Allston was isolated, pushed away from the rest of Boston by Brookline, split in two by the Mass Pike, blocked from Cambridge by the Charles. The Horace Mann School for the deaf was nearby and sometimes I would see buses filled with deaf children roaming the streets. They had a particular way of looking out the windows, a slow, deliberate turn of the head, as though if they could see deeply enough, sound might follow.
The Carrolls had a son. He was in his thirties and lived near Fenway. He was a psychologist. The word “psychologist” made me picture the big-breasted school counselor who wore reading glasses on a lanyard and broke up fights, but when I asked Mrs. Carroll if her son worked in a school like mine, she laughed and told me that he worked at a university, that he was the owner of an advanced degree. There were framed photos of him in cap and gown all over the house. He was never looking right at the camera, like his attention had been captured by something just beyond the lens.
One day the son moved back home, into the second bedroom upstairs. Next to me. Something had happened with his job, something that couldn’t be helped by his advanced degree, but no one wanted to talk about it. I would press my ear against the wall and listen to him moving around in his room. I learned that he liked songs sung in Spanish. He never had anyone over. His cell phone never rang. He watched action movies late into the night; I could hear the explosions of gunfire through the wall. In the mornings, when I was getting ready for school, I would find him in the kitchen, eating a bowl of sugar cereal without any milk. He wore square glasses, his eyes brown dots behind the lenses, and his teeth seemed crowded in his mouth. He wore polo shirts in different shades of blue. “The colors of the sea,” he would say, plucking at the collar of his shirt. At first, it was okay having him around.
We were alone one afternoon and he invited me into his room, which had been his since childhood and was preserved in his absence. I’d never been in there before. Posters of cities with cathedrals overlooking cobblestone squares were taped to the walls. Towers of books with linen spines filled the corners. He had a little contraption set up: two white electrodes hanging from thin wires, the wires connected to a laptop. He told me to sit on his bed. He put a white circle on each of my temples. Neurofeedback, he said this was called.
“Do you know what this does?” he asked me.
I shook my head.
“It lets me read your thoughts.”
I was seven and I had all kinds of thoughts I didn’t want anyone to read.
He sat in front of his laptop and pressed a button. I felt a tiny pulse on my skull.
“What am I thinking right now?” I asked.
“You’re scared,” he said. “Don’t be scared.”
There is a period of time in Allston, the eighth year of my life, that I still cannot remember. One day I was nine years old and away from Park Vale Avenue, living on the farm in Walpole. One day I was sitting at a school desk in a renovated barn and sleeping in a cottage dorm that overlooked a green field. I can’t remember arriving there or leaving Allston. It was like waking up from, or into, a dream.
7.
At the end of December, I turn twenty. A new decade, but of what? When our Floor Group cleans the Common Room, we keep the TV on, so we can hear about the recovery. As a result, we don’t spend much time cleaning. We stand around the TV with our sponges and spray bottles and brooms, watching. The windows are streaked with fingerprints, dust has settled along the floorboards, but the world around us is coming back to life. The president is in the White House. Hospital populations are shrinking. Garbage trucks are rumbling down streets. Snowplows are clearing roads. On TV, they make a noise that sounds like thunder.
We watch blue salt scatter across sidewalks. We watch a city bus dock by a stop; we watch the doors snap open. We watch a subway car bolt through a tunnel. We watch people line up outside a grocery. This is somewhere in Michigan. The grocery is surrounded by a lake of milky ice. In the line, there is an energy; I can feel it coming through the screen. It connects one person to another, like they are all holding a long rope.
These people belong to the same category now. They are the survivors.
The divide between us patients and the outside world has never seemed greater. Watching the recovery is like watching a new TV show play out: the narratives of the characters evolve, branch in new directions, while ours stays the same.
“Outside! Outside!” a patient shouts in the hallway.
During an Internet Session, I look at photos of abandoned places. There’s an empty power plant in Belgium, where the walls spiral up like a giant snail shell, slick with neon algae. A hotel in Colombia that sits high on a mountain, overlooking the Bogotá River, a lush garden growing on the roof. An underwater city in Shicheng. Michigan Central Station in Detroit, where rivers of rubble and silt flood the hallways. Holy Land USA in Waterbury, Connecticut, where tiny buildings are packed onto ridges, the eyelike windows looking out at the vines climbing walls and the crosses crumbling into the earth.
These places were not created by the sickness, just as the gap in my own memory was not created by the sickness. This was all done long before.
“Time is passing,” N5 says on the morning of my birthday, sucking blood into a syringe. “The world is moving on.”
“We aren’t moving on,” I say.
“That’s right,” says Louis. “We’re getting left behind.”
After she’s gone, Louis stands on his bed and starts jumping up and down. The mattress bobs. The frame shudders. “Happy birthday to you,” he sings.
I often wonder what Louis was like before the sickness, if he was a good husband, if he was faithful to his wife.
I climb up and jump beside him. I can almost touch the ceiling. I think the bed is going to come apart. For a few glorious seconds, I feel our togetherness return and believe we are going to be launched far away from here.
At breakfast, a cupcake topped with a white curl of icing is waiting for me in the Dining Hall, sitting on one of the long tables. All the Floor Groups have crowded around the table, along with Dr. Bek and the nurses. They applaud when Louis and I walk in. I play my role. I give a little wave. N5 hands me a plastic fork.