Laura van den Berg: Find Me

Things I will never forget: my name, my made-up birthday, the rattle of a train in a tunnel. The sweet grit of toothpaste. The bitterness of coffee and blood. The dark of the Hospital at night. My mother’s face, when she was young.

* * *

Things other people will forget: where they come from, how old they are, the faces of the people they love. The right words for bowl and sunshine and sidewalk. What is a beginning and what is an end.

On our third month in the Hospital, the pilgrims begin to appear. They gather outside the doors, faces tipped to the sky, while our Floor Group watches at the end of the fifth-floor hallway. The windows have bars on the outside and we have to tilt our heads to get a good view. Sometimes the pilgrims wave and we wave back. Or they hold hands and sing and we hear their voices through the glass. Some stand outside for hours, others for days. We don’t understand what they could want from us.

* * *

Early November and already the cold is descending across the plains. We can’t go outside, but we hear about it on the Weather Channel and feel it on the windowpanes. We can tell from the pilgrims’ clothing too, the way they come bundled in overcoats and scarves. The twins, Sam and Christopher, named the visitors, since the first one to turn up wore a black hat with a wide brim, like the pilgrims they learned about in school. I can remember the way the twins grinned as they offered this fact, pleased by the strength of their memories.

For hours I stand by the fifth-floor window and watch the pilgrims pace in front of the Hospital or use sticks to draw circles in the dirt. It’s like observing wildlife.

When the sky darkens and rain falls for three days straight, I go to Dr. Bek and make a case for letting the pilgrims inside. His office is on the sixth floor, a windowless room at the end of the hallway, furnished with two high-backed rolling chairs — Venn chairs, he says they’re called — and a desk shaped like a half moon. We all choose our dungeons: this is a saying I’ve heard somewhere before, though I can’t remember the source, a nibble of worry. The one personal touch is a poster of massive gray cliffs, fog-dusted peaks, ridges veined with snow, on the wall behind Dr. Bek’s desk. It’s the Troll Wall in Norway, where he was born.

In Norway, there are half a million lakes. In Norway, the cheese is brown. In Norway, the paper clip was invented. These are the things Dr. Bek has told us.

Me, I know nothing of Norway. I used to live in Somerville, Massachusetts, on a narrow street with no trees.

Dr. Bek types at his desk. Manila files are stacked next to his computer. I look at the folders and try to imagine what’s inside: our case histories, the results of our blood work, all the ways he is trying to find a cure. Dr. Bek is fair and tall, his posture stooped inside his silver hazmat suit, as though he’s forever ducking under a low doorway. Behind the shield, his eyes are a cool blue, his cheekbones high and sharp. When he’s angry, his face looks like it has been chiseled from a fine grade of stone.

The Hospital staff guards against the sickness with Level A hazmat suits, chemical-resistant boots and gloves, and decontamination showers before entering their quarters on the second floor. They need these precautions because they aren’t special, like the patients are thought to be. When we came to the Hospital, our possessions were locked away in basement storage. “Why does our stuff have to stay in the basement?” some patients demanded to know, and Dr. Bek explained it was all part of releasing the outside world for a time, of releasing a life that no longer belonged to us.

Each patient was given a pair of white slippers and four sets of scrubs, two white and two mint green. Louis, my roommate, and I avoid wearing the white ones as much as possible, agreeing they make us look like ghosts.

All the patients have been assigned weekly appointments with Dr. Bek, to make sure our feelings don’t stay in hiding. When our feelings stay in hiding, bad things can happen, or so we’ve been told.

I have no talent for following rules. I ignore my appointed times. I only go to his office when I have questions.

I sit across from Dr. Bek and tell him two pilgrims have been standing in the rain for days. They’re shivering and sleeping on the ground.

“They could get pneumonia and die,” I say. “Why can’t we let them inside?”

“Joy, I take no pleasure in their struggle.” Dr. Bek keeps typing. Every breath is a long rasp. The sound is worse than nails on a chalkboard or a person running out of air. “But we can’t let them in. After all, how can we know where these people came from? What they want? What they might be carrying inside them?”

Disease is as old as life itself, Dr. Bek is fond of pointing out. An adversary that cannot be underestimated. For example, when cacao farming peaked in Brazil, mounds of pods amassed in the countryside, gathering just enough rainwater to create a breeding ground for the biting midge. From this slight ecological shift came an outbreak of Oropouche, or Brazilian hemorrhagic fever. According to Dr. Bek, it only takes the smallest change to turn our lives inside out.

“It’s my job to see danger where you, a patient, cannot.” He stops typing and opens the folder at the top of the stack. I watch his eyes collect the information inside. “To protect you from the flaws in your judgment.”

Dr. Bek is a widower, but not because of the sickness. His wife died many years ago, or at least that’s what I’ve overheard from the nurses, who sometimes talk about him when they think they’re alone. Dr. Bek tells us little about his life beyond the Hospital walls.

As for the pilgrims, I have no argument — there is plenty of evidence to suggest flaws in my judgment — so I leave his office. Already our group of one hundred and fifty has dwindled to seventy-five. During the first month alone, a dozen patients became symptomatic and were sent to the tenth floor. We didn’t see them again.

Still, I feel a pain in my chest when I look out the window and find a pilgrim balled on the ground, his body pulsing from the cold. Before the rain, this man was pacing, and then, out of nowhere, he did one perfect cartwheel. I wish I had a way to talk to him, to ask why he came, to tell him no one is going to help him here. I don’t think it’s right to watch these people suffer, even if it’s a suffering they have chosen.

Finally the rain lightens and the man scrambles to his feet. He stares up at the Hospital for a long time, and I wonder if he can see me watching. What kind of person he thinks I am. He turns from the window and staggers away. Another pilgrim calls after him, but he doesn’t look back. It’s still drizzling. The sky is charcoal and goes on forever. I watch his silhouette grow smaller, until he is just a speck on the edges of the land. We the patients are always dreaming about being released from the Hospital. Sometimes it’s all I can think about, the outdoor air rushing into my lungs, the light on my face, but I don’t envy that man then.

* * *

The Hospital is ten stories high, plus the basement. The patients live on floors two through six. Each of us is assigned a Floor Group; each Group is staffed by two nurses. Louis and I belong to Group five. All floors amass for Community Meetings and activities and meals, but otherwise the Groups have a way of sticking together.