He has seen it already, how a child can unite them but also divide.
After that, Annie disappears upstairs with the baby. Ben drinks a glass of wine, quicker than he means to. Something has turned. The mood has spoiled. How often that used to happen in Brooklyn: a nice night slipping from their grasp. He drinks another glass.
That night, he dreams the same dream he’s been dreaming for two years: Annie leaves him for her dissertation advisor. Certain tied knots come loose in the night. This time, she takes the baby with her. And there is something else new: at the end of the dream, his teeth begin to loosen from his gums.
To those who believe in the fixed meanings of dreams, the loss of teeth is significant, symbolic of anxiety or fear. They would say that the dream presaged what will happen in the morning and maybe everything that happens after that. But he is always trying to lure his students away from those kinds of readings, asking them to be more expansive in their thinking, less obvious, less easy, more true. All they want are the answers, those kids, a grand order of things, as if every story were only code for something else.
He is awake at the time of the accident, as he will later tell the police, in bed but not asleep. The baby’s breathing is slow and steady in her crib, and Annie lies beside him, one bare leg stretched out on the sheet.
Six in the morning, everything quiet, that earliest, faintest light.
Into this silence there comes a sudden boom, as loud as thunder but nearer. It rattles the windows in their frames. Some sounds trigger a kind of vision. An image comes to mind.
“What was that?” says Annie, sitting up fast in the dimness. He can tell she isn’t sure whether she dreamed it or really heard it. Car alarms are ringing outside.
He reaches for the light, but no light comes. The power is out. His hands are shaking. Grace begins to cry.
He goes to the window in his boxers. Something has happened across the street, where the nurse lives. It is hard to see through the smoke.
“What is it?” Annie asks again.
Through the drifts of smoke, he can see that the house no longer stands. The walls have caved in, leaving a pile of blackened wood in which small fires burn. The lawn is scattered with debris.
“It’s the house across the street,” he says. “It looks like there was some kind of explosion.”
Already, neighbors are coming out into the street, hands over their mouths, a few running toward the lot with garden hoses, water streaming. In the air, scraps of paper are fluttering away in the breeze.
“An explosion?” says Annie.
The utility pole on the corner has snapped. Electrical wires are hanging like garland in the trees. They hear sirens in the distance.
Later, while the firefighters do what they can, and the police keep the people away, Ben and Annie stand around with the other neighbors in bathrobes, Ben with the baby in his arms, her eyes wide and serious, as if she, too, senses the mood. The sun is rising around them, while every dog on the street is barking and speculation is spreading through the crowd. A faulty hot water heater, maybe, or a stove left on too long. “That could do it,” says one of the older men. “A gas stove left on for many hours.”
Everyone hopes that the nurse was not at home. Maybe she was at work, they say, the overnight shift. But they can all see her car right there in the driveway, the windshield cracked and smudged black.
“First those college kids getting sick,” says one of the older women. “And now this.”
Some try to look for luck in the situation: “At least the fire didn’t spread to the other houses,” they are saying, the way people sometimes do. There is a comfort in thinking up something worse than what is.
Through all of this, the two girls next door stay inside. Ben can see them up in the widow’s walk, watching the street from above, their faces faintly red from the flashing of the fire trucks across the street.
At the same time, their father is doing some kind of work on the exterior of the house. He is standing up on a ladder, thick beard, no shirt, the sound of hammer and nail.
Annie is the first to notice him. “My God,” she says. “I think he’s boarding up the windows.”
He looks like a man at sea up there, closing the hatches of a ship, as if preparing for a storm that no one else can see.
12.
The tenth victim is found in his bed with the eleventh: two boys, roommates, sleeping secretly on one twin mattress. These boys in their boxers, long-limbed and pale, who pretended so much interest in the girls of the tenth floor, now sleep through the lesson made so instantly clear to the others: how disease sometimes exposes what is otherwise hidden. How carelessly it reveals a person’s private self.
The twelfth is discovered slumped in one of the showers, warm water streaming over her bare skin. Her body is blocking the drain, and this is what the others notice first, a tide of water pooling on the carpet in the hall. She is lucky, they say, that she didn’t drown in that sleep. But as she is carried away, under cover of a towel, she does not look lucky. Her dark hair drips down the hall as she sleeps, fingers pruned, the checked pattern of the bathroom tile imprinted on the pale skin of her thigh.
But the girls—the ones who are left—notice something else about her, too, a small flickering of her eyelids. The idea spreads quickly: like the others, she is dreaming. It seems important, this dreaming, as if these girls live in some other time, when what you saw in your sleep could still be taken for some kind of truth.
By now, experts in contagious disease have begun to fill the rooms of the bed-and-breakfasts of Santa Lora.
These are scientists who have floated down the Congo to reach villages hot with hemorrhagic fever or swabbed the saliva of bats in the remotest caves of southern China. They have suffered their own bouts of malaria while finishing their doctorates in the jungles of Zaire, and they know how it feels to breathe like an astronaut in a full-body biohazard suit. It is with some surprise that these travelers now turn their attention to a patch of earth they have not been watching, the soft belly of America, the small town of Santa Lora, California, population 12,106.
They do not, these experts, believe the cause of the sickness could be psychological.
Instead they suspect meningitis, which is not so rare a flower in the halls of college dormitories, where it travels in kisses and the steam of hot showers. Or encephalitis lethargica, another strange sleeping sickness that haunted the early twentieth century. But the symptoms don’t quite fit.
It isn’t bird flu or swine flu or SARS. It is not mononucleosis.
What they do know is that this sickness is unusually contagious, like measles: you can catch measles if you walk through a room ten minutes after an infected person has coughed a single cough.
Meanwhile, the afflicted go on sleeping a deep and steady sleep, their bodies now fed by plastic tubes taped into their noses, their skin kept clean by the gloved hands of strangers.
No one wants to say so right away, but already an idea is creeping into the minds of some of these scientists, like a premonition coming true: this sickness might be something new.
13.
On the twelfth day, Halloween, the weather finally turns, the first rain in three months. Big fat drops in the woods, a murmur in the trees, the unfamiliar smell of it soaking the pavement. And the California ground—it’s too dry to absorb it.