The Immortalists(31)

Simon pictures it: doors whooshing open and shut, young people walking with backpacks. The thought comforts him so deeply that he feels almost able to fall asleep. With his nerve pain and his twitching, he spends most nights awake.

‘Simon?’ Daniel asks, softening. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘No,’ Simon says, ‘there’s nothing.’ He wonders if Daniel is relieved when he hangs up.

June 13th. Two of the men on Simon’s hall died in the night. His new roommate – a Hmong boy in glasses who keeps asking for his mother – can’t be older than seventeen.

‘There was a woman,’ Simon tells Robert, perched beside him as always. ‘She told me when I’d die.’

‘A woman?’ Robert scoots closer. ‘What woman, baby? A nurse?’

Simon is light-headed. They’ve been giving him morphine for the nerve pain. ‘No, not a nurse – a woman. She came to New York. When I was a kid.’

‘Sy.’ Klara looks up from her chair, where she is stirring a yogurt for him. ‘Please don’t.’

Robert keeps his eyes on Simon. ‘And she told you – what? What do you remember?’

What does he remember? A narrow door. A bronze number swinging on its hinge. He remembers the filthiness of the apartment, which surprised him; he had imagined a scene of tranquility, as might appear around the Buddha. He remembers a stack of playing cards from which the woman asked him to pick four. He remembers the cards he chose – four spades, all of them black – and the hideous shock of the date she gave him. He remembers stumbling down the fire escape, his palm clammy on the railing. He remembers that she never asked for money.

‘I always knew it,’ he says. ‘I always knew I’d die young. That’s why I did what I did.’

‘Why you did what?’ asks Robert.

Simon lifts a finger. ‘Why I left Ma. For one thing.’

He puts a second finger out but loses his train of thought. Talking feels like trying to reach the surface of an ocean. More and more, it’s like he’s drifting toward the bottom, like he knows what’s down there, though he can’t explain it to anyone on land.

‘Hush,’ says Robert, smoothing the hair off his forehead. ‘It doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters.’

‘No. You don’t understand.’ Simon dog-paddles; he gulps. It is urgent, that he say this. ‘Everything does.’

When Robert leaves to use the bathroom, Klara comes to Simon’s cot. The skin beneath her eyes is swollen.

She says, ‘Will I ever find someone I love as much as you?’

She scoots into bed beside him. He’s become so thin that they both fit easily in the hospital’s twin.

‘Please,’ says Simon: her words, when they stood on the roof as the sun rose, when they stood at the very beginning. ‘You’ll find someone you love much more.’

‘No,’ gasps Klara. ‘I won’t.’ She lays her head on Simon’s pillow. When she turns to look at him, her hair falls over his collarbone. ‘What did she tell you?’

What does it matter, now? ‘Sunday,’ Simon says.

‘Oh, Sy.’ There is a strangled cry, like something that would come from a chained dog. Klara puts a palm over her mouth when she realizes it’s hers. ‘I wish – I wish . . .’

‘Don’t wish it. Look what she gave me.’

‘This!’ says Klara, looking at the lesions on his arms, his sharp ribs. Even his blond mane has thinned: after an aide helps him bathe, the drain is matted with curls.

‘No,’ says Simon, ‘this,’ and he points at the window. ‘I would never have come to San Francisco if it weren’t for her. I wouldn’t have met Robert. I’d never have learned how to dance. I’d probably still be home, waiting for my life to begin.’

He’s angry with the disease. He rages at the disease. For so long, he hated the woman, too. How, he wondered, could she give such a terrible fortune to a child? But now he thinks of her differently, like a second mother or a god, she who showed him the door and said: Go.

Klara looks paralyzed. Simon remembers the expression he saw on her face after they moved to San Francisco, that eerie combination of irritation and indulgence, and he realizes why it disturbed him. She reminded him of the woman: counting down, watching him. Inside him a bud of love for his sister breaks open. He thinks of her on the rooftop – how she stood at the edge and spoke without looking at him. Give me one good reason why you shouldn’t start your life.

‘You aren’t surprised that it’s Sunday,’ Simon says. ‘You knew all along.’

‘Your date,’ Klara whispers. ‘You said it was young. I wanted you to have everything you’ve ever wanted.’

Simon squeezes Klara’s hand. Her palm is fleshy, a healthy pink. ‘But I do,’ he says.

Sometimes, Klara leaves to let Simon and Robert be alone. When they’re too tired to do anything else, they watch videos, rented from the San Francisco Public Library, of the great male dancers: Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Nijinsky. One of the Shanti Project volunteers wheels the television in from the community room, and Robert lies with Simon in his cot.

Simon stares at him. How lucky I was to know you. He fears for Robert’s future.

‘If he gets it,’ Simon tells Klara, ‘he has to get into the trial. Promise me, Klara – promise me you’ll make sure.’