Laura van den Berg - Find Me

“I already have a suit.” I pointed at the hazmat draped over the couch, almost proud to be so well prepared.

“That won’t be necessary.” He smiled, showing off long incisors. “In the Hospital, you will be safe from germs.”

It wasn’t much longer before I boarded the bus and we rolled through Connecticut, Pennsylvania, the Midwest, picking up patients along the way. The trip took two days. I remember the swaying power lines and the thin blue sky and the light contracting and expanding along the horizon. At the Hospital, I watched a hazmatted nurse seal the photo in a plastic baggie and imagined the day of my release, my mother being handed back to me.

I do not know her name or where she lives or if she is still alive. Even so I have developed an attachment. I smell grass everywhere. I dream about her. In a different one, we are swimming in the ocean. No land is in sight, but we are not afraid. The water is calm and glistening. We can hold our breath for hours. When I wake in the Hospital, I wrap my hands around my head and try to remember the things she said to me.

Who else do I have to listen to?

Every morning, a nurse comes for our examination. Their face shields are narrow rectangles, so we can’t see anything but scrunching foreheads and darting eyes. Dr. Bek is the only member of the Hospital staff with a proper name and a fully visible face. I know all about psychological tricks: he wants the patients to believe he is the only one we can trust with our lives.

Today I sit on the edge of my bed and gaze through N5’s shield, in search of something human. The gold flecks around her irises. The lash that has fallen out and stuck to the bluish skin under her eye. Some mornings I want to shake her white plastic sleeve and beg her to tell me what is going to happen to all of us.

Here is what she measures: our blood pressure with cuffs that squeeze and hiss; temperature with an ear thermometer that makes a clicking noise inside the canal; sight with a flashlight we have to track back and forth, up and down; coordination with the Romberg’s test, where we stand straight and still, our feet pressed together, then shut our eyes and hold the pose.

Do the Romberg! Do the Romberg! I imagine a dance with steps I never learned.

“That doesn’t seem so hard,” I said the first time I did the Romberg, and N5 said try doing it with holes in your brain.

I stand and she uses the same flashlight to check my skin for blisters. She examines my scalp, her rubber fingers pushing aside my hair, so close I can feel the sound of her breathing nest inside my lungs.

Three times a week, she draws blood. My arms are dappled with tiny purple bruises, like a piece of meat beginning to rot, and the sight of a needle sliding from its casing makes me shiver. I watch the needle slip under my skin and red velvety fluid fill the vial.

“Healthy as a hummingbird.” She turns to Louis, big and slow in her suit. From the far end of a hallway, in a certain kind of light, I sometimes think the nurses look like enormous white birds. The air tank underneath is a hump between her shoulders. During our first week in the Hospital, she used long Q-tips to take cultures from our throats. I remember the cotton end of the Q-tip disappearing into my mouth, the brief sensation of choking.

“Hummingbirds have a very short lifespan.” Louis extends his arm for the needle. “Three years, max.”

“Good memory trick.” N5 ties a rubber tourniquet around his biceps and the bright tip of the needle appears. Louis doesn’t flinch when his blood is drawn and I wonder if he is still able to register feeling. “Now where did you learn about hummingbirds?” We are encouraged to recite whatever facts we know, to make sure we aren’t forgetting.

“Costa Rica was a bestseller at the store,” he says. “I lived my life surrounded by travel guides, but I never went anywhere.”

In her suit, N5 makes a noise that sounds like approval. But how do you know he’s telling the truth? I want to ask. In the Hospital, I can feel myself growing more and more suspicious.

After our exams, she crosses off the date on the countdown calendar tacked to the wall between our beds. The week is a row of black x ’s. Our calendar has a bird theme. December’s is the African gray parrot — prehistoric claws gripping a branch, a beady eye I can feel following us in the night. We have seven months until we can leave, until we know for sure if we have the sickness, if we are going to stop remembering.

I look around at the four white walls of our room and ask Louis what else he knows about birds. He’s lying on top of his sheets and flexing his arm. I want to go to him, to touch his knee, to press my hands against the bones in his chest.

I stay sitting on the edge of my bed.

“Hummingbirds can fly upside down.” He rolls onto his side and slides his hands under his cheek. He closes his eyes, already bored with this entire conversation. “The macaws in South America have a scream that will shatter your heart.”

The inside of my arm throbs. I press my thumb against the fresh needle mark. Blood seeps from the hole.

“Today is a very special day,” N5 says as she packs up her kit, a red duffel bag with a white cross on the front. “Today Dr. Bek is going to look inside your minds.”

* * *

After breakfast, the patients stay in the Dining Hall for testing. We fill the long tables, facing a portable projector screen. The nurses give us paper and tiny pencils with no erasers. I’m sitting with my Floor Group, across from Paige and Louis. The red trays are stacked on the buffet tables. The faces of the microwaves stare out at us. I can smell our last meal, breakfast meatballs, a category of food no one in our Floor Group has ever heard of before, rising from the green garbage cans in the corners of the room. Shadows slip around on the tables. Paige is doodling flowers on the edge of Louis’s paper.

We are supposed to write down the story of what we think is happening in the slides. The lights go out and the first slide is a black-and-white image of a house in a winter landscape. The windows are pale smudges and something is rising behind the house — large, dark clouds that cast strange shapes on the snow. Ridges of ice stick out of the ground like a creature’s spine. The more I look at the slide, the more I think the house is about to be consumed by the weather.

House getting eaten by winter , I write.

By now we the patients are used to Dr. Bek’s tests. In our first month, each of us got an electroencephalogram, a test that measures electrical activity in the brain. In Dr. Bek’s office, I sat in a chair and wore a helmet made of white electrodes. At the base of the helmet, long wires connected me to his computer. The office was silent. Dr. Bek watched the screen. Halfway through the test, I started to feel like I was going to explode. I couldn’t sit still any longer. I crossed and uncrossed my legs. I tapped my fingers against the seat. My bladder was suddenly full and I didn’t think I could hold it in.

“What is this doing to me?” I finally shouted, and Dr. Bek looked up from his screen and explained that it wasn’t doing anything; it was simply measuring, presenting him with data, helping him figure out how to keep me well.

Later we were given written personality tests where we had to answer yes or no to statements like “The best decision is the one that can be easily changed” or “You value justice more than mercy.” This test seemed like a trap, because the right response to nearly every statement—“It depends”—was never an option. Where he sees science, I just see something new to pass the time.

The next image looks like a tunnel, some kind of shadowy underground place. I put my head on the table and listen to the other patients scratching out their replies. I wait for the click of the slide changing. In East Somerville, I would wake in the dark of my basement apartment and think for a moment that I had fallen asleep in a cave. That this was where I had brought myself to die. The third image is blank. At first, I think it’s a mistake, but then I notice other patients writing away. Louis pinches his pencil between his fingers, tilts his head in concentration. I don’t see anything there, but I recognize a feeling.