On my plate, there is a pile of mashed potatoes, molded into a little volcano and filled with peas. This is something Marcus and I used to do at Ms. Neuman’s. In the Hospital, I find myself reverting back.
“I’m still hungry,” I call across the Dining Hall, holding the edges of my tray, but it doesn’t do any good.
When they come for our trays, we don’t resist. I let go of mine, and we watch the red rectangles rise from the table and crash against the floor.
Finally Groups four and six walk out of the Dining Hall, leaving behind a swamp of gooey red footprints. The staff doesn’t move. They breathe with monstrous slowness. The trays stay on the floor. The microwaves go uncleaned.
That night, the nurses play Carrie in the Common Room. A girl with very long hair gets soaked in pig’s blood at a high school dance and uses her paranormal powers to burn the school to the ground. In the dark of the Common Room, I find myself wishing for powers like that. The lights go out at the usual time. Two Groups have broken the rules, but nothing seems to have changed.
In the morning, the Dining Hall is somehow spotless and the patient from California is not at breakfast. No one in his Floor Group knows what’s happened to him. He was there when his roommate went to sleep; he was gone when the roommate woke. The staff tells us nothing. I walk the hallways and the stairwells, looking, like a dog on the trail of a funny scent. Not our Floor Group, not our problem, but still I don’t like the idea of people disappearing.
In three days, he’s returned to us. At his first meal back, he sits by himself. He eats withered blueberries one at a time. He stacks trays. He snaps on cleaning gloves and fishes a green sponge from a bucket of water and wipes all the microwaves. He looks like himself, but acts like a different person—how can we be sure who he is? He never says anything about his dreams again.
*
In my next Internet Session, I sit down and go right to WeAreSorryForYourLoss.com. As I scroll through the names, I get hot and itchy and keep sending the cursor in the wrong direction. It’s possible I will find my mother’s name on the list and everything will go back to the way it was before.
My list of worst mothers includes mothers who drugged their daughters with heroin and taught them to shoplift and used them to make porn and sold them and poured hot sauce in their eyes and buried them in the woods. This a list I keep to remind myself that there are worse things than leaving.
I scroll down to the l’s. I check three times. I do the b’s too, just to be sure. Her name is not there. It is on another list, on the list for the living, that I find her.
*
One morning I wake later than usual, because no one has come for our examination. My mouth is dry and sour. Louis is still in bed, his white sheets tangled around his calves. I go into the hall, into the tunnel of fluorescence. The door to the twins’ room is flung open and I see N5 swatting at their floor with a mop. Sam and Christopher are standing in the corner, barefoot, their pale toes curled like animal claws. Their floor is coated in water.
“What’s going on?” I ask from the doorway.
“Our toilet is overflowing,” Sam says. He swallows, and the freckles jump around on his throat. “We don’t know how to make it stop.”
I can make out N5’s body, her human body, heaving inside the suit. The shield is fogged. I can barely see her eyes. She keeps pushing the mop around. When she notices me standing there, she tells me to go find N6, the other nurse assigned to our floor.
I wander down the hall, past the bright white walls. There’s no one at the window, nothing but snow to see outside. I find N6 at the opposite end of the hallway, completing an exam.
“There’s a flood,” I tell him. “In the twins’ room.”
A patient, a gemologist from Santa Fe who knows the name of every kind of stone, sits on a narrow bed. Her bare feet are pressed against the floor and she’s rubbing the crook of her arm, so I know N6 must have just taken her blood.
“A what?” N6 says, squinting at me through the face shield, like I might be playing some kind of prank.
“A flood,” I repeat. “Like water. Like Noah’s Ark.”
N6 takes a mop from the supply closet and hustles down the hallway. The nurses mop and mop but the water keeps coming, a thin stream seeping from the base of the toilet and expanding into a clear pool on the bedroom floor. It’s rare to see something appear in the Hospital that the staff cannot control.
Finally N6 does something to the toilet that makes the water stop. He orders me and the twins to the Common Room until everything has been cleaned up.
“We want to stay,” the boys protest, their toes curling tighter.
The nurses point the ends of their mops toward the door.
Don’t you ever wish you could tell us your real names? I know better than to ask.
In the hall, the twins explain the program they saw on the Discovery Channel about rising sea levels. A chart showed Hawaii being covered in water. The Kohala volcano is gradually submerging. Hilo is shrinking 2.3 millimeters per year.
“Hawaii is sinking,” Christopher says.
“It’ll take a hundred years for Hawaii to sink,” I tell them. We pass the Common Room, where patients are coiled up like children on the floor, asleep or pretending to be. “You’ll be dead by the time Hawaii sinks.”
After I say “dead,” they go silent. They shrink inside their scrubs. We walk by two women holding hands. They aren’t from our Floor Group. I can’t remember their names. They don’t look at us as we pass. We the patients are like a chain of islands: occupying the same water, but isolated from one another.
“I’m sorry,” I tell the twins. “But it’s true.”
“The fact remains,” Christopher says.
“We started digging faster,” Sam says. “What will happen if they find our hole?”
I roll my eyes. “I told you dumping dirt in the toilet was a bad idea.”
“Shut up,” Christopher says.