The patient is asleep on her back, one arm resting on her stomach. The room is dim. The blinds are drawn. Catherine knows from the chart that her name is Rebecca. She has been asleep for sixty hours.
The girl’s mother—she must be the mother—is sitting beside the bed, her eyes bloodshot, overwide. Mothers: talking to the mothers is the worst part of her job.
“Can I open these?” Catherine asks, but she does not wait for an answer. She pulls the cord, and sunlight fills the room.
This mother seems relieved to have heard that this affliction might be psychological, as if the failings of the mind are any less destructive than those of the body.
“You mean she might not have a real sickness?” says the mother.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” says Catherine.
The girl’s blood pressure, the internists have told her, is normal. Her pulse, too. It was the same with the first girl, they say, the one who died. No symptoms beyond the deep sleep. This girl looks as if the slightest noise might wake her, or the faintest feather of a touch.
Catherine has seen patients rendered similarly lifeless by catatonic depression or by sudden traumatic news. When one’s life seems broken beyond repair, there remains one last move: a person can at least shut her eyes.
Catherine has forgotten this girl’s name, but it feels too late to ask. “Does she have any history of anxiety?” she asks. “Or depression?”
The mother shakes her head hard. But the parents, Catherine has learned, never know what is really going on.
A Bible has been pressed into the crook of the girl’s left arm, as if its messages can be transmitted to the soul through the skin.
A tiny sound comes from the girl’s mouth.
The mother jumps up. “Rebecca?” she says.
The girl’s eyelids begin to flutter.
In a healthy human being, Catherine knows, this motion of the eyes beneath the lids would indicate REM sleep, the state most conducive to dreaming. But Catherine cannot say for sure without tests what is happening inside this girl’s brain.
She orders an MRI. She will be back in two days, she says.
Catherine’s daughter is asleep by the time she gets back to Los Angeles, the babysitter reading on the couch. But that night, like every night for the past month, her daughter wakes screaming after midnight. Nightmares are common at her age.
It takes a while to calm her.
“Mama,” she whispers into Catherine’s ear, her cheeks lit by a night-light shaped like the moon. “I think there’s something wrong with my eyes.”
“What do you mean?” she says.
Her three-year-old arms are wrapped tight around Catherine’s neck.
“When I close my eyes,” says her daughter, “I see something scary.”
“Those are dreams,” says Catherine. “Like we talked about.”
What a crazy thing to do, her own mother had said: to have a baby on her own—and on purpose. Every one of her days hums with the possibility that she might be doing it wrong.
But also there is this: the secret pleasure in these minutes right here, that warm little body pressed into her chest, her hot breath on her neck, and the simplicity of the cure—a talk and a hug in the dark.
“This time,” says her daughter, “I dreamed there were snakes coming out of my skin.”
“Wow,” says Catherine. “That would scare me, too.”
One of her patients used to see that same image, but while she was awake. On an MRI, the dreaming brain looks almost identical to the brain of a schizophrenic.
It strikes her again, how many of a child’s fears are just rational responses to the facts of everyday experience.
Two songs and a back rub—and then her daughter is asleep again.
Catherine is back in her own bed when she hears a new message ping on her phone: a third girl from the same dorm floor has lost consciousness in Santa Lora.
7.
At sunrise, a professor of biology takes a walk in the woods of Santa Lora.
His white hair is cut close to his head. He wears a ten-year-old jacket. Hiking boots. Nathaniel—that’s his name.
No dog. No phone. Just a thermos full of coffee and an empty plastic bag.
The sky is clear. The air is cool. The woods are ringing with birdsong: blue jays and Steller’s jays and chickadees.
At a certain bend in the trail, a log has been carved into a bench. Here is where, a few hours from now, Nathaniel will bring his freshman biology seminar, to point out certain features and phenomena of trees: the intricate root structures of pines, how the bark beetle has worked with the drought to kill so many here, and then, the highlight, the zombie tree.
He calls it that for the kids, this ancient stump. No trunk, no branches, no leaves, just a hollowed-out stump, and yet, somehow, this stump lives on. The bursts of green in the grain of its wood—chlorophyll—are proof of ongoing life, as if this remnant of a tree is at once alive and also dead. “How can that be?” the kids will want to know, or the bright ones will, the few really interested ones. He has been bringing his classes here for years. It comes as a surprise to most of them, that trees have certain ways of communicating with one another, that they send chemical messages through the air, and that they sometimes help their neighboring trees survive. “This stump’s relatives are keeping it alive,” he will say. “They’re delivering nutrients to its roots.”
On this day, Nathaniel also comes across a familiar scattering of dark glass in this spot. Beer bottles. This is what he has brought the plastic bag for.
He doesn’t blame the kids for the drinking. Or for wanting to do it out here in these woods—among the ponderosas and the manzanitas, the white firs and the cedars, instead of sitting around on the particleboard furniture of their dorm rooms. He gets it: the mountains, the stars. There is a privacy in wilderness. But the trash—come on, these kids are old enough to pick up their own trash.
He is bending down to pick the glass from the dirt when he notices someone lying a few feet off the trail. A boy in an army jacket, dark jeans, tennis shoes, is nestled, facedown, in dried leaves.
“Hey,” says Nathaniel. “Hey, kid.”
He crouches down. He shakes the boy’s shoulder. The smell of alcohol is floating off the boy’s skin, accompanied by the loud snores of drunken sleep. He zips up the kid’s jacket. He turns the kid’s head to the side—at least he won’t choke if he vomits in his sleep.
At home, he calls the police: “There’s a kid passed out drunk in the woods,” he says. He tells the operator exactly where to find the boy. “Probably just needs to sleep it off, but thought you guys should know.”
A bowl of oatmeal. A glass of orange juice. The rattle of pills against plastic: high blood pressure. It might be stress-related—that’s what Nathaniel’s daughter thinks. Grief, she says over the phone from San Francisco, is a kind of stress. So is age, he argues. Decay comes eventually for every living thing.
He opens a small notebook. Someone else might call it a journal, but not Nathaniel. It is slim and small in his hands, a line-a-day diary, the kind that stretches five years: one line reserved for each day. What is the point of that? Henry used to say to him. What can you say in one sentence? But it is a comfort to do it, a mysterious distillation, like gleaning salt from the sea, like the perfection of the simplest chemical equation. He writes quickly, without too much thought—that’s the point, the habit, the doing: “Went to see Henry yesterday. His cough seems better.”
A shower, a sports coat, a pair of dark socks.
His car keys are rattling in his hand and his lecture notes packed in his bag when he finally stops to look at his email.