It is hard to feel hungry. Mei concentrates on the chewing, the cold lettuce of the sandwich against her teeth, while the other girls chat and complain.
It obsesses them immediately: what they cannot do and whom they cannot see. “It would be easier if we were used to being apart,” says one girl, whose boyfriend, she is saying, lives in a different dorm.
Already the days seem longer than before, only twenty-four hours deep, as if the passage of time requires some movement through space and here they all are, stopped in one place.
Mei’s mother calls again.
“You’re calling too much,” says Mei. She covers her mouth while she chews, as if there is anyone with her to see.
“I’m just worried,” says her mother. “I’m so worried.”
But her voice, like that, so urgent, so thin, brings the opposite of comfort, like the constant touching of a tooth when it’s sore.
“I’m fine,” says Mei.
She is aware of her voice as she speaks, the way it echoes against the bare walls, as if amplified. She’s been allowed to bring only one bag from her old room to this one; the old room, where Kara got sick, is now sealed shut with yellow tape. There is nothing here to soften the sound, those lonely acoustics of an empty room.
“Do they know yet what it is?” her mother asks again.
Out in the hall, Mei can hear one of the boys, a runner, jogging from one end of the floor to the other, again and again, an improvised track. Weird Matthew, the others call him, to distinguish him from the other Matthew. But running seems as good a use of time as any other.
“I told you,” says Mei. “I don’t know.”
She can hear her mother breathing into the phone.
“I love you,” says her mother, but there is a stiffness to it. They are not the kind of family who says it out loud. The words feel extreme between them, a registering of danger more than tenderness.
“Me too,” says Mei.
After that, she listens for a while to the sound of the boy running in the hall. He is training for a marathon, she overheard him say once. He likes to run barefoot, like the Kenyans, he says, like the ancient Greeks, like humans were meant to do. Now his footsteps land on the carpet. There’s a moment’s shadow each time he passes her door, coming close, fading, then coming back again, like the intermittent ticking of a clock.
On the second day of the quarantine, a message appears in the parking lot, ten floors down from the window of the study lounge. In giant white letters, made of chalk or flour, someone has spelled out the name of a girl, Ayanna, and something else, too, a code, maybe, or an abbreviation, stark and bright against the asphalt. A boy is squinting in the sunshine nearby, waiting for his work to be seen.
Mei can feel the hours in those letters, the planning and the labor, the bending of that boy’s back. No back has ever bent that way for Mei.
“What a waste of time,” says Weird Matthew, the runner. He is standing at the window, too, barefoot and sweaty, gulping water from a thermos. “Right?” he says.
A nearby window scrapes open in its frame. Ayanna in pajamas, the girl from Barbados, is waving wildly at the boy. Ayanna in V-necks and jeans, pink toenails in flip-flops, white teeth and smooth skin, that simple, effortless beauty. The sweet, appealing lilt of her accent. All the boys are in love with her, and maybe so are the girls, who forgive her for her loveliness—because what makes her so radiant is not only her looks but her warmth, the plain kindness that seems to glow from her cheeks. She is the only girl who is friendly to Mei in the hall.
When he sees Ayanna, the boy in the parking lot stands up and waves back with two hands, like a man in need of rescue by a helicopter. Ayanna shouts something down to him, but he can’t hear it. He cups his hand to his ear. Soon they are talking on their phones instead but still waving, as if two tin cans have been strung between them.
Mei watches them from the window until a sadness comes into her, as quick as adrenaline. She closes the curtains.
She calls her old friend Katrina. She should have gone to Berkeley, with Katrina, she sees now. Or else CalArts, like she wanted to, where she could have majored in what she really wanted to: drawing or painting or both. What a bummer, Katrina says, when Mei tells her about Kara and the others, and Mei feels right then that her old friend is floating away. It doesn’t sound like her, this word, bummer. Everyone is floating away.
That same day, two new doctors arrive on the floor. One is some kind of specialist, in from the East Coast. She wears green scrubs and green gloves and a thick, cream-colored mask that looks fresh from a package, crisp and clean.
She studies their eyes. She looks at their throats. She listens to the beating of their hearts. She does not seem at all relieved by the fact that everyone on the floor has woken up well.
“The incubation period could be long,” she says, as if their bodies are instruments for the measurement of time, which, in a way, they are. “The longer it takes to present itself,” she says, “the farther it could spread.”
When it is Mei’s turn to be examined, the doctor hands her a mask like her own, elastic loops dangling.
“From now on,” she says, “wear this at all times.” Her manner is lab-like, as if she is handling hazardous chemicals instead of people.
Mei is watching her face the way she watches flight attendants during turbulence: if they keep pouring the coffee, she knows things are fine—some kinds of tumult frighten only the unaccustomed or the untrained. But this doctor’s face, so tense and so tight, suggests that expertise is having the opposite effect.
“And there should be no physical contact of any kind,” says the doctor. “No kissing,” she adds. “And no sex.”
A heat comes into Mei’s cheeks. Sometimes she still feels like a child.
A second doctor follows the first, a different kind, a psychiatrist, maybe, or something like it.
This doctor asks questions about Kara’s mood before she died. “Do you know,” she says, “if your roommate had recently received any upsetting news?”
“I didn’t know her very well,” says Mei.
“Did she ever express any dark thoughts?”
“Not to me,” says Mei.
And what about the others? this doctor wants to know.
Mei shakes her head.
“I didn’t know them either,” Mei says.
After that, they all look more like patients than before, with masks stretched tight across their faces. The paper feels hot against Mei’s cheeks. You can feel yourself breathing, and it’s hard not to think about it, how precarious that rhythm, as if those masks have made the sickness more likely, instead of less.
Meanwhile, a new affliction begins to spread in the dorm—a boredom like Mei has never known.
She spends a long time staring out the window of the study lounge, at the lake shimmering in the distance as it shrinks away in the sun. The receding water has left the sand littered with fragments of a hundred lost things: sailboats from earlier decades, sunken for years, an ancient truck, rusted down to a silhouette. There is something suddenly unsettling about this landscape, which seemed so romantic to her before, how the woods that line the slopes around the lake are diseased and dried out, and how the trees stay standing long after death, branches blackened by fire or their trunks eaten away from the inside by beetles, as her biology professor has explained. But they go on standing, like headstones.
She thinks suddenly of Kara, of the girl’s body—her bones. How ludicrous it seems in this time that the troubles of a body can still shut off a mind.