Laura van den Berg - Find Me

“There are a lot of stories around here,” he says.

I’m sitting on the floor, working with sheets of construction paper and a black crayon. The dark wax keeps smudging and the letter looks more like a ransom note or a deranged love letter than the story I want to tell. I don’t have the right materials. I’m learning that in some ways life is all about having the right materials at the right time.

Three pages in, I stop and rip up the sheets.

“Tell me more about what it’s like out there,” I say to Rick. I tell him that I want to know what he saw, if he was afraid.

Rick sits next to me on the olive-colored rug and tells a story about where he grew up, which was not Oregon, but a town in Ohio, in the Mahoning Valley. For many years, his family worked in the steel mills on the river. As a child, he only knew the sky to be an ocean of gray smog. By the time he was a teenager, the mills had all closed and he learned that sky came in all kinds of colors. Without the mills, there was no money. The town’s population started shrinking. Rick went out to Oregon, leaving behind thousands of empty buildings and abandoned mills lining the river like rusting ghosts.

“This town became sick,” he tells me, turning over his palms. Brown scabs have stitched together the cuts on his hands. “Now that disease has spread and spread, so instead of only some places looking sick, many places look sick. That’s what it’s like.”

“Tell me more about the Laws of the Road,” I say next.

“You would do well out there.” He points a finger at me. Dirt under the nail.

“Why’s that?”

“Women never have a problem getting a ride.”

When Rick leaves me alone in the library, I start to imagine the dark edges of the land that exist beyond the snow, waiting for those of us who will survive.

At midnight, I meet Dr. Bek in the fifth-floor stairwell. His breath echoes and I imagine we’re standing in the dark bottom of a canyon. He points a flashlight at the stairs. His silver suit makes me think of a deep-sea explorer. Of my mother. We start to climb.

To see Louis one last time, that was what I told him I wanted.

As we pass the sixth floor, he tells me more about his wife. Her name was Alice. She wanted to be an art historian. She did not want to live in Norway forever. She wanted to end up someplace warm, like São Paulo or Barcelona.

When we reach the tenth floor, my legs are trembling inside my scrubs. Dr. Bek taps a code into the keypad. At the end of the hall, white light slips through the bottom of a door.

In the final hours, patients suffer from radical changes in temperature — shivering under their sheets one minute, drenching them in sweat another. In the final hours, the brain swells, pushes against the limits of the skull. In the final hours, there is apnea, or temporary suspensions in breathing, and the stretches get longer until they stop being temporary.

Dr. Bek lets me into the room, but doesn’t follow. The door clicks shut behind me, and I wonder how long he will wait on the other side.

Louis looks like all the rest. His bed is surrounded by a plastic tent. His IV bag is heavy with fluid. A thin white sheet covers his legs. His fingers twitch on the mattress like there’s an instrument he’s trying to remember how to play. The shape of his face has changed; it is round and glowing silver.

I touch the tent and the plastic ripples. “It’s me.”

He shakes his head. All the tubes shudder. In this room on the tenth floor, there is only one bed, but it is very long and wide and he looks so small on the mattress.

“Louis,” I say again. “Do you know who I am?”

He blinks fast. His hands turn over and it looks like he’s holding fistfuls of crystals. His chest stills and I wait for him to start breathing again. He has forgotten everything.

So I will start at the beginning. So I will tell him all about us.

“My name is Joy,” I say.

He repeats my name in a slow slur, turning the word over in his mouth. I imagine the little black spot on my own memory eating away at my brain like a fungus, because that is what the sickness does, after all: it takes those dark stains that exist within us and melts them down into a lake of forgetting.

I watch fluid from the IV drip into a slender tube and decide that I will never leave him.

I reach for his chest through the plastic. He looks down at my hand like it’s a foreign thing. He’s breathing again, quick and grasping. His eyes are the color of a bleached winter sky. He can no longer speak, he can only listen, so I will have to invent for him something beautiful.

* * *

I want to ride a plane and look out the window and see water dotted with tiny green islands or blue mountains or maybe both. After the sickness, the thought of all those people sitting in rows, our fingers touching the same armrests, our breath circulating, fills me with alarm, so here is my solution: I am the only passenger, sitting in one of the middle rows, with no one behind and no one in front, the seat belt loose across my lap. Where are you going? Is there even a pilot? I ask the questions Louis would ask if he could, then I press my body against the plastic and tell him I do not know.

* * *

I first learned about flight from the Psychologist. In college, he spent a semester in Rome. First he went from Boston to New York, which took one hour, and then to Rome, which took nine hours. Did I know that a pilot and a copilot are forbidden to eat the same meal? That a 747 is made up of six million different parts? That “aerophobia” means fear of flying?

Back then I wasn’t interested in flying. I wanted to hear more about Rome.

In Rome, the Psychologist heard Plácido Domingo’s voice for the first time, on a radio. “It was the worst night of my life,” he said, in an unusual show of vulnerability, “but his voice saved me.”

I tell Louis this story too and wish it was possible to be saved by a voice.

The night Louis died, I stayed in our closet. I did not move or eat or drink for two days. I only started again because N5 pulled me out of the closet, into a burst of light, and forced a straw between my lips. She breathed at me until I started sucking down a chalky milkshake from a can. In my meeting with Dr. Bek, I told him what I wanted, but he took away the sheets and would not be moved. I watched the white ball of fabric disappear under his desk. “Louis,” he said, “is almost gone.” He couldn’t have met me in the stairwell, because he was drinking a bottle of cleaning solution on the first floor, his attempt at erasure. He survived, a miracle of the body or the unconscious mind, but was left weak enough to be confined to a wheelchair. When I heard this news I wondered if he told me the truth about the Hospital not as a way of reaching his wife, but as a way of saying good-bye. Of unburdening himself. Of settling up.

“Dr. Bek will require some time to recover from a very challenging evening.” That was what the nurses told us.

Or was I there, with Louis? I can see everything so clearly. This is the opposite of a memory trick, when you are trying to remember what you don’t remember, not because you have forgotten, not because it has been hidden in some dark corner, but because it never happened. Remembering the false memory can make you feel like you are rewriting the past, reordering the laws of physics, which of course you are not.

All you are doing is telling yourself a story.

Now my room feels empty and the noise next door is back and I imagine the Hospital is speaking to me in a language I will never be able to translate. Dr. Bek has stopped holding Community Meetings. He has stopped taking our questions and talking about our specialness, about how we will soon be well. He stays on the first floor and I imagine his wheelchair rolling up and down the white hallway below us. The nurses have stopped coming for morning examinations. We see them slouching down the halls in their suits or sitting in the Common Room and staring at the dead TV. They don’t enforce Lights Out, so the Hospital glows fluorescent day and night. Sometimes we hear muttering over the speakers, but nothing that can be called speech. When I walk the floors, I pass patients lying in the hallways, staring up at the white ceiling, and wonder what is going to happen to all of us.