On a city block, a building had exploded. Already the police had put up barricades and were rushing around in blue surgical masks, to shield their lungs from debris. The smoke was so dark and dense that if they moved too far down the street, they vanished into it. We stood behind the barricades and watched a woman rush out of the smoke in a beautiful gold dress, the scalloped hem falling just below her knees, and blue bedroom slippers. On the corner, she fell to her knees and released a scream that was shattering in its loudness. She kneaded her fists against her stomach. Her entire body quaked.
In the Hospital, on the news, I have watched people in emergency rooms beat their stomachs as they wail, have seen faces covered by those same blue surgical masks, and the memory of the masked police and the smoking emptiness in the middle of the block and the woman screaming in her fine dress seemed not like the result of a freak gas leak—the cause of the explosion, we would later learn—but like a premonition, a chance to witness the kind of world that was to come.
*
Raul used to be a hairdresser in Chicago. He’s in our Floor Group and when he gets permission to give the patients haircuts, we line up outside the Common Room. I’m happy to have something to do besides pilgrim watching.
Louis and I have determined that there are two secrets to life in the Hospital:
1. Don’t get sick.
2. Don’t get driven insane by empty time.
The linoleum floors glow white under the fluorescent overheads. Sometimes it feels like we’re standing inside a flashlight. I wait next to Louis. He’s thirty, which to me seems young and old at the same time. He has the blondest hair and the greenest eyes and a dimple right in the center of his chin. He is a college graduate, handsome and solid, someone I never would have talked to out in the real world. I would have rung up his groceries, bagged his tomatoes and his eggs, handed him the coupons that printed with his receipt. We met on the bus that carried us to the Hospital and were assigned to the same Floor Group, the same room. We are the only coed room on our floor. There were odd numbers of women and men, so Louis and I got stuck with each other, and Dr. Bek said the Hospital was placing extra trust in us, in our ability to handle being an exception to the rules.
On our first night, I did not sleep. I lay on my side, facing Louis, and watched the gentle rise and fall of his body under the sheets. I was used to aloneness, and it would take me days before I could drift off with another person in the room.
The Hospital looked like a fortress from the outside, so far from everything that went wrong, a towering structure rising from the absolute flatness of the plains. From the bus window, I thought at first that it was a mirage.
A brief history of the Hospital: It started out as a public psychiatric hospital, but state budget cuts shut it down in 2009. The building sat empty until Dr. Bek and his staff took it over during the sickness and made it into something useful again. I’m betting the people who built this Hospital, the people who lived and worked here, could never have imagined what it would one day be used for.
A red exit sign hangs over the stairwell entrance. The light inside has burned out. There are no working clocks, but my guess is Louis and I have been waiting for close to an hour.
“I only want a little off the ends.” My hair falls past my shoulders in dark waves, lush and healthy-looking. It shines under the lights. No bangs, center part, showing off a high, smooth forehead. It’s one of the few things I have found consistently admirable about myself, my hair. “Nothing dramatic.”
“I don’t want a haircut,” Louis says. “Not from Raul, anyway.”
“So what’s your excuse?”
He’s leaning against the wall, one leg bent, arms crossed. The hair on his forearms is as light and soft as corn silk. I want him to say that he is here, that he is standing in this line, because he would do anything to be close to me.
“I’m looking for Paige. Seen her?”
Louis has recently taken a special interest in Paige, a patient from our Floor Group and a former marathon runner from Seattle. I’ve seen him watching her in the Dining Hall as she props her heel on a chair for stretches or offering to time her when she practices sprints in the hallway.
I shrug. “Maybe she doesn’t care about hair.”
The twins emerge from the Common Room. Their hair has been trimmed at the crown, but left shaggy around the ears and napes. They look like a pair of elves. I avoid eye contact with Louis, but I can feel him smirking at me, at the flaws in my judgment, as the boys pass.
“Next!” Raul calls.
It’s easy to picture psychiatric patients lolling around the Common Room, the air swelling with their cigarette smoke. A sour smell has gotten trapped in the dark blue carpeting. There are little holes all over the walls, rings of chipped white paint, evidence of what used to be there. The couch is long and the color of rust, the seat cushions indented with the impressions of bodies. The TV is an ancient black box resting on an equally ancient VCR. In Community Meetings, Dr. Bek has told us that he is suspicious of technology, of an overreliance on machines.
One morning a week, the nurses play a yoga video in the Common Room and patients from different floors bend and twist, form bridges with their bodies. On Saturday nights, the nurses select a movie to show. So far we have seen: Sleepless in Seattle, Meatballs, Night of the Living Dead, which gave half the patients nightmares, The Maltese Falcon, three installments of Mission: Impossible.
In Mission: Impossible, the masks made me think of the boy I used to live with, the boy I grew to love. That night, I lay in bed and mouthed his name. My private meditation.
When I first came to the Hospital, I wanted to know everyone. At Community Meetings and in the Dining Hall, I would go up to patients and ask them who they were and where they were from and what they missed. After the nineteenth person went to the tenth floor, a death for every year of my life, I stopped remembering names.