“I thought we agreed we needed to spend more time together,” he says, after I’ve failed to respond to any of his suggestions. “You’ve been getting home late nearly every day this week.”
“We did,” I say. “We agreed that whenever you weren’t glued to the ambulance and whenever I wasn’t busy with my research, we’d make time for each other. But you know Laird isn’t doing well. He’s important for my study.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand,” he said. “This week, though.”
“I promise.”
“Send my regards to Laird.”
At the hospital, Laird and his sister are watching television in his room, in the wing she donated. Orli has never quite understood my relationship with her brother; she’s always worried I’m taking advantage of him. I can’t blame her for thinking that. Half the time I don’t know whether I’m rooting for him and already mourning an ill friend, or looking forward to some scientific breakthrough in part because of him. Orli is holding the release form Laird just signed, which gives my lab total custody of his body when he dies. Laird waves me over, holds up his old iPod. It’s filled with our favorite hits. If he and I had met as teenagers, we would no doubt have spent hours dancing and smoking, drinking to the old greats—Talking Heads, Nirvana, buying Dead Kennedys patches on eBay to sew onto our denim jackets.
“But how will I say goodbye?” Orli says, turning to her brother with a sob. She stops herself before embracing him. Touching patients is not allowed, even if Laird is almost certainly not contagious—nearly all recorded adult cases thus far have been from water or food contamination or sexual contact.
“We never really got to say goodbye to Mom.” Laird scratches at the rash that’s forming around the monitor leads attached to his chest and reassures her he won’t stop taking his medication until we’re ready. He’ll fight through the pain for as long as he can. I want to say something about Laird helping many other families who’ve lost more than they can bear, how he’ll be part of the research that could help find the cure. But I know better than to speak right now.
I first met Laird almost a year ago, when he showed up at my lab after watching a documentary about our work on the True Crime+ Channel and how we’ve taken on the Arctic plague in addition to solving murders. At the time, he was desperate to understand what had happened to his mother. She’d gone missing during a cross-country drive to visit her sister. Nobody had known she was sick. When she was found off the side of the road in Des Moines, Iowa, the autopsy revealed that most of her organs had transformed into vague approximations of other bodily organs or—even more bizarrely—into globs of light. Most of the experts consulted believed she’d fallen into a coma long before death, and Laird, armed with only a bachelor’s in chemistry and a minor in music, wanted to help others find the peace he never could.
“I’ll let you and my brother do your thing,” Orli says, watching Laird scroll through his vintage iPod. “What letter are you up to now?”
“P,” Laird answers. “Panic! At the Disco, Paul Simon, Patti Smith, Pat Benatar, Pearl Jam, the Pixies. What do you think?” He turns toward me.
Orli bobs her head like she walked in on some secret clubhouse meeting before slipping from the room. She sits on a chair outside the door. I catch her turning around to check on us every few minutes. This alphabetized ritual began one day when Laird visited the lab and caught me watching recordings of old MTV music videos that I’d borrowed from the university library. He brought up his musical history minor capstone paper on the discovery and evolution of small bands and everything evolved from there. I sit by Laird’s bed and he continues to scroll through his collection.
“I think you want to start with Pearl Jam,” I say. “But if you’re any kind of gentleman you’ll throw me some Patti Smith.”
He hovers his thumb over the selection wheel and pretends to be in deep thought before playing “Dancing Barefoot.”
“How do you feel today?” I ask.
“Worse than yesterday. Better than this morning,” he says. “The usual. Now hush.”
I stay for nearly half an hour. I see Orli growing impatient, walking back and forth outside the door. Laird’s eyes flutter closed as we’re halfway through a Poison ballad.
“Champ, maybe we should call it a night,” I say, taking the iPod and turning off the Bluetooth speaker.