Lakewood - Megan Giddings Page 0,18

it. Lena yawned. The doctor kept staring. Lena’s left arm itched. She checked it for a rash, hives. Then, heat. Burning. A wildfire spread from the middle of her left arm to her fingers, up her shoulder. Lena’s mouth was saying a blur of “Oh my God, Help, Fuck, and What?” and sounds that in her pain she hoped she wouldn’t remember making.

She was on the floor in a ball.

The doctor was writing notes, pen moving fast. Her mouth was moving.

Lena sweated from the pain.

It was in her throat, claws out, scuttling quickly to her face. I’m going to die, she thought, and for the first time in her life she wasn’t being dramatic when she thought it.

A spasm in her lower back. Her mouth and face were wet from drool and tears. It was over. Lena’s vagina ached. She was relieved when she felt down there that she hadn’t peed.

“Now, tell me,” Dr. Maggie said, eyes still on her sheet, “which of those phrases do you remember?”

“What was that?”

“I said, ‘What do you remember?’”

“Caviar. Couch. Dead. Broken. Golden caviar.”

And then her feet were moving. She was in the hallway. If Lena could have sprinted, she would have. Her fingers were pressing against the wall, leaving sweaty prints. There was loud air coming through vents and a noise Lena realized was the sound of her breathing. A woman was standing in the middle of the hallway wearing gray workout clothes identical to Lena’s.

“Mom?” Lena asked. Her mother’s skin was gleaming as if it were freshly lotioned. Her hair in fresh braids. “I don’t feel well.”

Lena vomited. Looked up, shook her head.

It wasn’t her mother.

The woman was significantly taller, at least 10 years younger. She took another long look at Lena and sprinted away. She went to one of the doors and slammed it behind her. Lena followed, tried the door, but it was locked.

“Please, I’m sick,” Lena said.

If someone had asked her, she could not have said why it was so important to get this woman to acknowledge her. Maybe it was to think about anything other than what had just happened. Or how much her body still hurt. She knocked again on the door. In the instructional material they had talked about the need for isolation. From beneath the door came the sounds of what could have been a documentary or maybe a podcast. A man’s voice talking about recycling and plastic bottles that would be on the Earth for longer than anyone could ever possibly live. She leaned against the door, shut her eyes.

When Lena opened her eyes, she was being shaken awaken in her bed. Two people she didn’t recognize were looking down at her. Their faces were hard to see in the dark—only their white teeth and the shine of their eyes were visible at first.

“Don’t be scared,” a woman’s voice said. It was soft and kind, as if she were speaking to a child she loved. Lena coughed. She sat up, rubbed her eyes.

“It’s time to do some work,” a man’s voice said.

They led Lena to a room on the second floor that reminded her of a TV police station. She stood yawning and blinking while looking through what she assumed was a one-way glass. I am not afraid, Lena told herself. This is the place where I want to be. I’m okay. The man was checking his watch, as if he had somewhere important to go. Lena yawned again, her jaw popping a little with its force. Five men of East Asian descent walked into the glassed-in area. They faced forward. The lights in the area got brighter.

“Do you recognize any of these men?

Lena stared at each man carefully, understanding they were asking her about the man she had seen the first day, the one who had asked her to remember his face. Two of the men had unshaved necks, but none had the birthmark she had noticed earlier.

“No,” she said.

They thanked her and took her back to her room. In bed, she tried to figure out what day it was. She remembered talking to a man about how to make your brain louder than usual, how to force it to talk at someone. And Lena had been confused. “That sounds like comic book shit,” she had started to say before correcting the word to stuff. He had laughed and said, “No—like when your best friend has something stuck in her teeth and you look at her face and suddenly she understands something is