It is around this time that Ben’s dreams begin. They come quickly when they do. No matter how brief his sleep, the dreams rush in immediately, as if his consciousness can hardly keep them away. And always—always—at the center of these dreams, like a song that lives for days in his head, is Annie. In the dreams, she comes back to him in the smallest possible ways, in the form of things he did not know he knew: the click of her ChapStick rolling across the counter, the crisp scent of her practical soap, the way she lets her nails grow until they break, so that they’re always a little ragged and each one a different length. Sometimes, he dreams of what she sounds like moving through the rooms of the house, the flush of the toilet through the wall, the small splash of her spit landing in the sink, or her humming interrupted by the stubbing of her toe, once again, on the same loose floorboard she always trips on, that small familiar chirp: “Shit.”
These dreams always end the same way: with the wailing of the baby for milk.
Walking soothes the baby. And it soothes Ben, too, and what else is there to do? So they walk: two, three, four times a day.
This is a pine tree, he says as they drift once again down their street, and here is a pinecone. This is our shadow, yours and mine, long on the sidewalk because the sun is low in the sky at this time of year. And what we call it, this season, is fall.
Those people on that porch, he says, his eyes going watery, that woman looking weary and saying, “No, no, we have to stay inside again today”—we call her a mother. And that boy in the doorway, we call him her son.
Here is a sidewalk, he says. Here is a street. Here a spider web. A birdhouse. A car.
But not everything is so easy to name.
What are the right words for this: someone in a blue plastic suit who is crawling around in the middle of the street.
Ben and the baby are half a block away when he notices. The person’s hands are pulling at the rubber of his hood, yanking at the mask, the movements urgent but inefficient. Panic is a feeling you can recognize from a hundred feet away. Finally, those hands succeed in lifting that hood up and off the head. A face is revealed: a young man with sweaty black hair.
He is saying something, this man, sounds without meaning, an urgent mumbling. Something is wrong with his eyes—a blankness.
Ben steps back. His arms encircle the baby on his chest, as if the muscles of his wrists are separate from him, as if they know what to do before his mind can decide.
“Are you okay?” Ben calls out to the man.
But the man does not answer, this man in the blue plastic suit, and he does not turn his head. Instead, he begins to climb onto the hood of a parked station wagon. His feet keep slipping because of the booties he is wearing over his shoes.
A few neighbors now appear at their windows.
“Are you okay?” Ben calls out again.
But it is obvious what this is: the man is asleep, a walking dream. What is not clear is where he came from or who he is—a paramedic, maybe, left behind by his crew?
For a moment, his mumbling turns clearer, swiftly rising to a shout: “I can’t swim,” he says to no one. “Help me. Please. I can’t swim.”
A few people have collected on their porches now, watching, but they stay where they are: the unkindness of fear.
Ben is sure he would do something to help if he didn’t have the baby, her warm head resting against his chest. The baby makes everything simple. All he can do is get her away from this man. All he can do is get her home.
He calls 911 on the way. An ambulance will come, he is told. But it takes a long time. Ben can hear the man shouting for more than an hour, his voice drifting farther away, as Ben fastens and unfastens one diaper and then another and as he opens another package of formula.
All this time, while the man is shouting on another street, Ben’s baby girl stares at Ben’s face, as if she understands everything better than he does, and her whole growing up will be a slow coming-to. “Someone will help him,” he says to her, as if she has asked or accused. “Someone will help.”
If Ben were to turn on his television at that moment, he would discover that one of the news helicopters has begun to trail the man in the blue suit, so that millions of people are watching live as he zigzags down the street, disappearing at one point into the woods and then reemerging, barefoot, a few minutes later.
Ben is not one of the millions who see what happens next: how the man walks right into the path of a speeding Humvee.
But six blocks away, Ben hears the sound—a screeching of brakes, a breaking of glass—not knowing, or at least having no proof, that the man in the blue suit, this volunteer from Tennessee, as the world will soon learn, has been crushed beneath those oversized wheels.
The dreams: the more often they come, the stranger they are. Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation. Maybe it’s the isolation. Maybe something is happening to his mind. Whatever it is, these are not normal dreams. They contain, somehow, the heft of lived life. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a sensation that these experiences are real, as real as anything in his waking life.
At first, he dreams of the past: he and Annie in their old neighborhood in New York, he and Annie at a concert, cold beers in their hands, the feel of her waist in the dark as they sway to the music, real days unspooling in her dorm room, real afternoons in the park.
But he does not dream of that trip they took to Italy. He does not dream of their wedding. He never dreams of their favorite places: Venice, Mexico, the hammock in Maine. He dreams of her body—of course, of course. But he never dreams of her in that green dress he likes, or with glossed lips, or with her hair blown shiny and straight. Instead, he dreams of her in sweatpants. He dreams of her in smudged glasses. He dreams of her drinking a beer in her pajamas on their old vinyl couch in Brooklyn, the shape of her breasts just visible through that old T-shirt as she laughs. He dreams of her watching a documentary on his laptop. He dreams of those ice cream sandwiches she once made for a road trip—who makes ice cream sandwiches for the car?—the way they dripped and crumbled everywhere, the steering wheel sticky for weeks.
Sometimes he dreams of old arguments or small annoyances, how she never does the dishes and never takes out the trash, how she is never the one to think to buy the toilet paper, and how she was afraid to let them use the wobbly ceiling fan on the hottest night of the year. But there is a certain pleasure even in these dreams, the pleasure of problems that can be solved in the morning—with only a screwdriver and a stepladder, a quick trip to the drugstore.
And he never dreams, anymore, that Annie has left him for her advisor. In these new dreams, she is always at his side, sturdy and constant and calm.
He cannot always tell which are the real memories and which are not. Like those ice cream sandwiches, now that he thinks of it. “Did we really do that?” he asks the baby as he bathes her one morning in the kitchen sink, her eyes big and blank like a fish’s. He can no longer remember where they were going with those ice cream sandwiches or whose car it was or how old they were then. Or that wedding in the middle of the woods—was that real? “Whose wedding was that?” Maybe that wedding was only a dream.
But this is when a certain strange sensation begins to come over him—the feeling that these dreams are somehow glimpses of days yet to come.
He dismisses it, of course. Of course. It’s a crazy idea, like some kind of hallucination, he figures. An idea from the old stories he assigns to his students, where angels carry messages and witches speak in riddles, where kings and princes are visited by ghosts in their dreams.
Something is happening to his memory. For example, if his mind were working properly, would he have forgotten to clear the silverware from the kitchen sink before using the sink as a bathtub for the baby?
The serrated edge of a knife comes suddenly bobbing up in the soapy water near the baby’s thigh. His horror comes in the shape of Annie’s voice in his head: Ben, he hears her say, what the hell?
And this, too, didn’t this, or something like it, happen once before, in a dream?
A symptom of delusion, he recalls, is the inability to distinguish between reality and dream.
One afternoon, Ben discovers what everyone else in town already knows: the two gas stations have run out of gas. More is coming, the soldiers keep saying, but they won’t let the gas trucks through.
“Think about it,” says the guy in front of Ben in line at the gas station, as Grace begins to cry in her seat. “Why would they want us to have gas in our cars? This way, we stay put, like sheep in a pen.”
That Ben, he dreams of a beautiful sunny morning. They sleep late, he and Annie, luxuriously late. She goes out for chocolate croissants and strawberries. They spend the morning in bed, reading the paper and drinking coffee, the strap of her camisole sliding down her shoulder. What should we do today? she asks, stretching slowly, and the question comes with a feeling that they could do anything, anything at all. Time: that’s what the dream is really about. There is so much time in this dream, endless hours to spend however they like. An intense feeling of leisure.
How painful it is when the dream slips away, the bed empty beside him, but in the wake of its leaving comes that odd feeling again, that this exact morning lies somewhere up ahead.
It takes a moment to remember what is missing from that dream: the baby.
Now he wants to check on her. He is suddenly desperate to see the baby.
When he gets to the crib, he sees right away that something is wrong. Her blanket—it has come undone. Her face is completely covered. What relief it is when he sees that she’s fine under there, a little hot, maybe, but fine, and still asleep. But could she have suffocated? What if he hadn’t woken up?
An outlandish idea is beginning to bubble in his mind. Or is it only a wish? That these dreams really are a sort of travel, a kind of vision of a time yet to come.
It isn’t like him to think this way. He would never say it out loud, but he is different than he used to be, different from who he was before the baby. He believes in more—or is it less? It is so much harder to say, these days, what is true and what is not true. After all, the most unbelievable thing has already occurred—what could be more uncanny than an infant? Hadn’t it required a certain magical thinking to believe that what was swelling beneath Annie’s skin all those months really was a human being? And wasn’t she a little otherworldly when she came? A criatura. That’s the word that came to him, the Spanish word for a newborn, according to their book. A creature. She was born with a silky layer of hair all over her body. Fur, said Annie in delight. Lanugo, the doctor called it. Our baby has fur, she liked to say, as if Grace really had traveled from some supernatural realm. She knew exactly how to breathe without ever having done it. She knew exactly how to grasp a human finger. And isn’t it true that even now, whenever Ben wakes in the night, worried about the baby in her crib, she answers right away—as if by some midnight telepathy—with a small and reassuring cry? The point is this: after all that, who is he to say what is possible and what is not?
Morning: there’s a sudden dripping sound, and he cannot at first make sense of what he sees—coffee streaming across the kitchen counter and down the linoleum. He has turned on the coffeemaker while the carafe is still in the sink.
As he warms another bottle for the baby, his most recent dream still clinging to him, he begins to believe that maybe—he would never say it out loud, but maybe, maybe, like collective unconscious, like ESP, maybe—he really is seeing the future in his dreams.