When we hit our last room for the night, I get to do the stealing. I start with the dresser drawers. Empty. I move on to the bathroom, where I find a single pearl earring on the counter. The pearl is large and light, definitely fake, but I scoop it anyway. I wonder if the earring means this room belongs to a woman—if she is out here on her own, like me.
The first thing I ever stole was a comb. In Roxbury, I watched a girl run this comb through her hair day after day and coveted the pink plastic teeth. One morning she left the comb on her pillow and I took it without thinking, in a blaze of want.
I never felt bad for stealing cough syrup from the Stop & Shop. They always seemed to have too much of everything.
In the bedside drawers, I find a postcard stuck between the pages of the Bible. I’m about to call it quits when I notice a coat draped over a chair. The inside breast pocket holds two crisp fifties and a map of American highways, folded into a tiny square.
We examine our haul in the break room. We close the blinds and flick on the lights and dump everything on the king bed. We kneel together on the floor, breathless, sifting through our loot. The air is still heavy with smoke.
He counts the money: three hundred and seventy-five dollars. The coating on the fake pearl is peeling and faded. Neither of us want it; we took it for nothing. The postcard is a black-and-white image of waves breaking on a beach. The sky is caked with cloud except in the center, where flecks of light have burned through. Someone somewhere wrote an address and a message on the back, but the ink has bled.
No Name hands me a thin stack of bills. “This is for you.”
A hundred dollars, plus the map.
I stare at the back of the postcard, trying to decipher the dark smudges. “I think this was addressed to someone in Virginia.”
What an elegant, gentle-sounding name for a place, Virginia.
“Take it if you want.” No Name pulls out his cigarettes and beats the bottom of the pack. “It’s worthless.”
*
In exchange for my work, I get a room on the third floor. I strip and hang my clothes in the little closet by the bathroom. In the mirror, my skin is chalk white. My bangs have grown down to my eyebrows. My legs are coated in rough fuzz. The hair in my armpits and around my crotch is a dark tangle. I rub the tender veins in my arms.
In the shower, I scrub myself with a washcloth until my skin is throbbing and pink, as though the cells hold memories I want to erase. I stand under the showerhead and let the water beat my shoulders for a while, waiting for someone to come and tell me that I’m taking too long or that it’s time for a Community Meeting or Lights Out. Time to do the Romberg.
No one does.
It takes me a while to get the temperature right. For a while, the water either scalds or freezes.
I forget to put down a bath mat and leave wet footprints on the tile floor.
Once, in Roxbury, there was an outbreak of head lice and it was decided the cure was drenching our hair in mayonnaise and waving hot dryers over our heads until our scalps were burning.
I remember this when I see the gun-shaped hair dryer under the motel sink.
After the shower, I sit on the bed and line up the postcard and my mother’s photo. They look right together, the captain and her sea.
I turn on the TV, hoping for Mysteries of the Sea, but instead an “outbreak retrospective” is on the news. A number of survivors have, in the last month, vanished. Some have moved across the country, abandoning jobs and mortgages and families, leaving behind only a letter to explain or just disappearing in the middle of the night. There are empty cubicles in office buildings and dogs tied to mailboxes and mounds of newspapers in their dewy plastic packaging on doorsteps. Others have committed suicide. Approximately five hundred people, to date. The news calls it a “microepidemic.”
In an interview, a mental health expert explains that some survivors can’t make sense of what they’ve lived through, of why they’ve lived through it, so they shed their life and assume another or shed their life and assume death. This man has a neat beard and a sweater-vest and I’m skeptical he knows very much about what it’s like to live through unbearable things.
Images from the sickness come next: long lumps under white sheets; patients cowering behind plastic tents, tubes springing from their arms, skin brilliant with silver sores; helicopters sweeping cities; an army of yellow hazmat suits flooding a wide street. I don’t want to keep watching, but I can’t seem to make myself change the channel.
The final death toll was close to four hundred thousand, more than half the population of Boston. Now there is debate about whether the “microepidemic” victims should be added to that count or if they demand a count of their own.
A woman standing on a street corner, the wind whipping around her. A tissue crumpled in her hand. A flush is spreading down her nose and across her cheeks. She looks to be about the same age as my own mother. Her son survived the sickness, then dove off the Golden Gate Bridge. He left a note telling her he couldn’t trust the world anymore.
What would Dr. Bek have to say about this man, about his unconscious mind?
She looks into the camera. A clear stream runs from her nose.
“When could we ever?” she says.
*
In the middle of the night, I get up and go down to the swimming pool. Under the clamshell, the water looks as soft and pink as a tongue. I smell the bitterness of chlorine. There’s a crack in the concrete bottom shaped like a bolt of lightning. The white lounge chairs surrounding the pool are heaped with snow. No one else is in the courtyard. All the floors are silent.
Again I take off my clothes. I don’t know what else to do with all this freedom.
The pool is barely lukewarm. The advertised heating feels like a lie. Like something to hate. My body is different than it was on land—lighter, more nimble, like all the blood in my veins has been replaced with air. My nipples are purple and hard.