Find Me (4 page)

This woman, this Christina, stared blankly through her tent. Even in the suit, I was afraid to get too close. I wondered if a mistake had been made.

The doctor lingered in the doorway, watching us, until shouting broke out in the hall and he was called away to another disaster.

“I'm Joy,” I said, taking a step toward her, trying to be brave. “Joy Jones.”

I was named Joy Jones by the nurses at Brigham, who got tired of calling me 6212, my hospital ID number. The symmetry of the name has never suited me.

Christina's mouth was molting silver. Her lips smacked at the air.

A doctor's stool stood in the corner and on that stool sat an envelope, my name written across it. Inside I found a square of paper with an address, a street in the South End, and a key. On the other side of the paper, there was a note:

Joy—

Look under the bed.

C

“Is this for me?” I pressed the envelope against the tent and the plastic shuddered. I felt a burn under my skin, like my nerve endings were catching fire. “Is this where I'm supposed to go?”

She squeezed her eyes shut, her lids clay-colored and sagging. Her right arm began to twitch on the bed.

In the end, the muscles spasm. Patients cannot swallow or talk and are fed through tubes or not at all. Those who are not being properly monitored suffocate. In the end, sight betrays them. They see things that aren't there. The once solid world dissolves like a brick of sugar left out in the rain. In the end, the patients shit their beds. Touch is agony. They cannot sleep. They lie rigid under the sheets, a corpse in the making, somewhere between conscious and not.

The doctor returned and pumped morphine into her IV. Her eyes were the color of milk. Three hours later, she was dead. From the corner of the room, the envelope stuck between my gloves, I watched her body go still and stiller, and even then it did not look restful, like sleep. I never got to ask how she found me or who my mother was or why she left me at Brigham. I never got to ask what was so wrong with her, or with me.

On my way out, the doctor stopped me in the hallway, his gloved hand brushing my shoulder, and told me the address was the last thing she wrote before her memory disappeared.

I entered a small, dark room where people in hazmats were waiting to scrub my suit with neon white paddles frothing with a liquid that looked like water but was not water. The suit was part of the Last Rites package, forever mine. Outside, the town car was waiting to take me to the address, a brownstone on Warren Avenue.

The key unlocked an apartment on the first floor. I followed a carpeted hall into the bedroom. Framed photos of people I did not know had been arranged on the wall in a shape that looked like a puzzle on the verge of completion. The suit made a cracking sound as I knelt and reached under the bed.

I found a white shoebox. I pulled it out and raised the lid: a single photograph surrounded by curls of paper. A Polaroid, the edges worn soft. In the photo, a woman stood on a ship deck, the sunlight caught in the brown sheen of the wood. She wore khaki pants and a white blouse, turned translucent by the light, so I could make out the tan bra straps pressing against her collarbone. She was holding a pair of binoculars and looking straight into the camera, as though the photographer had just offered her a challenge. Hair the color of coal poured over her shoulders. Her eyes were stuck deep in her skull. Her lips were parted slightly, and there was a tiny oval of darkness between them. Behind her I could see the blue expanse of water.

I started reading the strips of paper, the details Christina must have tried to preserve before she started forgetting.

Scorpio, allergic to raw apples, afraid of not very much.

She kept you one month before—

Her first and only love is water.

She made it through childhood without vomiting once.

We have not spoken in seven years.

Hates heights, likes to be low, close to the earth.

She has no patience for anything!

You are her only child.

Regrets—we have many.

I flipped the photo over.
Your mother,
1997 was written on the back. This was shot two years after I was born.

I took the photo with me. I left everything else behind.

I slipped into the backseat of the town car and the driver peeled away. I unzipped my hood. Warm, bleachy air gusted into the suit. I always imagined my mother only glimpsed me at birth, only held me for a minute or two, my body still slick with her insides, before handing me over.

According to Christina, I was wrong: she had a life with me and, after thirty days, she decided that she did not want that life.

The sun was coming through the back window. No matter how many people died, no matter how far the sickness spread, there was always the sun, a fact of our existence that seemed both miraculous and chilling. I looked again at the photo. If I concentrated very hard, I could remember one detail about my mother. A scent, something close to fresh-cut grass. Now there was an image to fill in what memory had failed to catch. All I was missing was a name.

*   *   *

Two days after Christina died, a man knocked on my door. He was dressed like a pallbearer underneath his hazmat: a black suit with a red carnation tucked into the lapel. His hair was shorn close to the skull. He carried a black briefcase. He was the third thing.

This man had come to invite me to the Hospital. He said I was among the small portion of the population who, despite exposure to the infected, didn't get sick. That I, and others like me, had a resistance. I might be in possession of a genetic abnormality that could lead to a cure; the formula could be waiting right there in my blood. He pointed a gloved finger at my chest as he said this. When I said I didn't think I was the kind of person who could help with such a thing, he told me Louis Pasteur cured rabies by injecting the virus into the brains of mad dogs.

“All avenues, no matter how unlikely, must be explored,” he said.

My basement apartment was warm and dark. Trash collection had been suspended and black garbage bags were piling up in my little galley kitchen, swollen and reeking. Outside I could hear a police vehicle rolling down the street, an announcement being made through a megaphone. The hazmat suit was slung over the couch and I had started to think of it as company.

Sometimes, at night, I would put the suit on and walk around my apartment and listen to the peculiar sound of my breath. Or watch reruns of
The X-Files
on my laptop, which always left me wishing for a partner in crime. I've never liked the things girls my age are supposed to.

In my favorite episodes, a virus caused by aliens takes over human bodies and a death row inmate with psychic powers channels the ghost of Scully's father and in a suburb called Arcadia a monster eats people who break community rules about lawn decorations. In the suit, I felt like not a person but a creature, the kind of thing that could turn up on an episode of
The X-Files.

The man told me the sickness usually killed within seven days, but in rare cases there was a lengthy incubation period, so the deal was a ten-month stay in the Hospital, long enough to be sure I wasn't infected, and then I would be released. People like this man were knocking on doors all across the country and offering 149 other Americans the same plan. Not a single person refused.

It was true I touched one of the infected, back when the sickness was still new. A neighbor wobbled into the backyard. From my doorway I watched her plop down and grab at her eyelids. I called 911. I went outside. We didn't know much about the sickness then, didn't know it could be spread through any human contact. I asked if she wanted to go home and she looked at me and said, “Where is a home?” She reached for me and her fingertips, rough with the silvery beginnings of blisters, grazed my wrist.

When the ambulance came, paramedics in rubber gloves and gas masks shooed me back inside like I had committed a crime.

The man snapped open his briefcase and passed me a thick stack of papers. He pointed to a paragraph with tiny font, marked by an arrow-shaped sticker. “As you can see here, your primary role in the Hospital is to simply exist, along with daily examinations, to ensure there are no signs of infection.”

“Sounds like the beginning of a horror movie,” I said.

“More horrifying than what you've already experienced?” The man took a fountain pen from his briefcase and placed it next to the papers. “I sincerely doubt it.”

How would
he
know what I had already experienced?

I won't even pack a suitcase, I decided then. I would go in the clothes I was wearing, my mother's photo in my pocket. I bent at the waist. My hair fell over my eyes. Blood rushed to my skull. I had my own reasons for wanting out of Somerville.

Here were the facts of my life: I worked as a cashier at a twenty-four-hour Stop & Shop, graveyard shift. My basement apartment had no windows. I slept through the daylight hours and never left for work without drinking at least four ounces of cough syrup. I stole fresh bottles from the Stop & Shop and I knew one day I would get caught and be fired, but did I care? I did not care.

It was at the Stop & Shop that I started with the cough syrup. I got the idea while restocking shelves in Health & Beauty. I tried Creomulsion, Boiron, Mucinex, but cherry-flavored Robitussin, maximum strength, was my favorite.

“I already have a suit.” I pointed at the hazmat draped over the couch, almost proud to be so well prepared.

“That won't be necessary.” He smiled, showing off long incisors. “In the Hospital, you will be safe from germs.”

It wasn't much longer before I boarded the bus and we rolled through Connecticut, Pennsylvania, the Midwest, picking up patients along the way. The trip took two days. I remember the swaying power lines and the thin blue sky and the light contracting and expanding along the horizon. At the Hospital, I watched a hazmatted nurse seal the photo in a plastic baggie and imagined the day of my release, my mother being handed back to me.

I do not know her name or where she lives or if she is still alive. Even so I have developed an attachment. I smell grass everywhere. I dream about her. In a different one, we are swimming in the ocean. No land is in sight, but we are not afraid. The water is calm and glistening. We can hold our breath for hours. When I wake in the Hospital, I wrap my hands around my head and try to remember the things she said to me.

Who else do I have to listen to?

 

4.

Every morning, a nurse comes for our examination. Their face shields are narrow rectangles, so we can't see anything but scrunching foreheads and darting eyes. Dr. Bek is the only member of the Hospital staff with a proper name and a fully visible face. I know all about psychological tricks: he wants the patients to believe he is the only one we can trust with our lives.

Today I sit on the edge of my bed and gaze through N5's shield, in search of something human. The gold flecks around her irises. The lash that has fallen out and stuck to the bluish skin under her eye. Some mornings I want to shake her white plastic sleeve and beg her to tell me what is going to happen to all of us.

Here is what she measures: our blood pressure with cuffs that squeeze and hiss; temperature with an ear thermometer that makes a clicking noise inside the canal; sight with a flashlight we have to track back and forth, up and down; coordination with the Romberg's test, where we stand straight and still, our feet pressed together, then shut our eyes and hold the pose.

Do the Romberg! Do the Romberg! I imagine a dance with steps I never learned.

“That doesn't seem so hard,” I said the first time I did the Romberg, and N5 said try doing it with holes in your brain.

I stand and she uses the same flashlight to check my skin for blisters. She examines my scalp, her rubber fingers pushing aside my hair, so close I can feel the sound of her breathing nest inside my lungs.

Three times a week, she draws blood. My arms are dappled with tiny purple bruises, like a piece of meat beginning to rot, and the sight of a needle sliding from its casing makes me shiver. I watch the needle slip under my skin and red velvety fluid fill the vial.

“Healthy as a hummingbird.” She turns to Louis, big and slow in her suit. From the far end of a hallway, in a certain kind of light, I sometimes think the nurses look like enormous white birds. The air tank underneath is a hump between her shoulders. During our first week in the Hospital, she used long Q-tips to take cultures from our throats. I remember the cotton end of the Q-tip disappearing into my mouth, the brief sensation of choking.

“Hummingbirds have a very short lifespan.” Louis extends his arm for the needle. “Three years, max.”

“Good memory trick.” N5 ties a rubber tourniquet around his biceps and the bright tip of the needle appears. Louis doesn't flinch when his blood is drawn and I wonder if he is still able to register feeling. “Now where did you learn about hummingbirds?” We are encouraged to recite whatever facts we know, to make sure we aren't forgetting.

“Costa Rica was a bestseller at the store,” he says. “I lived my life surrounded by travel guides, but I never went anywhere.”

In her suit, N5 makes a noise that sounds like approval. But how do you know he's telling the truth? I want to ask. In the Hospital, I can feel myself growing more and more suspicious.

After our exams, she crosses off the date on the countdown calendar tacked to the wall between our beds. The week is a row of black
x
's. Our calendar has a bird theme. December's is the African gray parrot—prehistoric claws gripping a branch, a beady eye I can feel following us in the night. We have seven months until we can leave, until we know for sure if we have the sickness, if we are going to stop remembering.