Find Me (2 page)

When breakfast ends each morning, I stand on an orange chair and look out the Dining Hall windows. I turn my back on the maze of long tables, the clatter of the Groups stacking trays. The Dining Hall is on the fifth floor; the bars on the windows are thick as arms. I peer between them, searching for pilgrims. Sometimes it's the same people. Or a new one has arrived. Or there are no pilgrims at all, just a scattering of footprints in the brown soil.

I spend a lot of time thinking about why the pilgrims started coming here, how they even found us. The easy answer is that they think this is a safe place, that we might have a cure, but that reasoning has never satisfied me. I do much of this thinking in the library, sitting between the squat bookcases filled with dictionaries and encyclopedias, plus books on space travel and the Mayan empire and dinosaurs. Dr. Bek believes that even though our bodies are confined to the Hospital, there is no reason to limit our minds.

I think about how devoted the pilgrims seem, the way they stand out there in all kinds of weather, staring up at the windows. They don't bang on the doors and shout to be let inside; they don't demand to be included in our secrets. They just wait. Dr. Bek is always reminding us of our specialness. Do the pilgrims know we're special too?

For a while, the library is the space I like best. All the patient quarters are white-walled rooms with white twin beds and white rolling medicine cabinets—other things in the Hospital that are white: the sheets, the pillows, the hazmat suits of the nurses, the flimsy shower curtains, the towels that scratch our skin—and so the walnut bookcases and the round olive-colored rug make the library feel special, a portal to a place that is separate from the rest of the Hospital.

When I start reading about the dinosaurs and the Mayans, however, the things I learn disturb me. For example, the book on the dinosaurs is not about how big and magnificent they were, but about why they all died. There is no agreement on what happened. An asteroid, continental drift, an epidemic. In the book about the Mayans, the author says they were wiped out by a plague, that every so often “incurables” appear and civilizations are reset. When I discuss my findings with Dr. Bek, he says the sickness is not the result of some cosmic reordering. Rather it's the simple truth that the smallest alteration can create the perfect atmosphere for a new disease to emerge. “The world is a very fragile place,” he tells me, another favorite line of his.

I've grown up knowing the world is fragile. No one needs to tell me that.

*   *   *

I stretch out in a hallway. I've been walking the Hospital for so many hours, I've forgotten what floor I'm on. I only know that I can't keep moving. I lie on my back, my arms pressed against my sides, and feel the cool on my spine. On the patient floors, the hallways are identical: long and white and fluorescent-lit, with an arched, barred window at one end. I think of the different Floor Groups standing at their window and watching the pilgrims at the same time, all of us mirrors of each other.

I gaze up at the lights and feel the burn in my corneas. I wonder how long I would have to look into them before I went blind. I feel the brightness in my cheekbones and inside my mouth. I feel it sinking into my skull. The floor stays empty. I begin to think no one will ever find me here. That I can lie like this forever, still and filled with light.

The voice brings me out. None of the patients have ever seen the Pathologist, but every day his voice crackles over the wall speakers. I sit up and rub my eyes, imagining a man alone in a room on the tenth floor, whispering into a machine. Sometimes he has practical things to say, like an announcement about meals, and sometimes he just talks to us.

Today he tells us what good patients we are. Meditations, these are called, even though I've always been under the impression that meditating is something you're supposed to do in silence.
REPEAT AFTER ME: YOU ARE WELL, YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN WELL, YOU WILL ALWAYS BE WELL.
He says we're doing everything right. All we need to do now is keep breathing.

 

2.

Three things brought me to the Hospital. In my first month, in the library, I wrote it all out on sheets of paper and pretended I was telling someone a story.

Number one: the sickness itself. The first case was reported in June, in Bakersfield, California, when a fifty-year-old woman named Clara Sue Borden stumbled into the ER with a constellation of silver blisters on her face. She couldn't walk a straight line. She pressed a hand over her right eye, claiming everything she saw out of that eye had a funny look. She couldn't tell anyone her name or date of birth or where she lived or how she got to the ER. If there were relatives to call. She remembered nothing. “I am me,” she kept saying.

For as long as I could remember, the weather had felt apocalyptic. Y2K fever and the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. The death of bees and the death of bats and radioactivity in the oceans and ravenous hurricanes. I thought the country was like a fire that would rage and rage until the embers lost their heat, but instead the sickness appeared and within two weeks it had burned through the borders of every state in America. It was everywhere and it was so fast. At first, the Centers for Disease Control thought it was a highly contagious strain of Creutzfeldt-Jakob. Autopsies showed prions eating through brain tissue, leading to sudden neurological collapse, but once they got everything under the microscopes, they realized it was something different, something new. We were awash in theories—biological attack, apocalypse, environmental meltdown—and no solutions. Our brains, our greatest human asset, were disintegrating. The president was moved to a secret location and the World Health Organization announced a Phase 5 alert. Our borders with Mexico and Canada were closed. For once, no one wanted to come in. And they definitely didn't want us coming out. By August, one hundred thousand people had died. By September, that number had doubled. Experts now say the toll could be worse than the 1918 influenza, which left half a million Americans dead.

*   *   *

When I was a child, I lived for a time with a boy I grew to love. One morning we were walking to school when we felt the ground shake. “Earthquake,” the boy said, even though we'd never heard of an earthquake happening in Charlestown, which was where we were living, just north of downtown Boston. We saw smoke spiraling up in the distance and moved toward it. We forgot all about school.

On a city block, a building had exploded. Already the police had put up barricades and were rushing around in blue surgical masks, to shield their lungs from debris. The smoke was so dark and dense that if they moved too far down the street, they vanished into it. We stood behind the barricades and watched a woman rush out of the smoke in a beautiful gold dress, the scalloped hem falling just below her knees, and blue bedroom slippers. On the corner, she fell to her knees and released a scream that was shattering in its loudness. She kneaded her fists against her stomach. Her entire body quaked.

In the Hospital, on the news, I have watched people in emergency rooms beat their stomachs as they wail, have seen faces covered by those same blue surgical masks, and the memory of the masked police and the smoking emptiness in the middle of the block and the woman screaming in her fine dress seemed not like the result of a freak gas leak—the cause of the explosion, we would later learn—but like a premonition, a chance to witness the kind of world that was to come.

*   *   *

Raul used to be a hairdresser in Chicago. He's in our Floor Group and when he gets permission to give the patients haircuts, we line up outside the Common Room. I'm happy to have something to do besides pilgrim watching.

Louis and I have determined that there are two secrets to life in the Hospital:

1. Don't get sick.

2. Don't get driven insane by empty time.

The linoleum floors glow white under the fluorescent overheads. Sometimes it feels like we're standing inside a flashlight. I wait next to Louis. He's thirty, which to me seems young and old at the same time. He has the blondest hair and the greenest eyes and a dimple right in the center of his chin. He is a college graduate, handsome and solid, someone I never would have talked to out in the real world. I would have rung up his groceries, bagged his tomatoes and his eggs, handed him the coupons that printed with his receipt. We met on the bus that carried us to the Hospital and were assigned to the same Floor Group, the same room. We are the only coed room on our floor. There were odd numbers of women and men, so Louis and I got stuck with each other, and Dr. Bek said the Hospital was placing extra trust in us, in our ability to handle being an exception to the rules.

On our first night, I did not sleep. I lay on my side, facing Louis, and watched the gentle rise and fall of his body under the sheets. I was used to aloneness, and it would take me days before I could drift off with another person in the room.

The Hospital looked like a fortress from the outside, so far from everything that went wrong, a towering structure rising from the absolute flatness of the plains. From the bus window, I thought at first that it was a mirage.

A brief history of the Hospital: It started out as a public psychiatric hospital, but state budget cuts shut it down in 2009. The building sat empty until Dr. Bek and his staff took it over during the sickness and made it into something useful again. I'm betting the people who built this Hospital, the people who lived and worked here, could never have imagined what it would one day be used for.

A red exit sign hangs over the stairwell entrance. The light inside has burned out. There are no working clocks, but my guess is Louis and I have been waiting for close to an hour.

“I only want a little off the ends.” My hair falls past my shoulders in dark waves, lush and healthy-looking. It shines under the lights. No bangs, center part, showing off a high, smooth forehead. It's one of the few things I have found consistently admirable about myself, my hair. “Nothing dramatic.”

“I don't want a haircut,” Louis says. “Not from Raul, anyway.”

“So what's your excuse?”

He's leaning against the wall, one leg bent, arms crossed. The hair on his forearms is as light and soft as corn silk. I want him to say that he is here, that he is standing in this line, because he would do anything to be close to me.

“I'm looking for Paige. Seen her?”

Louis has recently taken a special interest in Paige, a patient from our Floor Group and a former marathon runner from Seattle. I've seen him watching her in the Dining Hall as she props her heel on a chair for stretches or offering to time her when she practices sprints in the hallway.

I shrug. “Maybe she doesn't care about hair.”

The twins emerge from the Common Room. Their hair has been trimmed at the crown, but left shaggy around the ears and napes. They look like a pair of elves. I avoid eye contact with Louis, but I can feel him smirking at me, at the flaws in my judgment, as the boys pass.

“Next!” Raul calls.

It's easy to picture psychiatric patients lolling around the Common Room, the air swelling with their cigarette smoke. A sour smell has gotten trapped in the dark blue carpeting. There are little holes all over the walls, rings of chipped white paint, evidence of what used to be there. The couch is long and the color of rust, the seat cushions indented with the impressions of bodies. The TV is an ancient black box resting on an equally ancient VCR. In Community Meetings, Dr. Bek has told us that he is suspicious of technology, of an overreliance on machines.

One morning a week, the nurses play a yoga video in the Common Room and patients from different floors bend and twist, form bridges with their bodies. On Saturday nights, the nurses select a movie to show. So far we have seen:
Sleepless in Seattle
,
Meatballs
,
Night of the Living Dead
, which gave half the patients nightmares,
The Maltese Falcon
, three installments of
Mission: Impossible
.

In
Mission: Impossible
, the masks made me think of the boy I used to live with, the boy I grew to love. That night, I lay in bed and mouthed his name. My private meditation.

When I first came to the Hospital, I wanted to know everyone. At Community Meetings and in the Dining Hall, I would go up to patients and ask them who they were and where they were from and what they missed. After the nineteenth person went to the tenth floor, a death for every year of my life, I stopped remembering names.

An orange Dining Hall chair stands in the corner, the metal legs encircled with mounds of hair. Raul waves me over with his scissors. A nurse from our Floor Group is sitting on the couch, supervising. We identify the nurses by the ID patches on the breasts of their hazmats. Hers is N5. She's reading a magazine, an old issue of
Newsweek
, from the library. A soldier in a mud-crusted combat helmet stares out from the cover, his eyes wide and vacant.

After the sickness broke out, people stopped talking about wars.

“This way.” Raul's stomach is a small dome under his green scrubs.

I sit down, facing the wall. Despite the cleaning efforts of our group, there are scuffs on the floorboards. My slippers rest on a pile of hair. “Just a trim,” I say to Raul, who has already started.

I watch dark clumps fall to the ground. Scissors graze the back of my neck. I tell him that I hope he's not getting carried away.

“You look like an old customer of mine.” He digs his fingers into my hair, his hands warm and rough. His nails pierce my scalp. “You have the same kind of face.”

I ask Raul what kind of face that would be, to describe this woman to me, but he doesn't answer and I wonder if this same-faced person has lost their memory, if they are dead. When he finishes, I pat my forehead and feel bangs.

“Do you have a mirror?” I ask.