Find Me (15 page)

“Take you, for example.” Behind the face shield his eyelids, laced with blue veins, flutter. “Abandoned on the steps of a hospital. In winter, no less. Raised in all those strange places, with all those strange people. Drugging yourself unconscious every chance you got.”

Did he know our trauma would keep us from forming a cohesive rebellion? Keep us from doing more than standing around like dazed cattle? That we could be volatile, maybe even dangerous, but in the end have little faith in our ability to make anything better.

You aren't the first person to do experiments on me, I want to tell him, but maybe he already knows.

Dr. Bek stops. He releases a long breath and it sounds like something is being deflated.

“If I say you are a patient, you are a patient. If I say I am a doctor who will cure you, I am a doctor who will cure you. If I say there is a pathologist examining your blood, there is a pathologist examining your blood. At the hospital, this has been our philosophy, our way of reaching the unconscious mind.”

I'm still sitting in the Venn chair, my feet planted on the floor, swimming with information. I realize two things:

First, Dr. Bek hasn't just been talking about Oslo. He has been talking about this Hospital too. They do not have a cure here and they are not in the process of creating one. Rather they are hoping that with the right encouragement, the right kind of help, we will be able to cure ourselves.

Second, I do the math. Dr. Bek's wife was still a young woman when she got sick, not so much older than me, and I understand that he is telling me this story about the kind of person, the kind of doctor, he has chosen to be, because he never got a chance to tell it to her.

*   *   *

That night, I dream of Jan Mayen. I'm standing on a tiny island in the middle of the sea, in sand the color of bone. There are people moving through this bone-colored sand with plastic bags over their heads and I think that one of them is Marcus. I try to find him by looking at everyone's palms, picking up one soft, warm hand after another and reading the lines, but they all look the same; I will never find him. In the distance, a volcano rumbles.

When I wake up, I'm not in my bed, but in our closet, hidden behind the legs of Louis's scrubs, panting in the dark.

*   *   *

Apart from my mother, there is only one other person I've searched for on the Death List. I checked for Marcus during my first week in the Hospital and could not find him on either list, not the one for the living or the one for the dead.

*   *   *

On my third meeting with Dr. Bek, there is no more talk of Oslo. The room feels colder. In the Venn chair, my skin hardens under my scrubs and I start shivering like I'm outside in the snow. This time, Dr. Bek doesn't start with a story, but by sliding a manila folder across his desk, toward me.

I look at the folder, so thin and ordinary, for a while before opening it. Inside I find sheets of paper with all the patient names, divided into two columns. I close the folder.

“There are two kinds of patients here,” Dr. Bek tells me. “Those who are immune and those who have tested positive but remain asymptomatic. They will present sometime during the ten-month window.” He touches the silver throat of his suit. “The hospital is the last home they will ever know.”

I feel the chair sink into the floor, as though the Hospital is absorbing me into its structure, pulling me into that deep-down place where the buzzing comes from, where the incinerator burns. Dr. Bek's voice grows distant and I think maybe I am just returning from one of those in-between spaces I slip into sometimes and any second now I will blink and Louis will be there, tapping my wrist, trying to bring me back.

“I hope you understand why these lists must remain confidential,” Dr. Bek continues, and suddenly the Venn chair is sitting normally on the floor and nothing about him is distant at all. “Any hope of success depended on them believing, first consciously and then unconsciously, in their own survival, in their ability to keep remembering.”

The folder has become inevitable. I open it again and begin to read the names. Louis and I are separated: he is in one column; I'm in the other. My column is much shorter than his. Clustered around his name I see the names of patients who have died and then the print goes blurry and I think maybe I won't be sitting up in this chair for much longer.

“We've been trying to learn all that we can. The dormancy alone is a miracle. How can they stay asymptomatic for so long? Can the window be extended? Can they be cured?”

He pauses again. His cheeks are bright with sweat.

“We had hoped that the immune patients, like you, Joy, would help show the others how to live, present them with a contagious model of health, but that hasn't quite gone as planned, has it?”

I think of Louis roaming the Hospital, soaked in fluorescence, time ticking down inside of him, and feel my stomach rise.

“This is our last appointment,” Dr. Bek says. “It ends in five minutes.”

I slap the arms of the Venn chair.

“How do you know I won't tell everyone what you've done?” The folder is sitting in my lap and I'm afraid to keep touching the pages. They feel contaminated. “How do you know I won't run out there and tell everyone the truth?”

Dr. Bek's silver suit makes a strange whistling noise.

“It takes a certain kind of person to look into the eyes of another and tell them their life will soon be ending. Are you that kind of person, Joy?”

“Maybe,” I say, because the truth is I'm still trying to understand what kind of person to be. “Maybe I am exactly that kind of person.”

He looks at me, his eyes wide and patient behind the shield, like he is trying to teach me a lesson I am being very slow to learn. He makes a steeple with his gloved hands.

“It will not feel unnatural to keep the information I've shared between us. Some people would be burning to tell, but secrecy is your natural state. You are used to keeping them—secrets from other people, secrets from yourself.”

*   *   *

After my last meeting with Dr. Bek, I find Louis in the fifth-floor hallway. I take him by the hand and pull him into the stairwell. He stands on the stairs, one step below me, so we are the same height, and I touch his face and his soft blond hair and think about how I am already missing him.

“Let's go back to that first month,” I say. “I want to go back.”

Time changes when you know you're running out. Now I want the slowness, the wet heavy thing, but the days are tumbling by. I tell Louis about my mother, about
Mysteries of the Sea.
In our room, I show him the photo. He stares at it for a long time, tilting it around in the light, and then tells me what he sees. We talk about leaving the Hospital and going south, to Florida. We talk about white beaches and endless sunshine and alligators and how we will find my mother there. We are becoming like the twins, only Florida is our Hawaii.

From a guidebook on the Everglades, Louis knows that alligators have been alive on the earth for millions of years. As I listen to him, I comb the air with my fingers and pretend I'm making my way through a sea.

That night, after Lights Out, we sit on his bed, in darkness, a sheet draped over us. We have decided to hold a séance, to see if we can reach the twins. We press our palms together and shut our eyes. We regulate our breathing. We try to enter a trance, but I keep getting distracted. His skin is warm. He has the clean smell of bar soap. How many breaths does he have left, how many memories? All the other patients look different to me now; I can see their pain hanging over them like a shadow. I keep thinking that maybe Dr. Bek is wrong. Maybe his data is mistaken. Maybe I am the one who is going to die and this is just another way of testing me, of trying to reach my unconscious mind.

“Did you hear anything?” I ask.

“Nothing.” Louis shifts under the sheet. His palms slip against mine. He is so alive. “I think we have to go deeper into the trance.”

“What if we can't?” Cocooned inside the sheet, so close to him, it's almost possible to pretend we are no longer in the Hospital.

I open my eyes. Our foreheads are touching. His eyes are still closed, his curved lashes dusting his skin. His lips part, preparing to answer. For the first time in weeks, I don't hear anything in the twins' room. I just hear him.

 

19.

In Allston, the Psychologist said he was training my brain waves. During our sessions, the Spanish music played on his laptop. He told me a man named Plácido Domingo was singing. He told me that he always wanted to live in Spain, where people sat under umbrellas in beautiful stone plazas and all the buildings were ancient and you could sleep through the middle of the day. When the music stopped, he asked me if I liked it and I nodded. He told me I could start it again with my mind, if I concentrated hard enough.

I was sitting on his bed. The white electrodes were stuck to my scalp. I thought as hard as I could about Plácido Domingo, who I had never heard of before. I tried to picture what he would look like and saw a man with a heavy black beard. Nothing happened.

“It's okay,” the Psychologist said. “This is just practice.”

Practice for what? I did not think to ask.

At the end of one session, he turned the computer around to face me. An image of my brain quivered on the screen. It was round and dense as a planet, the color a liquid green that kept shifting into yellows and blues.

“Imagine something happy,” he said.

I thought of the rope swing in Ms. Neuman's backyard, the sensation of being airborne, and watched blue wash into the center of my brain. Plácido Domingo's voice returned.

“Now imagine something scary.”

I thought of the white electrodes lying flat as leeches on my skull and his drawer full of eyeglasses. A watery red line swam around the front of my brain and the singing vanished.

“The trick,” the Psychologist told me, “is to train your brain to think about the happy thing while the scary thing is going on.”

*   *   *

He never explained himself to me, not in the way Dr. Bek explained himself to me, and maybe I should thank God or whatever for that.

*   *   *

During an Internet Session, I look up Plácido Domingo. I find the following: Plácido Domingo was born in Madrid. Onstage, he's played over one hundred and fifty roles. In the eighties, in Mexico, he pulled earthquake survivors from collapsed buildings. In this earthquake, he lost his aunt and his uncle and his nephew and more. There is a statue of him in Mexico City. I find a photo of the statue, a bronze figure standing with his arms raised. He has met the pope.

*   *   *

In the Hospital, I keep playing along with the examinations and the Community Meetings and the meditations. I try to be a good model of health, so good that my model might become contagious. Also: Louis cannot know what I know, because if he does then what I know will become real.

One night I show Louis the hole. We're naked and wrapped in our sheets. We keep the lights off. We sit in front of the hole, the sheets pooling white around us. A dull light rises from the opening. Louis leans over it and closes his eyes and I wonder what he is thinking or if the buzzing has walked inside his brain and taken away his ability to think at all.

“Do you hear that noise?” I ask.

He nods, eyes still closed. “It sounds like a machine.”

“Sometimes I hear it through the walls.” The sheets slide down my shoulder, and I am relieved at the sight of smooth healthy skin. “Sometimes I imagine I can say things and the twins will hear me.”

He starts counting the knots of my spine. I feel the light pressure of his fingers moving up my back, toward the sensitive spot at the base of my neck.

We stay by the hole. We take turns sticking our hands into the opening and breathing the strange air. We feel the vibrations on our skin. After we slide the tarp back into place, Louis scoops me up like a bride and carries me to our room. In the morning, when a nurse comes for us with chilly alcohol wipes and cuffs and needles, the edges of our sheets are stained black with dirt.

 

20.

Louis gets his morning exam. I'm sitting on my bed and staring at the dates the nurses have forgotten to mark on the bird calendar, counting up our blank days like they are something that can be repaid. When I look over at Louis, he is doing the Romberg, only he's doing it differently than before. His back is to me and I can see his shoulders tipping to the right, a statue about to topple over.

N5 says to try again and I watch his body sway like he's being pushed by a wind.

She takes out her little flashlight and starts checking his skin. She looks under his sleeves and along his throat and down his back and inside his mouth. She's checking one of his legs when the light stops. She doesn't move to the next phase of the exam. She leans closer to Louis and all I can hear is her breathing.

He sits down on his bed and rounds his back, the bumps of his spine pressing against his green scrubs.

“There's an abnormality,” she says.

She turns off the flashlight and packs her kit. She tells us to stay in our room and we nod dumbly. We don't need to ask where she's going. We know she's getting Dr. Bek.

When I hear the click of the door closing and look at Louis on his bed, hunched under the lights, his hands squeezing the edges of the mattress, I feel something inside me pop—a sharp sudden break, like a wishbone snapping. Microburst after microburst after microburst.

Louis keeps sitting on the bed. He doesn't say anything, doesn't turn to look at me. I go to him. I kneel at his feet and push up the leg of his scrub and there it is: a blister the size of a quarter on his shin, rough and silver in the center, ringed with pink. For a while, we sit wrapped in heavy silence.