Chapter 5
When it happens, it’s May.
It’s a shitty good-for-nothing day with a sky outside that’s not sunny or snowy or rainy, just a big gray pointless nothing.
Approximately twelve hours have passed since Danny’s call with Julian, and Danny has spoken to no one but doctors since—not Julian or Eve or Gigi or even Cal, who has been breathing but asleep, or something like sleep.
Time goes very slow but very fast. Danny cannot bear to do anything but sit there, but the just sitting there is an indescribable monotony. Every time Cal exhales, Danny’s body tenses until he hears the next inhale.
The doctors say today. Maybe tomorrow. Danny’s skull feels heavy.
He sits in the chair by the bed and wishes he had gone to med school instead of learning about binary search trees.
Cal is mostly not awake. Danny should call the woman he loves.
Instead, he opens his phone and tells an artificial intelligence over and over again: I just want to be happy.
The artificial intelligence writes back: Got it! Give me a moment to think.
Cal says something.
“Hey.” Danny sits up. Sets his phone aside. “How are you?”
Unintelligible.
Danny takes Cal’s hand. The fingers are curved slightly, cupped into a crescent.
At the door, a doctor almost enters, pauses, and goes the other direction.
Because someone has paged him? Because he’s giving them privacy?
Is that a thing doctors do? Danny hates that he’s asking these questions as the time slip slip slips away.
He wants to be here, right here, and not wondering where the doctor has gone, and why he won’t come back, and if it makes sense for Danny to get up and run after him or if he would regret that lost moment for the rest of his life.
What could the doctor have seen about this moment that Danny can’t?
“Hey, kid,” the doctor would have heard Danny’s dad say, if he had stayed. “The mooooon.”
The doctor would have watched Danny lean over their hands. Maybe the doctor would have heard the same thing Danny was hearing—the billowing of static filling every space. Then he would’ve seen the nurses, and heard whatever they had to say, and he could have repeated it so Danny heard, too.
And then, after the moon and the static and the nurses, maybe the doctor would have seen the lanky young man with the expensive watch step through the doorway and help Danny from the chair by the bed and hug him, not asking anything, just standing there in the awful room hugging him—and maybe he would have guessed they were brothers.