How High We Go in the Dark(50)

“Do you need me to call someone to help?” I ask, standing near the doorway.

“I pushed the button. Sometimes it takes a while.”

“Do you want me to help?”

“I don’t want you seeing me like that,” he says.

“My hands are literally going to be inside of you when you die,” I say.

“Well, when you put it that way,” he says, laughing.

A moment later a nurse blows past me. I turn around while she takes care of Laird. I hear him groan as he’s lifted off the pan. She asks about his pain level and Laird says three. The nurse leaves with barely another word.

“Okay,” Laird says. “I’m decent-ish.”

I sit on the edge of his bed, take a napkin from his tray, and dab at his forehead beading with sweat. On the news, an iridescent cigar-shaped object is shown crashing into the ocean, the footage taken on a phone by a bystander in Venice Beach.

“Huh,” Laird says, turning up the volume. “Ain’t that some shit.”

“Let’s get out of this room,” I say. “It’s not scorching outside for once. Maybe you’ll have more of an appetite with some real food instead of this slop.”

We stop by the cafeteria after-hours self-serve kiosk for snacks—rubberized fried calamari, Goldfish crackers, day-old cherry pie—and find a picnic table in the courtyard. Laird plays the Smashing Pumpkins. I ask for a round of Siouxsie and the Banshees. We’re both staring at the stars.

“You sort of just mashed up your pie on the plate,” I say.

“It’s a bit hard to swallow,” he says. “But I still like the taste of food.”

“Are you afraid?” I ask.

“I don’t think so,” he says. “A lot of people are afraid it’ll hurt, that they’ll be hurting family and friends, but I’ve been hurting for so long now. And Orli will be okay, eventually.”

“What about the things you wanted to do with your life?”

“Sure, that sucks,” he says. “I’m not going to lie and say making something of myself or falling in love or honoring my mom by helping you find a treatment weren’t on my list of things to do. But it’s not like it’s just me now, you know? I guess it makes it easier knowing that I’m not the only one. And I’ve had thirty-two years. More than a lot of other people.”

I hold Laird’s hand. It’s uncannily soft, as if his finger bones are made of rubber. He looks at me for a moment and then back at the sky.

“When I was a kid I was so obsessed with space. I wanted to study the stars, but I sucked at math,” Laird says. He’s still looking upward and squeezes my hand, grazes it with his thumb. “Would be pretty amazing if that thing that fell in the ocean was really from another world. You believe in that stuff?”

“I think it’s probable,” I say, searching the sky for the dippers. “Awfully big place for it to be only us.”

“Well, maybe somewhere on some faraway planet or moon, two beings are together like this asking the same thing.”

“I’m going to miss you,” I say. I lean over the table and kiss him gently on the lips—too long to be friendly, too soft and quiet to be anything more than a little sad. “I’m sorry we couldn’t have met another way.”

He’s silent for a long while, pops a few Goldfish crackers into his mouth. I wonder if he’s ever fantasized about intimate moments like this with me. He pulls his iPod from the speaker dock and begins to scroll.

“The Strokes?”

“Sure,” I say.

“I’ll miss this,” he says.

Three days later, Orli shows up to the lab, carrying a Chia Pet box, and tells me that Laird passed away in the night. I had planned to meet him that afternoon, made reservations at my favorite Italian restaurant. She sounds like she spent all morning practicing what she would say to me, as if veering from her lines might cause her to implode. I imagine Laird in his hospital bed the other night, closing his eyes, drifting off to sleep. I do not want to acknowledge the pain. I imagine myself there at his side, rather than giving in to Tatsu’s desperate advances. We’d made it through T on my last visit, mostly ruled by the Talking Heads. Laird barely spoke. I asked him several times if he wanted to stop, let the album play even though he’d drifted off to sleep. He told me the last real meal he could taste was french fries, and his last real outing when he felt healthy was to a comic book store—and we both laughed at his nerdiness, his encyclopedic knowledge of Magic: The Gathering, Star Trek, and Superman lore.

“We’re having a memorial,” Orli says. She writes down the information and hands me the box. “He told me to give this to you.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I’m so sorry. Can I—”

But before I can hug her or offer her coffee or maybe my life story, which might allow her to look at me like a human being rather than some well-meaning scientist who may or may not have the hots for her dying brother, she turns away and sprints down the hall. I curl over my desk, find a playlist on my phone called “The Saddest Songs in the World.” “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M. starts right as my boss taps me on the arm.

“Aubrey, I heard about Laird,” he says. He squeezes my shoulder. The entire staff is pretending not to look at me, side-eyeing our conversation. “Just take the day off.”