How High We Go in the Dark(31)

Pig die without heart.

“Yes,” I say. “Pig die without heart.”

Snortorious lumbers across the room in deep thought and hits the paddle button for the TV. He flips through several stations before finally settling on the Travel Channel, a program depicting Machu Picchu. The snort-sniffles start again.

I never go this place, he says. He flips the channel again to two people kissing, an old episode of Dawson’s Creek. I never do that. He’s about to change the channel again. I place my hand on his foot.

“You’re special,” I say. I almost tell him the whole truth— But the thing that makes you special is also killing you, I say in my head, hoping he can hear me. “What do you want?” I ask.

I want home, he says. Not here.

I call Patrice and tell her to bring Ammie and the lab’s van to the service entrance as soon as they can. Half the time, the rent-a-cop is busy playing games on his phone or looking for other jobs, so there is little to no chance of us getting caught, so long as we’re back by morning.

“Pig Express is here,” Ammie says, holding the van’s sliding door. “Where we going?”

“My house.” Before I hop in the back with Ammie and Snortorious, I swing over to the driver’s side.

“Thank you for doing this,” I tell Patrice. She’s visibly shaken. Her hands are clenched tightly to the wheel. “If we get caught, I’ll tell the university that I forced you to do it. Don’t worry.”

“It’s not a problem,” she says, but I can tell it totally is.

Back in the van, Ammie and I try to stay out of Snortorious’s way. He’s fixed to the back window, taking in his first glimpses of the world outside of campus, narrating everything to us as we pass. Blue car. Truck. Statue. Tall building. Lady running.

“So, what’s the plan?” Ammie asks, pushing Snortorious’s prodigious behind out of the way.

“This isn’t a jailbreak,” I say. “At least not yet. We need to think this through. Where would we take him? He doesn’t exactly belong anywhere.”

“Why take him out in the first place then?”

I rub Snortorious’s sides. His mouth is half-open; his tongue hangs out in a goofy smile. “He asked for home. I wanted to give him that, if only for a night.”

We herd Snortorious into my bachelor pad duplex. I’m trying not to alert what’s left of my fraternity house neighbors. But, of course, a group of kids smoking a hookah in the back of a parked pickup truck spots us.

“Hey, hey doctor dude! Cool pig!” one of them shouts. “Can your pig take a hit?”

“That’s legit,” another student says. “I love Babe!”

I give them a thumbs-up. Three months ago, I saw an ambulance outside of their house, the small group of them diminished by one. They stood outside with their Greek hoodies and T-shirts, huddled in the rain, chanting their friend’s name: Luka, Luka, Luka, howling at the moon like warriors on a battlefield. After their brother’s death, I walked over with a typed-out list of dos and don’ts: Don’t swim in the ocean. Don’t eat imported meat or seafood. Wash your hands frequently. Do practice safe sex. Do seek medical care immediately should you experience fever or any unusual pain. I left them my card with my personal number written on the back.

“That’ll do,” I say.

“Oh, shit!” one of the students says. “A film aficionado.”

“So, this is where the magic happens,” Ammie says as I usher everyone inside and into my living room.

“I’m barely here,” I say. I pick up the trash and dirty laundry from the sofa, lay a blanket near the fireplace for Snortorious. Fire, fire, fire. Christmas fire.

“Christmas isn’t for another month. But maybe we do have a present for you,” I say. I search the house for Fitch’s old soccer ball that he never really got to use and kick it over to Snortorious. It’s already past midnight. We only have six hours at best before we need to head back to the lab.

“What are we going to do?” Patrice asks. She’s huddled in the corner of the sofa, clearly a ball of nerves.

“Apart from getting you a drink?” I slink to the kitchen and return with a bottle of bourbon and three glasses. We bounce around a few ideas and settle on watching classic holiday movies. Ammie and Patrice select It’s a Wonderful Life. Snortorious chooses A Charlie Brown Christmas. This is us now. This is family.

“Maybe we should get something to eat,” Ammie suggests. I look in the kitchen and heat up all the remaining frozen dinners that I have—three beef stroganoff, two veggie lasagnas—and run to the twenty-four-hour market for a cake and some candles. By the time I return, our weird little family is watching George Bailey promise the moon to Mary. I can tell Snortorious is preoccupied by the new environment, looking around at the photos on the wall, sniffing all manner of stains and spills on the carpet. I curl up beside him and pull out a family photo album, try to keep my mind wide open for him. Snortorious asks questions about every memory. Who? Where? How old? I have never had someone so genuinely interested in my life before. Ocean, he says.

“My ex-wife and I went to Hawaii for our honeymoon.”

So big, he says. So blue. I try to visualize Dorrie and me scuba-diving off the coast of Maui, bearing witness to the long-dead coral reefs, and hope Snortorious can feel the water surrounding him.