Laura van den Berg - Find Me

In the hallway a patient screams and it takes me a second to realize the screaming person is me.

I run straight into our room. I shut myself in the bathroom. Get in the shower stall and turn the water on. Listen to the water beat the tile. Sit on the floor in my scrubs and feel the cold spray. I turn my body into a tight ball to keep everything from shaking loose. I want to drown out the sound of me.

From the window I was too far away to know if the body should be called Christopher or Sam.

* * *

I don’t know how long I’m in the shower before Louis pulls back the curtain and turns off the water and tries to get me to come out. At first I won’t break the tight ball of my body, because I am afraid of what will happen if I do. He sits next to me in the shower stall and touches my wet knee. The toes of his slippers are soggy.

He starts explaining about how I missed the Emergency Community Meeting, missed Dr. Bek saying that they have no choice but to admit the pilgrim to the Hospital, that releasing him back into the world was not an option. I missed the way the meeting broke up, with Dr. Bek turning away from the patients, toward the window, and releasing a long and shuddering sigh, a rare admission of defeat.

The pilgrim was carrying Sam. He died from exposure. He was killed by the weather. I think of the slides Dr. Bek showed us, of the house that was being eaten by winter. Christopher is still out there and this pilgrim is the only person who knows where he is.

Right now the nurses are conducting a full examination in the basement. They are preparing him to meet us.

In the shower, my palms are fixed to the wet floor and there is an awful pressure in my chest.

“Joy,” he says. “Can you hear me?”

My hair is dripping. Everything is dripping. My scrubs are stuck to my skin. It sounds like he’s speaking to me through a wall.

I shake my head. I feel the cold of the tiles on the back of my scalp, taste the salt of snot.

“Joy.” He lets go of my knee. “The pilgrim is coming upstairs.”

* * *

The patients clot in the fifth-floor hallway. I listen to the coughs and sniffs, to the slipper soles scratching the white floors. Some patients stand in the middle of the hall, their arms crossed, others lean against the walls. Patients from Group four take turns punching the dead elevator buttons to pass the time. Louis and I keep watching the stairwell door, the unlit exit sign. We are in a fog of disbelief. No one from the outside has ever been let into the Hospital before.

It takes a long time for the nurses to bring the pilgrim up. We whisper and nudge as he emerges from the stairwell, into the blistering fluorescent light. He pauses under the exit sign, starts moving toward us.

He’s wearing slippers and scrubs like the rest of us, like he’s never been anything but a patient, except he smells of the rankest part of nature. The nurses trudge behind him, a white hissing mass. The pilgrim hunches inside his scrubs. His slippers drag against the floor. His hands have been unwrapped, revealing slivers of pink oozing skin. His fingernails are black crescents. Matted gray hair coats his arms and the back of his neck. His eyes are beady and dark. Reptilian.

Louis is standing next to me. I hold on to his arm. The lights pour down on us, bleach out our skin. The ends of my hair are still damp.

The patients part to make room for the pilgrim. We don’t say anything. We step aside. He stops in the middle of the hall, the nurses breathing on one end, Dr. Bek breathing on the other, the patients all around him, flashes of white wall visible between our bodies. He looks very tired, but he does not look afraid. A red cut pulses along the side of his throat.

He knows what we want to know and before we can even ask he starts telling us about finding the boys lying together in the snow, in the shadow of a tree. Icicles hung from the branches like rows of teeth. Their eyes were closed. Their bodies were wrapped in white sheets, their feet in pillowcases. Their hair shone with ice. At first he thought he was hallucinating — from a distance they looked like mummies — but then he touched their cheeks and they became instantly real. He checked for breath and found only the worst silence. These children were wearing scrubs and he knew they must have come from the Hospital, the very place he was trying to find.

“I tried to bring them both back to you,” the pilgrim tells us. He stretches out his arms like that second child, that left-behind child, might appear in the empty space. “But I could only carry the one.”

Without the twins, life in the Hospital feels stiller, quieter, like a creature that’s been stunned. The nurses are silent during our morning exams. They forget to mark the days on our calendar and we don’t remind them. They rush through the Romberg. The needle is not a gentle slide, but a jab. N5 never brings up what she said in the closet and I don’t know how to ask.

I start to cry one morning as she prepares to take my blood. My veins are swollen and throbbing. You’re taking too much from us, I want to tell her, but instead I just say, “No,” and hide my arm behind my back like a stubborn child. She takes my wrist and straightens my arm. She ties the rubber around my biceps and the needle finds its way in.

With the pilgrim’s guidance, two nurses drive out into the plains in search of Christopher. I imagine the nurses leaving the van and creeping through the land in their hazmat suits, the careful crunch of their steps, the echo of their breath slipping around the trees. Their long, strange shadows. Will the animals see them? What will they think? From the arched window, our Floor Group watches the van make its way back to the Hospital. The windshield gleams. The black tires spin on the snow.

The nurses unload a small blue body bag from the back of the van. Olds and Older whimper, clasp their hands to their mouths and turn away. Dense cottony clouds loom in the sky.

The patients stop asking questions at Community Meetings. No one shows up for morning yoga or Saturday night movies. The nurses turn on the videos at the appointed times and end up sitting on the empty couch, watching the hero charge through a blaze of gunfire or yoga people twist their bodies in ways that would be impossible in the suits.

Not a single patient continues to entertain the idea of escape.

The pilgrim is named Rick and he came all the way from Eugene, Oregon, to find us. He is assigned to our Floor Group.

Curtis has an empty bed in his room, so he and Rick become roommates. Curtis tells us that in the mornings he finds Rick not in his bed, but asleep on the floor, bundled up in his sheets. He’s caught him pissing in a corner. He saw his bright white ass. Once he woke in the night and Rick was standing at the foot of his bed. He was just looking at Curtis. And whistling.

“Whistling what?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Curtis says. “Country western, it sounded like.”

It is the afternoon. Our bellies are full from lunch.

“The point here is that to be a cop means to be an excellent judge of character,” Curtis tells our Floor Group. “And that guy is not right at all.” He points at Rick, who is standing alone at the other end of the hallway, staring at a white wall.

We have to show Rick how to use the microwaves in the Dining Hall. Without our help, he finds these machines confusing. When it is time for us to clean, we have to show Rick how to wipe the handprints and scuff marks from the Common Room walls. At first, we talk to him as little as possible, because we can’t look at him without seeing Sam’s body in his arms.

I try to focus on my mother, on leaving the Hospital and finding her, but that lost feeling is creeping back. I walk the Hospital until my feet are numb, hoping the numbness will spread. I keep to the lit hallways. I stay away from the ghost floors and the basement. I keep visiting the hole at night and stay long enough for the buzzing to make my eardrums burn. I feel on the brink of seeing the Hospital’s inner machinery, its lungs and guts and heart. Its secrets.