A plastic container filled with vials of black rocks sit on the counter. The man picks one up and shakes it. W. VA COAL is painted across the vial in small red letters.
“This isn’t real coal,” the man tells us, one eye drifting toward the door. “But it sure looks real, doesn’t it?”
Marcus and I are starting to think this man in the Kiss T-shirt is not someone who can help us, but then he starts drawing a map on a brown paper napkin. He tells us we’re close to where we want to be. He sketches out a tight maze of streets and adds arrows to show us where to go.
“Have you seen those people with painted faces running around?” I ask the man. “What are they?”
“Oh, those people,” the man says, shaking his head.
We wait, but he doesn’t give us anything more.
We thank him and head back out into the night.
“Mountaineers are always free,” he calls after us.
We have no idea what that means.
We follow his map back to the white building with the domed roof, but then we get turned around again. We end up sitting on the steps of the building and blowing hot air on our fingers. I can feel the blisters growing inside my sneakers. We watch the sun rise over the river and soak the water in light. We set out again with our little gas station map and this time we don’t walk for long before we find ourselves, as if by magic, standing right outside the place we are supposed to be.
*
In our motel room, I get into one of the beds. The curtains are thick and block the rising sun; in here it is endless night. Marcus is sitting on the other bed and scratching the skin behind his mask.
I turn on the TV, where a reporter is chronicling all the ways people have tried to find cures. One man concocted an antidote from household cleaning supplies and poisoned his entire family. After the sickness ended, they were found lying in a circle on their living room floor, feet pointed at the wall, heads pointed at the center of the circle, like they were playing a game or doing a meditation exercise or taking a nap from which they would, at any moment, wake.
Next door a man is shouting. The noise is too much. My mother seems very far away. I feel the world grow duller, feel sound melt into a fuzz, and it occurs to me that this might be what it’s like when you begin to die.
When I wake, Marcus is kneeling next to me and holding a finger under my nose. He blinks at me from inside the rabbit mask. My feet push at the empty space at the bottom of the bed. I feel slow and thirsty, like I have been away on a very long adventure I can no longer recall.
“Are you alive in there?” Marcus says.
I sit up and the sleep peels away like sand falling out of my hair.
“You’ve been asleep for twelve hours.” He pulls his hand back. “Ten hours is a coma. I was starting to get worried.”
I look at the bedside clock. Already another day is slipping past. Outside the Hospital the rules of time are confusing to me. Maybe in my sleep I was swimming toward that new self I know is out there.
The TV is still on, but muted. A camera pans across a purple mountain range, an advertisement for a special kind of oxygen-enriched air. This air is called Super Air and it promises to help you get what we all want: more time on earth.
“Yes,” I say, for the second time since leaving the Hospital. “I am alive.”
*
When I was alone, the act of calling my mother’s number, of pressing that particular sequence of buttons, seemed impossible. With Marcus, I feel braver.
Still, I don’t call right away. He walks me through the phone visualization exercise again and this time I get as far as the booth and the ringing; I just can’t get myself to walk on the screen and answer. We each take showers and we wash our shirts in the sink and dry them with the hair dryer in our room, which is long and white instead of dark and gun-shaped. In the bathroom mirror, we stand side by side and look at our reflections. I can see my nipples through the thin cotton of my bra and I don’t feel exposed and I don’t feel ashamed. Marcus’s body is still boyish. His torso is pale and hairless except for the soft ring around his bellybutton and the freckle over his right nipple. With his masked face I think he looks like a wrestler and tell him so.
“What would your wrestling name be?” I ask. “Marcus the Marauder. Marcus the Murderer.”
“Marcus the Monster!”
“Marcus the Monsoon!”
“Rabbits are vicious,” he says.
We laugh and in the mirror our stomachs ripple.
I’m so starved that my body feels like it has been emptied, like I contain nothing but dust. We get dressed and go outside, driven by hunger, and find the same white-faced mob standing on a street corner and passing out sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil and Styrofoam cups filled with cold coffee. The day is the color of slate. We drink the coffee and chew the stale bread. Marcus slips everything under his mask with an expertise that makes it look like a magic trick. These provisions are free and right now anything free feels like a blessing.
When we ask these people if they remember us from the night before, if they remember nearly running us the fuck over, the bright white faces stare back, uncomprehending. When we ask them what they’re doing out here, they tell us that this is their city and they are saving it. When we ask them why they run in the night, they tell us they do it because they are so glad to still be among the living.
Inside the motel we pass a woman cleaning the fake ferns with a sponge, and when she sees our sandwiches, she points the sponge at us and says, “Goddamn those people. They are terrorizing this city.” She tells us the sandwiches are probably poisoned. We each ate two sandwiches apiece and we don’t know what to believe. What if the acrobats are part of some kind of cult? What if they are trying to incite mass suicide? In our room, we sit on a bed and hold our stomachs. We suffer no ill effects.
Calling my mother is the last thing I do before we leave. I pick up the phone and listen to the dial tone. I start pressing the numbers. The phone rings and rings. I count to twelve and hang up.
“No one’s there.”