I ask, is she going to be okay? My grandma, she raised me since I was eight years old. She's my mom's mom, and she came across the country to get me after my mom and dad both died. By then, I was laid out on the gurney, and the man was wheeling it down the hospital corridor. Through open doors, you could see all the beds were empty, the sheets thrown back to show the dents where sick people had been. In some rooms, the televisions still played music or people talking. Next to some beds, lunch trays still sat, steam rising off the tomato soup.
The man wheeled the gurney so fast the ceiling tiles started to blur, so fast that, laying there, I had to shut my eyes or I'd get sick.
The hospital public-address system kept saying, “Code Orange, East Wing, second floor . . . Code Orange, East Wing, second floor . . .”
Still, I was swallowing the sticky-sweet taste of that pill.
That little blue pill, Shirlee says just two of those would be a fatal overdose.
When I woke up, it was here, in this room with this view of Puget Sound, this wide-screen television, this clean, beige-tile bathroom. The intercom in the wall beside the bed. Some of my clothes and music from my room at home, they were packed in boxes sealed with shrink-wrap plastic. A camera had to be watching me, because, the moment I sat up in bed, the intercom said, “Good morning.”
My grandma was dead. Raymon was dead. Miss Frasure, my English teacher—dead. That was four Christmases back, but it might as well be a black-and-white TV rerun I watched a hundred years ago.
At The Orphanage, you lose track of time. According to the chart, I'm twenty-two years old. Old enough to drink beer, and I've only ever kissed a dead boy.
One, two, three days, and my life was over. I didn't even graduate from high school.
You build up a viral load to the point you can transmit the Type 1 Keegan virus, and don't expect you'll get a lawyer. Or a caseworker. Or an ombudsman. You end up on Columbia Island, and you can expect to stay in a decent hotelish room like at a franchise hotel, a Ramada Inn or a Sheraton, but for the rest of your life. The same room. The same view. The same bathroom. Room-service food. Cable-television movies. A brown bedspread. Two pillows. One brown recliner chair.
There's people locked up here, people who did just one wrong thing. They sat next to the wrong stranger on an airplane. Or they took a long elevator ride with another person they never even spoke to—then all they did was not die. There's lots of ways you can spend the rest of your life locked up here. Here being a little island in the middle of Puget Sound, in the state of Washington, the Columbia Island Naval Hospital.
Most of the people here, they arrived when they turned seventeen or eighteen years old. The staff doctor, Dr. Schumacher, says we were exposed to something when we were little, some virus or parasite that took years to build in our system. The day it hit the right viral load or blood-serum level, the people around us started to die.
That's when the Centers for Disease Control would notice a cluster of deaths, and the teams come throw you in a container suit and cart you here for the rest of your natural life.
Each resident at Columbia Island carries something different, Shirlee says. A unique strain of killer virus. Or a fatal parasite or bacteria. That's why they're, each of them, isolated. So they don't kill each other.
Still, Shirlee says, they get heat in the winter. Air conditioning in the summer. They get all their meals cooked for them, fish and vegetables, or ice cream, club sandwiches, anything within budget.
Come the hottest days of August, and Shirlee says the air conditioning alone makes her glad she works here.
Shirlee calls each resident a “blood cow.” In every resident suite, two long rubber arms come through the wall from under a mirror. The arms are this bulletproof kind of long rubber glove. Every couple of days, a light comes on behind the mirror to show a lab tech sitting there, he or she will reach through the wall with the rubber arms and take a blood sample, place the sample in a little airlock, then retrieve it safely on the other side.
It's when the light comes on, when the mirror in your suite turns into a window, then you can see the camera that's always there. Always watching. Recording you.
Shirlee, it's part of her job to herd the blood cows outside for some exercise.
Every few days, the staff lets the cows put on container suits. Inside the suit, all you can smell is powdery latex. Pick a flower or lay down in the grass, and all you can feel is latex. Inside the sealed hood, all you can hear is your own breathing. The other hospital residents, they throw around a Frisbee, always knowing the exact number of minutes they have left before Shirlee herds thems back inside. They're always aware of the sharpshooters with rifles, in case a resident wades into the water to make a break for freedom. Wearing a container suit with its self-contained oxygen system, you could walk the mucky bottom of Puget Sound all the way to downtown Seattle. The dark-blue shapes of ships crisscrossing the water, high above your head.
In case you're wondering how I got out . . .
“After that long underwater walk,” Miss Sneezy says, “my sinuses have never been the same.” And she wipes her nose sideways with one sleeve.
Out on Columbia Island, all of them outside on the hospital lawn, throwing a Frisbee back and forth, wearing their baggy blue container suits, they could've been a gang
