Fever Dream

The novel opens with a conversation between two people in an emergency care clinic. Amanda, a woman visiting from Buenos Aires, lies in the bed. She cannot see, but she feels the texture of her sheets, and she hears a boy, David, speaking into her ear. David is talking about something that he compares to “worms, all over [the body]” (1), and he tells Amanda that it is important for her to discover exactly when the worms came into being. Amanda is unwell and confused, but David refocuses her attention to their conversation.

He asks her to describe the yard outside her rental house, and Amanda tells him she can see his mother, Carla, in the yard. She tells David that she met Carla after arriving at their vacation home and befriended the woman. In Amanda’s memory, Carla wears a distinctive gold bikini and walks toward Amanda’s car. David keeps prodding her with his questions, but Amanda has trouble answering. She claims to be “stuck” and wonders if it is a side effect of the medicine the nurses have given her. She asks David if she will die soon, but the boy only redirects her attention back to the story, urging her to remember every detail.

Amanda describes Carla sitting in her car, crying. Carla wants to tell Amanda something, but she worries that it will make the other woman change her opinion of her. She worries that Amanda will no longer want David to play with her daughter, Nina. Amanda reassures her, and Carla begins. She tells Amanda that when David was born, she was terrified he would be born without all his fingers and toes; she couldn’t believe it when he came out whole. Now, however, she claims that something far more terrible than a missing finger is wrong with her son.

When David was a baby, Carla’s husband, Omar, bred racehorses. He borrowed a top-notch stallion to sire his foals and observed the horse to keep track of his progress with the mares. When Omar went out, Carla was supposed to watch the stallion. She didn’t take the job as seriously as her husband, just glancing occasionally out the window at the horses. However, one day, looking out the window, Carla realized the stallion was gone. Worried about losing the valuable horse, she took David and looked for the horse. She found him drinking water in a nearby stream and put David down to grab his reins. Carla reflects that she never imagined something more terrible than losing the horse awaited her. 

With the horse secured, Carla turned her attention back to David and found him playing in the stream. She noticed a dead bird in the water and quickly pulled her son away. She took David and the horse home and said nothing about the incident to her husband. The next day, the stallion fell ill, his face so swollen he looked like “a monstrosity.” Immediately, Carla knew that the horse had been sickened by the same water in which David had played. She knew she had to act quickly to save her son’s life and that a doctor wouldn’t make it to their rural town in time. 

In the car, Amanda looks out the window to watch her young daughter, Nina, walking beside the pool. She wonders if Carla’s tragedy could befall her and Nina, too. Amanda thinks about the “rescue distance” between her daughter and herself. It is “the variable distance separating [Amanda] from [her] daughter” (19), which would have to be crossed to rescue Nina in case of disaster. 

Carla tells Amanda that her only choice was to take David to a local healer, a woman living in a green house. The woman told Carla that David had been poisoned. The only way to save his life was to attempt “a migration” and send David’s spirit to another body. The spirit would take some of the poison, and David’s body could fight off the rest. The woman told Carla there was no way to know where David’s spirit would go, and there could be other “consequences,” but it was the only way she could help. 

In a state of shock, Carla agreed to the migration. The woman took David away, and Carla waited, staring at a picture of the woman’s sons working in a soy field. Finally, she heard David walking out of the room and immediately knew he was different. His footsteps were unfamiliar, and she couldn’t bring herself to hug the “monster” that had replaced her son. As Carla finishes her story, Amanda starts to worry that she can no longer see Nina, and she goes inside to check on her daughter, thinking that Carla’s story is superstitious nonsense. 

Back in the hospital bed, she again becomes conscious of David next to her and tells him she is sorry for what he has become and how his mother treated him. David replies that he is a “normal boy.” He insists that Amanda is confused and needs to remain focused on finding the “exact moment” when the worms appear.