I feel the anesthetic crawl over my face, burning the follicles in my beard. I know I have a few seconds of consciousness left to me and I use them to stare at the ceiling. Pure white, no telltale shimmer. The orderlies cleaned the room at least ten times before I agreed to enter. Or they told me they did.
This is the only way I can travel. The last time they tried to move me, I panicked and hurt someone. We were crossing a bridge and I could see the whole city. The skyline glowed that color. They put me in a room with a set of sterilized color swatches and I settled on puce. Puce - even the name sounded right. They asked me to confirm, but I couldn't touch it again. I knew it was right.
I didn't know I could be violent, but I was. The city was the wrong color and the water below the bridge, it was on fire. The river was hellish and I was afraid we were going to fall into it. I hit someone, I scratched someone, I nearly caused an accident. They pinned me down and shut my eyes, but I could still see it like staring at the sun through my lids.
The anesthesia is at my eyes. Propofol, some gas, I don't know? I'll go under, they'll move me to the stretcher. I don't weigh much. I eat in a brightened room but I still know it's there. They tried giving me elemental nutrition through a tube and I think I like that better. The woman assigned to me treats me well.
When I come to I'm already talking to her, but I don't know what I'm saying. There's a bloom above her left eye and I reach out to touch her face. She smacks my hand away and laughs, thinking I'm flirting. We do, sometimes. Her face softens, her eyes fall, and she turns away. We both know I'm revolted and she's ashamed. She's one of the cleanest people I know, I remind her, and it was just a bit of dust from the ceiling or something.
They tested me exhaustively. I've looked at tens of thousands of dishes. I realized after a while they were using me to test - did the antibiotic kill the bacterium? Is this viral? Sometimes the concentrations are too small for me to see. They showed me a probiotic pill once. It was dead - I told them they wasted their money.
She's back in the room and she's wearing a scarf over her hair. She tells me the rooms and patients have already been thoroughly cleaned, but there's a slight chance something is left over. She hands me a marker - I'll use it to draw the outline of the infected areas. I ask her what it is, but she shakes her head. We laugh.
They don't discuss agents with me, she reminds me, because I'm phobic. They asked me to track down a burkholderia infection once, in a monkey lab. Later that night, after we'd swept through the facility, I looked it up. For days I could feel it under my skin and I thought about hurting myself to get it out. After that, they told me everything was lactobacillus. Someone spilled his yogurt, she tells me. They transfer me to a wheelchair.
We roll our eyes. Clumsy soldier at lunch, she says. They push me through an outer door and they're right - almost everything is clean. There are bits in the corners that they messed and point. It's not what they're looking for, I can feel that, but I mark it anyway. I see it soon, I point it out, and we're hustled out. There's a tree made of light, just a foot tall, on the back wall of a supply closet. It's growing up from a crack at the base. It would be beautiful if it didn't mean catastrophe.
I ask her where it goes and she doesn't answer. Light shines through and maybe it's a lab. Maybe it's monkey cages. They've stopped telling me and I don't really want to know. We've done this before. She'll tell me it was a small leak and they just wanted to know where the air was coming from. We've done this little tango of lies before.
There's an itch in my lungs and I'd really like to be put under, I tell her. She tells me to breathe, to feel my feet on the floor. I can survive any feelings, she says, and I've done this before. But I can see the dot on her forehead shining through her scarf and she's leaning too close. I don't want to breathe, because that's how they get in. Through the lungs or through the eyes. It's why they shine.
She sticks me and it doesn't hurt - she's good at this. I'll wake up back in my room and they'll give me a day off. Then therapy tomorrow and the day after that until, she says, until I get better. It's irresponsible to put me under so often, she says, but I'm doing a good thing. I'm fading and she comes in close to whisper in my ear. She tells me she watches me while I sleep and that when I'm no longer a patient we should talk, maybe get together.
I tell her she's cruel. She says that's true, but she likes being able to say these things without consequences. I tell her I'll remember this time. She laughs, laughs genuinely, and says that I definitely won't. I ask if she likes working like this. She runs a hand through my hair and it burns, the anesthetic already halfway done with me. It's the strangest feeling, like every nerve firing at once.
She says something and I can't understand it, but I'm thinking - she touched her face with that hand. They're going to have to shave my head. No, buzz cut. Shaving can cut the skin and that's the last thing I want. I wonder how many bacteria my hair collects from the air. I should have gotten rid of it a long time ago.
It hits my beard and I'm happy. She's right - in a few moments I won't remember any of this. I'll wake up in my bed and she'll ask if I know where I am. She will have bathed and she'll be immaculate and in the back of my mind there'll be that shadow of a suspicion that she wanted to talk to me about something.