Find Me (13 page)

*   *   *

We drift back down to the fifth floor. Some of the patients have congregated in the Dining Hall, even though it's not a mealtime. They are sitting at the long tables or on the floor under the windows, in pale cones of light. They have all finished searching their assigned areas. No one has seen the twins. Nightfall is slow to come to the Hospital. From the window, the eventual moon is fat and white and sunk behind banks of cloud. I want to run through the Hospital shouting: Come on out! Everyone gets found eventually.

*   *   *

The twins do not get found. They stay missing.

That night, in our beds, we hear the sound of the nurses moving up and down the hallways, and in the morning the pairs of patients are sent to look around the Hospital once more. This time Louis and I get the library. I comb the pages of the encyclopedias for clues. I examine the book on space travel.

The nurses venture out in the Hospital vans and search the land around us. Our Floor Group stands by the arched window and watches two vans move like white bullets over the snow. We all find nothing and more nothing. After the twins have been missing for three days, Dr. Bek calls a Community Meeting and explains that he has contacted the local authorities in La Harpe and they are doing what they can from the outside. They are searching too. Dogs are getting involved.

He tells us that we are not giving up on finding the boys, but not all questions have immediate answers. Life in the Hospital must continue on.

I feel Dr. Bek's breath travel down my skin. I feel something in the Hospital tilt. The possibilities, the rules of what can and cannot happen to us, are being rearranged.

The nurses stand by the window, facing away from the Floor Groups, so we can only see their humped backs. I imagine they are still looking.

Every patient has a theory. In our Floor Group, they include: falling through frozen ice; getting lost on the plains and maybe they are still out there, wandering through winter; they made it to La Harpe and were taken in by a townsperson; they made it to La Harpe and were abducted off the street; dematerialization; bears; they never left the Hospital, they are trapped somewhere inside; Hawaii.

What each theory reveals: how much hope the theorizer has left.

Raul says that maybe the twins were never here, maybe we have been driven mad by winter and started seeing things and then stopped seeing those things. Maybe something inside
us
has gone missing. I know this theory is the most untrue—how do you explain the hole and the drawings on the walls?—but the idea of our minds playing such a powerful trick scares me.

“Hawaii,” I whisper when I'm alone.

An absence, an unanswered question, is not the same as a death, not the same as what happened to Marie, and I'm starting to think that in some ways it's worse. A death without closure.

I spend most of my time by a window, any window, waiting to see the boys emerge from the land.

As the days pass, word about the twins' hole gets out. It moves through our Floor Group and despite the
KEEP OUT
sign that has been taped to their door, I start seeing white and green bodies slipping in and out of their room. I find faint trails of dirt leading into the hall. In the eyes of the patients, I detect a new kind of aliveness. An unspoken question spreads like a germ through the air: is it possible for
me
to leave too?

*   *   *

After Lights Out, after Louis has fallen asleep, I listen for the sound of the twins digging next door, but of course there is nothing. The wait for morning becomes unbearably long.

One night, I catch a different kind of sound through the walls—a strange buzzing. I get up and go to the twins' room. The air in the Hospital is still and yet the edges of the
KEEP OUT
sign flutter.

The hole has been covered with a black tarp. The beds have been stripped, white sheets folded on green mattresses, like the vacant rooms on the eighth floor. The drawings are still hanging on the walls and I'm glad it's too dark for me to see the ghost of Waialae Avenue, who has nothing better to do than drive women insane.

The buzzing sound is coming from the hole. I kneel in front of it and push away the tarp. The floor is covered in grit. There's dust and darkness and a metallic smell—not the earthy scent of dirt, but chemicals. The silver body of the air-conditioning duct snakes below the opening. If I reach into the hole, I can almost touch it. Warm air gusts onto my face. The buzzing is even louder up close, like construction is happening somewhere in the Hospital.

Could that one theory be right? Could the twins still be trapped in here?

“Sam?” I say into the hole. “Christopher?”

The buzzing gets louder. It opens a door in the side of my head and walks right into my brain. I wonder if the twins heard this sound when they lowered themselves into the tunnel, if it became unbearable as they moved through the duct, if they still had the noise ringing in their ears as they ran out into the snow.

 

15.

One morning, in the first week of February, I look out the arched window and see a pilgrim standing outside the Hospital. He is the first person to come since the start of winter. He is standing on a bank of ice. His face is wrapped in a black scarf. Only his eyes are visible and I am too far away to tell what kind of eyes they are. His hands are covered in mittens so thick, they look like bandages. He reminds me of the photos I have seen of men trekking through distant deserts, their heads swathed in cloth to protect them from the sun.

This pilgrim is holding something in his arms. This something looks long and heavy.

I squint. A swirl of human hair, a bare foot.

He is holding a body. He is holding a child.

“Nurse,” I hear myself say, but I can't move from the window. I touch the glass and feel the burn of the cold.

Other patients come to the window. The faces around me are pale blurs. They press their hands against the glass and look and look and then one of them runs away shouting, “Let him in let him in let him in!”

I watch nurses in hazmats pour out of the Hospital. They trudge through the snow, their white arms flapping. The pilgrim skids down the bank of ice. One of the nurses takes the pilgrim by the shoulders and another touches the body and then they all start rushing back toward the Hospital. In the arms of the pilgrim, the body is still in a way that lets me know the child is no longer alive. Everyone, even the pilgrim, disappears inside.

I imagine a chill moving across a person's skin and into their veins. I imagine the veins delivering the chill like poison to the lungs and spleen and heart. All those soft squishy places that want to stay warm. The person runs and sweats, a comfort until the wet fabric turns to ice on their ribs and they forget how exactly running is supposed to work. They can feel their body temperature dropping, a machine shutting down. They think about going back, to the place where people do experiments with blood, where they know they will be welcomed, because they still have blood to give. They turn around, look at the endless white field behind them, and realize the way back has become a mystery. They are getting very sleepy. They lie down under a tree. They imagine the tree is a house and they are climbing through a window and getting warm by a fire or a stove or a bearskin rug with the head still on and the mouth open like this rug has been waiting its whole life to eat someone.
Hawaii
, they keep saying to each other, trying to ignore the hungry bearskin rug, until they can't feel anything, not their tongues drying up in their mouths, not their slowing hearts, not their eyes that flicker like a wild, trapped animal until they stop.

In the hallway a patient screams and it takes me a second to realize the screaming person is me.

 

16.

I run straight into our room. I shut myself in the bathroom. Get in the shower stall and turn the water on. Listen to the water beat the tile. Sit on the floor in my scrubs and feel the cold spray. I turn my body into a tight ball to keep everything from shaking loose. I want to drown out the sound of me.

From the window I was too far away to know if the body should be called Christopher or Sam.

*   *   *

I don't know how long I'm in the shower before Louis pulls back the curtain and turns off the water and tries to get me to come out. At first I won't break the tight ball of my body, because I am afraid of what will happen if I do. He sits next to me in the shower stall and touches my wet knee. The toes of his slippers are soggy.

He starts explaining about how I missed the Emergency Community Meeting, missed Dr. Bek saying that they have no choice but to admit the pilgrim to the Hospital, that releasing him back into the world was not an option. I missed the way the meeting broke up, with Dr. Bek turning away from the patients, toward the window, and releasing a long and shuddering sigh, a rare admission of defeat.

The pilgrim was carrying Sam. He died from exposure. He was killed by the weather. I think of the slides Dr. Bek showed us, of the house that was being eaten by winter. Christopher is still out there and this pilgrim is the only person who knows where he is.

Right now the nurses are conducting a full examination in the basement. They are preparing him to meet us.

In the shower, my palms are fixed to the wet floor and there is an awful pressure in my chest.

“Joy,” he says. “Can you hear me?”

My hair is dripping. Everything is dripping. My scrubs are stuck to my skin. It sounds like he's speaking to me through a wall.

I shake my head. I feel the cold of the tiles on the back of my scalp, taste the salt of snot.

“Joy.” He lets go of my knee. “The pilgrim is coming upstairs.”

*   *   *

The patients clot in the fifth-floor hallway. I listen to the coughs and sniffs, to the slipper soles scratching the white floors. Some patients stand in the middle of the hall, their arms crossed, others lean against the walls. Patients from Group four take turns punching the dead elevator buttons to pass the time. Louis and I keep watching the stairwell door, the unlit exit sign. We are in a fog of disbelief. No one from the outside has ever been let into the Hospital before.

It takes a long time for the nurses to bring the pilgrim up. We whisper and nudge as he emerges from the stairwell, into the blistering fluorescent light. He pauses under the exit sign, starts moving toward us.

He's wearing slippers and scrubs like the rest of us, like he's never been anything but a patient, except he smells of the rankest part of nature. The nurses trudge behind him, a white hissing mass. The pilgrim hunches inside his scrubs. His slippers drag against the floor. His hands have been unwrapped, revealing slivers of pink oozing skin. His fingernails are black crescents. Matted gray hair coats his arms and the back of his neck. His eyes are beady and dark. Reptilian.

Louis is standing next to me. I hold on to his arm. The lights pour down on us, bleach out our skin. The ends of my hair are still damp.

The patients part to make room for the pilgrim. We don't say anything. We step aside. He stops in the middle of the hall, the nurses breathing on one end, Dr. Bek breathing on the other, the patients all around him, flashes of white wall visible between our bodies. He looks very tired, but he does not look afraid. A red cut pulses along the side of his throat.

He knows what we want to know and before we can even ask he starts telling us about finding the boys lying together in the snow, in the shadow of a tree. Icicles hung from the branches like rows of teeth. Their eyes were closed. Their bodies were wrapped in white sheets, their feet in pillowcases. Their hair shone with ice. At first he thought he was hallucinating—from a distance they looked like mummies—but then he touched their cheeks and they became instantly real. He checked for breath and found only the worst silence. These children were wearing scrubs and he knew they must have come from the Hospital, the very place he was trying to find.

“I tried to bring them both back to you,” the pilgrim tells us. He stretches out his arms like that second child, that left-behind child, might appear in the empty space. “But I could only carry the one.”

 

17.

Without the twins, life in the Hospital feels stiller, quieter, like a creature that's been stunned. The nurses are silent during our morning exams. They forget to mark the days on our calendar and we don't remind them. They rush through the Romberg. The needle is not a gentle slide, but a jab. N5 never brings up what she said in the closet and I don't know how to ask.

I start to cry one morning as she prepares to take my blood. My veins are swollen and throbbing. You're taking too much from us, I want to tell her, but instead I just say, “No,” and hide my arm behind my back like a stubborn child. She takes my wrist and straightens my arm. She ties the rubber around my biceps and the needle finds its way in.

With the pilgrim's guidance, two nurses drive out into the plains in search of Christopher. I imagine the nurses leaving the van and creeping through the land in their hazmat suits, the careful crunch of their steps, the echo of their breath slipping around the trees. Their long, strange shadows. Will the animals see them? What will they think? From the arched window, our Floor Group watches the van make its way back to the Hospital. The windshield gleams. The black tires spin on the snow.

The nurses unload a small blue body bag from the back of the van. Olds and Older whimper, clasp their hands to their mouths and turn away. Dense cottony clouds loom in the sky.

The patients stop asking questions at Community Meetings. No one shows up for morning yoga or Saturday night movies. The nurses turn on the videos at the appointed times and end up sitting on the empty couch, watching the hero charge through a blaze of gunfire or yoga people twist their bodies in ways that would be impossible in the suits.