But whoever shares her lipstick that day, whoever borrows her eyeliner, whoever kisses her cheek that night or dances too close or clinks her flute of champagne, whoever touches her hand to admire the ring, whoever catches the bouquet at the end of the night—all of them, every one, is exposed.
This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love.
24.
In the annals of infectious disease, there is a phenomenon known as a super-spreader: a person who, by some accident of biochemistry or fate, infects many more people than the other victims do.
Rebecca, it turns out, still suspended in sleep, holds exactly this kind of sway.
Unlike the other families, Rebecca’s relatives remain at her side: her mother sleeps in the bed beside hers, and her father lies unconscious as well. Over there in the corner rest her two teenage brothers, curled like children in their beds. All of them, now, are snaked through with tubes.
If they were awake, this family—keepers of so many memorized verses—they might think of Matthew, Chapter 9, when a father whose daughter has just died comes to Jesus and asks for his help, and how, before healing her body, Jesus says to the mourners around the daughter, “Go away. The girl is not dead but asleep.”
Meanwhile, in that same room, there swims one more, too young yet to dream. A sesame seed—that’s what the books would say if Rebecca were reading them. Already the cells are organizing themselves into layers. Soon the organs will begin to form. In a week, that speck of a heart will divide into chambers. In two weeks, the contours of the face will begin to emerge. In three, the first sprouts of hands and feet.
Only one thing is needed now: time.
25.
And then everything accelerates, as if the increase in cases has caused a quickening of time.
All of this in one day:
A man in a wrinkled suit slips out of consciousness during the sermon at Santa Lora Lutheran, but a few always doze in those pews, so it is only afterward that anyone realizes what is wrong.
A woman who cleans houses discovers two bodies in the master bedroom of a renovated Victorian on Alameda. “They’re dead,” she whispers into the phone, but they are soon reclassified, this dean and his wife: joined not yet in death but in sleep.
A florist’s van speeds into the lake at midday, no brakes. The driver makes no attempt to escape. Ten dozen roses drift for hours on the water before gradually washing up on the beach.
The stories soon multiply, as stories often do: the jogger found splayed on a sidewalk while his infant wails in a stroller, the park ranger, curled and hypothermic, in the woods on a rarely used trail, and the story, perhaps apocryphal, of the fisherman who falls asleep at the wheel of his boat, way out in the middle of the lake, his dog barking in the moonlight while the boat drifts farther and farther from the shore, never to be seen again.
The sickness wafts through the ventilation systems of the YMCA and the high school. And it spreads through the intensive care unit of the hospital.
Certain connections are being made: how the florist delivered bouquets to the wedding of a nurse, how the dean might have bought an orchid from the florist that week.
The story now begins to blaze across the national broadcasts. Now is when the details surge to the tops of home pages, crackling through millions of news feeds all over the world. The headline is posted and reposted and commented upon: “Mysterious Sickness Continues to Spread Rapidly Through California Town.”
The appetite for information exceeds what information there is.
Politicians—from mayors to the president—rush to fill the vacuum with press conferences, while talk show hosts devote whole hours to the subject. There is something like thrill beating hard in their voices. Hear the click-click of a roller coaster inching up an incline. Already, the arguments are starting. How to handle this thing, what to do. Questions are being raised: Why didn’t the CDC respond sooner? Are the health workers wearing the right protective gear? And how could the authorities lose track of twenty-six kids being held in quarantine?
26.
On the afternoon of the seventeenth day, in the lakeside sunroom of the nursing home, where Nathaniel has spent so many hours sitting beside Henry, a ninety-year-old woman dozes off in her wheelchair. The noise of her breathing, wheezy as usual, but strong and steady, keeps the staff from disturbing her. Why not let an old woman sleep? The television runs all afternoon. The bougainvillea scrapes against a hundred-year-old window. The sun drifts across the lake. She is still asleep at dusk, her head against her shoulder, as the dinner plates begin to clink in the cafeteria. She seems to awaken slightly when the nurses lift her into her bed. She says something about her children. And this rousing, this brief opening of the eyes, delays the call to a doctor. Even much later, when she fails to wake in the morning, it takes a few hours for anyone to realize that it’s the sickness. This is a place where to die in one’s sleep is considered the best way to go.
After that, new procedures are put in place: the nursing home is closed to visitors.
Nathaniel receives this news that same afternoon, from a security guard, stationed in the parking lot.
“It’s only one case,” says the guard. He seems to want to console. “But just to be safe.”
Nathaniel writes Henry’s name on the white paper bag in which an almond croissant is cooling. “Can you make sure he gets this?” he says, and hands the bag to the guard.
As he drives out through the front gates, he feels only the tiniest ping of worry. To him, this thing still seems overblown. Didn’t they put the campus on lockdown twice last year, and both times were false alarms? Hysteria—that’s the real disease of this era.
His walks in the woods grow longer each day, the dry crunch of boots on pine needles. These trees, too, are going to sleep, in a way—sent there by drought and bark beetle. It’s been happening for years, he tells his students, this ravaging, but no one talks about it, this other, slower wasting. These trees live and die on glacial time, their journeys so slow as to be almost imperceptible to humans. While one root creeps across the soil beneath a field, our history unfolds at high speed.
His classes have been canceled for two weeks. There is a lot of day to fill.
But on this afternoon, an idea comes to Nathaniel with a gust of relief: there is a pipe under the bathroom sink that needs fixing. Here is something that needs doing.
At the hardware store, the man behind the counter wears a white hospital mask, blue latex gloves.
“We’re out of masks,” he calls to Nathaniel as soon as he steps inside. “No more gloves, either.”
He can feel it everywhere in town, this buzz of panic and gloom. They almost want it, don’t they, the drama and the thrill?
“I’m just looking for a stop valve,” he says. It’s the tiniest part, seven dollars apiece, but without it, one leak in one sink could drown a whole house in water.
The man behind the counter is surprised, and disappointed, maybe, that anyone, at a time like this, would be working on a problem so ordinary.
It was Henry’s house, this house, before it was theirs, the kind of place Nathaniel never would have picked out for himself, all these small rooms, one leading to another, and each one packed tight with furniture: wingback chairs and grandfather clocks, mahogany bureaus filled with tablecloths. Persian rugs. Victorian wallpaper. Candlesticks.