I awake in darkness. I can barely tell if my eyelids are open. I cry for help, for a nurse to turn on the lights, for any other patients beside me to make a sound so I know I’m not alone. I’m no longer in a hospital gown but in what feels like a T-shirt and jeans. There is no breathing tube in my nose, no drip in my vein muddling the pain. The charged air on my bare feet feels like how a child might imagine clouds—substantial enough to rest on yet capable of being traversed, an infinite expanse and cocoon at once. Above, the air feels light on my fingertips, as if gravity has dissipated, but such physics would suggest a grounding force. I wave my hands beneath my feet and cannot detect where my body finds purchase in the dark.
I start to wander, and soon other voices reach me: Where are you? I can’t see you. My phone won’t turn on. Mine too. Everyone, keep talking. Arms outstretched, bodies walking toward sound until we converge—chest against chest, heads bouncing off each other like billiard balls. At first, we count and there are ten of us. Most had been in hospital plague wards, like me; a few had still been living their lives. A lawyer from DC was getting ready for work, eating cereal with his daughter. An admitted felon had recently been released from jail for robbing his brother. A high school student and VR game vlogger said he was diagnosed only days ago. He’d been playing a game in his bed, hoping to finish while he could. An old woman had been talking on the phone to her daughter, who had just buried her children.
“My daughter had been coughing a lot lately,” the old woman explains. She is almost shouting, even though I think she’s standing a few feet away from me. “I needed to believe it was the flu.”
“My parents were visiting me at the hospital,” I say in perfect English, with no hint of my Japanese accent. I study the sounds emanating from my mouth—a perfect California boy, lingering on the ends of my words as if every final syllable is made of syrup.
The silences in our conversation fill my ears with a ringing tone, the sound of my own eardrums. I pinch myself to wake up. I want to see my parents watching over me. I close my eyes and open them again. I stamp my feet on the non-ground, hoping to break through whatever force or blanket of air is holding me.
“Maybe there’s a way out of here,” I say.
“But what if we’re supposed to stay?” someone says.
“I’m not just going to wait here,” the lawyer says.
“What if we get separated?” the old woman says.
“We hold on to each other,” I answer.
“Who the hell put you in charge?” the felon asks.
“He’s the only one suggesting anything useful,” says the lawyer.
I can sense the shape of the others around me as we push through the dark like a conga line. The lawyer asks people for their theories, and it’s not long until we connect the plague to this place. None of us can tell how long we have been gone. We aren’t tired or hungry. There has to be an edge, a door or stairwell to somewhere else. If we cry out loud enough, someone will hear us. When the old woman begins to sing to fill the silence, we immediately join in, taking turns with our own selections—the Carpenters followed by the Beatles and the Talking Heads.
I’m in the middle of “Kokomo” when the lawyer matter-of-factly interrupts and confesses that he’s been having an affair.
“TMI,” the gamer kid says. “Random much?”
“I’m afraid my wife will leave,” the lawyer says. “I have a family.”
“A possibility,” the old woman says. “But if you’re not honest with her, things will never be quite right.”
“We just sharing shit now? Okay, my older brother was murdered in a hit-and-run,” the gamer kid says. “He was traveling with a bad crowd, you know. Not that I was a saint.”
“Mom died of an overdose when I was a baby,” the felon says. “Not what you think. She was just taking these pills to stay up because I wouldn’t stop crying. My dad pretty much blamed me for her being gone. Been an asshole to me my entire life.”
I wait a long time to confess anything about myself. I never snuck out at night to smoke. I never had an affair （never had a real girlfriend, for that matter）。 My parents and I moved to America after my father’s job ended with the shuttering of the Fukushima power plant. We helped my uncle in Berkeley with his bakery. I received scholarships for college. But I also remember long lines in drab government buildings, my mother crying at night. I rarely spoke in class because I was ashamed of how I sounded. I rarely spoke to anyone, and yet I wrote constantly. I was afraid I wouldn’t make my parents proud, even though they told me they were whenever I showed them my stories and poetry. I’d spend hours locked in my room the summers I was home from college. My father would take out his reading glasses and flip through my pages with an electronic translator.