It is the afternoon. Our bellies are full from lunch.
“The point here is that to be a cop means to be an excellent judge of character,” Curtis tells our Floor Group. “And that guy is not right at all.” He points at Rick, who is standing alone at the other end of the hallway, staring at a white wall.
We have to show Rick how to use the microwaves in the Dining Hall. Without our help, he finds these machines confusing. When it is time for us to clean, we have to show Rick how to wipe the handprints and scuff marks from the Common Room walls. At first, we talk to him as little as possible, because we can’t look at him without seeing Sam’s body in his arms.
I try to focus on my mother, on leaving the Hospital and finding her, but that lost feeling is creeping back. I walk the Hospital until my feet are numb, hoping the numbness will spread. I keep to the lit hallways. I stay away from the ghost floors and the basement. I keep visiting the hole at night and stay long enough for the buzzing to make my eardrums burn. I feel on the brink of seeing the Hospital’s inner machinery, its lungs and guts and heart. Its secrets.
One night the light from the hall splashes on the wall, on the drawing of Waialae Avenue, and I see the red headless figure floating toward me.
In my room, I pull my mother’s photo from my pillowcase and find myself in the slight droop in the corners of her eyes and in the curves of her nostrils. During an Internet Session, I watch a video of her standing on her ship deck, explaining an electrical phenomenon called St. Elmo’s fire, not uncommon on ships before a storm. In the video, St. Elmo’s is why all the antennae on her ship are glowing blue. I pause on an image of my mother standing near one of the antennae. Her head is tilted back, showing off the elegance of her neck. Her mouth is open and dark. Above her the bright blue end of the antenna looks like a hot poker or a magic wand.
*
At dinner, Rick sits with our Floor Group because he is supposed to be one of us now. I tell Rick that I’ve never been to Oregon before and ask what it’s like there. He says it’s big and empty and filled with rivers and forests and wild animals and rain. I think it sounds beautiful and frightening, Oregon.
I watch him eat rice and beans covered in a thick black sauce, and wonder how this compares to what he’s been eating outside the Hospital walls.
We listen to stories of Rick’s travels. He’s slept on roadsides and in fields and in barns. He’s been soaked with rain and waded through waist-deep snow. He’s killed fish with sticks and eaten them raw, felt their flesh shiver in his throat. He’s hitchhiked with people who let him sleep in the backseat and people who wanted to talk through the night and people who wanted to steal.
“Do you want to know the Laws of the Road?” he asks us, and then keeps going before anyone has a chance to answer.
I want to know about these laws.
The Laws of the Road include: Never turn down food or water. Lose your shame about what you are willing to eat. Never underestimate the usefulness of a towel. Lose your shame about where you go to the bathroom. The older the car, the better your chance of hitching a ride. Solo hitchhikers have better odds than those in pairs or groups. Avoid vans. Believe in your ability to keep walking forever. Lose your shame about where you sleep, but never fall asleep around strangers. Only sleep when you’re alone.
I want to know more, but other patients are less interested in the Laws of the Road. They cut in and ask Rick why he came here, how he found us.
Rick frowns. “Don’t you know about the chat room?”
We shake our heads. We know nothing about a chat room.
According to Rick, there is a chat room devoted entirely to the Hospital, to the special ones who have been hidden away for study. In this chat room, people share stories about the early days of the sickness, a person in a hazmat coming to their neighbor’s door and that neighbor disappearing—not dying, but going to some other mysterious place. In this chat room, there are rumors about a state psychiatric hospital in Kansas that has found a use again.
We lean back in our chairs, absorb this new information.
“I didn’t get sick,” Rick explains. “I knew this place was where I belonged.”
“But the sickness is over,” I say. “This isn’t the only safe place anymore.”
Rick laughs, his tongue black from the sauce.
“Nothing is over,” he says.
The Pathologist’s voice seeps into the room. A meditation. BREATHE DEEPLY THREE TIMES AND SAY I AM DOING JUST FINE.
All the patients in our Floor Group rest their hands on the table and take three breaths. Even Rick plays along.
“I am doing just fine,” we all say to each other, like that part of church where you turn to the congregants and say peace be with you, though I am starting to wonder if the Hospital is doing us about as much good as church—which is to say not much good at all.
*
I decide to start keeping my mandatory appointments with Dr. Bek, the ones I have been ignoring since the fall. I am drowning in questions. From the doorway of his office, I tell him that I want to start coming to my appointments, but first I want him to promise me something: no more electroencephalogram, no more tests. I just want to talk.
Dr. Bek is sitting at his desk. Behind him the Troll Wall rises through the fog.
“You don’t think talking is a test?”
He doesn’t look up from his computer screen. He moves the mouse around on a black pad. I wonder if he knows about what N5 said to me in the closet.
“I know things about this place,” I say.
“I’m aware you think you know things,” Dr. Bek says.
Finally he looks up and sits back in his chair. “Do you remember the appointment time you were given when you first came here? The one you have chosen all these months to ignore?”
I nod. “After lunch on Thursdays.”
“Come back then,” he says, and returns to looking at whatever is on the screen.