Lost and Found
You sit folded in a chair, your legs tucked under your body like you're praying. The heels of your shoes digging into your ass. The hospital is quiet at this hour, those not working steadily to distribute the cure or tend to the invalid having deserted the building hours ago. There's not much anyone can do right now anyway. Nothing you can do at all, except sit and watch.
In the isolation room time seems to have been suspended, the drawn curtains and brilliant fluorescent lighting blotting out any sign of either night or day; the figure in the bed unmoving for some hours now, drugged into sleep, pale face sweaty and sallow like the washed-out yellow gown. You press your palms flat onto your thighs and it occurs to you that there is a kind of reverence in this, sitting beside his bed in a silence broken only by the sound of your breath. The atmosphere is reminiscent of the church your mother took you to once as a child - a place you remember for its vaulted ceiling and the sensation of muted vigilance, as if someone had just made a move to speak and been gently hushed by a maternal hand. Your mother told you that the people who prayed here believed in the same God in a different way and that you could speak to Him here, if you needed to, sit in the sanctuary of the empty pews and let God listen to the thoughts inside you. Her father was a Catholic. He used to wear a crucifix and smell of tobacco, and he always went to church on Sundays. You remember experiencing the same feeling then as you have now, sitting here watching the rise and fall of breath in his chest. Waiting.
You stopped believing in God a long time ago, because you can't go out there on the streets day after day and still think that something good is in control of this place, or even that there is anyone in control at all, like maybe God's asleep at the wheel and everything is goin' to hell without Him, a truck barreling off the road. You don't keep kosher. The only time you really think about religion is when you want to make a bargain with whatever it is that dictates to the Fates: let him live and I'll do anything you want. Anything. Just please don't let me have been too late. And sometimes when you're angry, too: why the hell does this always happen to us?
The man in the bed stirs and murmurs. You reach out and smooth back the sweat-dark flaxen hair from his forehead, and he opens his eyes, looking straight at you.
"Hey." You find that you are whispering. "You back among the living, Blondie?"
His answering smile, faint as it is, breaks over you like sunlight through a stained-glass window.
"Depends. Found... Callendar?"
"He turned himself in in the end. Saved a lotta lives, including yours."
"Knew you could... do it..."
You can barely hear his voice but it doesn't matter; you've never needed words to communicate anyway. Your hand drifts down to his shoulder. Squeezes.
"We did it." You survived.
Maybe God's been listening, maybe He hasn't, but either way you have your own kind of religion right here. Me and thee. It's all the faith you need.