Find Me (21 page)

Behind the counter we find a man in a Kiss T-shirt. His chin is barbed with dark hair. He has a lazy eye. We tell him that we're lost.

“What are you trying to find?”

“The Econo Lodge. Washington Street.”

A plastic container filled with vials of black rocks sit on the counter. The man picks one up and shakes it.
W. VA COAL
is painted across the vial in small red letters.

“This isn't real coal,” the man tells us, one eye drifting toward the door. “But it sure looks real, doesn't it?”

Marcus and I are starting to think this man in the Kiss T-shirt is not someone who can help us, but then he starts drawing a map on a brown paper napkin. He tells us we're close to where we want to be. He sketches out a tight maze of streets and adds arrows to show us where to go.

“Have you seen those people with painted faces running around?” I ask the man. “What are they?”

“Oh, those people,” the man says, shaking his head.

We wait, but he doesn't give us anything more.

We thank him and head back out into the night.

“Mountaineers are always free,” he calls after us.

We have no idea what that means.

We follow his map back to the white building with the domed roof, but then we get turned around again. We end up sitting on the steps of the building and blowing hot air on our fingers. I can feel the blisters growing inside my sneakers. We watch the sun rise over the river and soak the water in light. We set out again with our little gas station map and this time we don't walk for long before we find ourselves, as if by magic, standing right outside the place we are supposed to be.

*   *   *

In our motel room, I get into one of the beds. The curtains are thick and block the rising sun; in here it is endless night. Marcus is sitting on the other bed and scratching the skin behind his mask.

I turn on the TV, where a reporter is chronicling all the ways people have tried to find cures. One man concocted an antidote from household cleaning supplies and poisoned his entire family. After the sickness ended, they were found lying in a circle on their living room floor, feet pointed at the wall, heads pointed at the center of the circle, like they were playing a game or doing a meditation exercise or taking a nap from which they would, at any moment, wake.

Next door a man is shouting. The noise is too much. My mother seems very far away. I feel the world grow duller, feel sound melt into a fuzz, and it occurs to me that this might be what it's like when you begin to die.

When I wake, Marcus is kneeling next to me and holding a finger under my nose. He blinks at me from inside the rabbit mask. My feet push at the empty space at the bottom of the bed. I feel slow and thirsty, like I have been away on a very long adventure I can no longer recall.

“Are you alive in there?” Marcus says.

I sit up and the sleep peels away like sand falling out of my hair.

“You've been asleep for twelve hours.” He pulls his hand back. “Ten hours is a coma. I was starting to get worried.”

I look at the bedside clock. Already another day is slipping past. Outside the Hospital the rules of time are confusing to me. Maybe in my sleep I was swimming toward that new self I know is out there.

The TV is still on, but muted. A camera pans across a purple mountain range, an advertisement for a special kind of oxygen-enriched air. This air is called Super Air and it promises to help you get what we all want: more time on earth.

“Yes,” I say, for the second time since leaving the Hospital. “I am alive.”

*   *   *

When I was alone, the act of calling my mother's number, of pressing that particular sequence of buttons, seemed impossible. With Marcus, I feel braver.

Still, I don't call right away. He walks me through the phone visualization exercise again and this time I get as far as the booth and the ringing; I just can't get myself to walk on the screen and answer. We each take showers and we wash our shirts in the sink and dry them with the hair dryer in our room, which is long and white instead of dark and gun-shaped. In the bathroom mirror, we stand side by side and look at our reflections. I can see my nipples through the thin cotton of my bra and I don't feel exposed and I don't feel ashamed. Marcus's body is still boyish. His torso is pale and hairless except for the soft ring around his bellybutton and the freckle over his right nipple. With his masked face I think he looks like a wrestler and tell him so.

“What would your wrestling name be?” I ask. “Marcus the Marauder. Marcus the Murderer.”

“Marcus the Monster!”

“Marcus the Monsoon!”

“Rabbits are vicious,” he says.

We laugh and in the mirror our stomachs ripple.

I'm so starved that my body feels like it has been emptied, like I contain nothing but dust. We get dressed and go outside, driven by hunger, and find the same white-faced mob standing on a street corner and passing out sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil and Styrofoam cups filled with cold coffee. The day is the color of slate. We drink the coffee and chew the stale bread. Marcus slips everything under his mask with an expertise that makes it look like a magic trick. These provisions are free and right now anything free feels like a blessing.

When we ask these people if they remember us from the night before, if they remember nearly running us the fuck over, the bright white faces stare back, uncomprehending. When we ask them what they're doing out here, they tell us that this is their city and they are saving it. When we ask them why they run in the night, they tell us they do it because they are so glad to still be among the living.

Inside the motel we pass a woman cleaning the fake ferns with a sponge, and when she sees our sandwiches, she points the sponge at us and says, “Goddamn those people. They are terrorizing this city.” She tells us the sandwiches are probably poisoned. We each ate two sandwiches apiece and we don't know what to believe. What if the acrobats are part of some kind of cult? What if they are trying to incite mass suicide? In our room, we sit on a bed and hold our stomachs. We suffer no ill effects.

Calling my mother is the last thing I do before we leave. I pick up the phone and listen to the dial tone. I start pressing the numbers. The phone rings and rings. I count to twelve and hang up.

“No one's there.”

“Try again,” Marcus says.

The phone rings three times before someone answers. They don't say anything, but I can hear them breathing on the line. Is this my mother? Does she know who I am?

“Hello,” I say.

There is just breath and breath and breath.

*   *   *

On the road there are certain things we learn to count on. There are the water fountains with the rotten egg smell and the low-pressure ones that force your lips too close to the spout. The rough brown paper towels we use to clean our faces and necks and armpits and between our legs in the bathrooms, except for when the dispenser is empty and what you want is a wet crumple on the floor. In that case, we use toilet paper or little white napkins or go without. There are the bathrooms that are clean and the ones that look like a tiny apocalypse. In Horse Cave, Kentucky, I see a cardboard core of a toilet paper roll soaked in blood. There's the thin gas station coffee we doctor with sugar and cream. The vending machines that eat your change and the ones that give you double Cheetos, which feels like cosmic balance. The shifting configuration of the riders, like a party where the pool of guests keeps getting made over, except no one is talking or laughing or having any fun. There is the smell of exhaust, the smell of unclean bodies, the smell of hot dogs roasting on gas station counters, the skin crisped and gleaming, the smell of the tall boys passengers crack open late at night. The road is alive. There are people in rest area parking lots, filling up tanks, spreading maps across hoods. There are Jehovah's Witnesses handing out pamphlets and telling us that God cares about the individual burden of our suffering. There are cars and pickup trucks and semis rolling alongside us on the highway. Everyone is trying to get somewhere.

 

27.

In Memphis, the bus drops us on the outskirts of the city. We have been riding for nine hours, passing through towns with names like Cattlesberg and Hurricane and Coalton. We are down to seven dollars and fifteen cents.

We passed the Olympia State Forest and signs for Dinosaur World and I thought about the books in the Hospital library, about asteroids and epidemics and continental drift. In Black Rock, Arkansas, we passed a lake with a tiny forest in the center. I looked into the dense dark trees and wondered what kinds of things might be living in there. In a gas station bathroom, I saw a sign that said
USE THE RECOVERY POSITION
, with a drawing of one person standing over another and rolling them onto their side.

Somewhere in Tennessee, on I-40, the driver pulled onto the shoulder and got out. What is wrong with these drivers? He stood in the cold, staring at the barbed-wire fence and the snowy field beyond it. The wire points on the fence looked like tiny stars. I watched his breath rise above him in white clouds. The passengers cupped their hands and peered out the frosted windows, waiting for something to happen.

Marcus and I rapped the panes. A few people went out and tried to see what was going on. A woman wanted to get the keys and drive the bus herself, to leave this man behind, if that's what he wanted, but the driver wouldn't hand over the keys and no one seemed willing to take them by force.

After two hours, the driver got back on the bus and continued down the highway. No one knew what changed within him, why he stopped in the first place or why he decided to keep driving.

Is there any greater mystery than the separateness of each person?

Now the sun is sinking, another night-soaked arrival in a strange place. That is the pattern of our days, not clock time, but the cycles of light and dark. For a while we walk along a river and Marcus tells me about how, before the sickness, he bounced around shelters in Cambridge, played chess for cash in Harvard Square. He beat the mental patients and the teenage geniuses and the punks and the professors. He had an uncanny ability to predict his opponent's next move. For a while, he belonged to a group at a community center that was supposed to teach its members life skills, but when they got together all they did was stand around and hug each other.

“You mean like sex?” I say, not wanting to imagine all those lost people groping each other on some musty basement carpet.

“No, I mean like this,” he says, and wraps his arms around my shoulders.

In darkness, we climb a steep hill. We find train tracks to follow and hope they will lead us somewhere, to lights, to people, but everything we pass looks deserted. A string of little houses with screened porches and soft, sunken roofs. Impenetrable thickets of bramble and tree. An abandoned barn.

I remember waiting for the T one night, at a stop where the trains went above ground, and seeing a man with a backpack trudging up the tracks, into the distant dark. I shouted “Watch out for the trains!” and felt ridiculous for warning him of such an obvious danger. Didn't I know the worst dangers weren't the obvious ones?

We leave the tracks and head in the direction of the barn. We get snagged on roots, brush against the rough trunks of trees. There is no light anywhere around us.

“Fucking shit,” we say.

We are lost. There is no getting away from that. We decide to sleep in the barn. At least it is a structure, with four walls and a roof. We walk through a doorway that is missing its door, into an enormous space as dark as an underground cave or a black hole in outer space or the Hospital at night.

The floor is blanketed in frozen leaves. As we go down, they crunch like tiny bones.

I dream about the Hospital. I'm alone, in one of those white hallways, the window a distant arch at the end. I'm standing under a speaker and the most terrible noise is pouring into me. It is Dr. Bek's rasping breath, only much louder than before, like a team of hazmatted people are standing around a microphone and speaking into it. In the dream, I have been in this hallway, listening to this noise, for many years. I want to stop the noise, to knock the speaker off the wall, to tear out the wires, but I have no way to do such a thing. I don't have any of the right skills and that seems like the worst part, my inability to save myself.

When I stop dreaming, I'm grabbing at leaves and daylight is streaming through two coffin-shaped windows and large hawkish birds are perched on the wooden beams above. I can see light coming through the holes in the walls. I hear a rustling in the corners and the wind outside.

I sit up. A pebble falls out of my ear. Leaves are trapped in my hair. My mouth feels like it's full of gravel. Dirt is stuck to my arms. There is a sloshing in my stomach. One of the hawkish birds swoops down and lands on the ground. It pushes the leaves around and then flies away with a small squirming thing clutched in its beak.

I shake Marcus awake.

We get up. We look around. We touch the walls of the barn, searching for liquid, condensation, melting ice. We are that thirsty. That desperate to get what we need to survive. On the walls, there is no liquid, just dust that sticks to our fingers. It hurts to walk, to bend down, to look up, to breathe. Outside we find small patches of snow and we eat them. I take off my gardening gloves and scoop the ice into my palms and lap at it like a dog. The snow has rocks in it and tastes like dirt.

*   *   *

When we leave the barn, the afternoon sun is low and fading, like all the color is being slowly sucked out, and we realize we are on the edge of a property. From a distance, we can see an old house on a hill, a two-story with a dormer roof and a sagging wraparound porch. The dark splotches on the roof where shingles are missing look like water curving around land on a map. The white paint is peeling. The front door is knobless. A neon yellow skull has been graffitied in the center. A tall metal frame stands to the left of the house, as though the structure was abandoned mid-renovation.