I shift on the bed. It feels better now—marginally better. I can move.
There’s my sport jacket. Folded nicely at the foot of the bed. I stand up, waver a little, unfold the coat and slip it on. My little treasure trove is still in the inside pocket: The picture of young Nico. The butt of the American Spirit. The plastic fork. My notebook, nearly full. Only thing missing is the SIG. Everything else still in its place.
I pick up the jug and tilt it back and swallow the last drops of the water.
There’s no mirror in the room, no pictures, no paintings. The Casio says 5:45, but the information seems abstract; incomplete. Five forty-five when? How long have I been under? It’s an uncomfortable relationship you develop with sleep, at a time like this, it feels like every time you close your eyes you could wake up on the last day of the world.
I get up and out of the bed, relieved to find that I can walk with only a little difficulty. I cough again on the way to the door, try the handle and find it locked from the other side, as I had a feeling it would be—but as soon as I rattle it, someone cries out on the other side.
“He’s awake!” A woman’s voice, relieved, joyous even. “Praise God! The boy is awake.”
The boy. Is that me? A scrape of a chair, then another scrape. Two people out there, sitting in the hallway, waiting for me. A vigil. The second voice I recognize.
“Be still. Stay.” Old man, thick neck, beard. The creak of his boots approaching the door. I hear the lock click open, and I step back, my heart tightening. I remember his hands at my back in the cornfield, shoving me forward. The door sneaks open, letting in a sliver of light from the hallway. He is there, my assailant from the roadway, black coat, large body, just outside the door.
It’s the voice of the woman, though, that travels in. “Friend,” she begins. “We must ask. Are you ill?”
“I—” I stand in the quiet room, confused. Am I ill? Obviously, I am not well. I have been burned. There is smoke in my lungs. I have been kicked by a horse, and my forehead is split. I am hungry, and exhausted, and worn. But am I ill?
“Friend?” she says again, the voice of a woman in her early old age, firm and maternal and insistent. “You must tell us. We will know.”
I stare at my side of the door. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t understand.”
“She means to ask whether you suffer from the plague.”
The old man’s words are slow and purposeful. He wants to make sure I get his meaning. But I don’t. I don’t think I do.
“Excuse me,” I say. “What?”
“Whether you are stricken like so many others.”
Stricken. A word from another time. Saddlebag. Milking stool. Stricken. I feel my cheeks with my mummy hands, half expecting to find boils or welts, some new biblical form of suffering written on my face. But it’s just my same face, thinned out by travel, mustache thick above my lip, wild stubble across my chin.
The man speaks again. “Here we keep ourselves isolated from the illness. We need to know whether you have been afflicted.”
Slowly I bring my hand down from my face, while my mind races, trying to work this through. Stricken—afflicted. I begin to nod, I begin to think I’ve got a line on the situation here, and I’m already trying to figure out how to navigate my way through, how to get what I need and get out.
I clear my throat. “No,” I say, and cough. “No, sir, no ma’am, I am not afflicted. Can I please come out of the room now?”
*
If there are any Amish people in the state of New Hampshire I’ve never come across one, and so my entire concept of Amishness is from culture, the cartoon version: black hats, black beards, horse-drawn buggies and candles and cows. Now she opens the door, an old woman in a faded purple dress and black bonnet, and beside her the old man, just as formidable a presence in daylight: tall and wide-bodied in a white shirt, black pants, and suspenders. Estimable chinstrap beard, black with streaks of gray. Broad forehead and large nose, eyes wary and staring above a carefully set mouth. The woman meanwhile has one hand clasped to her mouth in startled joy that I am alive, that I am well, like I am her own long-lost child.
“Come now,” she says warmly, beckoning me forward, “come on. Come along to everyone.”
I trail along behind her down a sunlit wood-floor hallway, and she is speaking quietly in English the whole way, thanking God and murmuring praise, but not the old man—he’s just a pace behind me, and when I glance at him he just looks back at me wordlessly and grave, his silence an unspoken warning. Quiet, boy. Hold your peace. The house smells like cinnamon and bread, warm and welcoming and calm. We pass three doors, two of them open to neat bedrooms like the one I was in, one closed tightly shut with a light on underneath.