The Square Root of Summer(63)

I stay awake, watching them blink out, one by one.

Until I’m alone with the darkness.





Zero

It’s the last day of summer. Except it isn’t, not really. I’m here and I’m not here. This is the first time I’ve been here, but also it isn’t. Déjà vu. I’m watching myself, inside myself. It’s a memory, it’s a dream, it’s a wormhole.

A wormhole. But it still hurts.

It’s the day Grey died.

And I’m wishing. Not cross-your-fingers lightly, or how six-year-old me wished for my vegetables to magically disappear.

I’m pouring everything I have into wishing to a God I don’t believe in.

How could I be sleeping with Jason in the sunshine three hours ago, and now I’m in the hospital?

Papa was nowhere to be found when I got here, but Ned was in the waiting room, green snakeskin on a grey plastic chair. We’d exchanged information: the note I found on the blackboard. The texts we swapped on that long bus ride. As though by knowing exactly what had happened, we could change the outcome.

“The paramedics say he was all right when they arrived.”

“They think he might have had a stroke after getting to the E.R.”

“He’s in the ICU.”

“He’s in the stroke ward.”

“Didn’t you say?”

“I thought he was…”

Papa eventually showed up. Maybe he’s always been here, invisible. Maybe when Mum died, Papa never left this hospital.

We follow him down the corridor.

Grey has shrunk. He was a giant, a grizzly bear. Now, he’s under some evil wizard’s spell. His face is a landslide.

He blinks at me, mewing, his hands frantically pawing at his flimsy hospital gown over and over again, unwittingly exposing himself, a baby.

And his hands!

There’s a picture of Ned, newborn and wrinkled as a pickled walnut. He’s just a frog in the palm of Grey’s huge hand—a hand that’s now translucent. A tube sticks out of it, covered in tape, surrounded by a bruise. There’s a drop of blood on the sheet underneath.

Papa comes back and the doctors come in, and give us numbers.

Seventy-five percent chance of disability.

Fifty-fifty chance of making it through twenty-four hours.

Ten percent chance of further seizures.

Six months till we’re out of the woods.

His blood pressure is a problem, they say. There are risk factors, underlying conditions. It could go either way, they say. He’s sixty-eight, they say.

I stop listening, start thinking of Midsummer’s Eve. Jason’s kiss. But before that, Grey lit a fire to ward off the mist that rolled in from the sea. We’d eaten roast chicken and potato salad with our fingers, and wiped the grease onto the grass.

“I want to die like a Viking!” Grey had roared, drunk on heat and red wine, leaping across the flames like an enormous Pan. “Burn me on a pyre; push me out to the waves!”

A brisk nurse, a different one from a couple of hours ago, rattles a plastic curtain around Grey’s bed. Someone else, someone old, is wheeled into the next bay—

The bonfire smelled of smoke and spring.

The hospital smells of antiseptic. He can’t stride into Valhalla from here.

Grey blinks up at me, tiny. The nurses roll him over so they can peel away his shit-stained sheets, and he’s looking right at me and he doesn’t see who I am.

I love you, I think, holding a hand that can’t squeeze mine back. His skin is slack under my fingers, loose and cold. You are a Viking.

The nurses write numbers on a clipboard. Ned comes back from the canteen with weak, hot coffee that burns our hands through the thin plastic cups, and we don’t drink any of it. Jason texts, a single question mark. Papa sits across from me on a plastic chair, his hand over his mouth. Staring at nothing. Waiting.

There were sparks in the air on Midsummer’s Eve. Sweet wood smoke and a first kiss, a fire collapsing in a shower of light and flame.

The machines beep quietly over and over again. My grandfather lies on the bed, tiny and alone, and far away from me.

I close my eyes.

“Burn me on a pyre; push me out to the waves!” Grey leaps across the flames. “I want to die like a Viking!”

And I wish that for you, with everything I have.

Two hours later you are dead.





{5}

BLACK HOLES




The heart of a black hole, known as its singularity,

has zero size and infinite density. A black hole

is formed when a star collapses in on itself.

Gravity implodes, sucking in everything around it.

And it’s called black hole entropy.





Sunday 17 August

[Minus three hundred and fifty]

I dream I’m in a spaceship, and Thomas is at the controls. He steers us through galaxies. We are all alone in the world, except for the stars. They rush past us as we speed through time and space, heading to the future. And when we get to the very edge of the universe, Thomas stops the spaceship and turns us around.

“You can see Earth from here,” he says. “Everyone’s there, waiting.”

I look where he’s pointing, but I can’t see anything. Just darkness. And when I wake up, he’s gone.