Laura van den Berg - Find Me

“Do you have a mirror?” I ask.

“No, he does not,” the nurse answers for him. She turns a magazine page.

Hair bits are stuck to my thighs. I brush them away. I stand and look at my hair spread all over the floor and try not to panic. In my head, I start a new list, because lists are what I lean on when I get upset.

In the Hospital, I have seen women with bangs that hang like curtains over their eyes and ends so split it looks like they’ve been electrocuted. I have seen a pixie cut that never seems to grow. In the Hospital, I have seen men with sideburns, men who only have swirls of hair at their temples, men with small bald spots on top of their heads, round and shiny as coins. There are all kinds of people in here.

Raul gives my bangs one last snip and calls for the next patient.

Louis is still hanging around the hallway. A few patients from other Floor Groups have wandered over and fallen into line. I rush past, sweeping hair from my scrubs.

“Sheepdog!” he shouts as I walk by. “Sheepdog, sheepdog!”

I hurry into our bathroom. In the mirror, my hair is short and thick, so it puffs out like a helmet, and heavy bangs blanket half my forehead. I lean closer and notice a black hair on the tip of my nose. I flick it into the sink and turn on the faucet.

“Fuck you, Raul,” I say to no one.

* * *

One morning, near the end of November, I look out a Dining Hall window and there’s just this one pilgrim, a woman. She isn’t someone I’ve seen before. She wears a saggy black coat and her pale hair, which I envy immediately, falls past her waist. “Hello,” I whisper. My breath makes a fog circle on the glass.

It takes me a minute to realize the pilgrim is barefoot. Her feet are white and delicate. The bare skin glints in the daylight, so it looks like her feet are made of crystal, like that part of her body is not quite real. I gaze through the bars and try to imagine what it would feel like to stand barefoot on that frozen ground.

Breakfast is over. Floor Groups four and six have finished cleaning the microwave trays with the smelly green sponges. I turn to call to Louis, to show him this barefoot woman, who must have some kind of death wish, forgetting that he’s long gone, lured away by Paige, who needed a timer. After all, what is the point of running if there’s no finish line? No audience? No one to tell you that you’ve won?

Louis and I used to have rituals. We sat across from each other at breakfast each morning. We kissed in the dark of the stairwells, his hands disappearing under my scrubs. I can still remember the wet, electric feeling of his tongue pressing into the hollow spot at the bottom of my throat. Now we are just roommates. Nothing more.

In Kansas, when it is not the dead of winter, there are lots of sunflowers. In Kansas, in the year 1897, in a city called Atchison, Amelia Earhart was born. Kansas is not the flattest state in America. In Dodge City, spitting on the sidewalk is illegal. The state insect is the honeybee. The people who live here are called Kansans.

I repeat my list about Kansas and keep watching the pilgrim, who — like everything else in the world — is unreachable through the distance and the glass.

* * *

Lights Out is at ten o’clock and to our room it brings the darkest night I’ve ever seen. It’s not like city darkness, softened by streetlights and headlights, but thick and black as tar. Louis isn’t in bed for Lights Out — typical ever since he took up with Paige; her roommate was among the first to go to the tenth floor, so she can be counted on for privacy — but he returns not long after, in the mood to talk.

If your roommate dies, you remain in your room. There is no switching, no matter how lonely you get.

Tonight he’s complaining about the food. In the Hospital, we have eaten lumps of breaded chicken drenched in a mysterious red sauce and partially defrosted peas and hard, stale dinner rolls, which Louis thinks taste like ash. At dinner, we pick up these rolls and make like we’re going to clunk each other in the head.

“At least we’re alive,” I say. “When you’re dead, you don’t get to eat at all.”

“Like ash ,” says Louis.

I stretch my legs underneath the sheets, into the cool space at the bottom of the bed. Our room smells like rubbing alcohol and Vaseline. Louis can talk about whatever he likes. I just want to keep hearing his voice.

In the beginning, I would climb into his bed and feel his hands move down my waist. The whole time, I told myself we just needed something that felt familiar, needed to prove that a part of ourselves still belonged to the outside world. But during our second month the routine changed. After Lights Out, I burrowed next to him, started kissing his chest. He sat up and shrugged me away. At first, I thought this was a symptom: the prions were attacking his brain, he was losing his memory, he no longer knew who I was. Quick , I remember saying to myself, as though there was something for me to do.

In the dark, he started talking about his wife. He told me about the tangles of hair he would find in the bathroom, like tumbleweeds, or the way she used to unroll maps on the floor of their travel bookstore and trace the blue lines of rivers with her pinkie finger. He was remembering perfectly well.

His wife died in the third week of July, at five in the morning, at the Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia.

They lived in Philadelphia, Louis and his wife, in an apartment above their travel bookstore. I lived in a basement apartment on a dead-end street, on the eastern edge of Somerville. I want to believe I can have a fresh start here, in the Hospital.

That night, after Louis stops talking, I concentrate on where I am, in a safe place, in the care of medical experts, but the truth is our Hospital is in middle-of-nowhere Kansas and it is very dark. There aren’t even shadows on the walls.

When he starts to snore, I crouch beside his bed and watch him sleep. A hand rests over his heart. His eyelids flutter, and I wonder if he’s dreaming.

In the Hospital, I can’t get away from the idea that sleep is preparation for death.

I slip out of our room and down the hall. The arched window looks beautiful and foreboding in the night. The floodlights illuminate the ground outside and it’s a relief to be away from the deep dark of our room. I look for the barefoot woman, but don’t see anything except falling snow, the flakes fat and drifting sideways. I’ve been told that in this part of the country, once the snow begins, the cold will be endless.

I remember the perfect cartwheel the pilgrim did before he wandered out into the plains. I lose my slippers and run down the hallway with my hands over my head. Step, reach, kick. Soon I’m dizzy. My brain rocks back and forth inside my skull.

Here is a dream I keep having about my mother: We are sitting at a round table, a glass of water between us. She is faceless, but I know it’s her. We are both staring into the glass. There’s a gold coin in the bottom. We want to get it out, but don’t know how.

I fall four times, knees and elbows smacking cold linoleum, before I get one right. No one has ever called me a fast learner.

For most of my life before the Hospital, I was an orphan. As a baby, I was left on the steps of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, in the winter. A nurse found me wrapped in a white T-shirt and rolling around in a cardboard supermarket box, the kind of thing you put oranges in. I was in the early stages of frostbite.

From my first group home I remember: sleeping on mattresses with springs that time had turned flat and hard; a hole in the staircase that was a portal for winged roaches; sandwiches made of Wonder Bread and grape jelly; a communal bathroom with snot green walls and a ceiling dotted with mold. In this bathroom, all the sinks dripped. In this bathroom, I found tampons, heavy with water and blood, clogging the shower drain. The light was always flickering off, usually when someone was in the shower. The girls at the home started spreading rumors about a ghost in the bathroom, when we all knew the ghost could be any one of us.