I spend most of my time by a window, any window, waiting to see the boys emerge from the land.
As the days pass, word about the twins’ hole gets out. It moves through our Floor Group and despite the KEEP OUT sign that has been taped to their door, I start seeing white and green bodies slipping in and out of their room. I find faint trails of dirt leading into the hall. In the eyes of the patients, I detect a new kind of aliveness. An unspoken question spreads like a germ through the air: is it possible for me to leave too?
*
After Lights Out, after Louis has fallen asleep, I listen for the sound of the twins digging next door, but of course there is nothing. The wait for morning becomes unbearably long.
One night, I catch a different kind of sound through the walls—a strange buzzing. I get up and go to the twins’ room. The air in the Hospital is still and yet the edges of the KEEP OUT sign flutter.
The hole has been covered with a black tarp. The beds have been stripped, white sheets folded on green mattresses, like the vacant rooms on the eighth floor. The drawings are still hanging on the walls and I’m glad it’s too dark for me to see the ghost of Waialae Avenue, who has nothing better to do than drive women insane.
The buzzing sound is coming from the hole. I kneel in front of it and push away the tarp. The floor is covered in grit. There’s dust and darkness and a metallic smell—not the earthy scent of dirt, but chemicals. The silver body of the air-conditioning duct snakes below the opening. If I reach into the hole, I can almost touch it. Warm air gusts onto my face. The buzzing is even louder up close, like construction is happening somewhere in the Hospital.
Could that one theory be right? Could the twins still be trapped in here?
“Sam?” I say into the hole. “Christopher?”
The buzzing gets louder. It opens a door in the side of my head and walks right into my brain. I wonder if the twins heard this sound when they lowered themselves into the tunnel, if it became unbearable as they moved through the duct, if they still had the noise ringing in their ears as they ran out into the snow.
15.
One morning, in the first week of February, I look out the arched window and see a pilgrim standing outside the Hospital. He is the first person to come since the start of winter. He is standing on a bank of ice. His face is wrapped in a black scarf. Only his eyes are visible and I am too far away to tell what kind of eyes they are. His hands are covered in mittens so thick, they look like bandages. He reminds me of the photos I have seen of men trekking through distant deserts, their heads swathed in cloth to protect them from the sun.
This pilgrim is holding something in his arms. This something looks long and heavy.
I squint. A swirl of human hair, a bare foot.
He is holding a body. He is holding a child.
“Nurse,” I hear myself say, but I can’t move from the window. I touch the glass and feel the burn of the cold.
Other patients come to the window. The faces around me are pale blurs. They press their hands against the glass and look and look and then one of them runs away shouting, “Let him in let him in let him in!”
I watch nurses in hazmats pour out of the Hospital. They trudge through the snow, their white arms flapping. The pilgrim skids down the bank of ice. One of the nurses takes the pilgrim by the shoulders and another touches the body and then they all start rushing back toward the Hospital. In the arms of the pilgrim, the body is still in a way that lets me know the child is no longer alive. Everyone, even the pilgrim, disappears inside.
I imagine a chill moving across a person’s skin and into their veins. I imagine the veins delivering the chill like poison to the lungs and spleen and heart. All those soft squishy places that want to stay warm. The person runs and sweats, a comfort until the wet fabric turns to ice on their ribs and they forget how exactly running is supposed to work. They can feel their body temperature dropping, a machine shutting down. They think about going back, to the place where people do experiments with blood, where they know they will be welcomed, because they still have blood to give. They turn around, look at the endless white field behind them, and realize the way back has become a mystery. They are getting very sleepy. They lie down under a tree. They imagine the tree is a house and they are climbing through a window and getting warm by a fire or a stove or a bearskin rug with the head still on and the mouth open like this rug has been waiting its whole life to eat someone. Hawaii, they keep saying to each other, trying to ignore the hungry bearskin rug, until they can’t feel anything, not their tongues drying up in their mouths, not their slowing hearts, not their eyes that flicker like a wild, trapped animal until they stop.
In the hallway a patient screams and it takes me a second to realize the screaming person is me.
16.
I run straight into our room. I shut myself in the bathroom. Get in the shower stall and turn the water on. Listen to the water beat the tile. Sit on the floor in my scrubs and feel the cold spray. I turn my body into a tight ball to keep everything from shaking loose. I want to drown out the sound of me.
From the window I was too far away to know if the body should be called Christopher or Sam.
*
I don’t know how long I’m in the shower before Louis pulls back the curtain and turns off the water and tries to get me to come out. At first I won’t break the tight ball of my body, because I am afraid of what will happen if I do. He sits next to me in the shower stall and touches my wet knee. The toes of his slippers are soggy.