Laura van den Berg - Find Me

In the Common Room, Olds and Older, the two oldest patients in our Floor Group, are sitting on the couch, watching the news, their heads mops of gray from the back. They have a tai chi routine they practice in the hallways. Good for the circulation, they claim, and anything good for the circulation is good for the memory. I stand in the doorway and listen.

For months, the news has been a misery. The death toll climbs. People are starving to death and giving birth and killing each other in their homes. In hospitals, beds are jammed into hallways and stairwells and waiting rooms. In hospitals, doctors are passing out from exhaustion. If there are flaws in the decontamination protocols, the doctors become infected. There is a black market for hazmat suits. Trash has not been collected in months; it sits like small mountains in driveways, leaks into streets. If you call 911, nothing happens. Gangs of people, made crazy by the waiting, are setting fire to city parks. I have watched fire move like an orange wave across Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. When they were finished with Grant Park in Chicago, the streetlamps and walkways were black with ash, a volcanic aftermath. In some neighborhoods, all the streetlights have gone out. At night, these people wait and freeze and hope in perfect darkness. I have watched a helicopter swoop over a hot zone and the National Guard collect citizens wandering an empty Times Square, the mammoth billboards flashing behind them. In that footage of New York, a place I have never been, a place I might never get to see, the streets and skyscrapers glistened from a recent rain. Always I look for that boy I grew to love, who would now be a man, and my mother in the crowds.

Tonight the news is different.

From the studio, a reporter tells us that no new cases have been recorded in seventy-two hours. Behind him an electronic map of America tracks the progression of the sickness. Whenever a certain number of new cases are reported in a state, the borders turn neon red. Just last week Arkansas and Ohio were pulsing with alarm.

I step into the Common Room. My slippers sink into the carpet. Is it possible the sickness, which came from nowhere, could vanish back into nowhere? According to this reporter, that’s exactly what happened with the 1967 Marburg outbreak in West Germany. The hotter the virus, the faster it burns out. Olds points the remote at the TV and raises the volume higher.

The news spreads throughout the Groups. Patients start rushing down from their different floors. They amass in front of the TV, our oracle, and gaze at the screen in wonder. They rub the top of the box, the sleeves of their scrubs swaying, as though to encourage it to keep giving us the kind of information we crave. The lights stay on, which means Dr. Bek and the nurses have become aware of our discovery. The only skeptic is a man from our Floor Group, Curtis, who used to be a cop in Cleveland. His roommate is dead. We stand on the edges of the Common Room.

“Hope is a seductive thing,” he says. “Hope can make people lose all sense.”

I don’t like Curtis. He never does his fair share when we’re cleaning the Common Room. He’ll stand by the window with a spray bottle and a rag and never actually touch the glass. Still, I have to admit that I don’t disagree.

* * *

Our wonder doesn’t last long. When Dr. Bek enters the Common Room, all ten of the nurses trailing behind him, the patients go silent. We stand with our Floor Groups. Mine is huddled by the door. From this angle, the bars on the windows remind me of skeleton ribs. Group three takes over the couch, like they always do. Dr. Bek stands in front of the TV, the nurses fanning out around him. The sound of their collective breathing scratches at the air.

I know the questions we are all burning to ask. Is the world really getting safer? Have our contracts changed? How much longer do we have to wait until we are free?

Dr. Bek takes the remote from Olds and mutes the volume. On TV, a different reporter, a woman, is wandering down a street. The sky is dark, but a news truck has turned the street electric. All the houses are heavy with snow. In her white hazmat, standing in a front yard, the reporter looks like she’s in camouflage. The camera moves across doors and windows, waiting for someone to emerge, for some sign of life.

“You are the danger now,” Dr. Bek tells us.

He keeps talking. I watch the floor. After Raul finished his haircuts, our group swept and vacuumed, but I keep finding strands, some light, some dark, stuck inside the carpet.

First, he explains, there’s no way to know how safe it really is out there, at the start of this alleged recovery. Twenty days must pass before it can be called a recovery at all. Second, if the sickness has vanished, it’s more important than ever to make sure we are not infected, to let the incubation period run its course. To hold tight to our memories. He says now is the time for skepticism and questioning.

“Every day in the Hospital progress is made.” Dr. Bek presses a button and the reporter vanishes. “But still there is so much to be done.”

I can feel the Floor Groups looking at each other. We have all swung from excited to confused. Outside I hear a winter wind moving over the Hospital. I imagine it prying open the bars and the windows and trying to get at what’s inside.

Dr. Bek can sense our hesitation. He has more to say. Do we know the story of the flight attendant who carried the AIDS virus from Africa to the West? The index case. How much time do we spend considering the reactions of our actions, the way one disaster can give way to another, like mud sliding down a mountain in springtime? He pauses and makes a diving motion with his gloved hands.

“What a calamity it would be for you to go out there now.” He points the remote at the window. “You could reinfect the entire population. You could ruin our chances of finding a cure. Do we want America to be just as helpless if the sickness returns? No. We want her to be able to help herself next time. Isn’t that what we want?”

None of the patients say anything. “Well, isn’t it?” Dr. Bek presses.

“Yes,” some of us mutter in reply.

“I thought so.” He nods at the white wall of nurses behind him, as though he’s just given them a lesson in how to handle us. Behind the shield his teeth are like tiny polished stones.

Dr. Bek reminds us that Lights Out was over an hour ago and it’s time for us to be on our way.

* * *

When darkness comes, I lie awake and picture patients flooding out of the Hospital, into the snowy land, and drifting back to wherever they came from. I’m left standing outside, looking east and west, unsure of where to go.

I try to see something different: Louis and I walking out of the Hospital and across the frozen plains. Catching a bus and watching the white landscape roll by. His hand on my cheek. Our fingertips on the cold windowpanes. It’s all going beautifully until I hear Paige’s feathery voice and realize she’s on the bus too, sitting right behind Louis, her hands on his shoulders.

I get out of bed and go to the Common Room. The space is dark and quiet. I sit down on the couch and turn on the TV. Another news truck moves through a suburb and catches people cracking open doors and peering outside. This is in California, where the sickness started. The sky is a violet haze. When a truck passes a blue gingerbread house with a white fence, I see a family standing in the yard. They’re wearing gas masks. They even have one small enough for their little girl. The truck casts a net of light over the mother as she kneels and rubs the dirt. The father holds the child. The girl waves her tiny finger around like a wand. The mother and father look up and raise their fingers too. The girl lifts her hand higher. They are all pointing at something in the sky.