Slices (2 page)

She
thinks she’s sick. She always thinks she’s sick. She
thinks she looks pale and is complaining about dark circles under her
eyes, but she looks fine to me. She’s coughing and keeps
telling me she’s got a fever. I saw a nurse take her
temperature and it was ninety-eight-point-six, so she’s just
faking again.

No,
that’s not fair. She believes it, I’m sure she does. Even
when she comes up with the weirdest shit. She was even telling me her
tongue
felt swollen, if that makes any sense to you.

Jerked
back awake — drifted off, hand holding the remote dropping onto
the bed and startling me. TV looks blurry through sleep-watery eyes.
They’re talking about — wait —

I
sit up and turn up the volume. I heard something about quarantine.
Something about the Center for Disease Control.

Something’s
wrong with the TV. Static around the edges and voices distorted,
echoing. There’s a map on the screen, red circles around the
city, white noise like a million bees droning —

Eyes
snap open again. Drifted off. There’s an ad for some medicine
now — smiling woman in a green meadow, sunlight streaming down.
Doesn’t say what it’s for. Ask your doctor if it’s
right for you.

I
flip through the channels, trying to find the news report again, but
there’s nothing. Just dreaming. I turn off the TV and toss the
remote aside. I want to turn out the light, but I’m too tired
to lean over and do it. I close my eyes again and try to ignore it.

Ask
your doctor. Talking to her’s got me dreaming about sickness.
Tomorrow I’d be talking to her doctor — I’ve talked
to her nurse a few times, but she doesn’t really seem to know
much. Maybe the doctor could tell me if there really was anything
wrong with her this time.

I’m
on a bus the next day and I wish to God I had money to rent a car or
even get a taxi. I’d walk, but it’s too damn cold out.
Cold enough it feels like it would snow if the air weren’t so
dry. People around me are bundled up, thick drab coats and scarves. I
hear lots of sniffling, muffled coughs. Guy across the aisle from me
keeps coughing, staring out the window blankly. God, I keep thinking,
if you’re that sick, just stay home. Or at least cover your
mouth when you cough. How do you get to be a grown-up without someone
teaching you that?

Maybe
if you don’t grow up with a mother who’s a germ-freak, I
guess. Someone who wipes doorknobs down with Lysol and washes her
hands fifty times a day, tries to make you do the same. Always making
me wear a sweater or a coat when she felt cold, warning me about
every cold or flu that was going around. And I always caught them
all, dammit.

The
staff at the hospital seem busy and stressed. They look like they
haven’t slept and I feel like I haven’t, either — I
got at least eight hours, but none of it very deep. I see nurses in
huddled quiet conversations in doorways, jumping when they see me
near. I didn’t think I looked that bad.

“So
what is wrong with her?” I ask, when I finally do see her
doctor.

Mom’s
asleep, fitfully, a frown creasing her forehead. The doctor looks
sharply down at her, pauses a moment before he answers.

“Honestly?
Nothing. Aside from her leg, she’s perfectly healthy. And the
leg is looking good — X-rays confirm that the reduction was
successful, and her bone alignment is looking just fine.”

“She
says she’s sick. She says the leg isn’t why she’s
really here.”

The
doctor shakes his head. “We thought from what she said at first
that she might also have some kind of respiratory ailment, but we
haven’t seen any actual symptoms. She’s been coughing,
but frankly, we think she’s, well — ”

“Faking
it,” I say.

“Well,
yes.”

“She’s
always done this. Jesus.” I screw my eyes shut and rub my
forehead for a minute. “So is she going to be able to go home
soon?” What I really meant was, am I going to be able to go
home soon?

“We’ll
see how her progress with the leg goes. And — well, we’d
like to keep her here for observation for a while longer.”

“ …
You just said there’s
nothing wrong with her.”

He
looks up at me, and all the warmth is gone from his eyes. He smiles
blandly. “Well, it’s best to be sure about these things.”

That’s
all he has to say about it. I try asking him some more questions, but
it’s like talking to voice mail.

I
give up and go back to the hotel. There’s a homeless guy
slumped over on the bench in the bus shelter and I don’t want
to sit next to him. I don’t really want to get back on the bus
again, close myself in with all those people, even though it’s
raining — I just pull my coat tight around myself and start
walking. Catch your death of cold, Mom would say. I smile tightly at
the thought.

Some
newspaper blows across the sidewalk in front of me, and I catch just
a couple words of headline: “hospitals baffled.” I reach
out and try to grab it, but it’s gone.

I
take the coins I was going to use for the bus and buy a newspaper
instead. The edges of the newspaper box feel wet and sharp and
unpleasant under my cold fingers. I take the newspaper back with me
to the hotel and read it cover to cover, but there’s nothing.

I
fall asleep with the TV on. I wake up at some nameless hour and watch
the colors of the screen spill across the ceiling, and remember how
I’d fall asleep to the TV sometimes when I was little, when I
was home sick, and I'd wake up in the middle of the night to the
Star-Spangled Banner and some old film of a flag blowing in the wind,
telling you the day was over and it was long past time to go to bed.
That was back when days used to end, before CNN and infomercials,
before all our days bled right into each other.

I
remember the headline and I want to see if the news is on, see if I
can find out what they were talking about, but I’m not awake
enough to find the remote. I just close my eyes and go back to sleep
again, wondering what I’m letting the TV whisper into my
dreams.

Third
night I break down and call you. I don’t want to bother you, I
know you’ve got school to worry about, that’s why you’re
not out here — not that you want to be, any more than I do. But
I don’t know who else to call — feel like I lost track of
all my friends when I was still trying to get rich playing the
dot-com field, and you see how well that worked out, so, yeah. I
don’t know who else I’ve got left. You sound kind of
annoyed to be hearing from your big brother, and I think I hear some
boy’s voice in the background, but I’ve got to ask you if
you’ve been watching the news. If you’ve seen or heard
anything.

Because
something’s wrong here.

When
I got to the hospital this afternoon, the same guy was still slumped
over on the bus-shelter bench. Was still there when I left tonight,
same position, and I kept my eyes straight ahead of me and kept
walking and convinced myself that wasn’t blood down the front
of his shirt, that he was still breathing.

More
people on the bus tonight sick, coughing, looking miserable. Pale
skin and dark-circled eyes. A couple people were wearing surgical
masks, or whatever you call them, looking around, flinching each time
someone coughed.

Restaurant
at the hotel was mostly empty but still slow, one waitress trying to
do the work of four, and she kept apologizing — everyone else
had called in sick. Guy at the table next to me was reading a
newspaper, and I could just see the headline on the local section —
“Mystery Virus at Three Hospitals.” I got up to ask him
if I could borrow the paper when he was done with it, but he started
coughing himself, eyes watering from the strain of it, and I just
kept walking past him and into the bathroom. I turned on the water in
the sink as hot as I could stand it and washed my hands over and over
again. Like Mom would make us do — best way to keep from
getting sick, she’d say, scrubbing and scrubbing at my hands
until they were red and raw from it. I stared at myself in the
mirror, trying to see if I looked pale.

I
get back to my table and my food’s there now, but my appetite
isn’t, and I drop a twenty on the table and walk out, head back
to my room, pick up the phone.

You
haven’t been watching the news, you tell me, but you promise
you will, you promise you will if that’ll get me to stop
babbling, and have I been drinking?

No,
I tell you, I haven’t. But it’s not a bad idea.

Four
days later and I haven’t heard back from you, and everything
here has gone off the rails.

I’ve
seen people collapse on the sidewalk. I’ve seen dozens of
people wearing surgical masks now and I want one myself but the
stores are out of them.

I
hear the siren sound of ambulances tearing down the street almost all
the time now. The hospital’s getting harder and harder to take.
I’ve seen patients choking and gagging, strapped to gurneys and
wheeled away out of sight. Mom still keeps insisting there’s
something wrong with her, that she’s burning to the touch and
white as a ghost and can’t breathe, but she’s fine,
anyone can see just looking at her that she’s fine.

But
she’s about the only one. They came in while I was there and
carried her roommate out on a stretcher and the old woman looked dead
to me and I asked the nurses and they wouldn’t tell me, they
wouldn’t say a goddamn thing, and some of the doors in this
wing are covered in plastic sheets now and the staff are just telling
everyone to be calm, just stay calm, everything is being handled, and
they look dead on their feet and ready to break.

Mom’s
got all kinds of theories and I hear all about them while she holds
my hand death-grip tight, while she drifts in and out of coherence.
It’s the terrorists, she tells me. Or it’s the Jews, or
the blacks. Whoever she’s scared of right this minute, that’s
who’s doing this, and she’s scared of so much right now.

I’m
not just catching snippets of news reports and half-glimpsed
headlines any more. Every paper I see is screaming about this on the
front page. Every TV I see in the hospital lounges has scientists and
experts calmly trying to figure out what to do.

Last
fucking straw tonight, I was on the bus again headed home and the
passengers around me looked like they were being taken away to a
concentration camp, helpless and pale and thin, and this one guy —

I
don’t even know how to tell you this part.

This
one guy, he started coughing and retching, and stood up, flailing for
the cord to pull to get the driver to stop, clutching his throat with
his other hand, flecks of spit flying from his mouth, people bolting
out of their seats to get out of his way, and bulging from his open
mouth, his tongue was — his tongue looked the size of a fist,
the color of a plum, and he kept choking —

Then
his tongue just. It just burst. Blood flew everywhere. People were
screaming. I think I was. I don’t know. The woman right in
front of him was wiping the blood from her face with both hands
screaming get it off get it off oh Jesus get it off me.

The
bus hit something. Another car or a bus shelter or a mailbox, I don’t
remember. The doors opened and the driver was freaking out but trying
to stay calm and telling us okay don’t panic everybody off
single file someone call an ambulance and everybody went for the
doors at once. I was right in the middle of it and there was
something blocking the door at my feet, I was stumbling and I looked
down, there was a kid, I don’t even know if it was a boy or a
girl fallen down and the crowd just going right over and I wanted to
stop and help them up but there were people behind shoving me and
hitting and screaming so I just — kept going, stepping right on
the kid like everyone else and you would have done the same damn
thing if you were there. You would have.

Somebody
should call an ambulance, somebody should do something, but everyone
just scatters. I drop to all fours, skinning my hands on the
sidewalk, and lose everything I’ve got in my stomach.

Fuck
this. No way. I have to get out of here. I don’t think about
Mom, I don’t think about any of my stuff back at the hotel, I
just get on the next bus to the airport. Ambulances will come. The
police will come and take care of all this but I have to leave.

But
I can’t. All the flights are canceled. There are men in black
BDUs with guns and gas-masks and riot shields blocking the gates. I
don’t know whether they’re military or the police and
they’re not answering any questions.

My
cell phone gets no signal here. I find a pay phone. It takes me hours
of “all circuits are busy” messages but I finally get
hold of you and you think I’ve gone crazy. You’ve been
watching the news, you’ve been looking online, and there is not
a single damn thing about an epidemic here.

I
get off the phone and just sink to the floor. That’s it, I
think, we’ve been abandoned. The world’s written us off.
They’re burying the story. They’ll be burying us next.

I’m
getting out of the city even if I have to walk. So I get on a bus
that takes me as far from downtown as I can get and then I start
walking.

This
is stupid. I know it is. If we’re really trapped here, if we’re
quarantined, there’ll be more men and more guns to keep me
inside. But I’m not sick. I’ve been keeping my hands
washed and drinking lots of liquids and following every stupid little
ritual mom ever taught me and I am
not
sick
and
they can’t keep me here.

A
few miles outside the city limits and I notice something’s
wrong.

No,
what I mean is — I notice
nothing’s
wrong.

I’m
not hearing sirens any more. There’s not many people on the
streets, but the people I do see look bored, polite, incurious, not
anything like the look of fear and distrust I’ve been seeing
everywhere.