A year after the lifting of the cordon sanitaire, Nathaniel leaves his house for the last time.
He is brief in the final email he sends to his daughter—they are going to seek some kind of treatment for Henry, experimental, he says, but promising. The unproven, he says, should not be confused with the impossible.
He checks Henry out of the nursing home. They drive to the airport. They fly from Los Angeles to Mexico City, and then on to a smaller town farther south, where an anesthesiologist has promised that he can induce with drugs the same dream sleep that the Santa Lora Virus did.
A needle is inserted into Henry’s veins. And then a second one is inserted into Nathaniel’s. He holds Henry’s hand as it happens. It takes less than a minute for the sleep to overcome them both.
And this is where they lie even now, side by side in a clinic in the mountains of Mexico, tended by nurses, hearts beating, lungs breathing, eyes closed to this world.
And who are we to say that they are not, these two, together somewhere even now, in the woods behind their house, those trees as healthy as they were thirty years ago, or in the old chairs on their back porch, drinking Henry’s favorite Irish whisky, now discontinued. Who are we to say that they are not right now dreaming a better world?
The college reopens. Classes resume. Kegs can once again be seen rolling up the ramps of fraternity houses.
But it will be years before enrollment returns to previous levels. A petition circulates to have the town of Santa Lora renamed.
The virus persists not only in the freezers of Level 4 labs of this country, but also in the form of empty houses in Santa Lora, and lost pets, untended gardens, the station wagons abandoned in the parking lots of the supermarket and the church, eventually towed one by one, also the dead patches of grass, shaded for too many weeks by the medical tents on the lawns. It lingers also in the weariness in some people’s faces, a slowness of gait, and someday, perhaps, a sunken fishing boat will emerge in the middle of the lake, whenever that water finally dries up completely.
Some dreamed of their youth. Some dreamed of old age. Some dreamed of days that might have been—all the lives they did not live. Or the lives that, in some other world, they did. Many dreamed of lovers, former and continuing. Some dreamed of the dead.
One man reported dreaming again and again of being trapped inside an elevator—he had the feeling that this tedium continued for years. This sort of thing turns out to be common in the dreams, these distortions of time, as if each dream contained its own unique physics.
Past, present, future—a physicist might say that these distinctions are illusions anyway. The human brain is subject to all kinds of misperceptions, and the waking mind not always more attuned to reality than the dreaming one.
Some of the children dreamed exquisitely beautiful worlds, the shadows of which will appear in their drawings for years. And what the infants dreamed we will never know, but perhaps those visions will live secretly in their habits and in their desires, their sense of what is familiar and what should be feared.
Researchers will be studying the virus for years—why some survived it and why some didn’t, and why it receded when it did. But the content of the dreams will be of little interest to science, just as a neurologist has no use for the soul.
Left almost entirely unstudied are the most famous claims—that some dreamers saw visions of the future. Anecdotal evidence suggests that certain dreamed-of events have indeed come to pass: the end of the drought and the deaths of several relatives. A rumor circulates around the elementary school that one of the fathers saw the library fire in his dreams.
These stories bring certain kinds of travelers to the streets of this town, in search of the mystical power of the Santa Lora sleep. Searchers and seekers, they camp out in the woods or in vans by the lake.
And as they wander the streets of Santa Lora, these hopeful travelers might notice, on many nights, a man on a porch swing with a baby resting on his lap, his wife sometimes beside him and sometimes not.
Ben: he will never escape the sensation that what he saw in his dreams—all those good days with Annie—was the future and not the past. Even later, when he understands that it must be true that those days have already come and gone, it does not feel true, the way those who argue that there’s no such thing as free will continue to deliberate carefully over big decisions.
The more time that passes, what begins to seem uncanny to Ben is the fact that all the days ahead are such a darkness, that all of us move through our hours as if blindfolded, never knowing what will happen next. How can he send his daughter out into a world like that?
But even an infant’s brain can predict the rough path of a falling object in flight.
And so, maybe, in a way, Ben can see what’s coming:
His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel afraid.
The sun will warm her face. The earth will ground her body.
And her heart—now thrumming strong and steady, against her father’s chest, as he rocks her to sleep on a porch swing one evening in early summer, at the very start of a life—that heart: it will beat, and it will someday cease to beat.
And so much of this life will remain always beyond her understanding, as obscure as the landscapes of someone else’s dreams.
Dedication
For my daughters,
Hazel and Penelope,
who were both born during
the years I was writing this book,
and who are everywhere
in these pages.
Acknowledgments
I’m very glad to have this chance once again to say thank you to the people who helped make it possible for me to write this book.
For years of friendship and insight—on writing as well as life—thank you: Alena Graedon, Nellie Hermann, Nathan Ihara, Tania James, Susannah Kohn, Dina Nayeri, and Maggie Pouncey. For particularly generous support of this book, I especially want to thank Karen Russell.
For various kinds of support and good times, thank you to Sara Irwin, Heather Sauceda Hannon, Shiloh Beckerly, Kelly Haas, Liz Guando and Dan Guando, Rachel Burgess, and Jack Hostetter and Carrie Loewenthal Massey.
For an endearingly weird non-book-club book club, thank you, Brittany Banta, Jenny Blackman, Hannah Davey, Meena Hart Duerson, Paul Lucas, Devin McKnight, Finn Smith, Pitchaya Sudbanthad (and Nathan Ihara and Casey Walker).
For their wisdom and generosity, thank you, Jim Shepard, Karen Shepard, Dani Shapiro, and Michael Maren.
Thank you again to my teachers, whose insights continue to guide my work as a writer and as a teacher: Aimee Bender, Nathan Englander, Mary Gordon, Sam Lipsyte, Mona Simpson, and Mark Slouka.
Thank you to my wonderful and talented colleagues at the University of Oregon: Daniel Anderson, Lowell Bowditch, Jason Brooks Brown, Marjorie Celona, Geri Doran, Garrett Hongo, and Brian Trapp. Thank you also to all of my students, whose work continually challenges and inspires me. Thank you to Julia Schewanick for smoothing the way.
Thank you to Amelia Duke, who made it possible to leave the side of a newborn baby for a few hours at a time to finish revising this book—and to do so without the slightest bit of worry.