“Yeah?” she says.
“That’s my family,” he says, like it’s some kind of confession. “I grew up in a gated community. I went to boarding school. My whole life has been paid for by dirty money.”
It’s true she had not pictured it, this boy in a ratty sweatshirt, old shoes. But there’s something about him: he is all present, no past. As if nothing he can do can surprise her.
“But I don’t want that life,” he says. There’s a kind of desperation in his voice, as if he expects her to be angry. “I think it’s wrong to live that way.”
Now she wonders what he would think of how her family lives, of her father the accountant and her mother the teacher, a Volvo parked in the driveway.
She shows him where to put the stakes for the tent. Together, they hammer them into the ground.
He’s in the tent now, kneeling, as he rolls out a sleeping bag inside. He drops the flashlight inside, so that the tent lights the lawn blue like a lantern. It is not very big, this tent, and she likes the idea of them crouched inside it together, that nearness.
He sits down on the grass. He looks up at the sky. He seems so sad sitting there, this mysterious boy.
She sits down next to him. Suddenly his face is close to hers.
A sudden kiss. She does not even think of how they shouldn’t be doing it. It’s quick and fast. It’s shy.
And then he is saying something about the stars, how they can’t see them anymore because of all the emergency lights, and how his dream is to just live in the woods somewhere and sleep under the stars.
“I want to live on the same amount of money that the poorest people in the world do,” he says. “That’s my goal. I think that’s the most ethical thing.”
Everything in his mind is either one thing or the other. Right or wrong. There’s a thrill in that clarity.
He motions for her to crawl into the tent.
She sees now how it will happen, how there’s no need to discuss it in advance, as if she can feel it already, the warmth of his arm beside hers before they fall asleep.
But then suddenly he is up and out of the tent again and standing in the grass.
“You sleep in the tent,” he says. “I’ll sleep out here.”
In the morning, none of the sales reps wake up.
A mass suicide is what it looks like, their bodies splayed out in the living room, their hair hanging over their faces, their mouths slightly ajar, saliva pooling on the planks of the floor. But if you listen closely, you can hear the sounds of their living: the slow breaths of deep sleep.
One of their phones keeps ringing. There is a lot of information in that sound, the way it rings so often that it is hard to tell when one call ends and the next begins: the ringing of a person gone crazy with worry. But here in this room, no one is stirring.
There is something terrible about the way the sun streams in over their faces, as if the sunlight were a part of it—and isn’t it true that the sun has turned ominous lately, parching the land deeper and deeper into drought?
According to the experts, there is no way to distinguish by sight alone between the sickness and sleep, but Mei can tell right away what this is. It’s a deep settling in, a blankness of the face, and they look younger, somehow, than they did the night before, this the kind of knowledge that can never be captured in the results of an experiment or in the lens of a camera, the human mind the only instrument subtle enough to register it.
If, somehow, the sales reps could see up through their dreams, here is what they would find, refracted, at the surface: A boy and a girl with white masks on their faces, bent over their nine bodies in the vast living room of strangers. The press of the boy’s fingers—in kitchen gloves they’ve found under the sink—searching their wrists for the beating of their hearts. The sensation of liquid running down their chins as the girl drips water from a child’s sippy cup into each drying mouth. They would hear the sound of the boy’s voice getting angry in the other room: But we’ve been waiting all day for an ambulance. And finally, the feeling of someone, that same boy, lifting each one up by the armpits, while the girl holds tight to their legs, the swing of their bodies like sandbags. Then the smell of leather seats. Then the makeshift click of seatbelts over their slumped bodies. The crank of a garage door. The turning of an ignition. The bump of the old streets beneath the tires, their heads swinging forward or back with the turns in the road. And maybe: a glimpse of pine trees, the mountains, the wide sunsetting sky, their bodies so long attuned to the rising and setting of that same sun—but suddenly no longer.
32.
From the window of the third floor of the hospital, now sealed for ten days, Catherine watches helicopters come and go—with supplies and with food. Garbage is piling up on the streets below.
There is something monstrous about the suits that she and the other healthcare workers now wear when in the isolation ward, the way the plastic distorts the faces of the doctors and the nurses, the way it muffles their voices. They look larger in those suits. Less human. People get spooked.
At the back doors of the hospital, sleepers have begun to appear slumped alone against the glass, abandoned like newborns or drug addicts, notes pinned to their shirts. Rumors are flourishing: anyone exposed will be detained.
Seventy miles away in Catherine’s townhouse in Los Angeles, Catherine’s daughter and her daughter’s babysitter are quarantined, too. This is a precaution, in case Catherine brought the virus back home—on her clothes, maybe, or on her skin, or in the very air she breathed as she kissed her daughter’s cheeks after those first few visits to Santa Lora.
She should have been more careful, she keeps thinking.
Her phone conversations with her daughter always end the same way: Okay, but Mama, now can I go outside?
She has begun to misbehave, says the babysitter, in unfamiliar ways. She pulls on the curtains. She throws her food on the floor. She runs in circles through the house.
The babysitter, so patient otherwise, has begun to sound weary on the phone.
On the following Sunday, Catherine spots from the window a small church congregation meeting outdoors, having dragged the pews out into the parking lot to limit the airborne spread.
There is something about it, those families in their pews, those Bibles in their hands, the faint strains of their hymns floating in the open air—tears come into Catherine’s eyes. She has never been away from her daughter so long.
One night, Catherine watches a crowd of people swarm a helicopter at the high school nearby, as it tries to land with a shipment of food.
After that, one of the ER doctors pulls her aside:
“We’re moving the opioids out of the pharmacy,” he says. He is very thin, this doctor, a new beard spreading across his face. He speaks quickly. None of the staff are sleeping much. The lack shows in this man’s eyes. “Now that the town is cut off,” says the ER doctor, “street drugs aren’t going to be able to get in, either. It’s only a matter of time before they come looking here.”
“Who?” says Catherine. But she knows who he means. He speaks of them like animals. But she wants him to say it.
“Addicts,” he says.
Addiction is not her specialty, but she often sees it in her patients. And why not? Those drugs soothe the same parts of the brain that mental illness sets on fire.
“If there’s going to be violence in this hospital,” says the ER doctor, “that’s how it will happen.”
She can see it in this doctor’s eyes, how clearly he can picture it: the drug-addicted, like zombies, overrunning the hospital. Worry, she often reminds her patients, is a kind of creativity. Fear is an act of the imagination.