Fever Dream

“‘He was mine. Not anymore.’ 

I look at her, confused. 

‘He doesn’t belong to me anymore.’ 

‘Carla, children are forever.’ 

‘No, dear,’ she says. She has long nails, and she points at me, her finger level with my eyes.”

This is how Carla begins her story of David’s illness. Amanda doesn’t understand how a child could no longer belong to a mother. Carla’s insistence, combined with the condescending “dear” and the pointing finger, suggests a sense of naivety on Amanda’s part. Carla treats the other woman almost like a child.

“You see how around here you can’t go for a walk with a stroller. In town you can, but from here to the playground you have to go between the big estates and the shanties along the train tracks.”

This quote illustrates the inequality in the rural community. The estates are juxtaposed against the shanties, suggesting that industrial agriculture benefits some while others remain in poverty. It also illustrates the disconnect between Carla’s life and Amanda’s. Raising her daughter in the city, Amanda hasn’t had the same experiences and faced the same difficulties as Carla.

“The stallion’s eyelids were so swollen you couldn’t see his eyes. His lips, nostrils, and his whole mouth were so puffy he looked like a different animal, a monstrosity.”

Here, Carla describes looking at the poisoned horse. This sense of something deformed and misshapen repeats throughout the novel and illustrates the uncanny atmosphere of the rural farming town. The horse, whole and strong just hours before, is now beyond recognition. Describing the animal as a “monstrosity” Carla suggests it has become something horrible and unnatural. She later describes David similarly, calling him a “monster.”

I knew it with utter clarity, because I had already heard and seen too many things in this town: I had a few hours, or maybe minutes, to find a solution that wasn’t waiting half an hour for some rural doctor who wouldn’t even make it to the clinic in time. I needed someone to save my son’s life, whatever the cost.”

As Carla tells Amanda about David’s sickness, she says that she knew immediately he was dying. Her conviction suggests that the town’s residents are prone to strange and fatal illnesses, and based on the horse’s fate, Carla knew she had to act quickly. The quote also touches on the isolation of the rural town and its lack of resources. Carla doesn’t even consider going to the clinic, knowing there will be no doctor and David won’t receive care quickly enough.

“I call it the ‘rescue distance’: that’s what I’ve named the variable distance separating me from my daughter, and I spend half the day calculating it, though I always risk more than I should.”

This is the first time that Amanda describes the rescue distance. Despite the time she spends calculating the distance between herself and her daughter, Amanda thinks she could always be more careful, risking the distance less. This suggests that Amanda feels she could always do more and be a better mother despite the time she already spends worrying about her daughter’s safety.

“‘She cures headaches, nausea, skin ulcers, and cases of vomiting blood. If you reach her in time, she can stop miscarriages.’

‘Are there that many miscarriages?’”

Here, Carla describes the ailments the woman in the green house cures. Carla’s mention that the woman can stop miscarriages catches Amanda’s attention. This seems like a strange addition to her because she thinks of miscarriages as relatively uncommon. Other symptoms, like skin ulcers and vomiting blood, also suggest that the townspeople often come down with strange illnesses that don’t occur frequently in the city.

“On a kitchen shelf across from me, the seven sons, now grown men, stared out at me the whole time from a large picture frame. Naked from the waist up, red beneath the sun, they were smiling and leaning on their rakes, and behind them was the big soy field, recently cut.”

As Carla sits waiting for David’s treatment to be completed, she looks at this photo of the woman’s sons in front of a soy field. This is the first time soy, the crop primarily responsible for excessive pesticide use in rural Argentina, appears in the novel. The image directly references the cause of David’s sickness, but it remains in the background, out of mind, and not directly blamed or acknowledged as anything more than a piece of the landscape—a danger hiding in plain sight.

“It’s good for Nina to see this, I think. It’s good for her to realize that we aren’t all born the same, and to learn not to be scared. But secretly I think that if the girl were my daughter I wouldn’t know what to do, it would be horrible.”

When Amanda and Nina see a strange girl with congenital disabilities in the home goods store, Amanda thinks that it is a good learning experience for her daughter. This suggests that they don’t see children like the girl in the city. Amanda wonders if she could accept being the girl’s mother, suggesting that she might struggle to love a damaged child, just like Carla struggles to accept David.

“Those are stories my mother tells. Neither you nor I have time for this. We’re looking for worms, something very much like worms, and the exact moment when they touch your body for the first time.”

David repeatedly insists that Carla’s story of his treatment in the green house isn’t true. He tells Amanda he is a “normal boy,” and here he suggests that Carla’s tale is the stuff of rural superstition. He insists that discussing it is a distraction and always steers Amanda back to her own story when she tries to ask him questions.

“My husband takes the can and turns it so I can see the label. It’s a can of peas of a brand I don’t buy, one I would never buy. They’re a bigger, much harder kind of pea than what we eat, coarser and cheaper. A product I would never choose to feed my family with, and that Nina can’t have found in our cupboards. On the table, at that early-morning hour, the can has an alarming presence.”

In this quote, Amanda describes a nightmare she has the night before she decides to leave the country house, cutting their vacation short. The can of peas is something normal and harmless, but it is so out of place that it frightens Amanda. The ominous presence of the can speaks to the novel’s suggestion that danger can lie in the most common places and that something mundane could carry hidden threats.

“My mother always said something bad would happen. My mother was sure that sooner or later something bad would happen, and now I can see it with total clarity, I can feel it coming toward us like a tangible fate, irreversible. Now there’s almost no rescue distance, the rope is so short that I can barely move in the room, I can barely walk away from Nina to go to the closet and grab the last of our things.”

Here, Amanda reflects on a mother’s tendency to always expect the worst. As she packs up to leave, Amanda feels that danger is imminent, even if she isn’t sure why. It is an instinct she inherited from her own mother, and she feels an overpowering urge to protect her daughter. There is also an interesting repetition in the first two sentences, suggesting Amanda’s confused state of mind and the insistence that something terrible is about to happen.

“I’m sitting ten inches away from my daughter, David. There is no rescue distance. 

There must be. Carla was only steps away from me the day the stallion escaped and I almost died.”

This is the moment when Amanda and Nina are poisoned. David presses Amanda for details, but she insists she feels no sense of danger or worry for her daughter’s safety. She believes that distance from her daughter is one of the key indicators of danger, and sitting so close to Nina, she feels like they are both safe. David’s response draws the parallel between Amanda and Carla’s experience and suggests that in finding an answer to Amanda’s failure, he might understand why his own mother couldn’t protect him.

“Are you going to wonder again what it was that got you wet? 

No, David. 

Are you going to smell your hands? 

No. 

You’re not going to do anything? 

No, David, I’m not going to do anything. We’re going to walk and I’m even going to wonder if I’m doing the right thing by leaving.”

Here, Amanda tells David that she won’t think about this moment again as she and Nina begin to feel the effects of the poison. It will become lost among the other benign moments of the day. She won’t look back or understand the danger.

“It happens, Amanda. We’re in the country, there are sown fields all around us. People come down with things all the time, and even if they survive they end up strange. You see them on the street. Once you learn to recognize them you’ll be surprised how many there are.”

Here, Carla directly references agriculture as the cause of the ailments that plague the rural town. She says it offhandedly, suggesting the danger is both common knowledge and an unavoidable fact of life. Agriculture drives the economy of the small town, and the residents accept the risk that comes with it.

“Strange can be quite normal. Strange can just be the phrase ‘That is not important’ as an answer for everything. But if your son never answered you that way before, then the fourth time you ask him why he’s not eating, or if he’s cold, or you send him to bed, and he answers, almost biting off the words as if he were still learning to talk, ‘That is not important,’ I swear to you, Amanda, your legs start to tremble.”

Carla again references the idea that something doesn’t have to be outlandish to be unsettling. Sometimes, that which is most frightening is the thing that is intimately familiar in most ways but slightly changed in others. David looks exactly the same, except for the spots on his skin, but the subtle differences in his behavior make him completely foreign to his mother.

“Some of them do, they learned how to write, but they can’t control their arms anymore, or they can’t control their own heads, or they have such thin skin that if they squeeze the markers too much their fingers end up bleeding.”

Here, David tells Amanda about the people who come to the place he calls the waiting room at the clinic. He shows her their childish drawings, all with names written in the same handwriting. This is another example of a seemingly unimportant detail that indicates something sinister. David explains that many of them cannot write because of the strange ailments that plague the town.

“Why do mothers do that? 

What? 

Try to get out in front of anything that could happen—the rescue distance. 

It’s because sooner or later something terrible will happen.”

This quote illustrates David’s attempt to understand his mother and Amanda’s thoughts. Throughout the novel, a mother’s most important duty is to protect her child. In order to do that, Amanda spends much of her time analyzing the rescue distance, trying to anticipate any danger and look out for Nina. She is correct that something very bad will happen to her daughter, yet her attempts to be prepared are inadequate. This atmosphere of dread and anticipation drives the tension of the plot.

“She was coming from her house carrying two empty plastic buckets, and she asked me if I’d noticed the way the water smelled too. I hesitated, because we had drunk a little as soon as we’d arrived, yes, but everything was new and if it smelled different it was impossible for us to know if that was a problem or how it always was.”

Late in the novel, Amanda reflects back on the first day she met Carla. The woman warned her against drinking the tap water because it smelled off that day. However, Amanda hadn’t noticed anything because she didn’t know how the water usually smelled. This moment indicates both the constant presence of the contamination and Amanda’s disadvantage in protecting her daughter in the country. She doesn’t know how to recognize the threats, let alone avoid them.

“Yes. But the nurse’s son, the children who come to this room, aren’t they kids who’ve been poisoned? How can a mother not realize? 

Not all of them go through poisoning episodes. Some of them were born already poisoned, from something their mothers breathed in the air, or ate or touched.”

Here, Amanda wonders how so many children could have been poisoned in the town without their mother’s knowledge. David’s response reveals the depth to which toxins have permeated the town and mothers’ inability to shelter their children from the dangers. The poison is all around them, and children are at risk from the moment they are conceived before mothers even have a chance to protect them.

“‘Can we go, Mommy?’ she says while she’s shaking me. 

And I am so grateful to her. Her words are like a command, and it’s as if she’s just saved both our lives. I bring a finger to my lips to tell her we have to be quiet.”

As Amanda gets sicker, she loses the ability to care for Nina. Carla takes over the role of mother for both of them, but there is also a role reversal between mother and daughter. Here, Nina protects her mother, speaking to her and giving her the strength to get up and leave the house.

“Please, David. And that’s the last thing I can say, I know it is the last thing, I know it a second before I say it. Everything is silent, finally. A long and tonal silence. Now there are no blades or ceiling fan. Now there is no nurse. Carla is gone. The sheets aren’t here, nor the bed, nor the room. Things are no longer happening. Only my body is here. David?”

Even as everything falls away in Amanda’s final moments, David is still there. She is dying and no longer aware of anything around her. However, she still feels David’s presence and hears his voice, suggesting perhaps that he has been a hallucination the whole time.

“Hanging on the wall behind him, there are two pictures of the man with the same woman, and below are more photos of the man with various horses. A single nail holds them all up. Each picture hangs from the previous one, each tied with the same thin rope.”

When Amanda’s husband visits Omar and Carla’s home, he notices that many things are connected with rope. Omar tells the other man that David has started tying things together, a new development in the boy’s strange behavior. The rope mimics the metaphor of the rescue distance, suggesting that it could be an attempt for the child to rebuild the lost connection with his mother.

“I see through my husband, I see those other eyes in yours. The seat belt on, legs crossed on the seat. A hand reaching slightly toward Nina’s stuffed mole, covertly, the dirty fingers resting on the stuffed legs as if trying to restrain them.”

As Amanda’s husband goes to leave Omar’s house, he finds that David has climbed into the back seat of his car. He sits cross-legged and bucked in, just like Nina did, and holds onto her stuffed toy. This implies that a portion of Nina’s spirit migrated to David’s body during her treatment in the green house.