by Ben Dolnick
Summer 2069—New Jersey—Age 88
You are sitting in the sun by the window where they’ve left your chair you start to reach for your glass of wine but your hand is shaking lately you’ve been dropping things pens glasses silverware your sister has been talking without taking a breath now she asks do you remember Denise you tell her yes of course you smile that seems to satisfy her you reach again for the glass but your fingers won’t open they seem not to belong to you your sister raises her eyebrows says you really do seem so much better she takes a handful of almonds drops them in her mouth you smile again say what you’d really like is to be out of this chair and you don’t mention the night last week when you fell from the bed the floor rushing up to meet you the dark crawl to the phone the rest on the carpet and how you had never until that second unable to move your arms or call for help or lift your head you had never understood before just what it meant to be alone…
[Incident Report, Department of Security, Northern Dutchess Hospital]
Name (Print):
Peter H. Israel
Pass #:
123102
Security Incident #:
E - 32 - 1250 - 15
Time of Report:
17:25
Supervisor Notified:
YES
Time Notified:
17:35
Incident Report Details:
I was notified by hospital staff over the radio to check the emergency exit door in the lounge because a maintenance worker had reported seeing it open. Upon checking the door it was open. After consulting Officer Clery I declared a E-2202 and followed protocol, contacting Dr. Gutman via radio (unavailable). Officer Clery asked me to assist him + staff in conducting headcount. 25/26 Sommers patients were accounted for. Missing patient concluded to be NICHOLAS BERON, Room 314, Age 30, Admit Date 12/14. Conducted brief search of ward + stairwells + hospital perimeter, after which Officer Clery instructed me to notify Dutchess County PD, send Beron’s patient ID photo + info. I did so (16:55–17:00). I then assisted Officer Clery + staff conducting E-2202 patient interviews 17:00–18:15 (notes attached).
Condition Resolved:
No
Further Comments:
In my opinion JAMES MCCLARAN (Room 302) and DIEGO ORTIZ (Room 314) should receive extra questioning.
1
Breaking out of Northern Dutchess Hospital turns out to require approximately the same level of ingenuity it takes to be admitted to it. For almost a week Jim and I, with Diego as our third wheel, played Escape from Alcatraz—whispering at the bathroom sinks, watching the security guards on their afternoon rounds, speaking in code (“shoe” meant “ID badge”; “Bobby” was “Sean,” the guard whose card we’d decided it would be the easiest to steal). The actual escape took all of fifteen minutes, and, except for the presence of one startled nurse’s aide vaping at the bottom of a stairwell, went off without a hitch. Signs that say “Emergency Exit Alarm WILL Sound” very rarely mean what they say. Bystanders who see that something is off tend, especially in a place as brimming with staff as a hospital, to assume that someone else will be the one to deal with it.
It was five o’clock when I emerged panting into the parking lot/loading dock behind Building Three; it was already dark out, raining halfheartedly. All I had with me were my toothbrush and a few pairs of underwear and socks, all wrapped hobo-style in an old sweatshirt of Hannah’s. There was no siren blaring, no policeman shouting into his bullhorn from a guard tower. Just the rain on the pavement and a couple of distant cars honking. On one side of the parking lot was a stand of bare trees; on the other was a windowless brick building that looked like it might house an incinerator. The air, just the quantity of it that was available to me as I set off along one of the empty exit roads, felt like a massive black lake.
I should say here that my faith—my conviction that Hannah, and so Jim, and so Wright, were nondelusional—had begun to waver in the days before I left the hospital, so I had, in order to maintain what remained of my self-respect, started building myself an internal cover story. It wasn’t necessarily, I’d begun to tell myself, that I believed in the truth of whatever Hannah thought she had discovered; it was just that I wouldn’t understand how she’d died unless I understood exactly what she thought she’d discovered. So I wasn’t, by returning to Wright, proving that I’d had a mental breakdown; I was conducting a psychological investigation of a crime scene. In her notebook I’d find the story that really would be good enough.
My first civilian stop was at a Dunkin’ Donuts a quarter mile south of the hospital on Route 9—this was in a strip mall featuring a GNC and a vacant, ghost-lettered Price Chopper. Being any sort of fugitive makes even ordinary sentences (“Glazed, please”) sound squirrelly. The Bluetooth-wearing man behind the cash register didn’t look up at me, though; I don’t think he could have identified me in a lineup of two. I inhaled half a dozen donut holes there on the sidewalk, working my lips over the wrinkled wax paper like a giraffe, and then, from what must have been the last working pay phone in Dutchess County, I collect-called my dad.
A minivan pulled past while I stood shivering, waiting for the call to connect, and I did my best, despite the pajama pants and sandals, to look as if I were conducting a piece of ordinary business, maybe calling my wife to see if I should pick up some eggs. I’d put Hannah’s sweatshirt on over my T-shirt, which didn’t help in my quest to look inconspicuous—it strained over my chest and shoulders and only went down to my belly button—but the temperature was dropping and the rain had become mixed with something like flecks of Slurpee.
“Hello? Nick?” My dad’s voice overlapped with the robot-operator saying that the charges had been accepted. I told my dad, turning my back to the parking lot while I spoke, about having left the hospital, about needing to go take care of something. I didn’t use the words escape or Hannah or, needless to say, ghosts.
“What are you doing? You need to be in the hospital. They were helping you. Where are you? Call them up and tell them you made a mistake.”
“I’m not going back. I’m just calling because the police are going to call and I don’t want you to freak out. Don’t tell them you talked to me.”
“Jesus, Nick—”
“I’m asking you. Just say you have no idea. And I need you to call Mom and tell her the same thing, okay? Can you do that? Just tell her that I’m fine.”
I could see him taking off his glasses, massaging his forehead with his fingertips. “Well, tell me where you are, at least. I can call someone to pick you up. They can bring you wherever you need to go.”
“I’m fine. Just remember to call Mom. Okay?”
He was silent for a second—I wondered if he was calling the hospital on the other line—and when he spoke again he sounded a hundred years old. “How did this happen?”
“I just walked out. It’s not like there’s a moat.”
“But how did it come to this? You were getting help…and now you’re running away from the hospital, the police—”
“I don’t know what to say,” I told him. “My life hasn’t been going exactly how I want it to. I need to hang up.”
It only took forty-five minutes for me to find my way from the strip mall to the train tracks. The commuter rails that crisscross the Hudson Valley are a godsend to anyone whose circumstances require them to navigate long distances on foot without the aid of a map. My plan—hatched at the public computer in the hospital lounge, with the browser in Incognito mode—was to walk fifteen miles north along the tracks to the Wassaic station, and then to let half-familiarity and road signs steer me to Hibernia. The tracks, where I joined them, were rusty and spottily lit, set along the spine of a long mound of gravel. I walked ten or so feet from the tracks, in a little gully by the edge of the woods, stopping every few minutes to pull gravel or a twig bit out of my sandals.
By the time I’d been walking for an hour or so—two trains had clattered past, each one consisting of literally countless massiv
e cars—the sleet had picked up to the point that Hannah’s sweatshirt was plastered to my shoulders and the socks and underwear in my hands were as soaked as if I’d just pulled them out of the washing machine. There were ice chips in my pants and in the neck of my sweatshirt. The occasional platforms I passed were like small towns along an endless highway; each one held a cluster of umbrella-wielding commuters who seemed to be not just in better circumstances than mine but in a better universe. I felt like a filthy Russian soldier marching to Siberia; I felt like a dog who’s broken hugely, catastrophically free.
I had started, by the time I passed the Pawling station, carrying on a scattered, nonlinear conversation, half with myself, half with Hannah. My lips were moving, but the sounds coming out were less than words. What happened? I mumbled. Where did you go? Why didn’t you teach me how to find you there?
It was dark enough now, and it had been long enough since a train had gone by, that I had started to suspect, incoherently, that I had somehow missed a fork and wandered off along some defunct set of tracks. My mind had entered that unreliable, sleep-adjacent state in which it seemed possible I might have hallucinated the entire walk. I was a few minutes past Dover Plains—this was the most crowded platform I’d seen yet—when this unreliability cleared away, or deepened, to produce the sensation that someone was following me. I could hear footsteps crunching gingerly along behind me, and when I stopped to listen to them, they would stop, replaced by the sound of someone breathing shallowly. Nothing was visible behind me except an ominous murk. I imagined a state trooper, newish on the job, creeping along with one hand on his weapon. I imagined a mountain lion with razor teeth and worn-velvet paws. Nothing connects you to your prey-animal past like a bout of outdoor paranoia; I could practically feel my nostrils twitching.
When the sense of huntedness became intolerable I ran a few feet from the tracks and walked the next mile or two through dark brambles farther from the gravel and the light. Thorn bushes looped along the ground like barbed wire. Tree branches kept appearing at perfect face-whapping height. I was convinced, with every squelching step I took, that at any moment a policeman’s shouting or an animal’s jaws were going to swallow me up, and I wasn’t at all sure that either of these would be a worse fate than just continuing to feel the way I felt. Keep walking, keep walking, keep walking. A train roared past, startling me and setting off a serrated scrape of pain along the back of my skull. I was far enough into the woods now, and it was dark enough, that I could only tell if the liquid on my cheek was water or blood by tasting it. The part of me, already small, that had any faith whatsoever in the wisdom of what I was doing was shrinking toward nonexistence.
When I finally saw the Wassaic platform—a yellow-lit oasis half-glimpsed through dark brambles—I had just been trying to decide whether it would make more sense for me to lie down here or to go off in search of a phone to call the hospital. Long walks aren’t over until you’ve spent a few minutes convinced that you may, instead of finishing, just have to die.
I staggered soaking out of the woods and across the tracks, having glanced both ways to make sure I was going to be neither killed nor ambushed, then I climbed, like Sasquatch hauling himself out of a swimming pool, up onto the empty and unlit end of the platform. A woman in a silver raincoat at the far end of the platform either saw me or just happened to tilt her head in my direction. The PA announcement implored us all to keep an eye on our belongings. I hurried down the stairs into the parking lot and out onto the sidewalk next to Deep Hollow Road. If they were going to catch you they would have already caught you. Manhunts are for terrorists and ax murderers. They probably haven’t even noticed that you’re gone. Deep Hollow led to 22 led to 44 led to 82 led, after what must have been a couple of hours, to landmarks I actually recognized. Williams Lumber was closed and its Pepsi machine was unplugged; the billboard for Hudson Valley Toyota looked like someone had torn it halfway down and then thought better of it. Every traumatic death is a mystery. How close am I to solving yours? What did you see what did you think what did you do what did you write and if I find it out can I be absolved can I sleep through the night can I see a woman your age without imagining it might be you can you show me how to bear your death my life?
I walked past the firehouse, the antique store, the town hall, the laundromat. The houses and houses and houses. Landscapes change so slowly when you’re on foot. Even this last, non-train-track, non-highway stretch of my walk couldn’t have taken less than two hours; my feet had long since stopped registering distinct sensations—I felt like I was walking on stumps of frozen steak. I kept putting my filthy fingers in my mouth, to thaw them out. I could feel that something bad was starting to happen around the edges of my ears. A little past Peck’s a white pickup truck stopped next to me—a man in a backward baseball cap leaned out and asked if I was okay—and I don’t know what my look conveyed, but he sped off without my having to say a word.
I finally turned onto Culver at what must have been close to midnight. There aren’t streetlights in Hibernia, once you get past the town, so all I could see of things were pale chalk outlines: road here, fields there, woods as squares of black. If I die of pneumonia will your parents come to my funeral? Will the firehouse change its sign in my memory? The sleet was making a sound like a thousand tiny drum rolls. The house with the corn crib had its porch lights on. My teeth were chattering, and I’d discovered that it warmed me up—or maybe just distracted me—if I sung a wavering, continuous v-v-v whenever I wasn’t talking to myself. So I was droning, and digging my fingernails into my palms, thinking pain might help too, when the road took a curve that I knew in the depths of my empty stomach. There was the fallen barn. There were the birch trees. And there, at the top of its hill, faint as a stone through dark water, was the Wright House.
. . .
The plan I’d worked out, if you can call it a plan, had two parts: I needed to find Hannah’s notebook, and I needed to teach myself the ghost-courting technique that Hannah and Jim and Wright had learned. But before I could start on either one, I had some immediate animal needs to take care of: warmth, hygiene, nourishment.
The museum, from the outside, looked so completely dark, so uninhabited, that it could just as well have been an unusually large shed. The front door was locked, and the key that Hannah and I had taken to hiding on top of the middle porch-pillar wasn’t there. The windows were locked too, and, in the back of the house, so was the door into the caretaker’s apartment. My only consideration, then, was which window to break, and what to do if/when the alarm went off.
I chose a particularly solid piece of firewood from the pile by the side of the house—a piece of wood that would, thanks to having been left out in the rain, have led to the most sputtering and miserable fire—and I walked quietly around to the back door. No neighbors’ windows were close enough for them to see me. No cars were on the road. So this, I thought, is how crimes beget crimes. With one satisfying motion I battering-rammed the log end first through the windowpane closest to the doorknob, a feeling like bashing a pumpkin with a baseball bat. Then I reached through the window, careful not to scrape my arm, and I let myself in. The alarm wasn’t sounding as I re-locked the door behind me, and it still wasn’t sounding as I peeled off my wet clothes and tossed the soaking fabric heap into the mudroom sink. Just to be safe I went over to the wall panel and punched in Hannah’s all-purpose four-digit code, 2734. There wasn’t so much as a flicker of acknowledging light.
It took me, despite the alarm, and despite the failure of every light switch I tried, a surprising number of minutes to realize that the house’s electricity had been turned off. And it took me longer than it should have after that to realize that this meant that the house wasn’t going to have heat, either. It was cold enough inside that my newly exposed skin—I was wearing just my boxers and T-shirt—felt like rotisserie chicken fresh from the refrigerator.
I made my way, via baby steps and wall patting—and with just one barking of my shin
against a low stool—to the closet near Hannah’s office, where I thought I remembered seeing the candles and candlesticks we’d used in the Spooky Halloween Festival. I felt blindly around the shelves, between cardboard boxes and unidentified small appliances, until my fingers encountered a box of cool wax cylinders, and next to them a row of metal candlesticks. Below the candlesticks, on a newspaper-and-mouse-poop stretch of shelf, I felt the bent cardboard contours of an almost-empty box of matches. Let there be a creepy sort of light.
Holding my candle by the candlestick’s too-small finger loop, I reacquainted myself with the main part of the house. The shadows cast by the candle flame seemed to vibrate. The furniture, most of it, had been covered in what looked like tattered bedsheets.
In the back corner of the parlor, below the row of coat pegs, I found the costume trunk, still rusty latched, still brimming. Fleabag coats and cotton shirts and hoop dresses and bonnets. I set my candle on a table and pulled together an outfit that would have embarrassed a nineteenth-century flasher, and then staggered my way, itching and encumbered, into the caretaker’s apartment.
My hunger, like a well-behaved child, had waited until it had a reasonable hope of satisfaction to notify me of the urgency of its situation. The only food left in the cabinets, though—the same cabinets that Hannah and I had once filled with almond butter and dry spaghetti and chocolate-cherry granola bars—was an ancient box of pancake mix and a slippery canister of olive oil. It required less time than you might think to resign myself to my options. I poured myself the most revolting sort of mouth-pancake—three parts dry pancake mix, one part rancid olive oil—and I swallowed the paste down greedily. I repeated this process, coughing and gagging, until I’d emptied both box and canister.