“I can’t breathe in here,” I say to Louis. I swat at my chest, swat at his arm, looking for something steady.
The heat, the noise, it swells like a balloon. We are too much for this space to hold. We are about to blow it apart. Dr. Bek bolts up the side of the room, a silver flash shooting into the hall, and then everyone starts to run.
Dr. Bek races down the white hall. The fluorescents hit the edges of his hazmat, framing his body in light. All the patients follow. The fifth floor is filled with the thunder of our footsteps. The patients in the lead reach for Dr. Bek, their fingers long and pale. What will happen if we catch him? Will we tear off his suit and rub our hands all over his face and say, You are one of us now?
Patients fall and claw their way back. Those who can’t run as fast, who are abandoned by the group, throw themselves against the walls and scream. I feel a hand grabbing at my ankle, digging nails, and I nearly go down, but Louis takes me by the elbow and pulls me up.
We are falling behind, Louis and me, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t still a part of it.
“Garrr!” Sam and Christopher call out.
The halls pass in a white smudge. When Dr. Bek reaches the Dining Hall, he taps a code into the keypad and darts inside. We hear the doors lock behind him, the heavy click.
Patients kick the doors. They slam their bodies against them. There are two small round windows in the doors and Dr. Bek stares out at us through one of those windows, so still that he looks like he could be part of an exhibit, an astronaut frozen behind a sheet of glass.
A plan is devised to break into the Dining Hall. No one knows the code, so patients raid the supply closets for brooms and mops and beat the doors with the long wooden handles. The tools the Hospital has given us to fulfill our duties, to maintain cleanliness and order, are now being used in the name of chaos. Broom handles bash the round panes, but the glass appears unbreakable. Dr. Bek’s face recedes from the window. I imagine him shrinking into a dark corner of the Dining Hall, breathing fast inside his suit.
When the doors do not open, the patients try to guess the code. We try the date of the first reported case and the date of our arrival at the Hospital and random configurations of numbers. After each wrong entry, the keypad turns red and bleats with disapproval. Some patients throw down their weapons and say they will wait for as long as it takes, but after a few hours most of us grow bored and listless and abandon the scene of our crime.
*
A small group of patients insists on guarding the Dining Hall. Others wander back to their rooms or the Common Room, where they sit in front of the blank TV, awaiting further instruction. Others travel down to the basement, hoping to figure out the code, but then they look through the triangular window and see the white ocean outside and go back upstairs. In the Hospital, we are far away from everything.
I’m walking the third-floor hallway when I hear a sound coming from the supply closet. I open the door and find N5 sitting there.
She’s pressed into a corner, next to a plastic caddy filled with cleaning supplies. Behind the shield her eyes are bloodshot. She’s holding on to her shins and I can see the shapes of her knuckles through the gloves. She blinks at me. Each breath is long and gasping. I look down at her and wonder what the consequences of abandoning Dr. Bek will be.
“It’s over,” I say. It’s strange to see a member of the staff looking so small and vulnerable, so human. “Everything is calming down.” I am surprised by my desire to help.
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this to us,” she cries. Her lids disappear. Her eyes grow wide. “We’re not even real doctors.”
*
The patients give up their rebellion when they realize nothing works in the Hospital without Dr. Bek and his staff. The Dining Hall stays locked. There is no other place for us to get food. There is no Lights Out. The fluorescent overheads burn through the night. The few patients intent on guarding the Dining Hall sleep on the floor and wake feeling cold and hungry and stiff. In the morning, they go back to their floors, to their rooms, and wait for their morning examinations. No one comes.
Louis and I drink water from the bathroom tap. We knead our aching stomachs. We give each other an exam. Louis pantomimes administering a shot. I sit on my mattress. His fingers form an imaginary needle. He takes my arm and nudges the delicate purple skin, a fake needle looking for a real vein.
“This won’t hurt.” He frowns at my arm. “Hold still. Let us help you.”
A sure sign it’s going to hurt? The more a person tells you it won’t, the more you can be certain it will.
“Owww,” I say.
We peek beneath scrubs and down throats. His throat is a dark moist tunnel. When I look under his scrubs, I see the flat white of his stomach, the soft blond fuzz. We palm foreheads and peel back eyelids. We do the Romberg. It feels good to be close to him.
Once we are touching each other, how can we be expected to stop? Soon I am flat against his bed, my scrubs around my ankles. My legs are parting and then he is on top of me, pushing. It’s daytime and there is no lock on the door, so we are quick, but I will never forget the feeling of blood flooding my body or our hot grasping hands or the way his eyes rolled back as we slipped into a place where time has no meaning, where we forget all about hunger, where we are so completely alive it seems impossible that we will not live forever.
*
All day the staff remains invisible. The patients are silent and drifting. The Dining Hall is still locked. We have not eaten in twenty-four hours. There are no meditations. I go back to the third floor and look for N5 in the supply closet, but there’s just the caddie stuffed with rags and spray bottles. I begin to worry they have left us for good.
From the Common Room window, I watch the sky go dark. I can still smell Louis in my hair and on my fingers. I can’t stop wondering where my mother is right now.