An orange Dining Hall chair stands in the corner, the metal legs encircled with mounds of hair. Raul waves me over with his scissors. A nurse from our Floor Group is sitting on the couch, supervising. We identify the nurses by the ID patches on the breasts of their hazmats. Hers is N5. She’s reading a magazine, an old issue of Newsweek, from the library. A soldier in a mud-crusted combat helmet stares out from the cover, his eyes wide and vacant.
After the sickness broke out, people stopped talking about wars.
“This way.” Raul’s stomach is a small dome under his green scrubs.
I sit down, facing the wall. Despite the cleaning efforts of our group, there are scuffs on the floorboards. My slippers rest on a pile of hair. “Just a trim,” I say to Raul, who has already started.
I watch dark clumps fall to the ground. Scissors graze the back of my neck. I tell him that I hope he’s not getting carried away.
“You look like an old customer of mine.” He digs his fingers into my hair, his hands warm and rough. His nails pierce my scalp. “You have the same kind of face.”
I ask Raul what kind of face that would be, to describe this woman to me, but he doesn’t answer and I wonder if this same-faced person has lost their memory, if they are dead. When he finishes, I pat my forehead and feel bangs.
“Do you have a mirror?” I ask.
“No, he does not,” the nurse answers for him. She turns a magazine page.
Hair bits are stuck to my thighs. I brush them away. I stand and look at my hair spread all over the floor and try not to panic. In my head, I start a new list, because lists are what I lean on when I get upset.
In the Hospital, I have seen women with bangs that hang like curtains over their eyes and ends so split it looks like they’ve been electrocuted. I have seen a pixie cut that never seems to grow. In the Hospital, I have seen men with sideburns, men who only have swirls of hair at their temples, men with small bald spots on top of their heads, round and shiny as coins. There are all kinds of people in here.
Raul gives my bangs one last snip and calls for the next patient.
Louis is still hanging around the hallway. A few patients from other Floor Groups have wandered over and fallen into line. I rush past, sweeping hair from my scrubs.
“Sheepdog!” he shouts as I walk by. “Sheepdog, sheepdog!”
I hurry into our bathroom. In the mirror, my hair is short and thick, so it puffs out like a helmet, and heavy bangs blanket half my forehead. I lean closer and notice a black hair on the tip of my nose. I flick it into the sink and turn on the faucet.
“Fuck you, Raul,” I say to no one.
*
One morning, near the end of November, I look out a Dining Hall window and there’s just this one pilgrim, a woman. She isn’t someone I’ve seen before. She wears a saggy black coat and her pale hair, which I envy immediately, falls past her waist. “Hello,” I whisper. My breath makes a fog circle on the glass.
It takes me a minute to realize the pilgrim is barefoot. Her feet are white and delicate. The bare skin glints in the daylight, so it looks like her feet are made of crystal, like that part of her body is not quite real. I gaze through the bars and try to imagine what it would feel like to stand barefoot on that frozen ground.
Breakfast is over. Floor Groups four and six have finished cleaning the microwave trays with the smelly green sponges. I turn to call to Louis, to show him this barefoot woman, who must have some kind of death wish, forgetting that he’s long gone, lured away by Paige, who needed a timer. After all, what is the point of running if there’s no finish line? No audience? No one to tell you that you’ve won?
Louis and I used to have rituals. We sat across from each other at breakfast each morning. We kissed in the dark of the stairwells, his hands disappearing under my scrubs. I can still remember the wet, electric feeling of his tongue pressing into the hollow spot at the bottom of my throat. Now we are just roommates. Nothing more.
In Kansas, when it is not the dead of winter, there are lots of sunflowers. In Kansas, in the year 1897, in a city called Atchison, Amelia Earhart was born. Kansas is not the flattest state in America. In Dodge City, spitting on the sidewalk is illegal. The state insect is the honeybee. The people who live here are called Kansans.
I repeat my list about Kansas and keep watching the pilgrim, who—like everything else in the world—is unreachable through the distance and the glass.
*
Lights Out is at ten o’clock and to our room it brings the darkest night I’ve ever seen. It’s not like city darkness, softened by streetlights and headlights, but thick and black as tar. Louis isn’t in bed for Lights Out—typical ever since he took up with Paige; her roommate was among the first to go to the tenth floor, so she can be counted on for privacy—but he returns not long after, in the mood to talk.
If your roommate dies, you remain in your room. There is no switching, no matter how lonely you get.
Tonight he’s complaining about the food. In the Hospital, we have eaten lumps of breaded chicken drenched in a mysterious red sauce and partially defrosted peas and hard, stale dinner rolls, which Louis thinks taste like ash. At dinner, we pick up these rolls and make like we’re going to clunk each other in the head.
“At least we’re alive,” I say. “When you’re dead, you don’t get to eat at all.”
“Like ash,” says Louis.
I stretch my legs underneath the sheets, into the cool space at the bottom of the bed. Our room smells like rubbing alcohol and Vaseline. Louis can talk about whatever he likes. I just want to keep hearing his voice.