And always, there is the musty smell of the old books rising up from the stacks around her, like soil, like roots, like the trees they once were. Maybe she is not in the library but on the shady floor of a forest. Maybe she is asleep in some unrecoverable woods.
At some point, her mother arrives. What a surprise it is to hear her voice—and a relief. How did you get in? she wants to ask her but cannot.
“What’s wrong with her eyes?” her mother asks, and keeps asking. “What happened to her eyes?” Mei worries that her eyes have been disfigured in her sleep, as if gouged out or removed. When she tries to open them, she understands suddenly and with a terrible certainty what has happened: the skin of her eyelids has grown down over her eyes.
And her mother, she realizes, is not here in this room. Of course she’s not. She is on the phone. Someone must be holding a phone up to her ear. Or else her mother is on speakerphone—maybe that’s why her voice is warbling like that. Or she might be on the radio, even. Her mother’s voice might be coming from the television on the other side of the room. Or through some deeper channel, as if through her brain, her blood.
“Why is she moaning like that?” her mother asks. “Is she trying to talk?”
One night—or it seems to her like it’s night—Matthew whispers something in her ear: I’m sorry.
It may as well be I love you. And she has the idea that she can say it, too, not with words but with thoughts instead, or with the sound of her breathing in and out, like a code that only he will hear.
That same night, or maybe another one, or maybe the middle of the day, Matthew climbs into her cot, and after that, he sleeps there with her for a long time until it becomes the main thing she knows, her surest truest fact: his body curled against hers.
45.
There is no one part of the brain in charge of keeping track of time. In the conscious brain, the system of timekeeping is loose and diffuse and subject to distortions of various kinds: love, for example, and grief, and youth. In the mind, time dilates, and time contracts. Different days travel at different rates.
But certain other parts of the body keep time with more precision. At the beginning, we all grow at a certain, fixed rate.
Thus, as Rebecca begins her seventh week of sleep, ten fingers begin to flower, and ten toes. A pair of tiny nostrils opens in a nose. The eyelids are starting to form. The skull, at this moment, is translucent like a jellyfish. And inside it are blooming the earliest passageways of a brain.
Soon, the reproductive organs will coalesce. The ovaries will begin to fill with eggs, and those eggs will travel with this tiny girl—if she survives—for the whole rest of her life.
The air in Rebecca’s room is still. Her only movements are the occasional shifting of her head in sleep, and the cyclical fluttering of her eyelids, her eyes darting beneath them in a way suggestive of dreams.
But soon, hidden inside her, those feathery limbs will begin to move. The arms will bend. The knees. The hands will meet and come apart. A thumb might make its way into the mouth. A million neurons will emerge every minute.
A blood test has finally revealed her secret to the doctors, who take it as a worrying surprise. There is no way of knowing how the virus might affect the fetus, or if they can keep Rebecca’s body well enough for the baby to grow to full term. From then on, the nurses treat her with extra care.
While Rebecca sleeps, and while the nurses change in and out of their suits, and while, outside, the soldiers go on and off shift, and while the world watches the continuing coverage of the Santa Lora sickness, the small developments of one minute human being go on unfolding at a perfectly predictable rate, like the intricate ticking of the most delicate clock on earth.
46.
The news travels quickly. It is a rumor, really, at the start. A development more shocking, in a way, than all the facts that have come before it. Seven weeks in, news like this is difficult to believe. But it is true: one of the sleepers has woken up, only the second to open his eyes since the outbreak began.
At first, says the nurse, she assumes she is mistaken. It can be hard to see through the rippling plastic of the masks. But a second look, at that man in the corner, four rows in, shows that she is right: his eyes are open. And it’s not only his eyes. It’s the way he is suddenly shifting around in his sheets, his movements so different from all the other sleepers, more purposeful, more direct. He whips his head back and forth. He is looking around.
His cot is one of two hundred cots set up in the college dining hall. There is a sleeper in every bed. There is an IV in every arm. The sight of one of them sitting up like this—it is as startling as it would be to see a corpse rise up from the dead.
Not described in any of the early reports is how the nurse feels in that first moment: a pang of fear she cannot quite explain.
The man begins to speak.
Often, they mumble and they moan, but this is different. This is speech. How alien it is to hear this man’s voice, hoarse at first, but his first word so crisp and so clear: “Hello?” he says. “Hello?”
He raises his head. He turns it quickly. He pulls the wires off his body. He waves his arms in front of him, as if he is blind, which, it turns out, he is, in a way—his glasses have been lost during his long weeks of sleep.
All the nurses soon gather around him, a clutch of yellow suits, the sound of Gore-Tex boots.
A contagious disease, they say. You have contracted a contagious disease. It is hard to tell if he can hear them, their voices echoey through the plastic. It is hard to tell if he understands what they are saying.
He has pale green eyes that shine blankly at them.
Later, these nurses will confide to one another about the strange sensation they experienced as they spoke to him, as if they were attempting to communicate with a traveler from some faraway land.
The man speaks quickly. His words tumble too fast to be discerned. And also there is this: he is shouting. He is shouting something about a fire.
“Did they put it out?” he shouts. “Is it out?”
You were dreaming for a long time, they tell him.
“There was a fire,” he shouts again. “At the library. The whole place was on fire.”
His voice grows louder and louder, but the sleep of those around him continues undisturbed.
He calls for water.
“Please,” he says. He keeps pulling at his beard. “I’m thirsty. I’m so thirsty.”
He drinks and drinks. He drinks so much water that the water comes right back up, splashing the rubber boots of the nurses, as if, after a while, a body grows to prefer even the worst of circumstances to any sudden change.
“A fire,” he shouts again. “It was a huge fire.”
The nurses nod together in their yellow suits. They are volunteers, these people, flown in from other states after most of the local nurses slipped under. They want to be comforting, but the man will not be comforted. One of the nurses touches his shoulder with her gloved hand.
“And my girls,” he shouts. “Where are my girls? Where are they?”
There is no mention of relatives in his chart. It seems possible that these girls, like the fire, are part of some deep and indecipherable dream.
He asks for pen and paper. This is how he spends the next few hours: writing in a notebook with the speed and urgency of a person facing his death.