Silence fills the crowd for a moment.
“I was watching my little cousin. We were playing Twister. I put a Band-Aid on him when he fell. I don’t know. Maybe it was the contact. Maybe I accidentally drank out of the wrong juice glass,” I explain.
“I slept with someone who turned out to be infected,” someone else says.
“What if this is some kind of punishment?” the felon says.
“I’m pregnant,” someone says. “I’m due next month. What could my baby possibly have done to deserve this? You tell me that.”
For the first time in who knows how long, I sit down on the ground （or space or whatever it is）。 Something like static electricity fills my body, and I wonder if this is it—perpetual bickering, wallowing, or if, perhaps one day （whatever time counts for here）， we’ll find another way to occupy the dark, figure out how to fill it with all we were and all we know, now that we’ve been separated from the slog of life. But right now, all I want to do is cry, for myself, for my parents who I never thanked enough, for the long days and nights they’ll spend beside my body, waiting. I see my mother bringing flowers to my room, my father reading stacks of my stories, practicing his English. Maybe he’ll read the one I wrote about a salaryman in Osaka who falls asleep on the train and wakes in a world that has forgotten who he is. The old woman, no doubt searching for my presence, brushes her hand over my head. I let her frail fingers rest on my shoulders.
“Are you okay down there?” she asks.
“So much of their life was devoted to me,” I say. “My mother prayed for a child for so long. The doctors didn’t think it was possible. I was their fifth and last try with IVF. What are they going to do now?” The old woman doesn’t respond. She crouches beside me and holds me in her arms.
The felon is standing one or two people away and seems to be picking fights with the others, screaming so loudly I can barely hear myself think.
“Yeah, why don’t you come here and say that, asshole!” he yells. I can hear the commotion, feel the bodies around me writhe like disturbed bees in a hive. Someone pushes past me from behind. I hear what I think is a fight—clothes tearing, the successive cracks of punches, asshole bystanders who can’t actually see anything cheering in the darkness. But then I hear something else. Crying. Others hear it, too. The wailing seems to be growing more frantic. It’s so loud now that the hairs on my arms are standing on end. The fighting and waves of voices suddenly cease. I stand and what feels like the entire horde shuffles toward the cries. As the sound gets closer, the old woman and I crawl on all fours, feeling out in front of us, weaving through the labyrinth of legs. Nothing. I swear the crying is right in front of me. Hours might have passed. Nothing. Tiny toes. A foot. A chubby little head. “I have them,” I say. The poor thing. The kid didn’t even have a chance. Can you do something about that crying?
“The kid didn’t even stand a chance,” I repeat under my breath. I think about the unfairness of it all, the shit hand we’ve been dealt. “The kid didn’t even have a chance, but maybe we can give them one,” I say.
“Are you that pyramid guy?” someone asks.
“I am. And there are a lot more of us now.”
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“Maybe the baby’s better off here,” someone else shouts.
“Do you honestly believe that?” I say.
“What if we’re just sending the baby to get sucked into some cosmic ventilation system?” a woman asks.
“We don’t know,” I say, my frustration growing.
Chatter erupts again, and so do the baby’s cries.
Hell of a thing to be a baby in here.
You think the baby could tell people about this place?
Are you an idiot?
Wonder when the orbs are coming back. At least we had something to do then.
I walk through the crowd slowly, letting my void mates hear the child in my arms. Some reach out their hands, and I guide them to the baby’s tiny body, head, and doughy hands, grasping onto my shirt. Perhaps in the world, my parents are sitting beside me. The hospital room televisions are playing the local news—a school shooting, another extinct animal, new statistics about the plague, people migrating from the heat. But my parents are telling me stories about a simpler life that I never knew, the kind where you could go to the beach and not worry about the sand or the city beyond it being swallowed by the sea, one where an earthquake never took away my father’s job and we still woke up on a tiny street in a quiet neighborhood in a bustling metropolis where everyone grew old together. At night, my mother would read me folktales from Japan like the legend of the weaver and the cow herder, two lovers who abandoned their duties and were cast to opposite ends of the heavens, allowed to reunite for only one day a year—the day of the star festival, where I remember writing wishes on brightly colored chains of paper, hanging them on bamboo trees with my family— I wish to be a famous soccer player （or maybe a writer）。 I wish to change the world. I wish for a long, healthy life for my family.