Find Me by Laura van Den Berg Page B

next to me, wild-eyed and rubbing their palms together and telling everyone they don’t want to die in here. The twins are lost in our Floor Group, in the rush of adult bodies, but I can hear them going on about the TV, how we need it, how it should be working, and others start taking up their cause.
    The room gets loud and hot and my memory tips back to summers in Boston, when the hair on my neck was always damp and the standing fans in my basement apartment churned around the warm air. At the Stop & Shop, every time the doors opened the heat would find its way in. I would escape to Frozens and press icy bags of peas against my forehead. On the T, the heat swarmed the bodies slouching in seats, the bodies wound around the poles, the bodies holding the straps like children who had tired of standing. When the cars rose aboveground and clacked across the tracks, the sun burned through the windows and I felt the burn in my cheeks just like the one I’m feeling now, in the Common Room.
    Patients stomp and chant. Some are chanting for hazmat suits and some are chanting for a new TV and some are chanting for our release and some are shouting, “Cure! Cure! Cure!” The mantras spread like fire. The exception is the guy from California, the one who led the rebellion in the Dining Hall, who is looking at all of us like, Oh no, not this shit again.
    I sink into the crowd. Green and white figures spread across the Common Room like a wave. I lose sight of Dr. Bek. The patients spill over the couch and around the TV, still chanting. The nurses have vanished from the doorway, leaving Dr. Bek to face us on his own.
    Me, I’m not chanting for anything. I just want the noise to stop.
    â€œI can’t breathe in here,” I say to Louis. I swat at my chest, swat at his arm, looking for something steady.
    The heat, the noise, it swells like a balloon. We are too much for this space to hold. We are about to blow it apart. Dr. Bek bolts up the side of the room, a silver flash shooting into the hall, and then everyone starts to run.
    Dr. Bek races down the white hall. The fluorescents hit the edges of his hazmat, framing his body in light. All the patients follow. The fifth floor is filled with the thunder of our footsteps. The patients in the lead reach for Dr. Bek, their fingers long and pale. What will happen if we catch him? Will we tear off his suit and rub our hands all over his face and say, You are one of us now?
    Patients fall and claw their way back. Those who can’t run as fast, who are abandoned by the group, throw themselves against the walls and scream. I feel a hand grabbing at my ankle, digging nails, and I nearly go down, but Louis takes me by the elbow and pulls me up.
    We are falling behind, Louis and me, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t still a part of it.
    â€œGarrr!” Sam and Christopher call out.
    The halls pass in a white smudge. When Dr. Bek reaches the Dining Hall, he taps a code into the keypad and darts inside. We hear the doors lock behind him, the heavy click.
    Patients kick the doors. They slam their bodies against them. There are two small round windows in the doors and Dr. Bek stares out at us through one of those windows, so still that he looks like he could be part of an exhibit, an astronaut frozen behind a sheet of glass.
    A plan is devised to break into the Dining Hall. No one knows the code, so patients raid the supply closets for brooms and mops and beat the doors with the long wooden handles. The tools the Hospital has given us to fulfill our duties, to maintain cleanliness and order, are now being used in the name of chaos. Broom handles bash the round panes, but the glass appears unbreakable. Dr. Bek’s face recedes from the window. I imagine him shrinking into a dark corner of the Dining Hall, breathing fast inside his suit.
    When the doors do not open, the patients try to guess the code. We try the date of the first reported case and the date of our arrival