Laura van den Berg - Find Me

He counts the money: three hundred and seventy-five dollars. The coating on the fake pearl is peeling and faded. Neither of us want it; we took it for nothing. The postcard is a black-and-white image of waves breaking on a beach. The sky is caked with cloud except in the center, where flecks of light have burned through. Someone somewhere wrote an address and a message on the back, but the ink has bled.

No Name hands me a thin stack of bills. “This is for you.”

A hundred dollars, plus the map.

I stare at the back of the postcard, trying to decipher the dark smudges. “I think this was addressed to someone in Virginia.”

What an elegant, gentle-sounding name for a place, Virginia.

“Take it if you want.” No Name pulls out his cigarettes and beats the bottom of the pack. “It’s worthless.”

* * *

In exchange for my work, I get a room on the third floor. I strip and hang my clothes in the little closet by the bathroom. In the mirror, my skin is chalk white. My bangs have grown down to my eyebrows. My legs are coated in rough fuzz. The hair in my armpits and around my crotch is a dark tangle. I rub the tender veins in my arms.

In the shower, I scrub myself with a washcloth until my skin is throbbing and pink, as though the cells hold memories I want to erase. I stand under the showerhead and let the water beat my shoulders for a while, waiting for someone to come and tell me that I’m taking too long or that it’s time for a Community Meeting or Lights Out. Time to do the Romberg.

No one does.

It takes me a while to get the temperature right. For a while, the water either scalds or freezes.

I forget to put down a bath mat and leave wet footprints on the tile floor.

Once, in Roxbury, there was an outbreak of head lice and it was decided the cure was drenching our hair in mayonnaise and waving hot dryers over our heads until our scalps were burning.

I remember this when I see the gun-shaped hair dryer under the motel sink.

After the shower, I sit on the bed and line up the postcard and my mother’s photo. They look right together, the captain and her sea.

I turn on the TV, hoping for Mysteries of the Sea , but instead an “outbreak retrospective” is on the news. A number of survivors have, in the last month, vanished. Some have moved across the country, abandoning jobs and mortgages and families, leaving behind only a letter to explain or just disappearing in the middle of the night. There are empty cubicles in office buildings and dogs tied to mailboxes and mounds of newspapers in their dewy plastic packaging on doorsteps. Others have committed suicide. Approximately five hundred people, to date. The news calls it a “microepidemic.”

In an interview, a mental health expert explains that some survivors can’t make sense of what they’ve lived through, of why they’ve lived through it, so they shed their life and assume another or shed their life and assume death. This man has a neat beard and a sweater-vest and I’m skeptical he knows very much about what it’s like to live through unbearable things.

Images from the sickness come next: long lumps under white sheets; patients cowering behind plastic tents, tubes springing from their arms, skin brilliant with silver sores; helicopters sweeping cities; an army of yellow hazmat suits flooding a wide street. I don’t want to keep watching, but I can’t seem to make myself change the channel.

The final death toll was close to four hundred thousand, more than half the population of Boston. Now there is debate about whether the “microepidemic” victims should be added to that count or if they demand a count of their own.

A woman standing on a street corner, the wind whipping around her. A tissue crumpled in her hand. A flush is spreading down her nose and across her cheeks. She looks to be about the same age as my own mother. Her son survived the sickness, then dove off the Golden Gate Bridge. He left a note telling her he couldn’t trust the world anymore.

What would Dr. Bek have to say about this man, about his unconscious mind?

She looks into the camera. A clear stream runs from her nose.

“When could we ever?” she says.

* * *

In the middle of the night, I get up and go down to the swimming pool. Under the clamshell, the water looks as soft and pink as a tongue. I smell the bitterness of chlorine. There’s a crack in the concrete bottom shaped like a bolt of lightning. The white lounge chairs surrounding the pool are heaped with snow. No one else is in the courtyard. All the floors are silent.

Again I take off my clothes. I don’t know what else to do with all this freedom.

The pool is barely lukewarm. The advertised heating feels like a lie. Like something to hate. My body is different than it was on land — lighter, more nimble, like all the blood in my veins has been replaced with air. My nipples are purple and hard.

In Somerville, I used to hear stories about the evangelical church baptizing new congregants in Foss Park. They had water that they had turned holy and they poured it over the person’s head. They said a prayer and somehow that ritual was supposed to leave that person changed.

I always envied those people, envied the certainty of their faith, their ability to believe they were moving through life with a purpose.

If I stand upright, the water covers my waist, the rise of my stomach, and I feel the lethal chill of winter, so I sink down into the shadow of the clamshell. From there the clothing piled on the concrete edge of the pool looks far away.

I inhale, go under. I touch the lightning-shaped crack. I see the faded blue dolphins painted on the sides of the pool, flippers and noses bleached with time. I notice a freckle on my ring finger that did not exist before. My eyes are on fire from the chlorine and it is my choice to let them keep burning or not.

My choice, my choice.

Finally I get out and put on my bra and my jeans. I run back to my room, sweatshirt clutched to my chest, bare feet slapping the concrete.

I race past a woman standing by the ice machine in a nightgown, filling a plastic cup. When she sees me, the wet, shirtless girl running toward her, she screams and drops the cup and cubes scatter down the hallway, glinting like diamonds under the light.

In my room, I bolt the door and get in bed and wrap myself up in the sheets and the polyester comforter even though I know it has not been washed in a hundred years. Another little bug has gotten stuck to my collarbone and it leaves a dark streak when I wipe it away. I shiver and I shake until I have exhausted myself and fallen asleep, and a while later I wake certain of a presence outside my room. A presence that wants to get in. An intruder, the bolt of panic you feel before a strange man strikes you in the head or drugs you with chloroform, the nightmare that starts and ends and starts again when you wake in a basement, or never has a chance to start again because you don’t wake at all.

The green numbers on the bedside clock say 3:05 a.m. and outside someone is pounding on my door. I am hazy with sleep, slow at first to register the sound. The knob is shaking so hard, I think it’s going to fall off. I hear a boot striking, someone trying to kick their way inside.

In Mission Hill, the older girls kicked down bathroom doors while the younger girls were inside. This was one of the many ways they convinced us of their power. Every girl in Mission Hill learned how to finish peeing in twenty seconds flat, from squat to flush.

As I got older, I waited for that feeling of power to come alive inside me. I thought it would sprout on its own, like breasts or the downy hair on my legs. I didn’t understand that it had to be claimed.

I creep up to the peephole and see No Name thrashing against the door. His face is warped through the glass, turning the proportions strange. His nose is a jutting ridge, his eyes are dark pools. The rings in his face glow silver. He’s wearing the same clothes and his body is a black blur as he beats on the door. Something has happened to him since we worked those rooms together. He has changed, or maybe this person was there the whole time, smoking cigarettes and counting money in the break room, waiting to get out.