* * *
A radio in the waiting room says, Nothing tastes better than a fresh-picked Idaho apple. The crinkling of the paper on the examination table borders on the untenable.
The doctor taps a keyboard. Bunny is wearing her Aspen Leaf smock with the two pockets in front. Into her flip phone she whispers, “I’ll work a double on Saturday, Suzette, I promise.”
The doctor shines a penlight in each of Seymour’s eyes. She says, “Your mother says you talked to an owl in the woods?”
A magazine on the wall says, Be a Better You in Fifteen Minutes a Day.
“What kinds of things would you tell the owl, Seymour?”
Don’t answer. It’s a trap.
The doctor says, “Why did you smash the classroom projector, Seymour?”
Not a word.
At checkout Bunny’s arm spelunks in the cavern of her purse. “Is there any chance,” she says, “you could just bill me?”
In a basket on the way out are coloring books with sailing ships in them. Seymour takes six. In his room he draws spirals around all the boats. Cornu spirals, logarithmic spirals, Fibonacci spirals: sixty different maelstroms swallow sixty different ships.
* * *
Night. He gazes out the sliding door, past the backyard, to where moonlight spills across the vacant lots of Eden’s Gate. A single carpenter’s lamp glows inside a half-finished townhome, illuminating an upstairs window. An apparition of Trustyfriend floats past.
Bunny lays a 1.69-ounce package of plain M&M’s on the table. Beside that she sets an orange bottle with a white cap. “The doctor said they won’t make you dumb. They’ll just make things easier. Calmer.”
Seymour grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes. The ghost of Trustyfriend hops to the sliding door. His tail feathers are gone; one wing is missing; his left eye is damaged. His beak is a dash of yellow in a radar dish of smoke-colored feathers. Into Seymour’s head he says, I thought we were doing this together. I thought we were a team.
“One in the morning,” Bunny says, “and one at night. Sometimes, kid, we all need a little help shoveling the shit.”
Konstance
She is walking a street in Lagos, Nigeria, passing through a plaza near the waterfront, gleaming white hotels rising around her on all sides—a fountain caught mid-spray, forty coconut palms growing from black-and-white checkered planters—when she stops. She peers up, a faint prickling at the base of her neck: something not quite right.
In Farm 4 Father has a single coconut in a cold-storage drawer. All seeds, he said, are voyagers, but none more intrepid than the coconut. Dropped onto beaches where high tides can pick them up and carry them to sea, coconuts, he said, regularly crossed oceans, the embryo of a new tree safe inside its big fibrous husk, twelve months of fertilizer provisioned on board. He handed it to her, vapor rising from its shell, and showed her the three germination pores on the bottom: two eyes and a mouth, he said, the face of a little sailor whistling its way around the world.
To her left a sign says, Welcome to the New Intercontinental. She steps into the shade of the palms and continues squinting up when the trees ribbon away, her Vizer retracts from her eyes, and Father is there.
She feels the familiar lurch of motion sickness as she steps off her Perambulator. It’s NoLight already. Mother sits on the edge of her bunk working sanitizing powder into the folds of her palms.
“I’m sorry,” Konstance says, “if I was in there too long.”
Father takes her hand. His white eyebrows bunch. “No, no, nothing like that.” The only illumination comes from the lavatory light. In the shadows behind him she can see that Mother’s usually orderly stack of worksuits and patches has been upended, and her button bag is spilled everywhere—buttons under her bunk, under the sewing stool, in the curtain track around the commode.
When Konstance looks back up at her father, some part of her understands before he speaks what he will say, and she feels so acutely that they have left their planet and star behind, that they move at impossible speeds through a cold and silent void, that there is no turning around.
“Zeke Lee,” he says, “is dead.”
* * *
One day after Ezekiel’s death, Dr. Pori dies, and Zeke’s mother has reportedly lost consciousness. Twenty-one others—one quarter of the people on board—are experiencing symptoms. Dr. Cha spends her every hour tending to crew members; Engineer Goldberg works through NoLight in the Biology Lab trying to solve it.
How does a plague start inside a sealed disc that has had no contact with any other living thing for almost six and a half decades? Is it spreading via touch or spittle or food? Via the air? The water? Was deep-space radiation penetrating the shielding and damaging the nuclei of their cells, or was it something asleep in someone’s genes, all these years, suddenly waking up? And why can’t Sybil, who knows all things, solve it?