After our exams, she crosses off the date on the countdown calendar tacked to the wall between our beds. The week is a row of black x’s. Our calendar has a bird theme. December’s is the African gray parrot—prehistoric claws gripping a branch, a beady eye I can feel following us in the night. We have seven months until we can leave, until we know for sure if we have the sickness, if we are going to stop remembering.
I look around at the four white walls of our room and ask Louis what else he knows about birds. He’s lying on top of his sheets and flexing his arm. I want to go to him, to touch his knee, to press my hands against the bones in his chest.
I stay sitting on the edge of my bed.
“Hummingbirds can fly upside down.” He rolls onto his side and slides his hands under his cheek. He closes his eyes, already bored with this entire conversation. “The macaws in South America have a scream that will shatter your heart.”
The inside of my arm throbs. I press my thumb against the fresh needle mark. Blood seeps from the hole.
“Today is a very special day,” N5 says as she packs up her kit, a red duffel bag with a white cross on the front. “Today Dr. Bek is going to look inside your minds.”
*
After breakfast, the patients stay in the Dining Hall for testing. We fill the long tables, facing a portable projector screen. The nurses give us paper and tiny pencils with no erasers. I’m sitting with my Floor Group, across from Paige and Louis. The red trays are stacked on the buffet tables. The faces of the microwaves stare out at us. I can smell our last meal, breakfast meatballs, a category of food no one in our Floor Group has ever heard of before, rising from the green garbage cans in the corners of the room. Shadows slip around on the tables. Paige is doodling flowers on the edge of Louis’s paper.
We are supposed to write down the story of what we think is happening in the slides. The lights go out and the first slide is a black-and-white image of a house in a winter landscape. The windows are pale smudges and something is rising behind the house—large, dark clouds that cast strange shapes on the snow. Ridges of ice stick out of the ground like a creature’s spine. The more I look at the slide, the more I think the house is about to be consumed by the weather.
House getting eaten by winter, I write.
By now we the patients are used to Dr. Bek’s tests. In our first month, each of us got an electroencephalogram, a test that measures electrical activity in the brain. In Dr. Bek’s office, I sat in a chair and wore a helmet made of white electrodes. At the base of the helmet, long wires connected me to his computer. The office was silent. Dr. Bek watched the screen. Halfway through the test, I started to feel like I was going to explode. I couldn’t sit still any longer. I crossed and uncrossed my legs. I tapped my fingers against the seat. My bladder was suddenly full and I didn’t think I could hold it in.
“What is this doing to me?” I finally shouted, and Dr. Bek looked up from his screen and explained that it wasn’t doing anything; it was simply measuring, presenting him with data, helping him figure out how to keep me well.
Later we were given written personality tests where we had to answer yes or no to statements like “The best decision is the one that can be easily changed” or “You value justice more than mercy.” This test seemed like a trap, because the right response to nearly every statement—“It depends”—was never an option. Where he sees science, I just see something new to pass the time.
The next image looks like a tunnel, some kind of shadowy underground place. I put my head on the table and listen to the other patients scratching out their replies. I wait for the click of the slide changing. In East Somerville, I would wake in the dark of my basement apartment and think for a moment that I had fallen asleep in a cave. That this was where I had brought myself to die. The third image is blank. At first, I think it’s a mistake, but then I notice other patients writing away. Louis pinches his pencil between his fingers, tilts his head in concentration. I don’t see anything there, but I recognize a feeling.
*
I stand in the mouth of my bedroom closet and run my hands over the scrubs. I watch the white ones sway on their wire hangers, as though invisible bodies are occupying them. I go into our bathroom and turn the sink water on and off. The floors are cool tile. The shower curtain is a wisp of white plastic. This faucet does not leak.
In the bathroom, I hear another one of the Pathologist’s meditations. WITH OPEN HANDS I WELCOME THE CONTINUATION OF LIFE.
I sit on the bedroom floor and poke myself in the knee, numb with boredom.
I thought I knew about boredom in my old life, but I was wrong. I knew about lulls in the action, stretches of stillness, but I did not know what it was like to feel time become a wet, heavy thing. I did not know days so long and familiar, you find yourself holding your breath until you’re dizzy and flushed, all for your own amusement.
There is no cough syrup in the Hospital, nothing to soften the borders of the mind.
A nightmare becomes a nightmare when you start to believe it will never end. In our contracts, there is an ending, but sometimes, when I’m lying awake at night, I wonder.
I’m saved when the twins come to see how I did on the test. The boys live in the room next door. They are ten and their parents are dead. They have no other family. They are orphans, signed away to the Hospital by a social worker.
The summer before the sickness came, they went to Hawaii with their parents. Now all they want is to go back. They draw maps—patchworks of blue and green, with black cones to mark the volcanoes—and get the nurses to hang them on their walls. They make leis from toilet paper and request pineapple rings in the Dining Hall. For hours they watch the Discovery Channel in the Common Room and sift through the encyclopedias in the library, in search of anything to do with Hawaii.