Chapter 27
27
SETH MAYS
WHEN does it get better?
ELLIOT CRANE
Bit by bit.
How long?
Tomorrow will be better than today.
But it takes TIME.
I think I’m out of time.
It’ll be okay, baby.
I didn’t believe him.
Because I was sitting in a chair outside the HR office, which is about the last place anybody ever wants to find themselves unless they’ve just been hired. Which I most definitely had not.
Quincy had tried her best to cover for me, to put in extra hours to get both our work done. It hadn’t been enough, and I knew it. We both did. She was being optimistic, suggesting that I might get written up, reprimanded, given some sort of quota to hit. She said we would hit it together.
But I had dropped too many balls, too many beakers, too many petri dishes, too many tests that had to be redone, too many procedures done slowly or that Quincy had to step in to finish. It might, as Elliot suggested, come back to me, in time. But I was out of that. And, I was afraid, out of this job.
Maginot was confident he knew the name of the Arcana Killer, although he wasn’t going to share it with us. Until he had enough to make an arrest, he couldn’t. So now it was a matter of building that evidence, carefully and cautiously. With no mistakes.
I was a walking mistake.
Would I still be in a month or a year? I certainly hoped not. I hadn’t gotten as far at my job as I had by being bad at it—but the last two weeks had really been a disaster. In normal circumstances, I’d likely have gotten a write-up after a week or so, but with Arcanavirus, they had a plausible reason to call my competence into question on a more permanent basis.
The real problem was that I couldn’t actually put a timeline on my recovery—I couldn’t promise that it would be better in a week, two weeks, even a month. With Arcana, some people didn’t ever fully recover. Some people were stuck with chronic fatigue, digestive issues, new allergies, and any number of other chronic conditions. For some people, that included a condition referred to as ‘brain fog’—issues remembering, thinking, focusing.
I had that, fatigue, a persistent low-grade headache, and increased pain in the joints that already had pain. I was fairly certain that the fatigue wasn’t actually a chronic condition—at least not a separate one. I had slept like absolute shit every night since I’d come home from St. Cyprian’s, which was saying something, since I’d already been sleeping like shit thanks to chronic Lyme. I was used to getting about five or six hours of interrupted sleep a night. Three or four wasn’t enough, which meant I was constantly tired—and it probably wasn’t helping my capacity to focus, recall, or think, either.
It felt like if I could just get some sleep, it would solve many of my other lingering symptoms. The brain fog and fatigue, anyway. And maybe the head-ache. I doubted it would help the joint pain, although maybe it would help me be more tolerant about dealing with it.
The problem was that I couldn’t just sleep on command, no matter how desperately tired I was or how much I wanted to actually sleep. It was a combination of pain and insomnia—the latter not just because of the pain, either. I’ve had my share of ‘pain-somnia’ nights—where the stabbing ache in my knee or my arm or my back were what kept me wakeful. What I had now wasn’t that. Now I could feel bone-deep exhaustion, wanting desperately to just lose consciousness for a while, and I just couldn’t. There was pain, but that wasn’t what kept me from sleeping or what awakened me.
I awoke covered in sweat, my skin prickling, breath shallow in my lungs with panic at something I didn’t remember. Or at something I did, some nightmarish semi-hallucinatory thing that made no sense in the light of day. Or at nothing at all, my eyes opening to stare blankly at the ceiling of my bedroom—Noah’s old studio—my brain running through all the day’s failures, all the things I wish I’d done differently, the things I’d forgotten or the things I desperately wished I could do.
Like see Elliot again.
I stared down at the messages on my phone, a chat history that went back over two months. A history that was playful, but kind. A history that seemed a lot more like friendship than it did two men who had been having casual sex and nothing more.
But it also didn’t seem like what I wanted it to be—lovers who cared for each other, who wanted a relationship with each other.
In the last month, everything I wanted, everything I had worked for, had all been taken from me. By a disease. By a bomb rigged in a dead man.
They always make it seem dramatic—being fired. Someone telling you to clean out your desk. A security escort.
And maybe there are jobs where it works that way, but mine clearly wasn’t one of them. Or hadn’t been, at any rate, since I was now no longer employed there.
Quincy had looked up when I came back in, her expression hopeful until she saw mine, and then she burst into tears, which hadn’t done much to make me feel any better about being an ex-employee of the state of Virginia.
“It’s not fair!” she’d cried, indignant on my behalf.
All I’d been able to muster was a sort of lackluster gloom. Not even anger, really. I was too tired, too wrung out, too beaten down to care what else the universe had in store for me. It was too hard to find the energy to care too much about any of it.
I knew I should have. It should have mattered a lot that I’d been fired—sorry, let go —from the job I’d loved, the job I’d sacrificed my physical and mental health to keep.
It would hit me at some point.
But all I could do at the time was awkwardly hug Quincy, then try to pretend I wasn’t dead inside .
And all I could do when I got back to the apartment with my pathetic cardboard box was set it down, then go into my room. At least I was driving myself now—so I hadn’t had to call Noah to come pick me up a little after lunch. A lunch I hadn’t had any appetite to eat, even though I knew I really should have.
I lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, my chest hollow.
We really feel that it’s in your best interest to stop working and take the time you need to recover. Once you return to good health, you should feel free to reapply for a position here.
It would be recorded, she’d told me a breath or so later, as a mutual decision based on my illness. Not as a termination. That meant I would be eligible to continue working for the state, whether in the crime lab or somewhere else. I would be able to get a reference from the state.
The woman, whose name I’d pretty much immediately blocked out, seemed surprised that I wasn’t thrilled at this extension of generosity. I wasn’t rude about it, either. I try not to be rude, especially since she likely hadn’t been the one to actually make the decision to let me go. But I just couldn’t muster even false enthusiasm that a job that fired me after forcing me back to work before I’d recovered from a life-changing illness was willing to consider my application or give me a reference at some undetermined point in the future.
The worst part was that I did need to take time off. I didn’t need to eliminate my income stream, but I wasn’t ready to be back at work. I could barely stay awake long enough to finish dinner, and dragging myself out of bed in the mornings was horrifically painful in both the physical and psychological senses. I did need to take more time to recover. But I hadn’t been let go out of concern for my well- being. If they’d had actual concern for my well-being, they’d have given me additional personal time off or offered me additional FMLA, which they didn’t, because the state of Virginia, in its infinite wisdom had eliminated FMLA of more than a month—which I’d taken—for people who contracted Arcana. To stop people from exploiting the taxpayers.
The taxpayers who didn’t actually pay for FMLA, because it was unpaid leave.
But that wasn’t an option. The only way now for me to take time off was to be laid off.
And so here I was.
I tried to nap.
And failed.
It wasn’t until I pushed myself up to go to the bathroom that I realized tears had been running down my face.