“I’ll be right there,” I yelled to Fitch as I helped his mother stand.
“I’m going to sit here on this bench,” Dorrie said, barely audible. “Come get me after.”
I moved as if the stone path had turned to quicksand. Each step had the potential to stop me in my tracks, my selfish thoughts racing, wanting to keep Fitch here with us somehow, the three of us together. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, told myself to think happy thoughts about intergalactic victory with the help of Space Commander Fitch. I tried to imagine him at his worst, when his paper-thin skin turned impossible colors, as if every cell in his body had been set aflame. I reminded myself that the virus eating at his brain had wrapped around his synapses, stealing a little part of him with each minute—and then I opened my eyes and saw him more alive than he had ever been.
As far as Fitch was concerned, he was already in the sky with Orion high above, aiming his arrow at Jupiter or Venus. He was shaking with anticipation in his seat, rubbing his arms. I draped his never-worn denim jacket around his shoulders, pulled down the padded restraints, buckled him in tightly. He asked me if we could get ice cream after, and I wanted to tell him he could have all the ice cream he wanted. I studied his face and wondered if this was just the wish of an astronaut who knew he might not be coming home. I gave him a high five, told him to hold on tight. I told him he was on a mission to save the world and that I wanted to hear him shout at the stars and raise his arms as high as he could to rake the bottom of the sky.
From the control booth, I gave him one final salute. The orange shimmer of the electric torches dotting the tracks washed over him just enough so I could see his silhouette amid the excited horseplay of the other children. I pushed the red button and the chains of the ride clicked and clacked, pulling the train upward. Each sound vibrated through my body, striking at the temptation to stop it all. Dorrie was standing with the other parents near the guarded perimeter gates. I sat back in the darkness of the booth, waiting. And for a moment, I thought I heard Fitch’s triumphant shouts, perhaps the happiest sound I will ever hear, until there was only the roar of Osiris and then nothing at all.
Through the Garden of Memory
My parents and I were driving home to Palo Alto from a belated memorial in Minneapolis three months after my cousin Kayla had been euthanized. I fell asleep in the back seat on our final day of travel, the smell of smoke seeping through a cracked window reminding me of home. I felt hot and light-headed, and when I looked up, the stars seemed to streak across the sky as if the universe had been grazed with a paintbrush. My father refused to stop. He said we were making good time. I woke up in a hospital plague ward a week later, my parents watching over me from a quarantine observation room.
“The kids you babysat during the memorial tested positive,” my mother said through an intercom next to my bed. “Their parents swore they’d been tested. We thought they were safe. I’m so sorry, Jun.”
“Fucking germ factories,” I said, allowing the room to come into focus. My throat crackled when I spoke, every word like coughing up pebbles. I thought about the gauntlet of toddler hands that smelled of actual shit, rubbing against my face during Twister, my aunt’s stale basement air circulating with tantrums. Beside me, I saw several other beds filled with adults—some awake and staring at the ceiling, others unconscious and hooked into machines pumping air down their throats. “How are the kids?”
“Kenta is in the ICU; the others are stable, receiving gene therapy,” my mother said.
I nodded, which sent a sharp pain down my back. I felt like I could sleep forever.
“The treatments for children don’t seem to be working for adults,” my father said. “It might be a new strain. They don’t think it’s airborne anymore—of course, nobody really knows for sure. Some college students were infected at a beach, maybe from sewage contamination.”
I felt like I was looking at someone else’s body. I couldn’t feel the sheet over my legs. The skin on my arms seemed abnormally pale, almost translucent, as if I were transforming into a deep-sea creature.
“What’s happening to me?” I asked.
My parents shook their heads, held each other, a public display of affection I had rarely seen before.
“We don’t know,” my mother said.
Across the hall, I heard doctors and nurses rushing into a room, the steady tone of a flatlining patient, the tiny explosions of a defibrillator. I wanted to tell my parents that I loved them, but my lips felt cemented together. My muffled screams filled the room. I saw my mother putting her hands to her mouth, crying. The skin on my body quickly cycled from normal to see-through; stars seemed to float through my veins. My mother began speaking in Japanese, something she did only when she was upset. I heard my father screaming for help. I closed my eyes for a moment.