By breakfast Louis has been moved to the tenth floor, where there are no roommates or even visitors. No activities or pilgrims or microwaves. I skip breakfast and I skip the Community Meeting, where I know his relocation will be announced. I sit in our closet, behind a curtain of scrubs, and remember.
In our room, Dr. Bek sat next to Louis, the mattress sinking under his weight, and asked him a series of questions. The basics, at first. Name? Age? Do you know where you are? His voice was warm and low inside his suit and did not sound like it was filled with lies. The more he went back—address in Philadelphia? high school attended? age at mother’s death?—the more each answer became a stab of uncertainty.
When Dr. Bek asked how his mother died, Louis’s eyes got quick and damp and I could tell he was searching for an authentic memory.
“Sick,” he tried. “Sick for a long time and then she died.”
Dr. Bek told me to get Louis’s slippers. I set his slippers down in front of him and he looked at them like he had no idea what they were and Dr. Bek said, “Joy, help him,” so I kneeled beside him again and pushed his toes into the cloth openings. His feet were heavy and cold. “Of course, of course,” Louis said, and slid his feet the rest of the way in.
“I’ll see you,” Louis said before he rose from the bed. Every movement, every breath, was weighted with shock. I couldn’t be sure he still knew he was talking to me and if he was, there was nothing in the world I could think to say back to that.
I stay in the closet through dinner. I don’t get hungry. I feel like my life is a tent someone has folded up and carried away. I squeeze the empty legs of Louis’s scrubs and go back to what the Pathologist’s voice told us in November, before the snow came, when he said all we needed to do now was keep breathing.
I try to keep breathing.
After Lights Out, I lie in Louis’s bed and find the part of the mattress that still has the shape of his body. I push my nose into his sheets like a burrowing animal. I wrap my arms around his pillow and hold on.
*
In the morning, after N5 has completed my exam and marked the day on the calendar, remembering the gesture for the first time in weeks, she starts stripping Louis’s sheets. When the corners rise and I see the green mattress beneath, I rush over to the bed and yank the sheets away. She stumbles back. I bunch the fabric in my arms and run out of the room and down the hallway. I run like I’m making a break for it. Like I’m Paige trying to beat her fastest time. My hair blows back. My feet smack the floor. I pass patients from our Floor Group and somebody whistles. I burst through the double doors that lead to the Dining Hall. I lope around the empty room, slowing and winded, like a toy winding down. I stand on a chair and wrap the sheets around my body. The fabric stretches, turns translucent, and my elbows look strange through the cloth. I crawl under one of the long tables, like the twins used to do, and sit surrounded by the silver legs of the chairs and it hits me that I am alone, so totally alone, and there is no place for me to go from here.
*
I’m still under the table when I hear the Pathologist’s voice on the speakers, telling me I’m wanted in Dr. Bek’s office. By now I know he might not even be a real pathologist, that he is only a voice, a stupid human voice, and in the Dining Hall I have a premonition that this is the last time the Hospital will give me an order that I follow.
*
In Dr. Bek’s office, there is something different about the Troll Wall poster: it has a little tear, right above gray cliffs, like someone has been jabbing the fog with a pencil. During our meeting, his computer keeps chirping and I keep thinking of birds. I tell him what I want and that my terms are not negotiable.
*
In the library, as I wait for news of Louis, I start a letter to my mother. I want to tell her about my life. I do not go in order. Instead I begin with the bus ride to the Hospital, the desolate view from the windows and the blond man sitting next to me. In Ohio, we passed a miniature golf course, dinosaur-themed. An orange plaster T. rex loomed over the abandoned green. “He used to be at the top of the food chain,” Louis said. Those were the first words he spoke to me.
“What’s that?” Rick asks from the library doorway. He’s been in the Hospital for weeks, but still looks like he’s just wandered out of the woods.
“A story,” I tell him.
I think he’s going to leave, but instead he comes into the library. He stands in a corner for a moment and I remember Curtis’s stories and start to get nervous, start to anticipate a foul smell. He takes an encyclopedia from a shelf and pages through it.
“There are a lot of stories around here,” he says.
I’m sitting on the floor, working with sheets of construction paper and a black crayon. The dark wax keeps smudging and the letter looks more like a ransom note or a deranged love letter than the story I want to tell. I don’t have the right materials. I’m learning that in some ways life is all about having the right materials at the right time.
Three pages in, I stop and rip up the sheets.
“Tell me more about what it’s like out there,” I say to Rick. I tell him that I want to know what he saw, if he was afraid.
Rick sits next to me on the olive-colored rug and tells a story about where he grew up, which was not Oregon, but a town in Ohio, in the Mahoning Valley. For many years, his family worked in the steel mills on the river. As a child, he only knew the sky to be an ocean of gray smog. By the time he was a teenager, the mills had all closed and he learned that sky came in all kinds of colors. Without the mills, there was no money. The town’s population started shrinking. Rick went out to Oregon, leaving behind thousands of empty buildings and abandoned mills lining the river like rusting ghosts.
“This town became sick,” he tells me, turning over his palms. Brown scabs have stitched together the cuts on his hands. “Now that disease has spread and spread, so instead of only some places looking sick, many places look sick. That’s what it’s like.”
“Tell me more about the Laws of the Road,” I say next.