She can feel a tightening in her throat. Tears. Through the wall next door, there comes the faint throbbing of a television—is there any lonelier sound?
After that, she stays so long alone in her room that she does not hear the news until late the next day: two more girls have fallen sick.
10.
The eyelids flutter. The breathing is irregular. The muscle tone is visibly slack. With each new patient, Catherine notes it again—these signs that the sleepers might be dreaming.
What weird cases. Curiosity is part of what keeps her coming back all this way.
By her third visit to Santa Lora, a sleep specialist has confirmed it: the mapping of brain activity shows that these sleepers are, indeed, dreaming.
Dreams have never much interested Catherine. The field of psychiatry has moved on to different territory. Most of her colleagues would argue that dreams are entirely meaningless, a kind of mental junk, randomly generated by the electrical impulses of the brain. Or at best, some might say, dreams are like religion—a force that exists outside the realm of science.
But on her long drive home that night, it is hard not to wonder what it is those kids are dreaming of.
Maybe they dream of the lost and the departed, the once known and the dead. They dream of lovers, certainly, the real and the imagined, that girl at the bar, that boy they used to know. Or else they dream, as Catherine sometimes does, the mundane dreams of cluttered desks and computer screens, the loading of laundry, the clatter of dishes, the mowing of overgrown lawns. They dream they can fly. Or they dream they can kill. Maybe they dream they are pregnant and feel elated. Or they dream they are pregnant and are devastated. Or maybe, one or two of them, dream the answers to the problems they’ve been struggling with for years—like the nineteenth-century German chemist who insisted that the undiscovered structure of the chemical compound benzene came to him in the form of a dream.
If any of those kids dream of falling from great heights, they do not—for the first time in their lives—wake up before their bodies hit the ground. Instead, they dream right through these impacts and then go on dreaming after that.
The true contents of these dreams go unrecorded, of course, but in some patients, the accompanying brain waves are captured with electrodes and projected on screens, like silhouettes of the hereafter. Catherine is as shocked as the sleep specialists are by what she sees on those screens. These are not the brains of ordinary sleepers. These are not the brains of the comatose. These brains are extraordinarily busy.
By the time Catherine is pulling into her driveway back home, the news has leaked to the media and is streaming through the speakers of her car radio: there is more activity in these minds than has ever been recorded in any human brain—awake or asleep.
11.
That same night, in the kitchen of a large gray house ten blocks away from the college, a mother is singing to her newborn baby. A father is cooking dinner.
Of course they’ve heard the news. Of course. But at this point, just ten days in, it is still possible to enjoy the smell of onions browning in a pan, and the warmth of the baby’s head against his hand, and to say to Annie, as he opens the wine: “See? It’s getting easier, isn’t it?”
The baby is seventeen days old.
They are new to Santa Lora, Ben and Annie, visiting professors, their boxes still spread on the pinewood floors, their books stacked like firewood in the dining room, and the disassembled shelves, waiting for screws, and her prints in brown paper, leaning everywhere, unhung, against the walls. Also a soccer ball, clean and white and bought on impulse along with the grill—a backyard, can you imagine? A separate room for the baby. A whole house. They are delirious with space. They are young but not that young, these the last years in their lives when they can still be thought of that way.
Annie is sitting at the kitchen table in a T-shirt and boxers, the pajamas she’s been wearing for days and days, her breasts hanging loose beneath the cotton—so changed they seem like someone else’s, so much larger than before, and the centers gone wide and dark.
Grace is asleep in her arms. Those little pink feet, one crossed over the other.
“Can you defrost another bottle?” says Annie.
Her milk has been slow to come in. For a while, the baby was lighter every time they set her on the scale, as if she might soon float away, which is how it felt to them as they waited, like two animals, waiting for their baby to thrive. She’s a skinny little thing, said one of the nurses that first week, which made Annie cry right there in the hospital, from hormones, maybe, or from exhaustion, or from something much simpler: love.
But they’ve had a good day. The baby is finally gaining weight, thanks mostly to the milk of other women, donated to the hospital by mothers with too much supply. How weird this would have seemed to Ben before—milk pumped from other women’s breasts—but now, there is only urgency. There is only getting his daughter whatever she needs.
He has learned to bathe the baby while Annie’s incision healed. He taught himself to change a diaper. And there is all the other washing, too, the cleaning of dishes and sheets and clothes, always the sound of bottles clicking in the sink, so much work and no sex and the days so often ending before he has ever showered. For seventeen days, they’ve been sleeping different sleep: short and sudden, and like sipping salt water for thirst—they wake more in need than before they closed their eyes. Every hour is needed, every moment put to use. It is exactly what he has always feared would happen with a baby. But what he didn’t understand before, what he failed to imagine in advance, is how much pleasure there is in being so consumed.
These minutes, though, this evening, they form a sudden pause, an unexpected quiet, during which they have realized, for the first time in weeks—and with a flush of joy—that there might be time enough to make a salad, to cook a piece of fish.
Here I am with my wife, thinks Ben, as he washes the lettuce at the sink, here we are with our daughter, Grace—there is a delight in just saying her name. What pleasure there is in some statements of fact, such simplicity, such calm.
To say they are ignoring what is happening at the college would be not quite true, or not quite fair. A few sick strangers—those poor kids, but none from the classes they teach—is only one of a hundred bad stories that must be overlooked every day. To close one’s eyes can be an act of survival.
Annie turns her head toward the back door. She is saying something that he cannot quite hear.
“What did you say?” says Ben. He turns off the water to listen.
“Can you hear that?” she says, standing up with the baby, who stretches and stirs in response—the baby has a way of arching her back like a fish, her whole face turning red with the strain of it. “The birds,” says Annie. “They’re going crazy out there.”
From the backyard, there come the urgent cries of the swallows who live beneath the air conditioner, their nest wedged against the windowsill. That nest was one of their earliest discoveries here, even more endearing than the goslings who float on the lake at dusk, as if they had come to a place so bursting with life that even the air conditioners could engender it.
Annie’s is a temporary position at the college, two years in a physics lab, and his is only part-time, teaching literature. But there is a charm in the modesty of it, like the warped floors beneath their feet, a pleasant shabbiness.
“Maybe there’s a hawk somewhere?” says Annie. With Grace curled against one arm, she creaks open the screen door. She moves slowly, still sore from the cesarean. “Maybe that’s what’s bothering them? A hawk?”