The Dreamers

7.

At sunrise, a professor of biology takes a walk in the woods of Santa Lora.

His white hair is cut close to his head. He wears a ten-year-old jacket. Hiking boots. Nathaniel—that’s his name.

No dog. No phone. Just a thermos full of coffee and an empty plastic bag.

The sky is clear. The air is cool. The woods are ringing with birdsong: blue jays and Steller’s jays and chickadees.

At a certain bend in the trail, a log has been carved into a bench. Here is where, a few hours from now, Nathaniel will bring his freshman biology seminar, to point out certain features and phenomena of trees: the intricate root structures of pines, how the bark beetle has worked with the drought to kill so many here, and then, the highlight, the zombie tree.

He calls it that for the kids, this ancient stump. No trunk, no branches, no leaves, just a hollowed-out stump, and yet, somehow, this stump lives on. The bursts of green in the grain of its wood—chlorophyll—are proof of ongoing life, as if this remnant of a tree is at once alive and also dead. “How can that be?” the kids will want to know, or the bright ones will, the few really interested ones. He has been bringing his classes here for years. It comes as a surprise to most of them, that trees have certain ways of communicating with one another, that they send chemical messages through the air, and that they sometimes help their neighboring trees survive. “This stump’s relatives are keeping it alive,” he will say. “They’re delivering nutrients to its roots.”

On this day, Nathaniel also comes across a familiar scattering of dark glass in this spot. Beer bottles. This is what he has brought the plastic bag for.

He doesn’t blame the kids for the drinking. Or for wanting to do it out here in these woods—among the ponderosas and the manzanitas, the white firs and the cedars, instead of sitting around on the particleboard furniture of their dorm rooms. He gets it: the mountains, the stars. There is a privacy in wilderness. But the trash—come on, these kids are old enough to pick up their own trash.

He is bending down to pick the glass from the dirt when he notices someone lying a few feet off the trail. A boy in an army jacket, dark jeans, tennis shoes, is nestled, facedown, in dried leaves.

“Hey,” says Nathaniel. “Hey, kid.”

He crouches down. He shakes the boy’s shoulder. The smell of alcohol is floating off the boy’s skin, accompanied by the loud snores of drunken sleep. He zips up the kid’s jacket. He turns the kid’s head to the side—at least he won’t choke if he vomits in his sleep.

At home, he calls the police: “There’s a kid passed out drunk in the woods,” he says. He tells the operator exactly where to find the boy. “Probably just needs to sleep it off, but thought you guys should know.”

A bowl of oatmeal. A glass of orange juice. The rattle of pills against plastic: high blood pressure. It might be stress-related—that’s what Nathaniel’s daughter thinks. Grief, she says over the phone from San Francisco, is a kind of stress. So is age, he argues. Decay comes eventually for every living thing.

He opens a small notebook. Someone else might call it a journal, but not Nathaniel. It is slim and small in his hands, a line-a-day diary, the kind that stretches five years: one line reserved for each day. What is the point of that? Henry used to say to him. What can you say in one sentence? But it is a comfort to do it, a mysterious distillation, like gleaning salt from the sea, like the perfection of the simplest chemical equation. He writes quickly, without too much thought—that’s the point, the habit, the doing: “Went to see Henry yesterday. His cough seems better.”

A shower, a sports coat, a pair of dark socks.

His car keys are rattling in his hand and his lecture notes packed in his bag when he finally stops to look at his email.

Now is when he opens a message marked urgent: a student in his freshman seminar, Kara Sanders, has died of an unknown illness, possibly contagious, and two other students are exhibiting the same symptoms. More details to follow.

Her name brings no face to his mind. He feels a little guilty for it, but it is early in the year. He doesn’t know them yet. There is something familiar about it, though, the feeling of waste. Things are always happening to these kids: suicides, overdoses, drunk driving. It seems worse than it used to be. Is it worse?

His inbox is filling up with a series of campus-wide alerts about precautions and symptoms. Classes are canceled, one says. Campus is closed until further notice. They tend to overreact to these things, to see a larger pattern where there isn’t one. A shooter on campus last fall turned out to be someone holding a water gun. The smell of gas is almost always just someone boiling water in a dorm kitchen. A freak case of meningitis is often the only one. But okay, he’s not in charge of these things, so he sends his students an email reiterating: today’s class is canceled.

After that, the house is quiet, too quiet, the echoing scuff of his shoes on the wood. A brief disorientation: what to do, now, with the day.

But soon he is standing quietly in line at the bakery, where no one is yet talking about the sickness, and then he’s driving the two miles to the nursing home, with an almond croissant wrapped up on the passenger seat for Henry.

It has a certain grandness to it, this place, Restoration Villa, with its fountains and its porticos, and the way it overlooks the lake. It was once a sanitarium for the wealthy and tubercular, a history that in other circumstances would have appealed to Nathaniel, and to Henry. But a point comes in every visit when Nathaniel begins to read in the small movements of Henry’s face a coded message aimed at him: How could you leave me in this depressing fucking place?

On this morning, nothing here will seem amiss: the metallic slide and click of the patients’ walkers in the hallway, the low laughter of the nurses, the televisions running like ventilators in the other rooms. He will spend the morning reading to Henry from Henry’s favorite sections of The New York Times while Henry sucks on small pieces of the croissant like lozenges. In this way, Nathaniel will come across a small news story in the back pages, a little surprised, to see that this event in Santa Lora, like a pebble, is making traces in distant waters. People love a tragedy when it’s happening far away: an odd sickness has surfaced on a campus in a small California town.

“She was one of my students,” he will say to Henry.

And Henry will turn his head at this news. He will aim an unreadable expression at Nathaniel. His mind is like a school of fish, obscured by dark water. Once in a while, though, something tugs on the line.

That night, Nathaniel’s daughter will call from San Francisco. He will let the call go to voicemail. “It’s me, Dad. I saw the news and just wanted to make sure you’re okay.” He will send her an email: “Yes, all fine here. Love, Dad.”