How High We Go in the Dark(15)
“And what do you say?”
Dorrie pulled the chains of our swings together so we drifted right next to each other, our feet tracing parallel waves in the sand.
“I don’t know how to answer that question. I usually change the subject.”
“It’s amazing how all of this is invisible in the city,” I said after a long moment, pointing at the sky. I didn’t know how to respond to her comment. I just grabbed her hand and gazed up at the vast graveyard of long-dead stars.
We returned to the cottage and Dorrie watched Fitch toss and turn for a while. She told me the first sign of her son’s illness had been abnormal sleep patterns. His eyes would flutter no matter how much he slept. He always felt like there was a fog wrapped around his head. He only had a few happy memories from before his illness. A swimming lesson, she explained. Holding her young son in the shallows of Hanauma Bay during a family vacation as he kicked, surrounded by schools of reef fish. One shot of infected water up his nose was all it took. Most of the first-wave victims in Hawaii died within six months or they slipped into a coma. That was before doctors introduced gene therapy and drug cocktails as a means to slow the morphing of cells. Fitch had beaten the odds with three organ transplants, clinging to a sliver of his old life for nearly two years.
“Hey, let’s lighten up for a bit, if that’s okay. Wanna watch a movie?” I began searching for something fun to watch, waited for Dorrie to give me the green light.
“Nothing depressing,” she said.
“We are in the City of Laughter,” I said.
I scrolled and scrolled; she remained silent.
“Anything?”
“So far he’s been lucky,” Dorrie said. “Because of my ex, Fitch had so many chances the other kids didn’t have—a liver, a kidney, a lung. But there’s no plan B for a brain. The treatments are slowing the spread, but it’s only a matter of time.”
“We don’t have to watch anything if you’re not in the mood,” I said, turning off the TV.
Dorrie picked up the remote and turned it back on.
“No, let’s watch something ridiculous,” she said.
She curled into me, and I thought about all the nights these past nine months that ended just like this one—never acknowledging the future, desperately wanting to forget the past—taking small comfort in the equilibrium that we both knew couldn’t last forever.
*
I awoke the next day to the distant bellow of Osiris making a test run. Dorrie was still asleep beside me, her legs tucked tight against her body. I was normally at the park by now, changing into my costume before she stirred in the morning. I peeked out the window and saw others doing the same, waiting for their turn to make their way to work with minimal chance of running into someone else. No neighborly chitchat or gossip, each of us holding a perpetual funeral in our heart and mind, eyes fixed on the peak of Osiris, where loudspeakers blared Grieg’s “Morning Mood” right on time, every day at 8:00 A.M., and the soft female voice, sometimes adopting a faux-British accent, telling us to smile and laugh, to focus on the good we were doing for the children, for our country. “And always remember,” the voice continued, “to turn that frown upside down!”
In the next room, I could hear Fitch watching an old episode of Barney & Friends. I climbed out of bed, walked up to the glass wall that separated him from the rest of the world. He looked over and waved, quickly returned to drawing a labyrinth with crayons. It was a good day for him, which meant a day of video games and comic books punctuated by visits from the park nurse who checked his vitals. Such spells of energy never lasted long, though, and it was too early to be certain of the treatment’s effectiveness. The color had returned to his skin, but his eyes remained those of a person who’s never known rest, sunken into bruised craters.
“I bet you can’t solve this one,” he said, crossing his arms. He held the labyrinth he’d drawn against the glass. “You have to get the prince and princess out. The prince came to save her but then he got trapped, too.”
“What are those pointy things?” I asked. “And those rectangles in the middle of the path?”
“Spikes and trapdoors,” he said. “And there’s a half Pegasus, half shark that will eat the prince and princess if they don’t escape soon. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . .”
After I saved the prince and princess, I gave Fitch his daily comic book. This had become something of a routine between us. It was the one hobby I’d shared with my little brother, eventually amassing nearly three thousand issues. Comics let us see a brighter world, forget our troubles, allowed us to dream. And I wanted this for Fitch. He deserved another world.
He was flipping through one of my brother’s favorite issues of Fantastic Four. “Who is this?” He’d begun asking me for background on the characters. “And this?”
I pointed to each team member and explained they had traveled in a spaceship through a cosmic storm that gave them superpowers.
“I wish we could have a cosmic storm,” he said.
“Oh? And would you want to be invisible, be a human torch, have your body stretch, or be a pile of rocks?”
“I’d want to shape-shift so I could be all of those things or anything I wanted,” he said. I could tell that our brief interaction had drained him more than usual. He sank into bed, the comic book resting in his lap, eyes fluttering. I placed my hand on the glass wall to say goodbye and told him I’d check on him after work.