Find Me (18 page)

“I don't want her,” he says when the manager introduces us.

“You were almost caught the last time.” The manager hands No Name a sheet of paper, folded in half. “You need a lookout.”

He jams the paper into his pocket. “You sure these are empty?”

“I'm sure,” the manager says. “I just called them. Twice.”

No Name stalks into a concrete courtyard, where shriveled brown plants sit frozen in clay pots. We pass a swimming pool that looks like no pool I have ever seen before. A giant pink clamshell hangs over it like a very beautiful awning. I stop and watch the water lap at the edges of the night.

“Keep up,” No Name calls over his shoulder, and I forget about the pool and chase after him.

We walk along an open hallway, to a corner room on the ground floor. He slips a key into the door and we disappear inside. The room is dark. I move through a cloud of tiny bugs. I can't see them, but I can feel the itch of infestation move down a finger, across the back of my neck. One bug gets stuck in my eye. I'm supposed to stay by the door and listen for voices, footsteps. If someone tries to enter the room, I'm supposed to say that I work for the motel and there is a plumbing emergency under way inside and it is not a thing anyone would want to smell or see. He starts with the drawers by the TV and I catch the gold glint of a watch. The lights from outside wash the blinds in a soft glow.

“People always hide things in Bibles,” No Name whispers in the dark.

He does a quick sweep of the bathroom and the closet and then we're off to our next room, on the second floor. He finds a wedding ring hidden inside a pair of socks—according to No Name, people are always leaving wedding rings in their room too—and a ten-dollar bill on the bathroom counter. We're about to leave when I hear footsteps coming down the hall and go rigid.

“Hey,” I whisper, touching a finger to my mouth.

No Name flattens himself against the wall. I silently recite my lines about the plumbing emergency. We both wait, our breath drawn inside us, and listen to the footsteps pass. We hear them stop at the other end of the hall. A door opens and shuts.

“You're not terrible at this,” No Name says when we're back outside and moving down another hallway, the lights above wavering like the ones inside the T cars in Boston.

“What's the closest you've ever come?”

“Once a woman came back to her room. I was in the bathroom when I heard the door and I had to hide in the shower until she left. She was walking around the room and talking to herself. She kept saying that she had done wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. If she found me, I knew there would be no way out, no way to explain. That was when it was decided I needed someone like you.”

I whistle. My heels are rubbed raw. The insides of my pockets are still wet from the snow. “That's pretty close.”

“I've come closer with other things,” he says.

*   *   *

At ten, No Name announces it's time for a break. He unlocks a vacant room with a king bed. He sits down on the bed and takes out a pack of cigarettes. Soon the room is clotted with gray.

Smoking is not allowed in the Hospital, I want to tell him.

Sitting on the bed might suggest something I don't want to suggest, so I stay on my feet, by the door. I take off the gardening gloves and examine the grooves of dirt and blood on my knuckles, the black under my fingernails. Do I look like I escaped from someplace awful? Do I look like I ever had a home?

“What did you do before the sickness?” The red carpet is damp, like the one in the lobby, and I can feel a chill coming off the walls.

“Same kind of thing. Only bigger.” He's smoking one cigarette after another and putting them out on the bedspread. The comforter is dotted with small, dark holes. I smell burnt polyester.

“What about during?”

No Name tells me that he was living here, in this motel in Kansas City, when the sickness came. Was there a better place to be? He had a bed, a shower, a TV, a telephone. If you knew where to look, there were endless supplies of bottled water, bar soap, towels, saltine crackers in plastic pouches. From the window, he could monitor what was happening outside. After the sickness ended, he decided to stay. He had been on the move his whole life—why not try living in one place? And then once the recovery began and travelers started filling the rooms, he and the manager saw an opportunity.

I ask No Name what he knows about Kansas City and he tells me this place is nicknamed the City of Fountains because there are hundreds of fountains. The cowboy boot was invented here. Kansas City is home to one of the world's largest roller coasters.

“Not just one of the largest in the country,” he says, shaking his cigarette. “But in the world.”

“Not bad,” I say back. No Name seems to be fond of Kansas City.

“My turn to ask a question.” He blows smoke from the side of his mouth. “How long are you sticking around?”

“Only one night. I have someplace to be.”

Kansas City is just the first stop. Tomorrow I will keep pushing south.

“Someplace to be?” A pierced eyebrow pops up. He puts out another cigarette and the bed hisses. “Well aren't you fancy.”

I hear sirens outside. I go over to the TV and try to turn it on, but the set is dead, defective, like the one I left behind in the Hospital.

“If I wanted a room with a TV, I would have gotten us a room with a TV,” No Name says. “I'm real fucking tired of the news.”

I ask him for a cigarette. He lights a fresh one and holds it out. I reach, but I'm standing too far away and he's not coming to me; I have to get closer. I take the cigarette and sit down on the floor and feel the wet of the carpet seeping into my jeans.

“So,” I say, taking a drag. “What were things like before around here? How is it different now?”

He waves his cigarette and I follow the gray swirls. “What do you mean
how
?”

I want to tell him I've been in a Hospital for months and I have almost forgotten what it feels like to wear regular clothes and to breathe in city air and to stand in the tall shadows of buildings and to see people who are not patients, who have never been patients. I have almost forgotten there are people out there who smoke. I don't know what it was like a week after the sickness ended or a month after. I don't know if the emptiness and the rot is a new situation or if things have always been this way out here.

“I'm not very well traveled,” I say instead.

“What's your theory?” he wants to know.

“My theory?”

“Of the sickness. Why it happened.”

“I don't like to speculate,” I tell him in place of the truth, which is: I have no idea. I let the line of ash get longer. I didn't really want to smoke. I just needed something to do. Outside the Hospital, conversation feels like a bright light in my face and I want to get away from the glare.

“Here's what I think.” No Name kneels in front of me. His hood slips back and I see a red birthmark, vaguely Florida-shaped, on his temple. His cigarette has burned down to a white stub. “I think someone out there wanted very badly for another person to forget what they knew. I think someone started this whole goddamn thing just to make one person forget.”

“That seems like a lot of trouble for just one person.”

“Doesn't it?” No Name nods like we're agreeing. He puts out his cigarette and once again the bed sizzles. I'm starting to feel sick from the smoke. My body is not used to pollutants. I'm not sure how much longer I can stand being on break.

He takes out his list and calls the motel manager. He nixes one room and adds another.

“Back to work,” he says after he hangs up.

What's your real name? I know better than to ask.

“I want the next room.” My cigarette has gone dead between my fingers. My lap is dusted in ash.

“We'll see,” says No Name.

*   *   *

When we hit our last room for the night, I get to do the stealing. I start with the dresser drawers. Empty. I move on to the bathroom, where I find a single pearl earring on the counter. The pearl is large and light, definitely fake, but I scoop it anyway. I wonder if the earring means this room belongs to a woman—if she is out here on her own, like me.

The first thing I ever stole was a comb. In Roxbury, I watched a girl run this comb through her hair day after day and coveted the pink plastic teeth. One morning she left the comb on her pillow and I took it without thinking, in a blaze of want.

I never felt bad for stealing cough syrup from the Stop & Shop. They always seemed to have too much of everything.

In the bedside drawers, I find a postcard stuck between the pages of the Bible. I'm about to call it quits when I notice a coat draped over a chair. The inside breast pocket holds two crisp fifties and a map of American highways, folded into a tiny square.

We examine our haul in the break room. We close the blinds and flick on the lights and dump everything on the king bed. We kneel together on the floor, breathless, sifting through our loot. The air is still heavy with smoke.

He counts the money: three hundred and seventy-five dollars. The coating on the fake pearl is peeling and faded. Neither of us want it; we took it for nothing. The postcard is a black-and-white image of waves breaking on a beach. The sky is caked with cloud except in the center, where flecks of light have burned through. Someone somewhere wrote an address and a message on the back, but the ink has bled.

No Name hands me a thin stack of bills. “This is for you.”

A hundred dollars, plus the map.

I stare at the back of the postcard, trying to decipher the dark smudges. “I think this was addressed to someone in Virginia.”

What an elegant, gentle-sounding name for a place, Virginia.

“Take it if you want.” No Name pulls out his cigarettes and beats the bottom of the pack. “It's worthless.”

*   *   *

In exchange for my work, I get a room on the third floor. I strip and hang my clothes in the little closet by the bathroom. In the mirror, my skin is chalk white. My bangs have grown down to my eyebrows. My legs are coated in rough fuzz. The hair in my armpits and around my crotch is a dark tangle. I rub the tender veins in my arms.

In the shower, I scrub myself with a washcloth until my skin is throbbing and pink, as though the cells hold memories I want to erase. I stand under the showerhead and let the water beat my shoulders for a while, waiting for someone to come and tell me that I'm taking too long or that it's time for a Community Meeting or Lights Out. Time to do the Romberg.

No one does.

It takes me a while to get the temperature right. For a while, the water either scalds or freezes.

I forget to put down a bath mat and leave wet footprints on the tile floor.

Once, in Roxbury, there was an outbreak of head lice and it was decided the cure was drenching our hair in mayonnaise and waving hot dryers over our heads until our scalps were burning.

I remember this when I see the gun-shaped hair dryer under the motel sink.

After the shower, I sit on the bed and line up the postcard and my mother's photo. They look right together, the captain and her sea.

I turn on the TV, hoping for
Mysteries of the Sea
, but instead an “outbreak retrospective” is on the news. A number of survivors have, in the last month, vanished. Some have moved across the country, abandoning jobs and mortgages and families, leaving behind only a letter to explain or just disappearing in the middle of the night. There are empty cubicles in office buildings and dogs tied to mailboxes and mounds of newspapers in their dewy plastic packaging on doorsteps. Others have committed suicide. Approximately five hundred people, to date. The news calls it a “microepidemic.”

In an interview, a mental health expert explains that some survivors can't make sense of what they've lived through, of why they've lived through it, so they shed their life and assume another or shed their life and assume death. This man has a neat beard and a sweater-vest and I'm skeptical he knows very much about what it's like to live through unbearable things.

Images from the sickness come next: long lumps under white sheets; patients cowering behind plastic tents, tubes springing from their arms, skin brilliant with silver sores; helicopters sweeping cities; an army of yellow hazmat suits flooding a wide street. I don't want to keep watching, but I can't seem to make myself change the channel.

The final death toll was close to four hundred thousand, more than half the population of Boston. Now there is debate about whether the “microepidemic” victims should be added to that count or if they demand a count of their own.

A woman standing on a street corner, the wind whipping around her. A tissue crumpled in her hand. A flush is spreading down her nose and across her cheeks. She looks to be about the same age as my own mother. Her son survived the sickness, then dove off the Golden Gate Bridge. He left a note telling her he couldn't trust the world anymore.

What would Dr. Bek have to say about this man, about his unconscious mind?

She looks into the camera. A clear stream runs from her nose.

“When could we ever?” she says.

*   *   *

In the middle of the night, I get up and go down to the swimming pool. Under the clamshell, the water looks as soft and pink as a tongue. I smell the bitterness of chlorine. There's a crack in the concrete bottom shaped like a bolt of lightning. The white lounge chairs surrounding the pool are heaped with snow. No one else is in the courtyard. All the floors are silent.

Again I take off my clothes. I don't know what else to do with all this freedom.

The pool is barely lukewarm. The advertised heating feels like a lie. Like something to hate. My body is different than it was on land—lighter, more nimble, like all the blood in my veins has been replaced with air. My nipples are purple and hard.