Laura van den Berg - Find Me

I find a video of her in a minisubmarine that looks like a giant orange egg. The video lasts two minutes and forty-three seconds. I replay it thirteen times. Her figure is miniature inside the machine.

I watch the submarine move gradually into a stream of light. The camera tilts upward and I see the outline of the cave, black and yawning, like the open mouth of a giant. As she passes through the entrance, the light shifts, becomes translucent.

I listen to the supervising nurse breathe in a corner and think about all the staff does not know. I don’t want to share my mother with the Hospital. She is one of the only things in here that feels private, that belongs to me.

I want to edit her Wikipedia page, even though online we’re only supposed to observe, not communicate: check the weather, check the news, check the death list. No e-mails, no status updates. For our safety, Dr. Bek has assured us. Our security.

Under Biography I could type: In 1995, a daughter, Joy Jones, was born.

Her daughter grew into a fine person, maybe even a special person, despite her mother leaving her outside in winter . Those are just some of the things I could write.

I close the window.

No one will ever write a Wikipedia page for me.

* * *

In another session, I find my mother’s phone number, the one for her headquarters on Shadow Key: Rescue, Inc. I stare at the number, the ten digits linked by dashes, until it has been committed to memory.

* * *

After the blizzard, the snow does not stop. It keeps falling, hiding the plains behind a curtain of white, and a patient from Floor Group two turns symptomatic. During her morning exam, a nurse discovered a shoulder pocked with silver blisters. I imagine a gloved hand raising her scrubs and finding a shoulder blade turned to quartz. When they asked about the season, she smiled and said, “Summertime.” The nurses called for Dr. Bek and didn’t mark another day on her calendar. By breakfast she was on the tenth floor and I wanted my brain to be filled with ice.

In the Common Room, I stand by the window and remember winter in Boston, how in January the ice would become thick and permanent and items would get trapped inside: a penny, a cigarette butt, a Coke bottle, a pen. On one of those raw winter days, I looked down at a frozen street corner and saw my own face looking back and imagined the ice had gotten me.

Later, in the Dining Hall, I wander around with an empty red tray. It’s lunchtime, but for once I don’t feel like eating. Louis is sitting alone at a table, apart from our Floor Group. Thunder booms outside and I wonder if another storm is coming and all of a sudden I’m not in the Hospital anymore. I’m back on the bus that brought us here. I’m looking out the window and seeing a sneaker lying in a ditch, the shoelaces black with mud, and then I’m back, standing next to Louis, who is dissecting a burrito with his fork.

“Shit,” I say.

“Don’t you wonder who’ll be next?” he says without looking up. “We should start taking bets.”

I’ve hidden my mother’s photo in my pillowcase. When I’m alone, I take it out and will myself not to get sick.

“I wouldn’t bet on you,” I say. “You’re going to live a very long time.”

“How would you know?”

I smile, no teeth. “Assholes live forever.”

He does not smile back. I sit down next to him. He slumps in his chair. We don’t speak for a while. I slide my empty tray back and forth on the table.

“Will you cut that out?” Louis smacks the table, glaring.

I let go of the tray. His hands are cupped around his eyes. I want to touch every finger, to kiss every knuckle, like I used to when we first came to the Hospital and weren’t afraid to act like we needed each other.

“What’s the matter with you? Besides the obvious, I mean.” The obvious being the country getting razed by forgetting and then coming back to life and all the while we stay stuck in here, getting sicker.

“Paige doesn’t want to see me.”

“Oh,” I say. “Did she give you a reason?”

His hands fall into his lap. He looks out at the patients bent over their plates and sawing open burritos with plastic knives. “Do I really need to tell you, Joy? This is a hopeless place, for hopeless people. Not a place for romance.”

“I don’t know about all that,” I say.

I touch his shoulder and feel heat rising from his body, proof of his aliveness. I want to tell him to not give up, that Paige only loves running, that she was never going to love him, that there are other kinds of people in here.

There is, for example, me.

“Well.” He rubs the fine hair on his arms. “It’s not like I was madly in love.”

“Oh,” I say again. “So you don’t miss her?”

“What I miss is living.”

I keep my hand on his shoulder. I feel his skin grow warmer under my palm.

Across the room, I catch the twins sitting under an empty table. Their legs are bent and pulled to their chests. They’re facing each other, chins resting on knees, and whispering. They go unnoticed by the patients walking past, by everyone but me.

* * *

I walk the Hospital for hours that afternoon. In the third-floor hallway, I pass a spot where the paint has bubbled. I touch the lump, troubled by the anomaly, by the image of tumors multiplying inside the building and pushing their way through the walls. The cold coming up through the floor makes the bones in my feet ache. Afterwards I visit the Dining Hall and then do a slow pass through the Common Room, where Curtis is trying to get the TV to come on.

“Any luck?” I ask him. How I miss seeing my mother’s face.

“Nope.” He kneels behind the black box and fiddles with a nest of yellow wires. During the blizzard, a patient snuck into the Common Room and pissed in a corner. Our Floor Group treated the stain with powdered carpet cleaner, but there’s still a dark, tangy splotch.

In the days between our Internet Sessions, we worry about what might be happening. If life on the outside is still getting better or if it is getting worse. We know how quickly things can change: one day the sickness does not exist; one day the sickness is in California; one day it is everywhere; one day it is starting to disappear. The scheduled Internet Sessions are like sips of water in a long hot desert, and we want more to drink.

Curtis gives up on the TV and starts grumbling about Dr. Bek’s lack of progress. “Why should we keep waiting around here to die?” he says, dropping into the battered couch, not quite talking to me.

I start to hear a scraping sound coming from the twins’ room at night. It’s a soft clawing noise, like they’re using their fingernails to scratch through the floor. I roll away from the wall and shut my eyes, but I can’t stop listening. I imagine miners pickaxing their way through a cave, archaeologists excavating ruins, explorers drilling through the earth’s crust and mantle and into the deepest core.

* * *

Some nights I don’t listen to the twins at all because I am tangled up in a net of remembering. I think about the stories Marcus and I used to tell each other in Charlestown. Real-Life Ghost Stories, we called them. Here’s one.

On my first night in Mission Hill, I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom and when I looked up, an older girl was in the doorway. She was tan and wide. Pink jelly bracelets were stacked on her wrists. She smacked the toothbrush out of my hand. It clattered against the floor. White foam ran down my chin. I felt the bathroom shrinking. She smacked me in the face. I crashed into the wall, banging my head on the sharp edge of the paper towel dispenser. She cornered me and did it again and again — fast, open-handed slaps. My face was scorching. My mouth was filling with blood. Her last slap knocked loose a tooth, a molar, and I swallowed it whole.