I woke up with a start, like when you are still mostly asleep but in your subconscious you notice that you’re not where you expect to be. Sometimes it’s the feel of the sheets, the mattress, the sounds outside, the light; if you’re lucky it’s some long, soft hair. But I knew I wasn’t where I last was, not that I could remember where that was anyway. It was the sheets. They were that tough clinical white cotton that are designed only to get soft after a few hundred washings.

The room was dark. A few streetlights glowed through the thick curtains. I heard a cough and sat up. To my left, slumped in some metal chairs with just a bit of padding, were my parents. I hadn’t seen them in almost a year, although we talked regularly enough. Still, I couldn’t figure out under what circumstances we’d have been reunited. It’s not like I’d ever drank myself into a blackout and boarded international flights before.

“Mom? Dad? Are you guys asleep? What’s going on?” I tried to ask them quietly so as not to surprise them, but I realized they had already woken.

“Tim? Did you say something?” my dad asked plaintively.

“Yeah, I’m up. What’s going on?”

“Oh, God, he’s speaking,” my mom said. She broke down and started crying. I noticed that Dad was crying as well. I hadn’t seen Mom cry since the time I’d gotten caught for some petty vandal stuff in tenth grade, and even then it was mostly with anger. Dad… well, I know I’d seen him tear up once, but I can’t remember when or why. It was a strange occurrence to say the least. He also had his arm around her, which had been even more strange since my sister and I leaving for school left them with no more reasons not to get divorced.

“Yeah, I’m speaking. Should I not be? What in the world is going on? How did you guys get here?” I asked, pretending I knew where ‘here’ was.

“Well, Timothy…” Mom rarely used my full name, definitely never with her voice cracking as she struggled to lift her face from her hands. “It’s just that, that… you’ve just been very sick.” She could barely get that much out. Dad patted her on the back.

I, for one, felt perfectly fine. I sat up on the bed to demonstrate. “Sick? What are you talking about? I’m great. Confused, sure, but not sick. Now what are you guys talking about? At least tell me where I am before you keep on worrying so much. I can’t bear to see you guys like this.”

“It’s good you feel good, son,” Dad said distractedly. “Where to begin… I guess I’ll try to explain it as best as I can. There was some sort of sickness going around in São Paulo, it made all of the international news. No one was sure at first exactly what it was, but they figured it was something to do with dengue, being a warm year with plenty of mosquitoes and whatnot. The first time we talked it didn’t seem to be a big deal, only old folks and babies were really getting sick, and you said it was just fodder for slow news days. But by the time it became apparent that it was, in fact, a big deal, whatever it was was spreading too quickly. Now there’s plenty of argument that it was terrorism, or some sort of undercover experiment like they’ve done in Argentina and Peru, but that’s unimportant I suppose.” He took a deep breath, wiped his eyes one last time, and gave me a sad smile. “At least now you’re back with us.”

It was a lot of digest, and I didn’t really try to understand. “Fine, fine, but where are we now?”

“We’re back in California, a couple hours south of the Oregon border, in a motel.”

“Thank you, that’s what I wanted to know. Now, about this sickness or whatever, what happened? How did I get home?”

Mom, who’d been staring at me with red-rimmed eyes, hands trembling more than I remembered, just put her head back in her hands. The look she’d given me, with an attempt of a smile at what must have been happy memories in glaring contrast to the tight pinch of hopelessness at the sides of her eyes, was enough to snap me out of what was left of the sleepy daze and seriously begin to worry.

I turned to Dad, who was looking at his hands like he’d never seen them before. “Are you going to fill me in on what’s going on?”