50.
As the newspapers will later report, arson is suspected. Matches are found in the basement, the torn pages of books used for kindling. The setter of the fire is never found.
But many of the sleepers survive. Most are carried out in their sleep.
The big news, though, is this: fourteen of them wake up and walk out.
It’s amazing, everyone agrees, miraculous, even. There is a great appetite for the miraculous. Among these survivors is a husband and wife, the Romeo and Juliet of Santa Lora, as several news outlets soon take to calling them in place of their real names: Ben and Annie.
Another survivor is an eleven-year-old girl, who, as the media widely reports, was carried out by her own father, himself only recently recovered, who rushed to the building when he saw the smoke, calling her name until he found her: Libby.
The media pays less attention to the sleepers who do not survive. There are nine of them. The cause of death is smoke inhalation, the gradual dissipation of oxygen from the blood, which, once, was thought to cause unusually vivid dreams.
Among these dead are two nurses, a CDC specialist in infectious disease, and the dean of the College of the Arts and Sciences.
Also on the list is a Santa Lora College freshman from San Diego: Mei Liu, age eighteen.
Her body is found too late by firefighters in a far corner of the smoky reading room of the library, still prone in her cot, curled beneath a blanket, saline still draining into the main vein of her swiftly whitening arm. She slept right through it, her parents are assured. She passed away peacefully, they say, in her sleep.
In the days after the fire, one story is circulated more than any other—people love when a crisis brings out the goodness in others: as smoke filled the library, one student, a college freshman and heir to the Baker & Baker pharmaceutical family, Matthew Baker, rushed inside and saved a baby from the fire. The story is shared again and again, how he grabbed the very youngest of the sick, the one who had the most life left: an infant, nine weeks old, wrapped in blankets, who went on sleeping all the while.
This story stands above the rest, this hero of Santa Lora, as proof of what human beings are capable of—who among us does not love a simple song?
51.
They report only minor residual symptoms, Ben and Annie. A mild dizziness, in her case. A slight impairment of his peripheral vision. They notice nothing else at first.
A year earlier, or two years, or any number of years before this one, their reunion would have felt different, like a wild piece of luck, miraculous, some might say, like a rising from the dead.
But in this particular year of their lives, they do not feel lucky. They feel almost no gratitude, as they hold tight to one another’s hands or lean into the warmth of one another’s arms. Each of them is entirely preoccupied with someone else. He is a father. She is a mother. Their child is sick.
The college dining hall is where the youngest surviving sick are moved after the fire. Here is where—after much waiting and calling and calling again, and much signing of paperwork—Ben and Annie find their baby.
They see her lying in a clear plastic bassinet. She is swaddled in unfamiliar blankets, her little mind locked in that deep, unreachable sleep.
A feeding tube is taped into her tiny nostril.
“She’s so much bigger than the last time I saw her,” says Annie, her eyes continuously welling with tears.
Already, she is holding her up in her arms, the tubes dangling behind her. Even in sleep, the baby resettles her head on her shoulder, as if the memory of her mother resides entirely in the muscles of her neck.
Masks are suggested, and gloves. But it would be impossible, with gloves on, to wipe the crust from their daughter’s eyes, or to rub Vaseline on her dried and cracking lips. There is a tremendous need to touch her skin.
She is two weeks older than the last time Ben saw her. Just the continued fact of her body, just her existence, is proof of the work of other people, those nurses, now swishing through the room in protective suits, how they have cared for her every day since he last saw her, and the college student they will never meet who rescued her from the fire.
She could have died—this is the knowledge that lights every moment with her now. The things that could have happened but did not are just as crucial to a life as all the things that do.
A few other mothers and fathers lean over some of the other children, or they sit, like Ben and Annie, in plastic chairs beside their cots. But most of the children lie here alone save for the nurses—and not enough of them—who turn them and wash them and fill the feeding tubes and change the diapers.
One of the last dreams Ben dreams before waking from the sickness goes like this: He and Annie are in a boat, a canoe. The sun is shining on her back, which is bare except for the strings of her green bikini. They are floating in some kind of bay. He does not know where. They paddle out to a small island on which grows a single pine tree. They leave the canoe and the paddles on the small beach and walk up to the tree, where they drink the beers they have packed in a cooler and watch the other boats drift by in the sun. There is an intense feeling of happiness, as the light glitters on the water, and something else, too: possibility. A lightness.
But suddenly someone is shouting at them from a passing boat.
“Hey,” they say, “is this your canoe?”
And there it is, their canoe, floating empty in the middle of the water. The tide must have come in, they realize as they swim out to catch the boat and collect the drifting paddles. Like all the other dreams, there is something about this one that does not feel like a dream at all. It feels—how else can he put it—real. Here is that feeling again: that what he is seeing is the future.
In those first few days after waking, the dream hangs over Ben, a kind of background noise to his days in this converted dining hall.
He wants to tell Annie about it.
But it seems suddenly too intimate to mention, and too ridiculous, too. He keeps quiet. The act of matching words to the experience saps his belief.
Instead, he can only say this: “Did you have any weird dreams?” he asks her.
She does not look up from the baby.
“No,” she says. “I didn’t dream at all.”
She feels so far away these days, like a stranger sitting across from him on a train.
On the second day, an older baby nearby begins to whimper in his sleep. His face is wincing. His diaper, Annie soon discovers, has leaked. Ben calls for a nurse. After a few minutes of waiting, the boy moaning, Annie changes it herself. There are certain circumstances under which the changing of a diaper is a sacred act.
One day a small boy in a bed nearby opens his eyes. The movement of those eyelids, the white around his eyes, sends hope surging through the whole place.
“I want my mama,” he says. He is calm for a moment, as if the request will be granted. “I want my mama.”
But when she does not appear right away, he begins to cry.
Ben tries to comfort him, but he will not be comforted.
Finally, the mother is located and brought to his bed.
“He asked for me?” she says when he jumps into her arms. “With words?”