Stanzi—Thursday Night—Hysterical Girl

IN THE PLACE OF ARRIVALS

Gustav and I are still acting. He plays the part of the boy who got us lost and needs directions. I play the part of the angry, scared girlfriend who wants to call home so no one worries about me. Patricia started this. We’re just following her lead.

They feed us scrambled eggs. Duck eggs. They feed us stale bread. They feed us homemade pickles that survived the winter.

Gustav and I pretend to nap all afternoon because we are playing parts and we said we hadn’t slept in three days, so we figured we should be tired.

But Gustav doesn’t sleep because Gustav never sleeps.

I don’t sleep because Gustav isn’t sleeping.

We lie on our sides and stare at each other. We don’t say a word, but the whole time I tell Gustav I love him in my brain and I can feel him doing the same. Then we lie on our backs and hold hands while we stare at the ceiling. I think about how Patricia wants to leave here. I think about how she told me Gustav loves me.

I try to remember how many people I saw when I was in the dining hall. It’s like counting sheep before bed. One sheep wore wild eyeglasses. One sheep was bald. One sheep was dressed in a Sunday suit. One sheep was missing part of his ear. One sheep had a lab coat on like mine. He didn’t look like a good talker.

Gustav wakes me up for dinner.

“Did you sleep?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says, but I know that means no.

“How do you function without sleep?” I ask.

“I sleep. Just a different way than you.”

“I’m not hungry,” I say.

“You’re starving,” Gustav says. “You’re really worried about calling home and letting them know you’re okay.”

I take a deep breath.

“You’re upset because no one has given us directions yet,” he adds.

“I’m the hysterical girl and you’re the quiet, brooding boy.”

“We can’t call attention to ourselves. They’ll destroy the helicopter.”

More drills.

Before I can say anything, Patricia knocks gently on our door and says, “It’s time for dinner.”

There are seventeen people here. When I wonder to myself if this is everyone, Patricia nods at me. When I wonder to myself if they are all going crazy from isolation, Patricia says, inside my head, Only some of us.

I eat as much as I can so I look the part of a hungry, lost traveler. Gustav is brilliant. He picks at his food and gains sympathy from the men, who shake their heads in solidarity as I prod him to ask them for directions to a phone to call home.

Gary explains, “We don’t want directions. Why would any of us want to leave?”

I wonder if it’s possible for Gary to be more smug than he already is.

Patricia says, inside my head, Totally possible.

I wonder, Does everyone here read minds?

No, she says inside my head. Just me and Kenneth.

Gary makes his smug lips form smug words. The words arrive in the atmosphere in smug word bubbles and say, smugly, “You, my dear, have found yourself in paradise and you don’t even recognize it. Imagine finding Eden and not knowing it!”

I decide to avoid anyone who ever starts any sentence with “You, my dear” for the rest of my life.

Patricia says, “I want to introduce you to Marvin before our walk.”

I say, “Okay.”

Inside my head, she says, Marvin is our biologist. I think you’d like his lab.

When she says this, I wonder if I should take off my lab coat so I look more like the part I’m playing, but the thought of removing it makes my heart rate increase and my hands shake.

Inside my head, Patricia says, Marvin thinks everyone is stupid. You won’t need to change your clothes.

Marvin wants to show me his lab. He walks me around and points to things.

Patricia sits in the corner of Marvin’s laboratory, scribbling notes of some sort. Marvin takes me to his desk and shows me drawings. He tells me he has found two new organs in the human body.

“How?”

“How what?” he asks.

“How have you found new organs? Do you have cadavers?”

“People have died. This is biology, no?”

“You cut up your friends?”

“I’m the world’s leading biologist. I can cut up whomever I please.”

I want to tell him I’ve never heard of him, but I stay quiet as he shows me diagrams of his newfound organs. One is a small, glandular-looking thing. No bigger than a petit pois pea seed. He has it drawn between the third and fourth fingers of the right hand—between the knuckles.

“Does it also exist on the left hand?” I ask.

“No.”

“Were all of your specimens right-handed?”

“Yes.”

“Are there any left-handed people here?”

He looks at Patricia. She says, inside my head, Don’t remind him. She says aloud, “Don’t expect me to drop dead anytime soon, Marvin. Not gonna happen.”

“It doesn’t matter which hand,” Marvin says. “What matters is what it does.”

I look at him, waiting.

“Do you want to guess?”

“No.”

“Why do you wear that coat and act stupid?” he asks. “You don’t think any of us really believe you got here by hiking, do you?”

I stare at him. “What does it do?” I ask.

“If massaged for long enough, in the correct direction, and using the correct amount of pressure, that little pea can increase sex drive up to one thousand percent.”

“Sex drive?”

“Yes,” Marvin says proudly. “While millions of people buy dumb little pills for billions of dollars a year, they are unaware they have their own, personal pill right there,” he says, pointing to his hand. “Right there!”

I look at Marvin blankly.

“So maybe you don’t care about sex drive,” he says. “But I have cures.”

I continue to look at Marvin blankly. Patricia continues to scribble left-handed in her small notebook.

“I’ve cured two types of cancer,” Marvin brags. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“What cancer?” I ask.

“Leukemia, for sure. Some lymphomas, possibly.”

Mention of leukemia reminds me of Lansdale Cruise. She only says she has it, but she lies. There’s already a cure for lying.

“If I was back in the real world,” Marvin says, “stuck in some tiny lab, taking orders from some idiot from pharmaceutical or government, we would never move forward. There is too much money to be made in being sick.”

“You don’t go back?”

Marvin laughs. His hair even laughs. I can hear tiny gray chuckles.

“So the cure is stuck here and cancer patients are stuck there?”

“I wouldn’t think of it as stuck.”

Patricia hums something as she scribbles. We both look over at her. She stops humming.

I ask, “You said you discovered two organs. What’s the other one?”

Marvin looks at me seriously.

“Don’t you trust me?” I ask.

“You’re always talking about going home and calling your sister. You lied from the minute you got here. You haven’t earned my trust.”

“I miss my sister,” I say. This is not a lie.

“She will forget about you in time,” he says. “Everyone will. No one remembers me. No one remembers Patricia.”

In my head I say, The bush man remembers Patricia.

Inside my head Patricia says, The bush man?

“You’re a genius, Stanzi. Do you know that?” Marvin asks.

“Yes.”

“You couldn’t be here if you weren’t one.”

“Okay.”

“So what is it that you do in your laboratory that’s so important?” he asks.

“I dissect things. Frogs, mostly.”

“How quaint,” Marvin says.

“The frogs aren’t quaint. They’re dead.”

“You must be working on something other than dissecting frogs like a ninth-grade know-nothing.”

Patricia tells me in my head to trust Marvin. So I tell him.

I say, “I think there’s an organ that will relieve guilt in humans.”

His hair stands at attention and listens to me through the frayed ends.

“Like your sex-drive gland, I think they’re keeping it from us because—”

“Because guilt drives the real world, my dear. Very right,” he says. “Just like sex drive. You know they still don’t teach doctors in med school what the entire clitoris looks like? When we draw our diagrams, we draw but a tiny piece of a large, fascinating organ. Like drawing the hand as a stump with no fingers. Why do you think that is?”

I stare at him, not knowing what the answer is. Not wanting to discuss that sort of thing with Marvin.

He says, “It’s just another way to control us, love. Especially you women. God! Let’s control the hysterical women!” His hair screams like a hysterical woman: OHMYGOD! OHMYGOD! OHMYGOD!