendered similarly lifeless by catatonic depression or by sudden traumatic news. When one’s life seems broken beyond repair, there remains one last move: a person can at least shut her eyes.

Catherine has forgotten this girl’s name, but it feels too late to ask. “Does she have any history of anxiety?” she asks. “Or depression?”

The mother shakes her head hard. But the parents, Catherine has learned, never know what is really going on.

A Bible has been pressed into the crook of the girl’s left arm, as if its messages can be transmitted to the soul through the skin.

A tiny sound comes from the girl’s mouth.

The mother jumps up. “Rebecca?” she says.

The girl’s eyelids begin to flutter.

In a healthy human being, Catherine knows, this motion of the eyes beneath the lids would indicate REM sleep, the state most conducive to dreaming. But Catherine cannot say for sure without tests what is happening inside this girl’s brain.

She orders an MRI. She will be back in two days, she says.

Catherine’s daughter is asleep by the time she gets back to Los Angeles, the babysitter reading on the couch. But that night, like every night for the past month, her daughter wakes screaming after midnight. Nightmares are common at her age.

It takes a while to calm her.

“Mama,” she whispers into Catherine’s ear, her cheeks lit by a night-light shaped like the moon. “I think there’s something wrong with my eyes.”

“What do you mean?” she says.

Her three-year-old arms are wrapped tight around Catherine’s neck.

“When I close my eyes,” says her daughter, “I see something scary.”

“Those are dreams,” says Catherine. “Like we talked about.”

What a crazy thing to do, her own mother had said: to have a baby on her own—and on purpose. Every one of her days hums with the possibility that she might be doing it wrong.

But also there is this: the secret pleasure in these minutes right here, that warm little body pressed into her chest, her hot breath on her neck, and the simplicity of the cure—a talk and a hug in the dark.

“This time,” says her daughter, “I dreamed there were snakes coming out of my skin.”

“Wow,” says Catherine. “That would scare me, too.”

One of her patients used to see that same image, but while she was awake. On an MRI, the dreaming brain looks almost identical to the brain of a schizophrenic.

It strikes her again, how many of a child’s fears are just rational responses to the facts of everyday experience.

Two songs and a back rub—and then her daughter is asleep again.

Catherine is back in her own bed when she hears a new message ping on her phone: a third girl from the same dorm floor has lost consciousness in Santa Lora.