Find Me (3 page)

“No, he does not,” the nurse answers for him. She turns a magazine page.

Hair bits are stuck to my thighs. I brush them away. I stand and look at my hair spread all over the floor and try not to panic. In my head, I start a new list, because lists are what I lean on when I get upset.

In the Hospital, I have seen women with bangs that hang like curtains over their eyes and ends so split it looks like they've been electrocuted. I have seen a pixie cut that never seems to grow. In the Hospital, I have seen men with sideburns, men who only have swirls of hair at their temples, men with small bald spots on top of their heads, round and shiny as coins. There are all kinds of people in here.

Raul gives my bangs one last snip and calls for the next patient.

Louis is still hanging around the hallway. A few patients from other Floor Groups have wandered over and fallen into line. I rush past, sweeping hair from my scrubs.

“Sheepdog!” he shouts as I walk by. “Sheepdog, sheepdog!”

I hurry into our bathroom. In the mirror, my hair is short and thick, so it puffs out like a helmet, and heavy bangs blanket half my forehead. I lean closer and notice a black hair on the tip of my nose. I flick it into the sink and turn on the faucet.

“Fuck you, Raul,” I say to no one.

*   *   *

One morning, near the end of November, I look out a Dining Hall window and there's just this one pilgrim, a woman. She isn't someone I've seen before. She wears a saggy black coat and her pale hair, which I envy immediately, falls past her waist. “Hello,” I whisper. My breath makes a fog circle on the glass.

It takes me a minute to realize the pilgrim is barefoot. Her feet are white and delicate. The bare skin glints in the daylight, so it looks like her feet are made of crystal, like that part of her body is not quite real. I gaze through the bars and try to imagine what it would feel like to stand barefoot on that frozen ground.

Breakfast is over. Floor Groups four and six have finished cleaning the microwave trays with the smelly green sponges. I turn to call to Louis, to show him this barefoot woman, who must have some kind of death wish, forgetting that he's long gone, lured away by Paige, who needed a timer. After all, what is the point of running if there's no finish line? No audience? No one to tell you that you've won?

Louis and I used to have rituals. We sat across from each other at breakfast each morning. We kissed in the dark of the stairwells, his hands disappearing under my scrubs. I can still remember the wet, electric feeling of his tongue pressing into the hollow spot at the bottom of my throat. Now we are just roommates. Nothing more.

In Kansas, when it is not the dead of winter, there are lots of sunflowers. In Kansas, in the year 1897, in a city called Atchison, Amelia Earhart was born. Kansas is not the flattest state in America. In Dodge City, spitting on the sidewalk is illegal. The state insect is the honeybee. The people who live here are called Kansans.

I repeat my list about Kansas and keep watching the pilgrim, who—like everything else in the world—is unreachable through the distance and the glass.

*   *   *

Lights Out is at ten o'clock and to our room it brings the darkest night I've ever seen. It's not like city darkness, softened by streetlights and headlights, but thick and black as tar. Louis isn't in bed for Lights Out—typical ever since he took up with Paige; her roommate was among the first to go to the tenth floor, so she can be counted on for privacy—but he returns not long after, in the mood to talk.

If your roommate dies, you remain in your room. There is no switching, no matter how lonely you get.

Tonight he's complaining about the food. In the Hospital, we have eaten lumps of breaded chicken drenched in a mysterious red sauce and partially defrosted peas and hard, stale dinner rolls, which Louis thinks taste like ash. At dinner, we pick up these rolls and make like we're going to clunk each other in the head.

“At least we're alive,” I say. “When you're dead, you don't get to eat at all.”

“Like
ash
,” says Louis.

I stretch my legs underneath the sheets, into the cool space at the bottom of the bed. Our room smells like rubbing alcohol and Vaseline. Louis can talk about whatever he likes. I just want to keep hearing his voice.

In the beginning, I would climb into his bed and feel his hands move down my waist. The whole time, I told myself we just needed something that felt familiar, needed to prove that a part of ourselves still belonged to the outside world. But during our second month the routine changed. After Lights Out, I burrowed next to him, started kissing his chest. He sat up and shrugged me away. At first, I thought this was a symptom: the prions were attacking his brain, he was losing his memory, he no longer knew who I was.
Quick
, I remember saying to myself, as though there was something for me to do.

In the dark, he started talking about his wife. He told me about the tangles of hair he would find in the bathroom, like tumbleweeds, or the way she used to unroll maps on the floor of their travel bookstore and trace the blue lines of rivers with her pinkie finger. He was remembering perfectly well.

His wife died in the third week of July, at five in the morning, at the Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia.

They lived in Philadelphia, Louis and his wife, in an apartment above their travel bookstore. I lived in a basement apartment on a dead-end street, on the eastern edge of Somerville. I want to believe I can have a fresh start here, in the Hospital.

That night, after Louis stops talking, I concentrate on where I am, in a safe place, in the care of medical experts, but the truth is our Hospital is in middle-of-nowhere Kansas and it is very dark. There aren't even shadows on the walls.

When he starts to snore, I crouch beside his bed and watch him sleep. A hand rests over his heart. His eyelids flutter, and I wonder if he's dreaming.

In the Hospital, I can't get away from the idea that sleep is preparation for death.

I slip out of our room and down the hall. The arched window looks beautiful and foreboding in the night. The floodlights illuminate the ground outside and it's a relief to be away from the deep dark of our room. I look for the barefoot woman, but don't see anything except falling snow, the flakes fat and drifting sideways. I've been told that in this part of the country, once the snow begins, the cold will be endless.

I remember the perfect cartwheel the pilgrim did before he wandered out into the plains. I lose my slippers and run down the hallway with my hands over my head. Step, reach, kick. Soon I'm dizzy. My brain rocks back and forth inside my skull.

Here is a dream I keep having about my mother: We are sitting at a round table, a glass of water between us. She is faceless, but I know it's her. We are both staring into the glass. There's a gold coin in the bottom. We want to get it out, but don't know how.

I fall four times, knees and elbows smacking cold linoleum, before I get one right. No one has ever called me a fast learner.

 

3.

For most of my life before the Hospital, I was an orphan. As a baby, I was left on the steps of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, in the winter. A nurse found me wrapped in a white T-shirt and rolling around in a cardboard supermarket box, the kind of thing you put oranges in. I was in the early stages of frostbite.

From my first group home I remember: sleeping on mattresses with springs that time had turned flat and hard; a hole in the staircase that was a portal for winged roaches; sandwiches made of Wonder Bread and grape jelly; a communal bathroom with snot green walls and a ceiling dotted with mold. In this bathroom, all the sinks dripped. In this bathroom, I found tampons, heavy with water and blood, clogging the shower drain. The light was always flickering off, usually when someone was in the shower. The girls at the home started spreading rumors about a ghost in the bathroom, when we all knew the ghost could be any one of us.

This was in Roxbury. Back then I dreamed of the countryside: fields with mazes of tall grass, graceful rivers, climbing trees. Nearby there was an overgrown lot surrounded by a chain-link fence, and sometimes I would slip through a hole in the fence and walk through the dead grass, ignoring the shattered glass and the shadows of crumbling buildings, pretending I was free.

Once a fire alarm tore open our night. Eighteen girls raced down the staircase, led by our overnight counselor, a woman who wore white knee socks with sandals and her hair in a thick braid. Eighteen girls scattered across the front lawn. Some had thought to pull on shoes and some, like me, had just run. It was September and already there was a sharp chill in the air. I could feel a splinter settling into the arch of my foot. I stood on one leg. The night was dark and still. A grease fire had ignited in the kitchen. We watched smoke blacken the windows as we waited for the howl of the sirens, waited to be saved.

The kitchen was scorched long before a fire truck came, an early lesson in exactly how much the outside world cared about us.

I didn't know anything about my real mother until the sickness. That was the second thing that brought me to the Hospital.

During the sickness, a company called Last Rites was formed. For a fee, they got the dying whatever they wanted. The first person they kissed. A vintage arcade game. A jar of sand from a foreign beach. In the early days of August, I got a call from a Last Rites representative who said my aunt wanted to see me. When I told them I didn't have an aunt, didn't have any family at all, they said I did. Her name was Christina. My mother's sister. She was at Mass General. If I ever wanted to see her, this was my chance.

I was exhausted. I hadn't been sleeping. The nights were a long scream of emergency. I'd started seeing orange spots in the air, small discs that slid through the streams of dust and light in my apartment—a symptom, I was increasingly sure, of something incurable. The T was closed. There were no taxis or buses. I hadn't been outside in days, surviving on soup cups and lime Jell-O and getting stoned on cough syrup. My apartment felt like a tomb, the door a seal—would I ever get out? The representative's voice had a hypnotic effect on me. I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman speaking. They told me to wait ten minutes and then go outside.

The street was scattered with flyers warning people to stay in their homes and refuse contact with the sick. There was a drawing of a man peering out a window, one arm around a woman, the other around a child. Some flyers lay in the gutter, the paper a black pulp.

On the corner an aluminum trash can had been overturned. A thin brown dog trotted up and licked the metal edges. The dog ran away, howling. The sky was clear and bright.

At first, the black town car was a spot in my periphery. I looked down the street and watched it grow larger, turn into something real. The driver wore an orange hazmat suit. A nozzle connected mouth to body. A thin sheet of glass separated the backseat from the front. Inside the car reeked of bleach. The smell made my eyes run and my nose itch.

The streets stayed empty. We passed telephone poles papered with flyers and yards wild with vines and yellow grass.

HUMAN SACRIFICES
someone had spray-painted on the concrete side of a municipal building in dark, oozing letters.

It felt strange to be in the car, to be the one on the inside.

As we drove through Cambridge, I thought about Mount Auburn Cemetery, to the west of Harvard Square, and imagined the land swelling with bodies. I thought about the shop across the street from the cemetery that sold headstones. They were displayed outside, smooth hunks of gray and blue marble, made taller in the winter by ridges of snow. There was a condominium building next door, and I thought about what it must be like for the people who lived there to stare down at their eventual destiny. I thought about the supermarket a little farther up Mount Auburn and the jigsaw of abandoned shopping carts that always filled the parking lot.

All these signs of the end. How could we claim to have been caught by surprise?

We crossed over the Charles River, empty water.

At Mass General, a hazmatted doctor showed me to a quarantine room, where a suit of my own was waiting, hanging from a hook on the wall. A chair and table stood in the center of the room, parts of the hazmat—neon yellow boots, blue rubber gloves—laid out on top. First, an inspection. The doctor searched my body for silver blisters and then pointed a little flashlight in my eyes.

“Dilated pupils,” he observed.

“It's the Robitussin,” I said.

How much Robitussin and do you take it all the time? he might have asked.

So much, all the time, I might have said.

Instead the doctor clicked off the flashlight, unfazed. Dilated pupils were not a symptom of what he was tasked with finding.

I had to sit in the chair and do a coordination test where I placed my hands on my thighs and turned them over thirty times in a row.

“A beautiful brain,” the doctor said when I finished. He lifted the suit off the wall and carried it over to me.

I worked the suit on, one leg at a time. The boots and gloves followed. The air tank on my back was the size of a small fire extinguisher. The doctor secured the sleeves and legs with thick tape. He pulled the hood over my head and sealed me inside.

I followed him down a beige hallway. In the suit, my steps were clumsy and slow, as though I was moving underwater, and my heart felt like it was beating outside my body. I counted the heavy thuds.

Christina's bed was encased in a clear plastic tent. Machines surrounded her, screens and monitors that beeped and growled and sprouted white tubes. Her cheeks were collapsing into her face, as though the interior structure, the bones, were melting away. Her hair was a pale swirl on the pillow. She had a silver sore in the center of her forehead like an extra eye.

An epidemic of forgetting. That much is known. First: silver blisters, like fish scales, like the patient is evolving into a different class of creature. Second: the loss of memory. The slips might be small at first, but by the end the patient won't remember the most basic details of who they are. What is a job? What is a staircase? What is a goldfish? A telephone? A spoon? What is a mother? What is a me? Coordination deteriorates. Vision goes strange. The patient falls into a coma and never wakes.