When the ambulance came, paramedics in rubber gloves and gas masks shooed me back inside like I had committed a crime.
The man snapped open his briefcase and passed me a thick stack of papers. He pointed to a paragraph with tiny font, marked by an arrow-shaped sticker. “As you can see here, your primary role in the Hospital is to simply exist, along with daily examinations, to ensure there are no signs of infection.”
“Sounds like the beginning of a horror movie,” I said.
“More horrifying than what you’ve already experienced?” The man took a fountain pen from his briefcase and placed it next to the papers. “I sincerely doubt it.”
How would he know what I had already experienced?
I won’t even pack a suitcase, I decided then. I would go in the clothes I was wearing, my mother’s photo in my pocket. I bent at the waist. My hair fell over my eyes. Blood rushed to my skull. I had my own reasons for wanting out of Somerville.
Here were the facts of my life: I worked as a cashier at a twenty-four-hour Stop & Shop, graveyard shift. My basement apartment had no windows. I slept through the daylight hours and never left for work without drinking at least four ounces of cough syrup. I stole fresh bottles from the Stop & Shop and I knew one day I would get caught and be fired, but did I care? I did not care.
It was at the Stop & Shop that I started with the cough syrup. I got the idea while restocking shelves in Health & Beauty. I tried Creomulsion, Boiron, Mucinex, but cherry-flavored Robitussin, maximum strength, was my favorite.
“I already have a suit.” I pointed at the hazmat draped over the couch, almost proud to be so well prepared.
“That won’t be necessary.” He smiled, showing off long incisors. “In the Hospital, you will be safe from germs.”
It wasn’t much longer before I boarded the bus and we rolled through Connecticut, Pennsylvania, the Midwest, picking up patients along the way. The trip took two days. I remember the swaying power lines and the thin blue sky and the light contracting and expanding along the horizon. At the Hospital, I watched a hazmatted nurse seal the photo in a plastic baggie and imagined the day of my release, my mother being handed back to me.
I do not know her name or where she lives or if she is still alive. Even so I have developed an attachment. I smell grass everywhere. I dream about her. In a different one, we are swimming in the ocean. No land is in sight, but we are not afraid. The water is calm and glistening. We can hold our breath for hours. When I wake in the Hospital, I wrap my hands around my head and try to remember the things she said to me.
Who else do I have to listen to?
4.
Every morning, a nurse comes for our examination. Their face shields are narrow rectangles, so we can’t see anything but scrunching foreheads and darting eyes. Dr. Bek is the only member of the Hospital staff with a proper name and a fully visible face. I know all about psychological tricks: he wants the patients to believe he is the only one we can trust with our lives.
Today I sit on the edge of my bed and gaze through N5’s shield, in search of something human. The gold flecks around her irises. The lash that has fallen out and stuck to the bluish skin under her eye. Some mornings I want to shake her white plastic sleeve and beg her to tell me what is going to happen to all of us.
Here is what she measures: our blood pressure with cuffs that squeeze and hiss; temperature with an ear thermometer that makes a clicking noise inside the canal; sight with a flashlight we have to track back and forth, up and down; coordination with the Romberg’s test, where we stand straight and still, our feet pressed together, then shut our eyes and hold the pose.
Do the Romberg! Do the Romberg! I imagine a dance with steps I never learned.
“That doesn’t seem so hard,” I said the first time I did the Romberg, and N5 said try doing it with holes in your brain.
I stand and she uses the same flashlight to check my skin for blisters. She examines my scalp, her rubber fingers pushing aside my hair, so close I can feel the sound of her breathing nest inside my lungs.
Three times a week, she draws blood. My arms are dappled with tiny purple bruises, like a piece of meat beginning to rot, and the sight of a needle sliding from its casing makes me shiver. I watch the needle slip under my skin and red velvety fluid fill the vial.
“Healthy as a hummingbird.” She turns to Louis, big and slow in her suit. From the far end of a hallway, in a certain kind of light, I sometimes think the nurses look like enormous white birds. The air tank underneath is a hump between her shoulders. During our first week in the Hospital, she used long Q-tips to take cultures from our throats. I remember the cotton end of the Q-tip disappearing into my mouth, the brief sensation of choking.
“Hummingbirds have a very short lifespan.” Louis extends his arm for the needle. “Three years, max.”
“Good memory trick.” N5 ties a rubber tourniquet around his biceps and the bright tip of the needle appears. Louis doesn’t flinch when his blood is drawn and I wonder if he is still able to register feeling. “Now where did you learn about hummingbirds?” We are encouraged to recite whatever facts we know, to make sure we aren’t forgetting.
“Costa Rica was a bestseller at the store,” he says. “I lived my life surrounded by travel guides, but I never went anywhere.”
In her suit, N5 makes a noise that sounds like approval. But how do you know he’s telling the truth? I want to ask. In the Hospital, I can feel myself growing more and more suspicious.