Is she happy? Is she alone? Is she glad to be alive?
You might think we the patients would band together and make our own kingdom. You might think we would figure out a way to leave the Hospital, to trek into the closest town, La Harpe, or at least find a way into the Dining Hall. In December, when Floor Groups four and six threw around the trays, there was a leader. This time around, the patient from California is holed up in his room. He wants no part in leadership and no other leader has emerged. Still, there are seventy-four patients, the better part of a hundred. Isn’t this what we wanted, freedom from the rules? Why aren’t we doing anything useful with that freedom? What is wrong with us?
The longer the staff stays missing, the more patients I see curling up in corners or wandering aimlessly under the lights. Everyone starts taking on the same blank expression, the look of a child who has been left behind in a shopping mall, the look that knows there are all these people here but they are not the right people—where have those right people gone? How can I get them to come back?
Under the hallway lights, I read the twins’ palms in the way that Marcus taught me. From their thumbs, I can tell them about the division between will and logic and that they both fall on the side of will. The fingers of Saturn are longer than the fingers of Apollo. I can’t find Sam’s life line and instead of the truth I tell him his is as strong a line as I have ever seen.
That evening, the Pathologist’s voice washes over the floors. I look up at the speakers, hopeful. I remember the evangelical church in Somerville and wonder if this is what it feels like to be called by God, to hear a voice and peer into the lights above and know at once what it is you’re supposed to be doing with your life—which is, in my case, to proceed immediately to the Dining Hall.
In the Dining Hall, I find patients lining up for red trays. The line is straight and slow. There is no pushing, no laughing or screaming, no accusations of cutting. The windows are dark. Dr. Bek and the nurses stand against a wall, silent, watching. They have nothing to say to us. Already I can see our Floor Group cleaning the Common Room, erasing the evidence of what we’ve done.
Louis is there. He touches my hip. Together we fall into line.
I don’t tell him what N5 said to me in the closet. Her words are too large and slippery to make the journey from thought, from memory, to speech.
The staff left us alone just long enough for us to imagine a life without their oversight, a life of hunger and bathroom tap water and an endless wait for spring and maybe even cannibalism. I read all about the Donner Party in the Hospital library: I know what hungry people can become capable of. We thought time moved slowly before, but it was nothing compared to the way time moved without exams and meals and activities and testing. If you have no way to mark the hours, no variance in the days, time will open its mouth and swallow you.
*
After Lights Out, I hear the same scratching sound next door, but this time I get out of bed and investigate. In the twins’ room, I find the boys by the hole. Sam is holding a flashlight. Christopher is pecking at the ground with a big metal spoon, the kind of serving spoon I’ve seen before in the Dining Hall.
“Where did you get that?” I whisper.
“We stole it,” the boys whisper back.
The medicine cabinet blocks the bathroom entrance. Linoleum squares are piled nearby like shed skin. Sam points the flashlight at the hole and I am astonished by the size. The opening is as large as a car tire. I move closer and feel grit on the bottoms of my feet and think about how long it’s been since I’ve touched the outdoors.
I remember: snow in my eyelashes, grass sticking to my elbows, dirt on my knees.
The boys are crouched like rabbits around the hole, wide-eyed and pale. The freckles on their throats look like a spreading rash. Christopher holds the spoon in midair. I can hear their quick, panting breath. Sam shines the flashlight in my eyes and they become hidden behind a bright white wall.
“You can’t leave.” I raise a hand to block the glare. For starters, no one knows the keypad codes. For starters, the weather. The light stays on me and I try to find the boys in it.
I’m imagining a means of escape that is only passable by children, a path that gets tighter the longer you crawl, so what I really mean is: you can’t leave me.
“We found our way out,” Christopher says.
They lower the light. Translucent circles slip around in my vision. I blink them away. From the sound of metal striking earth, I know the twins have gone back to digging.
*
In the middle of breakfast, we hear that familiar voice on the speakers. We let our plastic spoons sink into our oatmeal, gray and gummy from the microwave, and look up toward the noise.
THERE WILL BE NO MORE TV, the Pathologist tells us, and I know right away that this is not a meditation. Apparently the weather has made it impossible to fix the lines. He pauses, and there’s a gurgling that is something like a cough or a growl or a person quietly drowning. AND BESIDES, he continues, DID YOU REALLY THINK THERE WOULD BE NO PENALTY FOR WHAT YOU’VE DONE?
Not one patient complains, or at least not out in the open. We’re fearful of what else might be taken away.
13.
In the year before the sickness, Marcus began haunting the Stop & Shop. I don’t know how else to explain it. He was nowhere and everywhere at the same time, which is how I imagine ghosts to be.