What a shock it is to receive the message after so many weeks in quarantine in the hospitaclass="underline" she is needed on the campus, Catherine, one of the few psychiatrists left awake in Santa Lora, and the only one who witnessed the waking of the first boy. His body on the pavement—it still glows bright in her mind.
She is escorted the three blocks from the hospital to the dining hall by two soldiers, her first time outside in more than a month. The weather has changed in that time. December. Dead leaves drift across the empty sidewalks as they walk, the seasons more apparent up here in the mountains than they are in Los Angeles, where her daughter, thank God, has been released from quarantine into the care of Catherine’s mother.
In the time they have been apart, her daughter has learned to count to twenty, and to put her own shirts on. Her bangs, she knows from their nightly video calls, have grown into her eyes.
The patient, when Catherine gets there, is writing in a journal—they have moved him to a separate room in the dining hall.
She wants to be more careful this time, after what happened with the first boy. She approaches this man quietly.
“Do you know,” she asks him, “how long you’ve been asleep?”
The man does not answer right away. He looks into the distance, the way one might if looking out over a vast remembered space. The other boy did that, too, Catherine remembers, as if the world inside his head were more arresting than the one outside of it.
A sudden burst of suspicion comes into the man’s face.
“You can’t keep me here,” he says. “You can’t keep me.”
“It’s normal to feel disoriented,” says Catherine through her mask.
Often, the comatose have the feeling afterward that they have been unconscious for only a short time, a few hours, maybe, or a single night. It can be traumatic to learn how much time has passed.
Catherine notes several unusual symptoms in the man, not present in the other boy: a tendency for palilaic speech, the repetition of certain words and phrases. And also the shouting, megaphonia, as the textbooks would call it. The patient seems unaware of both symptoms, as if his perception of the world is out of scale with ours.
“I’m not answering any more questions,” says the man. He does not speak for the rest of the day, but he goes on with his writing late into the night.
Only later that evening does Catherine discover one more eccentric symptom, familiar only from case studies she read in medical schooclass="underline" the pages of the man’s notebook are filled with miniature writing, the letters so small that they are legible only with a magnifying glass.
From what she can read when the man briefly dozes off, his writings are marked by delusion and confusion, and in particular, a conviction that he has been asleep for much longer than five weeks.
47.
Six A.M.: a barking of dogs in the yard, the clink of the chain on the back door.
Three floors up, alone in the house, Sara goes stiff in her bed, as if whoever is out there might sense the small movements of a twelve-year-old girl through the walls. She is sleeping again in one of her mother’s sweaters.
Now the crunch of footsteps in the dirt. Now a rattling of the side door.
The dogs go on barking and barking—she does not even know most of their names, each one rescued by Libby, hungry, from the street, but thank God for their loyalty, thank God for their noise.
Now the scrape of metal on wood. Something is being dragged across the loose boards of the back porch.
She wishes for her sister like a prayer. And in the darkness of the bedroom, still shadowed with the dolls they once imagined had the power to talk, she almost believes it: that some similar magic might call Libby back from wherever she sleeps.
She tiptoes to the window. Her hands shake as she pulls back the corner of the curtain.
The kittens are agitated, too, the littlest one pacing and pacing the floor, the others waiting deep under Sara’s bed.
When she peeks out through the boards on the bedroom window, what she sees in the early morning dark is a man standing on a trash can. It’s not the neighbor, this time. It’s someone else, this man who is right now reaching up toward the second-floor window.
He calls out to the dogs to be quiet—and this is when she recognizes him, his voice.
He arrives like a stranger and a thief, but here he is: her father.
At first, it’s a relief. Of course it is. Of course. Here is her father, sitting at the kitchen table. Here he is: alive and awake.
He keeps saying her name. “Thank God,” he says. “Thank God.” She does not remember a look like that showing up on his face before, a relief that seems somehow explosive.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says. He is a little out of breath.
His head has been shaved clean. His beard is missing.
He does not say much at first, as if there is not much to say, as if, after five weeks, he simply woke up and walked home.
“I don’t know what happened to my key,” he says. “Do you know what happened to my key?”
His skin is very pale, and he is squinting through a pair of borrowed glasses. He looks even skinnier than usual in a loose green T-shirt she has never seen before. But it’s him. It’s him. Those are his arms resting on the kitchen table, and those are his tattoos, the intricate wolf with the yellow eyes and the blocky black spider on his elbow, and her mother’s name fading gray on his forearm beside the birth dates of both of his girls. This cataloguing of his body feels necessary because there is something about him—there is something about him that is different.
“Do you know what happened to my key?” he says again.
His fingernails have grown long like a woman’s but ragged, the thumbnail so long that it is starting to curl.
“What happened to your hair?” Sara asks. “What happened to your beard?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
His skin is so pale, and that bare chin—she tries at once to look and not look, as if a section of his face has been removed. A phantom impulse rises in her: to point it out to her sister.
“You’re okay,” he says. “Right?”
“Are you?” she says.
By now, the sun is coming up. There is a quiet comfort in that milky light, the way it streams through the cracks in the boards so like the way it would on a more ordinary morning.
“Where’s your sister?” he asks. He glances toward the stairs.
She cannot look at his face while she tells him, so she looks out the window instead, toward the dogs. Every word of the story must be pushed, one by one, over the hard knot in her throat.
Her father seems confused by what he hears.
“You already told me that,” he says. “Didn’t you? You already told me she got sick.”
“What do you mean?” she says, her eyes going blurry.
“We talked about her, earlier,” he says.
She is afraid to say no, but he can see the truth on her face. It is hard to know what to say.
“Never mind,” he says, rubbing the bald ridges of his head. He has a mole up there she has never seen. “Never mind.”
She has the urge to replace the confusion that follows with a nice, clear idea: “If you got better,” she says, “then she’ll probably be okay, too, right?”
Her father stays silent. He looks like a man struggling to make mathematical calculations in his head.
She brings him a soda, the cool reassuring pop of the tab beneath her fingers. She brings him the nail clippers, too, leaves them on the table beside him. There is a certain confusion in the room about who is the caretaker and who the one in need of care.