Find Me by Laura van Den Berg

with you? Besides the obvious, I mean.” The obvious being the country getting razed by forgetting and then coming back to life and all the while we stay stuck in here, getting sicker.
    â€œPaige doesn’t want to see me.”
    â€œOh,” I say. “Did she give you a reason?”
    His hands fall into his lap. He looks out at the patients bent over their plates and sawing open burritos with plastic knives. “Do I really need to tell you, Joy? This is a hopeless place, for hopeless people. Not a place for romance.”
    â€œI don’t know about all that,” I say.
    I touch his shoulder and feel heat rising from his body, proof of his aliveness. I want to tell him to not give up, that Paige only loves running, that she was never going to love him, that there are other kinds of people in here.
    There is, for example, me.
    â€œWell.” He rubs the fine hair on his arms. “It’s not like I was madly in love.”
    â€œOh,” I say again. “So you don’t miss her?”
    â€œWhat I miss is living.”
    I keep my hand on his shoulder. I feel his skin grow warmer under my palm.
    Across the room, I catch the twins sitting under an empty table. Their legs are bent and pulled to their chests. They’re facing each other, chins resting on knees, and whispering. They go unnoticed by the patients walking past, by everyone but me.
    *   *   *
    I walk the Hospital for hours that afternoon. In the third-floor hallway, I pass a spot where the paint has bubbled. I touch the lump, troubled by the anomaly, by the image of tumors multiplying inside the building and pushing their way through the walls. The cold coming up through the floor makes the bones in my feet ache. Afterwards I visit the Dining Hall and then do a slow pass through the Common Room, where Curtis is trying to get the TV to come on.
    â€œAny luck?” I ask him. How I miss seeing my mother’s face.
    â€œNope.” He kneels behind the black box and fiddles with a nest of yellow wires. During the blizzard, a patient snuck into the Common Room and pissed in a corner. Our Floor Group treated the stain with powdered carpet cleaner, but there’s still a dark, tangy splotch.
    In the days between our Internet Sessions, we worry about what might be happening. If life on the outside is still getting better or if it is getting worse. We know how quickly things can change: one day the sickness does not exist; one day the sickness is in California; one day it is everywhere; one day it is starting to disappear. The scheduled Internet Sessions are like sips of water in a long hot desert, and we want more to drink.
    Curtis gives up on the TV and starts grumbling about Dr. Bek’s lack of progress. “Why should we keep waiting around here to die?” he says, dropping into the battered couch, not quite talking to me.

 
    11.
    I start to hear a scraping sound coming from the twins’ room at night. It’s a soft clawing noise, like they’re using their fingernails to scratch through the floor. I roll away from the wall and shut my eyes, but I can’t stop listening. I imagine miners pickaxing their way through a cave, archaeologists excavating ruins, explorers drilling through the earth’s crust and mantle and into the deepest core.
    *   *   *
    Some nights I don’t listen to the twins at all because I am tangled up in a net of remembering. I think about the stories Marcus and I used to tell each other in Charlestown. Real-Life Ghost Stories, we called them. Here’s one.
    On my first night in Mission Hill, I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom and when I looked up, an older girl was in the doorway. She was tan and wide. Pink jelly bracelets were stacked on her wrists. She smacked the toothbrush out of my hand. It clattered against the floor. White foam ran down my chin. I felt the bathroom shrinking. She smacked me in the face. I crashed into the