Laura van den Berg - Find Me

* * *

In the Hospital, I worry the gap in the back of my mouth with my tongue.

* * *

Here’s another. After I had been with Ms. Neuman for a year, I woke to find Marcus sitting on my legs in his Frankenstein mask, the rubber bolts sticking out of his temples. He told me he had a dream. We needed to go downstairs. In the living room, we found Ms. Neuman lying on the carpet, in the glow of the TV, her ex-husband talking about stationary weather fronts in his toupee. Her slip was hiked up. She was still holding the remote. A stroke, not the killing kind, but she couldn’t take care of us anymore, my case worker would tell me later, after I was gone from the yellow house on Ferrin Street, gone from Marcus, after I was spitting blood into a bathroom sink in Mission Hill and wondering how he knew.

At the next Community Meeting, Dr. Bek informs us that the patient from Floor Group two has died. He tells us about the silver scales on her fingertips, about her forgetting. He tells us the last thing she said, “Oh,” and I imagine her lips rounding and her eyes growing large. I wonder if that “Oh” was a sudden recognition, a final moment of remembering.

He tells us her name, Marie.

In the Common Room, Floor Group two collapses into itself, knees bending, arms folding across stomachs, a structure dissolving into dust. They are the ones who will see the absence in her bed and in their hallway and when they push around the laundry carts. Each time a Group is reduced by a single body, a single voice, every member feels themselves grow smaller.

The nurses are a mass in the doorway. I can hear them breathing behind us, the rustle of their suits. Floor Group three sits on the couch and stares at Dr. Bek like a row of inquisitors. The standing patients sway between the white walls. After this Community Meeting, our Floor Group will do our best to clean away the palm prints from the walls, the greasy outlines of fingers that always make me think about the residue of ghosts — if ghosts leave anything behind.

There is no mention of what has happened to Marie’s body. Late at night, in our room, Louis and I have agreed there must be a large incinerator somewhere in the Hospital.

Dr. Bek looks around the room, the silver head of his suit turning back and forth like it is moving independently from the rest of him. “Believe in your own wellness. Right here in this room, feel every cell in your body grow stronger.”

The patients are not in the mood for meditations.

What we want is answers to our questions. Has he made any progress? Is he closer to a cure? How much longer until you are standing up there and talking about my death? That is the question we are all really asking him.

“Next time” is Dr. Bek’s answer. His head stills and his suit shudders, like something very strange is happening inside his body. “We are treating you. We are getting closer. That’s why you are all so important. For the next time.”

He holds out his gloved hands, palms turned up, as though he is about to give us a blessing. “In times of sadness, it is important to not give in to negative feelings. To not be afraid.”

I think about how the Psychologist in Allston, with his little white electrodes, was the last person who told me to not be afraid.

“What if there wasn’t a next time?” Curtis shouts, his voice tearing through our Floor Group. He’s standing right in front of me, and I can see the flush climbing his neck. He breaks away and moves closer to the front. Group three scrambles up from the couch, still staring.

Olds and Older are right next to me, wild-eyed and rubbing their palms together and telling everyone they don’t want to die in here. The twins are lost in our Floor Group, in the rush of adult bodies, but I can hear them going on about the TV, how we need it, how it should be working, and others start taking up their cause.

The room gets loud and hot and my memory tips back to summers in Boston, when the hair on my neck was always damp and the standing fans in my basement apartment churned around the warm air. At the Stop & Shop, every time the doors opened the heat would find its way in. I would escape to Frozens and press icy bags of peas against my forehead. On the T, the heat swarmed the bodies slouching in seats, the bodies wound around the poles, the bodies holding the straps like children who had tired of standing. When the cars rose aboveground and clacked across the tracks, the sun burned through the windows and I felt the burn in my cheeks just like the one I’m feeling now, in the Common Room.

Patients stomp and chant. Some are chanting for hazmat suits and some are chanting for a new TV and some are chanting for our release and some are shouting, “Cure! Cure! Cure!” The mantras spread like fire. The exception is the guy from California, the one who led the rebellion in the Dining Hall, who is looking at all of us like, Oh no, not this shit again.

I sink into the crowd. Green and white figures spread across the Common Room like a wave. I lose sight of Dr. Bek. The patients spill over the couch and around the TV, still chanting. The nurses have vanished from the doorway, leaving Dr. Bek to face us on his own.

Me, I’m not chanting for anything. I just want the noise to stop.

“I can’t breathe in here,” I say to Louis. I swat at my chest, swat at his arm, looking for something steady.

The heat, the noise, it swells like a balloon. We are too much for this space to hold. We are about to blow it apart. Dr. Bek bolts up the side of the room, a silver flash shooting into the hall, and then everyone starts to run.

Dr. Bek races down the white hall. The fluorescents hit the edges of his hazmat, framing his body in light. All the patients follow. The fifth floor is filled with the thunder of our footsteps. The patients in the lead reach for Dr. Bek, their fingers long and pale. What will happen if we catch him? Will we tear off his suit and rub our hands all over his face and say, You are one of us now?

Patients fall and claw their way back. Those who can’t run as fast, who are abandoned by the group, throw themselves against the walls and scream. I feel a hand grabbing at my ankle, digging nails, and I nearly go down, but Louis takes me by the elbow and pulls me up.

We are falling behind, Louis and me, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t still a part of it.

“Garrr!” Sam and Christopher call out.

The halls pass in a white smudge. When Dr. Bek reaches the Dining Hall, he taps a code into the keypad and darts inside. We hear the doors lock behind him, the heavy click.

Patients kick the doors. They slam their bodies against them. There are two small round windows in the doors and Dr. Bek stares out at us through one of those windows, so still that he looks like he could be part of an exhibit, an astronaut frozen behind a sheet of glass.

A plan is devised to break into the Dining Hall. No one knows the code, so patients raid the supply closets for brooms and mops and beat the doors with the long wooden handles. The tools the Hospital has given us to fulfill our duties, to maintain cleanliness and order, are now being used in the name of chaos. Broom handles bash the round panes, but the glass appears unbreakable. Dr. Bek’s face recedes from the window. I imagine him shrinking into a dark corner of the Dining Hall, breathing fast inside his suit.

When the doors do not open, the patients try to guess the code. We try the date of the first reported case and the date of our arrival at the Hospital and random configurations of numbers. After each wrong entry, the keypad turns red and bleats with disapproval. Some patients throw down their weapons and say they will wait for as long as it takes, but after a few hours most of us grow bored and listless and abandon the scene of our crime.