Find Me (11 page)

Dr. Bek looks around the room, the silver head of his suit turning back and forth like it is moving independently from the rest of him. “Believe in your own wellness. Right here in this room, feel every cell in your body grow stronger.”

The patients are not in the mood for meditations.

What we want is answers to our questions. Has he made any progress? Is he closer to a cure? How much longer until you are standing up there and talking about my death? That is the question we are all really asking him.

“Next time” is Dr. Bek's answer. His head stills and his suit shudders, like something very strange is happening inside his body. “We are treating you. We are getting closer. That's why you are all so important. For the next time.”

He holds out his gloved hands, palms turned up, as though he is about to give us a blessing. “In times of sadness, it is important to not give in to negative feelings. To not be afraid.”

I think about how the Psychologist in Allston, with his little white electrodes, was the last person who told me to not be afraid.

“What if there wasn't a next time?” Curtis shouts, his voice tearing through our Floor Group. He's standing right in front of me, and I can see the flush climbing his neck. He breaks away and moves closer to the front. Group three scrambles up from the couch, still staring.

Olds and Older are right next to me, wild-eyed and rubbing their palms together and telling everyone they don't want to die in here. The twins are lost in our Floor Group, in the rush of adult bodies, but I can hear them going on about the TV, how we need it, how it should be working, and others start taking up their cause.

The room gets loud and hot and my memory tips back to summers in Boston, when the hair on my neck was always damp and the standing fans in my basement apartment churned around the warm air. At the Stop & Shop, every time the doors opened the heat would find its way in. I would escape to Frozens and press icy bags of peas against my forehead. On the T, the heat swarmed the bodies slouching in seats, the bodies wound around the poles, the bodies holding the straps like children who had tired of standing. When the cars rose aboveground and clacked across the tracks, the sun burned through the windows and I felt the burn in my cheeks just like the one I'm feeling now, in the Common Room.

Patients stomp and chant. Some are chanting for hazmat suits and some are chanting for a new TV and some are chanting for our release and some are shouting, “Cure! Cure! Cure!” The mantras spread like fire. The exception is the guy from California, the one who led the rebellion in the Dining Hall, who is looking at all of us like, Oh no, not this shit again.

I sink into the crowd. Green and white figures spread across the Common Room like a wave. I lose sight of Dr. Bek. The patients spill over the couch and around the TV, still chanting. The nurses have vanished from the doorway, leaving Dr. Bek to face us on his own.

Me, I'm not chanting for anything. I just want the noise to stop.

“I can't breathe in here,” I say to Louis. I swat at my chest, swat at his arm, looking for something steady.

The heat, the noise, it swells like a balloon. We are too much for this space to hold. We are about to blow it apart. Dr. Bek bolts up the side of the room, a silver flash shooting into the hall, and then everyone starts to run.

Dr. Bek races down the white hall. The fluorescents hit the edges of his hazmat, framing his body in light. All the patients follow. The fifth floor is filled with the thunder of our footsteps. The patients in the lead reach for Dr. Bek, their fingers long and pale. What will happen if we catch him? Will we tear off his suit and rub our hands all over his face and say, You are one of us now?

Patients fall and claw their way back. Those who can't run as fast, who are abandoned by the group, throw themselves against the walls and scream. I feel a hand grabbing at my ankle, digging nails, and I nearly go down, but Louis takes me by the elbow and pulls me up.

We are falling behind, Louis and me, but that doesn't mean we aren't still a part of it.

“Garrr!”
Sam and Christopher call out.

The halls pass in a white smudge. When Dr. Bek reaches the Dining Hall, he taps a code into the keypad and darts inside. We hear the doors lock behind him, the heavy click.

Patients kick the doors. They slam their bodies against them. There are two small round windows in the doors and Dr. Bek stares out at us through one of those windows, so still that he looks like he could be part of an exhibit, an astronaut frozen behind a sheet of glass.

A plan is devised to break into the Dining Hall. No one knows the code, so patients raid the supply closets for brooms and mops and beat the doors with the long wooden handles. The tools the Hospital has given us to fulfill our duties, to maintain cleanliness and order, are now being used in the name of chaos. Broom handles bash the round panes, but the glass appears unbreakable. Dr. Bek's face recedes from the window. I imagine him shrinking into a dark corner of the Dining Hall, breathing fast inside his suit.

When the doors do not open, the patients try to guess the code. We try the date of the first reported case and the date of our arrival at the Hospital and random configurations of numbers. After each wrong entry, the keypad turns red and bleats with disapproval. Some patients throw down their weapons and say they will wait for as long as it takes, but after a few hours most of us grow bored and listless and abandon the scene of our crime.

*   *   *

A small group of patients insists on guarding the Dining Hall. Others wander back to their rooms or the Common Room, where they sit in front of the blank TV, awaiting further instruction. Others travel down to the basement, hoping to figure out the code, but then they look through the triangular window and see the white ocean outside and go back upstairs. In the Hospital, we are far away from everything.

I'm walking the third-floor hallway when I hear a sound coming from the supply closet. I open the door and find N5 sitting there.

She's pressed into a corner, next to a plastic caddy filled with cleaning supplies. Behind the shield her eyes are bloodshot. She's holding on to her shins and I can see the shapes of her knuckles through the gloves. She blinks at me. Each breath is long and gasping. I look down at her and wonder what the consequences of abandoning Dr. Bek will be.

“It's over,” I say. It's strange to see a member of the staff looking so small and vulnerable, so human. “Everything is calming down.” I am surprised by my desire to help.

“I don't understand why you're doing this to us,” she cries. Her lids disappear. Her eyes grow wide. “We're not even real doctors.”

*   *   *

The patients give up their rebellion when they realize nothing works in the Hospital without Dr. Bek and his staff. The Dining Hall stays locked. There is no other place for us to get food. There is no Lights Out. The fluorescent overheads burn through the night. The few patients intent on guarding the Dining Hall sleep on the floor and wake feeling cold and hungry and stiff. In the morning, they go back to their floors, to their rooms, and wait for their morning examinations. No one comes.

Louis and I drink water from the bathroom tap. We knead our aching stomachs. We give each other an exam. Louis pantomimes administering a shot. I sit on my mattress. His fingers form an imaginary needle. He takes my arm and nudges the delicate purple skin, a fake needle looking for a real vein.

“This won't hurt.” He frowns at my arm. “Hold still. Let us help you.”

A sure sign it's going to hurt? The more a person tells you it won't, the more you can be certain it will.

“Owww,” I say.

We peek beneath scrubs and down throats. His throat is a dark moist tunnel. When I look under his scrubs, I see the flat white of his stomach, the soft blond fuzz. We palm foreheads and peel back eyelids. We do the Romberg. It feels good to be close to him.

Once we are touching each other, how can we be expected to stop? Soon I am flat against his bed, my scrubs around my ankles. My legs are parting and then he is on top of me, pushing. It's daytime and there is no lock on the door, so we are quick, but I will never forget the feeling of blood flooding my body or our hot grasping hands or the way his eyes rolled back as we slipped into a place where time has no meaning, where we forget all about hunger, where we are so completely alive it seems impossible that we will not live forever.

*   *   *

All day the staff remains invisible. The patients are silent and drifting. The Dining Hall is still locked. We have not eaten in twenty-four hours. There are no meditations. I go back to the third floor and look for N5 in the supply closet, but there's just the caddie stuffed with rags and spray bottles. I begin to worry they have left us for good.

From the Common Room window, I watch the sky go dark. I can still smell Louis in my hair and on my fingers. I can't stop wondering where my mother is right now.

Is she happy? Is she alone? Is she glad to be alive?

You might think we the patients would band together and make our own kingdom. You might think we would figure out a way to leave the Hospital, to trek into the closest town, La Harpe, or at least find a way into the Dining Hall. In December, when Floor Groups four and six threw around the trays, there was a leader. This time around, the patient from California is holed up in his room. He wants no part in leadership and no other leader has emerged. Still, there are seventy-four patients, the better part of a hundred. Isn't this what we wanted, freedom from the rules? Why aren't we doing anything useful with that freedom? What is wrong with us?

The longer the staff stays missing, the more patients I see curling up in corners or wandering aimlessly under the lights. Everyone starts taking on the same blank expression, the look of a child who has been left behind in a shopping mall, the look that knows there are all these people here but they are not the
right
people—where have those right people gone? How can I get them to come back?

Under the hallway lights, I read the twins' palms in the way that Marcus taught me. From their thumbs, I can tell them about the division between will and logic and that they both fall on the side of will. The fingers of Saturn are longer than the fingers of Apollo. I can't find Sam's life line and instead of the truth I tell him his is as strong a line as I have ever seen.

That evening, the Pathologist's voice washes over the floors. I look up at the speakers, hopeful. I remember the evangelical church in Somerville and wonder if this is what it feels like to be called by God, to hear a voice and peer into the lights above and know at once what it is you're supposed to be doing with your life—which is, in my case, to proceed immediately to the Dining Hall.

In the Dining Hall, I find patients lining up for red trays. The line is straight and slow. There is no pushing, no laughing or screaming, no accusations of cutting. The windows are dark. Dr. Bek and the nurses stand against a wall, silent, watching. They have nothing to say to us. Already I can see our Floor Group cleaning the Common Room, erasing the evidence of what we've done.

Louis is there. He touches my hip. Together we fall into line.

I don't tell him what N5 said to me in the closet. Her words are too large and slippery to make the journey from thought, from memory, to speech.

The staff left us alone just long enough for us to imagine a life without their oversight, a life of hunger and bathroom tap water and an endless wait for spring and maybe even cannibalism. I read all about the Donner Party in the Hospital library: I know what hungry people can become capable of. We thought time moved slowly before, but it was nothing compared to the way time moved without exams and meals and activities and testing. If you have no way to mark the hours, no variance in the days, time will open its mouth and swallow you.

*   *   *

After Lights Out, I hear the same scratching sound next door, but this time I get out of bed and investigate. In the twins' room, I find the boys by the hole. Sam is holding a flashlight. Christopher is pecking at the ground with a big metal spoon, the kind of serving spoon I've seen before in the Dining Hall.

“Where did you get
that
?” I whisper.

“We stole it,” the boys whisper back.

The medicine cabinet blocks the bathroom entrance. Linoleum squares are piled nearby like shed skin. Sam points the flashlight at the hole and I am astonished by the size. The opening is as large as a car tire. I move closer and feel grit on the bottoms of my feet and think about how long it's been since I've touched the outdoors.

I remember: snow in my eyelashes, grass sticking to my elbows, dirt on my knees.

The boys are crouched like rabbits around the hole, wide-eyed and pale. The freckles on their throats look like a spreading rash. Christopher holds the spoon in midair. I can hear their quick, panting breath. Sam shines the flashlight in my eyes and they become hidden behind a bright white wall.

“You can't leave.” I raise a hand to block the glare. For starters, no one knows the keypad codes. For starters, the weather. The light stays on me and I try to find the boys in it.

I'm imagining a means of escape that is only passable by children, a path that gets tighter the longer you crawl, so what I really mean is: you can't leave me.

“We found our way out,” Christopher says.

They lower the light. Translucent circles slip around in my vision. I blink them away. From the sound of metal striking earth, I know the twins have gone back to digging.

*   *   *

In the middle of breakfast, we hear that familiar voice on the speakers. We let our plastic spoons sink into our oatmeal, gray and gummy from the microwave, and look up toward the noise.

THERE WILL BE NO MORE TV
, the Pathologist tells us, and I know right away that this is not a meditation. Apparently the weather has made it impossible to fix the lines. He pauses, and there's a gurgling that is something like a cough or a growl or a person quietly drowning.
AND BESIDES
, he continues,
DID YOU REALLY THINK THERE WOULD BE NO PENALTY FOR WHAT YOU'VE DONE?