Now is when he opens a message marked urgent: a student in his freshman seminar, Kara Sanders, has died of an unknown illness, possibly contagious, and two other students are exhibiting the same symptoms. More details to follow.
Her name brings no face to his mind. He feels a little guilty for it, but it is early in the year. He doesn’t know them yet. There is something familiar about it, though, the feeling of waste. Things are always happening to these kids: suicides, overdoses, drunk driving. It seems worse than it used to be. Is it worse?
His inbox is filling up with a series of campus-wide alerts about precautions and symptoms. Classes are canceled, one says. Campus is closed until further notice. They tend to overreact to these things, to see a larger pattern where there isn’t one. A shooter on campus last fall turned out to be someone holding a water gun. The smell of gas is almost always just someone boiling water in a dorm kitchen. A freak case of meningitis is often the only one. But okay, he’s not in charge of these things, so he sends his students an email reiterating: today’s class is canceled.
After that, the house is quiet, too quiet, the echoing scuff of his shoes on the wood. A brief disorientation: what to do, now, with the day.
But soon he is standing quietly in line at the bakery, where no one is yet talking about the sickness, and then he’s driving the two miles to the nursing home, with an almond croissant wrapped up on the passenger seat for Henry.
It has a certain grandness to it, this place, Restoration Villa, with its fountains and its porticos, and the way it overlooks the lake. It was once a sanitarium for the wealthy and tubercular, a history that in other circumstances would have appealed to Nathaniel, and to Henry. But a point comes in every visit when Nathaniel begins to read in the small movements of Henry’s face a coded message aimed at him: How could you leave me in this depressing fucking place?
On this morning, nothing here will seem amiss: the metallic slide and click of the patients’ walkers in the hallway, the low laughter of the nurses, the televisions running like ventilators in the other rooms. He will spend the morning reading to Henry from Henry’s favorite sections of The New York Times while Henry sucks on small pieces of the croissant like lozenges. In this way, Nathaniel will come across a small news story in the back pages, a little surprised, to see that this event in Santa Lora, like a pebble, is making traces in distant waters. People love a tragedy when it’s happening far away: an odd sickness has surfaced on a campus in a small California town.
“She was one of my students,” he will say to Henry.
And Henry will turn his head at this news. He will aim an unreadable expression at Nathaniel. His mind is like a school of fish, obscured by dark water. Once in a while, though, something tugs on the line.
That night, Nathaniel’s daughter will call from San Francisco. He will let the call go to voicemail. “It’s me, Dad. I saw the news and just wanted to make sure you’re okay.” He will send her an emaiclass="underline" “Yes, all fine here. Love, Dad.”
8.
Rebecca: still sleeping, five days deep, one arm strung with an IV of saline.
If her eyes were to blink open on this particular day, she would find a heart monitor beside her and four white walls, and two baskets of flowers and one Mylar balloon, and the crosses, so many crosses, brought here by her parents, along with the Bible. In the chair beside the bed, she would find her mother, her mouth covered by a paper mask, her eyes tired, forehead wrinkled. She might hear the faint clicking of knitting needles as her mother busies her hands, or else the soft sound of her voice, so weary, on the phone: “No, not yet, they still don’t know what it is.”
But on this day, like the others, Rebecca’s eyes stay shut.
For days, her blood has been leaving her veins in vials, drawn again and again by the nurses—more tests. Doctors come and go with no news, while in other rooms, a few other mothers huddle over their own sleeping children, just watching them breathe, as if they are newborns again with lungs still new to the task. They look so healthy, these kids, their young bodies so sturdy in their beds, pink color in their cheeks, their chests rising and falling, as steady as metronomes.
Five now lie sick.
For now, they are alive, but the future is receding farther from them every second, time itself rushing forward without them.
On this afternoon, a minister arrives in Rebecca’s room. He and her family hold her hands in theirs, while the sound of prayer floats through the room. A laying on of hands.
Does she feel it in a dream, the pressure of their palms on her shoulders, her forehead? Can she sense their hopes in that touch? Who can say? She sleeps right through it all.
No one knows then that something else, too, more ordinary, is also brewing in Rebecca’s body, an invader of a different sort. Only later will anyone discover that a secret cluster of cells is already floating free inside her—too small yet to be called an embryo, but multiplying quickly—as it prepares to anchor in her womb.
9.
In an earlier time, they would have burned everything they owned, but chemicals now do the cleansing work of fire. Bleach: the usual smells of the dorm must have survived somewhere beneath it, all that cologne and the popcorn, the spilled beer and the cigarettes, but Mei can smell only this one thing from her room, the bleach, as clear and harsh as fluorescence.
With the bleach come new rules for everyone on Mei’s floor. No leaving. This is the main thing. Just for now, they say, just to be safe. No visitors, either. And no class.
No work, either. The dean Mei babysits for sounds annoyed on the phone. Who will watch her daughter? Mei is not explaining this right. She is not being clear. This dean makes her nervous, with her big house and her shelves full of books, and it seems somehow embarrassing to mention the sickness. When she tries again, the dean softens: Wait, you live on that floor?
Mei can tell that the college is not sure what to do. An uneasy feeling: to discover that the adults are no more prepared than the kids are.
No one says where the students from the other floors will go. But Mei can see what is happening from her window. They stream from the dorm like ants, the unexposed, ten floors down, burdened by huge loads. All day, the skid of suitcases on pavement. All day, the distant voices drifting in through the screens, a line of buses waiting at the curb. It is what it looks like: an evacuation.
Some of those leaving look up at the tenth floor as they go, but most keep their heads low, their eyes averted, as if what is happening up on that floor is too intimate for the others to see.
No one is using the word quarantine, but Mei looks it up. From the Italian, quaranta giorni, forty days. Forty days: the period that ships were once required to wait before entering the port of Venice—time enough, they hoped, for a contagious disease to burn itself out.
On the first day of the confinement, two men from the dining hall bring a cart full of sandwiches for dinner. They wear white paper masks, these men, their voices muffled like surgeons’, and Mei can tell what they’re thinking, from the way the one holds the elevator while the other sets the boxes on the carpet, as if they have planned this maneuver in advance: how to spend the fewest possible seconds in contaminated air.
Already the floor feels smaller than before, too small. And it seems to Mei that the kids are multiplying. Their hands on the doorknobs. Their fingers flicking the light switches. Their bare feet on the carpet, their spit in the sinks, stray hairs floating everywhere in the air.