Tell me a memory, Dr. Bek says on the tape, and the woman answers, One morning, he stared at me for a long time and said, “You look like a woman I used to know, maybe from the grocery,” and I said, “What do you mean ‘used to know’ and what do you mean ‘grocery’?” and he said I looked so familiar, he was sure I’d been bagging his groceries for years, if only he could remember my name. After two decades of marriage he said these things. That’s when I knew he was forgetting.
These are the intake interviews we did when we first came to the Hospital. I did not know we were being taped.
I remember this thing I read in a magazine, the woman continues. It was about a village in Greenland where all the residents have dementia. They go to the grocery and feed birds in the park and go to the theater. They get lost and miraculously there is always someone to help with directions. They are being watched all the time, but they have no idea. They have no idea they are stuck in a very pleasant kind of trap. I remember looking at my husband and wishing there was a place like that for us. She pauses. I hear the sound of papers being shuffled. Is that where we are now? In some sort of pleasant trap?
Louis and I haven’t been together since that morning in our room, haven’t talked about how it felt, if we want to do it again, but being in this strange room with him reminds me of our early days, when we traveled the floors and halls together. It reminds him of something too, because under the lights he clamps an arm around my shoulder and I feel the damp of his mouth along the hot curve of my ear.
After we fucked, I didn’t shower for days, desperate to keep the smell of him.
I’m startled to hear the twins’ voices. I look around, thinking for a moment that they’re somewhere in the room, but then I realize they’ve just taken over the recording, already going on about Hawaii, about the birds they will find there, Christopher talking over his brother. The starlings, he is saying. The nightjars. The bitterns.
“Why Paige?” I pull away from Louis. This is the question I’ve wanted to ask him since the fall, but I didn’t and I couldn’t because I was scared of the answer. I expect him to say there was always something about me that seemed defective. “Why not me?”
He looks down at the patch of white linoleum between his legs. “I liked the way she ran, I guess. I liked that she was doing something instead of waiting around here like the rest of us.”
He does not know about my mother, about all the work I have been doing in my mind.
“I’m planning to do a lot,” I say.
When I hear my own voice on the tape, I go to turn off the recorder, but Louis stops me. Before the interview, I stayed in motion. I drank my Robitussin. I refused to absorb all that had happened. The sickness. Christina, memoryless in her plastic tent. My mother. There was something about Dr. Bek’s dark little office and the wheeze of his hazmat and the Venn chair and the sea cliffs poster that put everything into focus. It was like running into a wall. My life was a wreck, had been seething with a sickness that was beyond what any doctor could cure, and I had agreed to spend ten months in a Hospital and I might live or I might die. During the interview, you can only hear Dr. Bek’s questions—Don’t you have memories, Joy? Do you remember what a memory is?—and, if you listen closely, a woman sobbing. During that first meeting, I wasn’t able to say a word.
*
We drift back down to the fifth floor. Some of the patients have congregated in the Dining Hall, even though it’s not a mealtime. They are sitting at the long tables or on the floor under the windows, in pale cones of light. They have all finished searching their assigned areas. No one has seen the twins. Nightfall is slow to come to the Hospital. From the window, the eventual moon is fat and white and sunk behind banks of cloud. I want to run through the Hospital shouting: Come on out! Everyone gets found eventually.
*
The twins do not get found. They stay missing.
That night, in our beds, we hear the sound of the nurses moving up and down the hallways, and in the morning the pairs of patients are sent to look around the Hospital once more. This time Louis and I get the library. I comb the pages of the encyclopedias for clues. I examine the book on space travel.
The nurses venture out in the Hospital vans and search the land around us. Our Floor Group stands by the arched window and watches two vans move like white bullets over the snow. We all find nothing and more nothing. After the twins have been missing for three days, Dr. Bek calls a Community Meeting and explains that he has contacted the local authorities in La Harpe and they are doing what they can from the outside. They are searching too. Dogs are getting involved.
He tells us that we are not giving up on finding the boys, but not all questions have immediate answers. Life in the Hospital must continue on.
I feel Dr. Bek’s breath travel down my skin. I feel something in the Hospital tilt. The possibilities, the rules of what can and cannot happen to us, are being rearranged.
The nurses stand by the window, facing away from the Floor Groups, so we can only see their humped backs. I imagine they are still looking.
Every patient has a theory. In our Floor Group, they include: falling through frozen ice; getting lost on the plains and maybe they are still out there, wandering through winter; they made it to La Harpe and were taken in by a townsperson; they made it to La Harpe and were abducted off the street; dematerialization; bears; they never left the Hospital, they are trapped somewhere inside; Hawaii.
What each theory reveals: how much hope the theorizer has left.
Raul says that maybe the twins were never here, maybe we have been driven mad by winter and started seeing things and then stopped seeing those things. Maybe something inside us has gone missing. I know this theory is the most untrue—how do you explain the hole and the drawings on the walls?—but the idea of our minds playing such a powerful trick scares me.
“Hawaii,” I whisper when I’m alone.
An absence, an unanswered question, is not the same as a death, not the same as what happened to Marie, and I’m starting to think that in some ways it’s worse. A death without closure.