Laura van den Berg - Find Me

Marcus disappears from sight. I tumble toward the edge of the group. I try to break free. My toes get stomped on, a jab to my tailbone makes me howl, the vibrations of their running moves like electricity through my body. I tuck my chin to my chest and push my way through.

There is a moment that must be like the eye of a storm, where the noise of the footsteps is so loud, so overwhelming to the senses, it becomes a kind of silence. I turn inside the dark swirl. Mouths open, feet strike asphalt, and I can’t hear any of it. I see an orange helicopter hovering over an ocean and the white froth of the water below and my mother on a stretcher, sealed inside a world where there is no noise and all the hands working the straps belong to one body and the borders of the ocean are not borders at all, because they are endless.

* * *

The stampede leaves our hearts pounding and our hands shaking and that warm pressure in my belly is being replaced with something as cold and hard as stone. Marcus’s rabbit mask has gotten twisted on his face. An eyehole has been displaced to a temple. I watch him put his features back in order. We stand on the empty side street until the vibrations have dripped out of our bodies and the asphalt has gone still under out feet.

We start back to the Econo Lodge, but we get lost. We go down street after street. In the dark all the buildings look the same. For a while, we run like the people in black, but eventually we get tired and fall into a stumbling walk. Who are we kidding? We find ourselves under the same overpass, back in the same park with the mushroom trees, back inside the fountain, circling and circling. This time we don’t jump inside and scream.

Panic creeps in, winds its way around my bones. What if we are searching like this forever? What if morning never comes? In the park, Marcus closes his eyes and tries to see our street and our motel and the way back, but his imagination is not feeling cooperative either.

We wander down a street where all the traffic lights are a dull red. We see a little white building called Johnny’s Luncheonette, a gas station called Stop & Go. Instead of being tucked into the pumps, the nozzles are all lying on the ground like they were once an alive thing that someone has killed. The inside of the station is aglow with light.

Behind the counter we find a man in a Kiss T-shirt. His chin is barbed with dark hair. He has a lazy eye. We tell him that we’re lost.

“What are you trying to find?”

“The Econo Lodge. Washington Street.”

A plastic container filled with vials of black rocks sit on the counter. The man picks one up and shakes it. W. VA COAL is painted across the vial in small red letters.

“This isn’t real coal,” the man tells us, one eye drifting toward the door. “But it sure looks real, doesn’t it?”

Marcus and I are starting to think this man in the Kiss T-shirt is not someone who can help us, but then he starts drawing a map on a brown paper napkin. He tells us we’re close to where we want to be. He sketches out a tight maze of streets and adds arrows to show us where to go.

“Have you seen those people with painted faces running around?” I ask the man. “What are they?”

“Oh, those people,” the man says, shaking his head.

We wait, but he doesn’t give us anything more.

We thank him and head back out into the night.

“Mountaineers are always free,” he calls after us.

We have no idea what that means.

We follow his map back to the white building with the domed roof, but then we get turned around again. We end up sitting on the steps of the building and blowing hot air on our fingers. I can feel the blisters growing inside my sneakers. We watch the sun rise over the river and soak the water in light. We set out again with our little gas station map and this time we don’t walk for long before we find ourselves, as if by magic, standing right outside the place we are supposed to be.

* * *

In our motel room, I get into one of the beds. The curtains are thick and block the rising sun; in here it is endless night. Marcus is sitting on the other bed and scratching the skin behind his mask.

I turn on the TV, where a reporter is chronicling all the ways people have tried to find cures. One man concocted an antidote from household cleaning supplies and poisoned his entire family. After the sickness ended, they were found lying in a circle on their living room floor, feet pointed at the wall, heads pointed at the center of the circle, like they were playing a game or doing a meditation exercise or taking a nap from which they would, at any moment, wake.

Next door a man is shouting. The noise is too much. My mother seems very far away. I feel the world grow duller, feel sound melt into a fuzz, and it occurs to me that this might be what it’s like when you begin to die.

When I wake, Marcus is kneeling next to me and holding a finger under my nose. He blinks at me from inside the rabbit mask. My feet push at the empty space at the bottom of the bed. I feel slow and thirsty, like I have been away on a very long adventure I can no longer recall.

“Are you alive in there?” Marcus says.

I sit up and the sleep peels away like sand falling out of my hair.

“You’ve been asleep for twelve hours.” He pulls his hand back. “Ten hours is a coma. I was starting to get worried.”

I look at the bedside clock. Already another day is slipping past. Outside the Hospital the rules of time are confusing to me. Maybe in my sleep I was swimming toward that new self I know is out there.

The TV is still on, but muted. A camera pans across a purple mountain range, an advertisement for a special kind of oxygen-enriched air. This air is called Super Air and it promises to help you get what we all want: more time on earth.

“Yes,” I say, for the second time since leaving the Hospital. “I am alive.”

* * *

When I was alone, the act of calling my mother’s number, of pressing that particular sequence of buttons, seemed impossible. With Marcus, I feel braver.

Still, I don’t call right away. He walks me through the phone visualization exercise again and this time I get as far as the booth and the ringing; I just can’t get myself to walk on the screen and answer. We each take showers and we wash our shirts in the sink and dry them with the hair dryer in our room, which is long and white instead of dark and gun-shaped. In the bathroom mirror, we stand side by side and look at our reflections. I can see my nipples through the thin cotton of my bra and I don’t feel exposed and I don’t feel ashamed. Marcus’s body is still boyish. His torso is pale and hairless except for the soft ring around his bellybutton and the freckle over his right nipple. With his masked face I think he looks like a wrestler and tell him so.

“What would your wrestling name be?” I ask. “Marcus the Marauder. Marcus the Murderer.”

“Marcus the Monster!”

“Marcus the Monsoon!”

“Rabbits are vicious,” he says.

We laugh and in the mirror our stomachs ripple.

I’m so starved that my body feels like it has been emptied, like I contain nothing but dust. We get dressed and go outside, driven by hunger, and find the same white-faced mob standing on a street corner and passing out sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil and Styrofoam cups filled with cold coffee. The day is the color of slate. We drink the coffee and chew the stale bread. Marcus slips everything under his mask with an expertise that makes it look like a magic trick. These provisions are free and right now anything free feels like a blessing.

When we ask these people if they remember us from the night before, if they remember nearly running us the fuck over, the bright white faces stare back, uncomprehending. When we ask them what they’re doing out here, they tell us that this is their city and they are saving it. When we ask them why they run in the night, they tell us they do it because they are so glad to still be among the living.