Find Me (12 page)

Not one patient complains, or at least not out in the open. We're fearful of what else might be taken away.

 

13.

In the year before the sickness, Marcus began haunting the Stop & Shop. I don't know how else to explain it. He was nowhere and everywhere at the same time, which is how I imagine ghosts to be.

At first, I worried something had happened to him, that this was a sign from the Beyond, and so in the break room at the Stop & Shop I sat down at the computer and entered his name into all the search engines. I looked for accidents and news articles and obituaries and I found nothing to suggest he was anything other than alive.

The haunting started around Halloween, when the masks we stocked at the Stop & Shop made me think only of him. When there were no customers to check out, I walked the Halloween aisle and looked at all the monsters staring back. One night I stuffed a vampire mask into my coat pocket and took it home.

On the bus, I kept a hand on the rubber face twisted up in my pocket. I watched the people sitting low in their seats and leaning their heads against the windows, sick with exhaustion, giving in to it. Others passengers played their music so loud, lyrics spilled from headphones, into the open air, like they were trying to shock themselves awake with sound. I listened and sometimes I liked what I heard.

My favorites: Michael Jackson, Madonna, David Bowie, Ghostface Killah.

In my bathroom, I took a few capfuls of Robitussin and put the mask on. The skin was green, the eyebrows tiny black pyramids, the tips of the teeth red with blood. I tied a black sheet around my shoulders and in the mirror I watched the movement of the thing that was no longer a sheet but a cape. I bared my fangs at my own reflection. I stuck out a hand and said, “Pleased to meet you.”

When I was out on my own, I could have gone looking for Marcus, but I didn't. I let the purple grow out of my hair, like a snake shedding its skin, and tried to forget. I told myself that I was used to impermanence, that attachments would get me exactly nowhere, but then some people stay with you in ways you don't expect and you try to shake them out, shake them away, but your memory won't let you.

In my apartment, I wore the mask and drank Robitussin all through winter.

In March, there was road construction. I had to take a different route, multiple buses. We passed an abandoned warehouse, the walls charred with weather and age, and I remembered the new construction I used to see through the bus window, the silver skeleton rising from the ground.

A string of teenagers on bikes, standing up on the pedals and leaning over the handlebars, calling to each other. How I admired the looseness in their posture, the freedom. In Chinatown, neon yellow signs with indecipherable red lettering and a restaurant with a fish tank in the window. Steam rose from the manholes. The bus growled behind a sluggish line of cars, in a gray swirl of exhaust.

Downtown I had to change buses. I was sitting up in my seat, my Stop & Shop apron folded in my lap, my nametag pinned to the neck string, when through the window I saw a man in a lion mask on a street corner. He was standing tall, his hands behind his back. The mask had a plastic wave of golden mane, a black nose, a pink tongue. I turned in my seat. I pressed my palms against the window. When the bus stopped, I rushed outside. I did not go to my next stop, but back to that corner in Chinatown, which was empty except for the rising steam and the silver fish darting around in the window across the street.

*   *   *

The last time it happened we were on the edge of spring. I remember the slush, the tentative green, the break in the bitter cold. At work, it was two in the morning and my manager was on a smoke break. A cashier had called in sick. I was the only one on the floor and I hadn't checked out a customer since midnight. For hours the same half-dozen pop songs had been playing on a loop. I didn't want to know the words, but was remembering them anyway.

I walked around Produce and petted the rough fur of coconuts and squeezed kiwis and examined items I had never eaten before, like kumquats and kohlrabi. The kohlrabi was a green bulb. I thought about stealing one and eating it like an apple in my apartment. I was pinching a kumquat when I saw a person swoop around a corner and down Canned Goods. There was something strange about their face. I followed them.

We went down Canned Goods and up Dry Packaged Goods and down Condiments & Sauces. I kept some distance between us, squeezing the kumquat. This person didn't stop and examine the shelves. They weren't pushing a cart or carrying a basket. They didn't appear to be shopping for anything. They were just walking.

Each time they rounded a corner, I caught a glimpse of their face. The skin was unnaturally smooth and white, the expression vacant, like the mask of a horror movie villain I was having trouble placing. I should have been scared, should have taken this masked person as a sign of an impending robbery or worse, but instead I followed them through Baking Supplies and Cereals and Health & Beauty. There was familiarity in their posture, their gait.

I lost the person in the cold labyrinth of Frozens. “Marcus,” I said at last, testing the possibility. I let go of the kumquat and it rolled across the white floor. My palm smelled of citrus. I ran around the store, checking all the aisles and the bathrooms. I went outside and stood under the lights that attracted fluttering clouds of moths. The parking lot was empty. The person was gone.

At home I drank enough Robitussin for me to pass out in my bathroom. I woke in a puddle of vomit that had hardened into a sour glue on the floor, my brain thumping inside my skull.

*   *   *

The last time I rode the bus, I sat across from a woman with a Seeing Eye dog. The dog had a golden coat and wore a bright yellow vest. He sat perfectly still, like he rode in buses all the time, which I suppose he did. When we passed the evangelical church, the dog started to lick my hand. The woman gave the leash a little yank, but the dog kept on licking. Summer was here; the days had gotten long again. I had stopped seeing signs of Marcus and tried to think as little as possible about what that might mean. I did not know that in a few weeks, the sickness would be all over the news and a hazmatted man with a carnation in his lapel would come to tell me about the Hospital, the first time I had ever been chosen for anything that could be called special. That my life would soon be burned down to a stub. Now I wonder what Clara Sue Borden was doing while I was riding that bus, a dog licking the salt from my arm with its long, rough tongue. Had she already started to feel a strange roughness on her skin, a fuzziness around the edges of her memory?

 

14.

I wake to voices in the hallway. The pitches shoot up and down. In my half-sleep I see a heart monitor screen and neon lines jumping around from
LIVING
to
DEAD
. I stare up at the white ceiling and listen. I roll around and get trapped in my sheets. When I hear Dr. Bek, I kick my way out of bed. He is rarely on the fifth floor in the mornings.

“Louis, wake up. Something's going on.”

He sits up and his pale hair falls across his forehead in a way that makes my heart pound.

“Something's always going on,” he says, yawning wide.

We go into the hall. The overhead lights are bright white. The door to the twins' room is open. Dr. Bek is in there, questioning the nurses from our floor. I look at the three of them standing by the beds, large and huffing and helpless. Next to them is a small tower of linoleum squares and a dark, gaping hole. “Have you looked in the basement?” he's asking, his blue eyes flitting around behind the shield. “Have you checked all the storage closets?”

Right away I know what's happened. The twins are gone.

*   *   *

An Emergency Community Meeting is called. All the patients are broken into pairs and each pair is assigned a part of the Hospital to search. Our Group gets floor eight. No one gets floors one or ten. There is no mention of the hole.

The eighth floor is residential, like ours: the long hallway, the arched window at one end, the smooth white walls, the row of closed doors. But since the eighth floor is unoccupied, the knobs on these doors don't turn. Faces, ashen from months spent inside, don't peek out into the hall.

I don't like this ghost version of our floor. I don't like the emptiness, the reminder of what the Hospital will be like after we are gone, dead or released from our contracts. I touch the walls as we pass, imagining I'm leaving my DNA behind. On the speakers, the Pathologist is calling the boys' names. Other patients are opening the doors to the supply closets and rummaging around inside.

Louis and I go into every room. All the beds have been stripped, leaving behind metal frames and green rubber mattresses. White sheets are folded on the mattresses, like patients have just departed or the Hospital is expecting imminent arrivals. On our countdown calendar, the bird for January is the snowy egret, which has feathers that spring from its body like a long fringe, but there are no calendars on these walls. In the bathrooms the little motes between the shower tiles are thick with black mildew, the mirrors bordered with rust. We shout “Sam!” and “Christopher!” and our voices refract back at us in a way that makes me sick with fear.

I don't think the twins are here, on this floor, but they are just kids and they have to be hiding out somewhere. We have more rooms to search. We keep going.

At the very end of the hallway, we find a room that has been turned into some kind of storage area. A hospital bed in full recline is parked in the corner. Brown boxes, the cardboard tongues flapping, have been pushed underneath. Tall rolls of plastic sheeting lean against walls, ready to be unfurled into the casings that surround the sick. Empty IV bags hang from metal stands like withered organs. Clear tubes are coiled on the ground and on the mattress and on top of the boxes. Death requires a lot of equipment, we are learning.

I remember Christina, the beeping of her monitors and the squares of flesh-colored tape holding the needles in her veins and the long pauses between her breaths. Her ransacked memory. The years of silence and secrets.

We lived in the same city and she never once thought to claim me, not until she was almost out of time.

Louis and I step into the room. We close the door behind us. This is the last place we have left to search; there is no sign of the twins here or anywhere else on this floor. I see us retreating downstairs and hearing all about how another patient found the boys in the basement or in the library, reading up on the Hawaiian alphabet, or in some remote corner of the Dining Hall.

Behind the door, against another wall, we find a tall tape recorder with two circles that stare out at us like eyes. Louis and I sit in front of it. There are rows of buttons and dials. I press a square button.

Static, Dr. Bek reciting a date, a woman's voice. The voice sounds familiar, like a voice we used to hear around the Hospital, but it is not one I hear anymore and so I know this woman must be dead.

Tell me a memory,
Dr. Bek says on the tape, and the woman answers,
One morning, he stared at me for a long time and said, “You look like a woman I used to know, maybe from the grocery,” and I said, “What do you mean ‘used to know' and what do you mean ‘grocery'?” and he said I looked so familiar, he was sure I'd been bagging his groceries for years, if only he could remember my name. After two decades of marriage he said these things. That's when I knew he was forgetting.

These are the intake interviews we did when we first came to the Hospital. I did not know we were being taped.

I remember this thing I read in a magazine,
the woman continues.
It was about a village in Greenland where all the residents have dementia. They go to the grocery and feed birds in the park and go to the theater. They get lost and miraculously there is always someone to help with directions. They are being watched all the time, but they have no idea. They have no idea they are stuck in a very pleasant kind of trap. I remember looking at my husband and wishing there was a place like that for us
. She pauses. I hear the sound of papers being shuffled.
Is that where we are now? In some sort of pleasant trap?

Louis and I haven't been together since that morning in our room, haven't talked about how it felt, if we want to do it again, but being in this strange room with him reminds me of our early days, when we traveled the floors and halls together. It reminds him of something too, because under the lights he clamps an arm around my shoulder and I feel the damp of his mouth along the hot curve of my ear.

After we fucked, I didn't shower for days, desperate to keep the smell of him.

I'm startled to hear the twins' voices. I look around, thinking for a moment that they're somewhere in the room, but then I realize they've just taken over the recording, already going on about Hawaii, about the birds they will find there, Christopher talking over his brother.
The starlings
, he is saying.
The nightjars. The bitterns
.

“Why Paige?” I pull away from Louis. This is the question I've wanted to ask him since the fall, but I didn't and I couldn't because I was scared of the answer. I expect him to say there was always something about me that seemed defective. “Why not me?”

He looks down at the patch of white linoleum between his legs. “I liked the way she ran, I guess. I liked that she was doing something instead of waiting around here like the rest of us.”

He does not know about my mother, about all the work I have been doing in my mind.

“I'm planning to do a lot,” I say.

When I hear my own voice on the tape, I go to turn off the recorder, but Louis stops me. Before the interview, I stayed in motion. I drank my Robitussin. I refused to absorb all that had happened. The sickness. Christina, memoryless in her plastic tent. My mother. There was something about Dr. Bek's dark little office and the wheeze of his hazmat and the Venn chair and the sea cliffs poster that put everything into focus. It was like running into a wall. My life was a wreck, had been seething with a sickness that was beyond what any doctor could cure, and I had agreed to spend ten months in a Hospital and I might live or I might die. During the interview, you can only hear Dr. Bek's questions—
Don't you have memories, Joy? Do you remember what a memory is?
—and, if you listen closely, a woman sobbing. During that first meeting, I wasn't able to say a word.