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.
I call the basement the zero floor. On the zero floor, there is a door with a triangle of glass in the center, a small window to the outside, and beneath it the faint green glow of a security keypad. Floors seven through nine sit empty. All elevator service has been suspended. You can punch the round buttons, but nothing will happen. Dr. Bek believes in the importance of exercise, so the patients have free passage to the other floors by going through the stairwells, except the first floor, where the staff lives, and the tenth floor, where the sick patients go—both are forbidden to us, also guarded by keypads.
The Dining Hall has a keypad too, but the staff allows those doors to stay open. Whenever possible, they like to create the illusion of freedom.
In the beginning, there were thirty patients on each floor. Now, after three months, no floor has more than fifteen. But the staffing has not changed. There are still ten nurses and Dr. Bek. “Way to lighten your workload!” Louis and I sometimes joke, because laughter makes us feel brave. In the end, the patients might be outnumbered.
An incomplete list of the rules: each Floor Group has a job within the Hospital. The Common Room is located on floor five and it is the job of our Floor Group to keep that space neat and clean. Floor Group three is in charge of the library. Every other week, Group two rounds up patient laundry in canvas rolling carts. After meals, Groups four and six collect trash, stack the red plastic trays, and wipe the warm insides of the microwaves and the stainless steel buffet tables. The surfaces of the tables are dull, but sometimes I catch a smudged reflection as I move through the food line and think, Who is that face? Each floor is responsible for keeping their own hallway in order. “A busy mind is a healthy mind,” Dr. Bek likes to say.
In the Hospital, there are no razors in the showers, just miniature bars of white soap that melt between fingertips, slip down drains. In the Hospital, there is nothing to drink but water. The plastic chairs in the Dining Hall are the color of tangerines. In the Hospital, we celebrate every patient birthday, knowing full well that it might be their last. In the Hospital, our meals come frozen in black trays, the plastic coverings fringed with ice, and we wait in line to heat them in the large humming microwaves. In the Hospital, there is no such thing as mail.
*
Before long the other patients lose interest in pilgrim spotting and go back to rummaging through the books in the Hospital library or watching TV in the Common Room or trying to sneak into the Computer Room on the fourth floor, yet another keypadded space, to check WeAreSorryForYourLoss.com, a government-maintained list of people reported dead from the sickness. We have supervised Internet Sessions every Wednesday and Friday, though of course we always want more.
When breakfast ends each morning, I stand on an orange chair and look out the Dining Hall windows. I turn my back on the maze of long tables, the clatter of the Groups stacking trays. The Dining Hall is on the fifth floor; the bars on the windows are thick as arms. I peer between them, searching for pilgrims. Sometimes it’s the same people. Or a new one has arrived. Or there are no pilgrims at all, just a scattering of footprints in the brown soil.
I spend a lot of time thinking about why the pilgrims started coming here, how they even found us. The easy answer is that they think this is a safe place, that we might have a cure, but that reasoning has never satisfied me. I do much of this thinking in the library, sitting between the squat bookcases filled with dictionaries and encyclopedias, plus books on space travel and the Mayan empire and dinosaurs. Dr. Bek believes that even though our bodies are confined to the Hospital, there is no reason to limit our minds.