They just want to monitor him for a while, they say, the doctors.
“That’s why they sent us here,” one of them says.
“I’m not going to the hospital,” he says.
“It’s a matter of public safety, sir,” says the one holding the door.
“It’s not safe for you or your daughter,” says the taller one.
“I’m not going to be some guinea pig,” says her father.
And this is how the conversation ends: he closes the door and locks it. Then he goes back upstairs to the computer.
It is a surprise when the police really do leave, that after all that, words are enough to chase them away. Before they get into their car, she watches them pull their green gloves off, one glove at a time, dropping them into a trash bag.
There is a feeling that they will be back, or that someone else will. It’s a feeling of a leak plugged only temporarily.
That night, a sound familiar but hard to place drifts up from the kitchen after midnight. A soft sandpaper scrape. And then again: scrape, scrape, scrape. She knows, from the occasional cough, that it’s her father down there. She is not sure he should be left alone.
The smell confirms it at the same moment as the sight: her father at the kitchen table, a lit match burning between his fingers.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
On the table beside him is a scattering of burnt-out matches, a whole pack from the basement, used up in a night—it isn’t like him to waste.
“This thing did something to my brain,” he says.
He watches the flame for a while and then gently shakes it out. He drops it in the pile with the others.
“What are you doing?” she asks again.
He takes a sip of beer. He pulls a fresh match from the box and begins again, the slow striking of the match to the box, too slow, at first, to make the match light. But he keeps at it, a determined, careful scrape.
The helicopters are still thumping outside in the dark, but she knows from the news that the reporters are wrong about which house is his—they think that the man who woke from the Santa Lora sickness lives in an old white house a few blocks away, a place abandoned for years, since before Sara was born, wildflowers growing up through the planks of the porch. Maybe it’s the boarded-up windows that make them confuse that house for theirs, that lead the helicopters to hover over that other roof and not theirs. But after she has watched the footage all day, that other house, a stranger’s house, a dead man’s house maybe, begins to take on a feeling of familiarity for her, the way, in a dream, a place you have never been can somehow stand in for home.
Finally, the match blooms in his hand. He lets it burn for a few seconds. Then he shakes it out again.
“I had these dreams,” he says. “While I was sick. Dreams that were like no dreams I’ve ever had before.”
He takes another drink of beer. It is not his first, she can see. Two other cans are sitting on the counter.
“What were they about?” she says.
“What do you mean?” he says, as if she is the one who brought it up. This is the way he has been since he got home, his mind always running on some second, unknown track.
“The dreams,” she says. “What did you dream about?”
He rubs his bald head. His fingers move slowly, as if tracing an alien terrain.
“I need to ask you something,” he says. He looks right at her. A layer of stubble has grown where his beard used to be. “Was there a fire while I was gone?” he says. “Was there a fire at the college library?”
“There was one in the woods,” she says, and it seems amazing that he could know about that somehow, though he slept through the whole thing. “On the night you got sick.”
But he shakes his head in frustration as if he has been trying to get this point across to her for hours.
“No, no,” he says. “I’m not talking about a brush fire. I mean in the building. Was there a fire in the library? On the second floor,” he says. He is closing his eyes as if remembering. “Or maybe the third?”
“I don’t think so,” she says.
“I had this dream,” he says. “That there was a fire at the library, and somehow, the fire—it woke up all the sick.” He takes a sip of his beer. He swallows hard. “The fire,” he says, “it worked like some kind of cure.”
After that, he goes quiet again. He goes back to his matches, lighting them one by one. Every once in a while, a look comes into his face that she has not seen before—spooked but satisfied, as if to say, Aha, there it is, that’s it.
“I’ve been having this strange feeling,” he says. “Ever since I woke up, I’ve been having this feeling that things are happening out of order.”
He scrapes another match. It doesn’t light. He tries again.
“Like just now,” he says. “When you came into the kitchen, I had the sensation that you were standing beside me, but that was before you walked in.”
It’s like everything’s out of order, he says, like there’s something wrong with the sequence, as if the future were coming before the past.
She understands already how powerful his imagination is. After trauma, she’s heard, people sometimes have hallucinations.
He picks up another match.
“Sometimes,” he says, “I see the flame before I strike the match.”
48.
The library: on the hundreds of metal bookshelves, now shoved flush against the wood paneling and the floor-to-ceiling windows, the ten thousand volumes now gathering dust in low light contain all the usual products of human thought.
In the Classics section, a visitor could read about the oracles of ancient Greece and Rome, how the people of those eras believed that dreams could sometimes reveal the future.
One floor down, in the Psychology section, one might eventually discover that Carl Jung, at a certain point in his life, became convinced that he had dreamed of his wife many years before he met her.
On another part of that same floor, in Philosophy, one could entertain the theory that if you could truly understand the complexity of reality, you could also accurately predict the future, since every moment of the future is set in motion by the events of the past—the whole system simply too complex for the human mind to model.
Upstairs, in Physics, one could find journal articles theorizing that the concepts of past, present, and future are artificial constructs, that in fact all three may exist at once, simultaneously, in different dimensions.
In Linguistics, one would find a similar intuition reflected in the grammar of certain languages. In Mandarin, for example, verbs operate entirely in the present tense. There is no special tense for the past or the future.
Time, said Saint Augustine, exists only in the mind.
But no one is reading any of the books in this library. At least one slim hardcover is right now being used to stabilize a wobbly army cot, where a small boy lies sleeping alongside a hundred other sick in the cavernous main reading room.
And even if one were to read every book in these stacks, certain mysteries would persist.
Think of William James, one floor down, back in Philosophy, who once compared any attempt to study human consciousness to turning on a lamp in order to better examine the dark.
49.
Certain real events are familiar only from the horrors of our dreams. And so, when smoke begins to pour into the main reading room of the library, drifting out over the bodies of a hundred sleeping sick, the same word rushes into the minds of more than one of the nurses: nightmare.
There will be much discussion later about the silence of the smoke alarms, offline for reasons no one can explain—whether tampered with, or simply unplugged to accommodate the heart monitors and the EEG machines.