How High We Go in the Dark(20)

Through the Garden of Memory


My parents and I were driving home to Palo Alto from a belated memorial in Minneapolis three months after my cousin Kayla had been euthanized. I fell asleep in the back seat on our final day of travel, the smell of smoke seeping through a cracked window reminding me of home. I felt hot and light-headed, and when I looked up, the stars seemed to streak across the sky as if the universe had been grazed with a paintbrush. My father refused to stop. He said we were making good time. I woke up in a hospital plague ward a week later, my parents watching over me from a quarantine observation room.

“The kids you babysat during the memorial tested positive,” my mother said through an intercom next to my bed. “Their parents swore they’d been tested. We thought they were safe. I’m so sorry, Jun.”

“Fucking germ factories,” I said, allowing the room to come into focus. My throat crackled when I spoke, every word like coughing up pebbles. I thought about the gauntlet of toddler hands that smelled of actual shit, rubbing against my face during Twister, my aunt’s stale basement air circulating with tantrums. Beside me, I saw several other beds filled with adults—some awake and staring at the ceiling, others unconscious and hooked into machines pumping air down their throats. “How are the kids?”

“Kenta is in the ICU; the others are stable, receiving gene therapy,” my mother said.

I nodded, which sent a sharp pain down my back. I felt like I could sleep forever.

“The treatments for children don’t seem to be working for adults,” my father said. “It might be a new strain. They don’t think it’s airborne anymore—of course, nobody really knows for sure. Some college students were infected at a beach, maybe from sewage contamination.”

I felt like I was looking at someone else’s body. I couldn’t feel the sheet over my legs. The skin on my arms seemed abnormally pale, almost translucent, as if I were transforming into a deep-sea creature.

“What’s happening to me?” I asked.

My parents shook their heads, held each other, a public display of affection I had rarely seen before.

“We don’t know,” my mother said.

Across the hall, I heard doctors and nurses rushing into a room, the steady tone of a flatlining patient, the tiny explosions of a defibrillator. I wanted to tell my parents that I loved them, but my lips felt cemented together. My muffled screams filled the room. I saw my mother putting her hands to her mouth, crying. The skin on my body quickly cycled from normal to see-through; stars seemed to float through my veins. My mother began speaking in Japanese, something she did only when she was upset. I heard my father screaming for help. I closed my eyes for a moment.

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.