“We don’t have the right masks or suits to be working in there,” says Mei. “We’re not trained.”
He sighs hard and lies down beside her. A sticky silence comes into the tent.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says. “I think you’re too attached to me.”
A lump rises instantly in her throat. It is a surprise how close these feelings are to the surface.
“Aren’t you attached to me, too?” she says. She reaches for his hand. He pulls it away.
“Let me ask you something,” he says. She can tell by the way he says it that he is heading toward something abstract, some example from philosophy he read in a book. It can be tiring, late at night, this constant talk of logic, this daily parsing of ethics.
“If I was drowning,” he says. “And two strangers were also drowning nearby. And if you had to choose to save either me or the two strangers, who would you choose?” he says. “Me? Or the strangers?”
“What do you think?” says Mei.
She knows what he wants her to say. But it’s not true. Him—she would save him. Of course she would. She has not dared, these weeks, to say the word love out loud, but it feels like the right one.
“But that’s the wrong choice,” says Matthew.
A set of sirens zooms by outside, the faint flashing of red lights on his face.
“Two lives are always worth more than one,” he says. “It shouldn’t matter that you know me.”
“I don’t just know you,” she says. He can be so cold sometimes. “I guess you’re saying you wouldn’t save me?”
“See?” he says. “This is why I think love is unethical. I don’t believe in it.”
It is a shock to remember that she has only known him for a few weeks. There is a feeling of the ground falling away.
He gives more examples, but she has stopped listening. At least it is dark in this small tent—he can’t see her tears. But they are coming fast and hard. She can’t hide it for long. Maybe she doesn’t know him at all, this boy, who does not, at this moment, reach over to comfort her, even now, as she begins to sob.
“This is what I mean,” he says. “You’re too attached.”
A sudden longing for her parents blows through her, an old memory from a lonely childhood: how at least her parents would always care what happens to her.
“Why are you being so mean?” she says finally.
He answers by unzipping the tent.
“You’re missing the point,” he says as he climbs out onto the grass like he is trying to shake her off of him, get free.
Next she hears the sound of his feet crunching quickly on dried leaves as he rushes off somewhere, leaving only the noise of the crickets in the woods, the distant thrum of helicopter blades, and in her, the longing to be somewhere else.
After that, she cries so hard her head hurts. She thinks to call her parents, but she can’t bring herself to try. She is all alone in a strange place. A kind of numbness follows.
She finally drifts into sleep, or something close to it.
That’s when it happens, an unfamiliar feeling: some kind of presence is with her in the tent.
“Matthew,” she says or tries to say.
But Matthew is not here. Some kind of dark figure is here with her. This figure, like something human and not human—now it’s climbing up onto her chest. Something is pressing down hard on her whole body. Something is pinning her arms.
She tries to scream, but nothing comes. Her throat is closing up.
Her entire body, she understands now, has slipped out of her control, like some kind of paralysis.
It is hard to think past the immense pressure on her chest, but there is the tiniest sense of the larger possibility, that maybe this is it: the sickness. Maybe this is how it starts.
44.
First is the feeling of hands—Matthew’s—as he lifts her up from the bed. Now the echo of his voice calling her name. Mei, Mei, wake up, Mei, wake up. She is aware of a shift in the light. A breeze on her skin. He has carried her out into the yard.
It is not at all how she imagined it would be, this sleep: a twilight more than a night. The waking world is somehow seeping through.
He will take her to the campus, she knows, like they have taken all the others. But this time, those arms hanging from their sockets—those are hers. And that head lolling back, that hair streaming over the face—it’s hers.
Her eyes are closed, and yet, somehow, she can see—or she sees without seeing, without needing to see. She knows the way the cracked sidewalk glints in the sun. She can picture the ragged line of the mountains against the sky. And the clean waft of eucalyptus in the air gives rise in her mind to the spidery image of that exact tree.
One other fact glows clear in her head: the pleasure of Matthew’s attention and concern.
At some point, they arrive at the college, her body still draped in his arms. Now the cool of old buildings, the murmur of many voices, the scent of bleach in the air.
“How long has she been like this?” someone says, voice muffled, as through a mask. Someone official.
A sudden urgency swells in her. I can hear you, she wants to say, but she can’t, or she doesn’t. I’m here, she thinks, but she cannot seem to make use of her voice. I’m here.
“I don’t know when it started,” says Matthew. He is out of breath. He is talking fast. She has not heard him like this before: afraid. “I think she’s been asleep for twelve hours,” he says. “Maybe longer.”
His bare hand, unprotected, brushes the hair from her face. His goodness comes into her like electricity through his palm.
Next comes the cold penny of a stethoscope on her chest, and then her spine sinking slowly into a cot.
She will try speaking again in a little while, she decides, just a little later, when she is not quite so tired as she is now.
She has a confusing sensation that she is surrounded by books, old ones. Maybe she smells it in the air—that mustiness, the decay of thin pages. Or maybe she hears someone say it through her sleep: that they have brought her to the library, one floor down from the children’s ward.
She is aware of certain gaps. She has lost hold of the passage of time. Each moment floats alone, disconnected from any other.
At one point, an old story floats up, murky, into her head, from a book she read once or a movie, or just an article she saw somewhere, years earlier, about a man paralyzed in an accident. Everyone thought he was brain-dead, but he wasn’t. No one knew he was in there, still thinking and noticing and longing to connect—for years. Locked in, they called it.
A sudden terror washes through her. Can Matthew sense it, somehow, this fear? Maybe this explains why he always seems to return to her bed at these moments, his warm hand squeezing hers.
Other times are inexplicably peaceful, a gliding, everything white and distant, as if somehow leached of meaning and consequence.
There might be a feeding tube in her throat—there must be. But if there is, it is painless. And because her hands no longer move in accordance with her will, it is easy to avoid running her fingers around the plastic tube that must be taped to her cheek.
She is sometimes aware of her legs moving slightly, but she is not in control—they move like reeds drifting in a mild current.
She is sometimes a child again, walking on the beach with her parents or helping her grandmother with the cooking, while her grandmother tells stories she only half understands in Chinese. But sometimes, instead, Mei is the grandmother, retelling those stories to her own grandchild.
She can hear the other sleepers, the snores and the breathing, a moan or a shout—the noise of their nightmares and their dreams. And otherwise: the crinkle of plastic suits, the squeak and the drone of carts rolling across the hardwood floors, the helicopters chopping in the distance.