I hold Laird’s hand. It’s uncannily soft, as if his finger bones are made of rubber. He looks at me for a moment and then back at the sky.
“When I was a kid I was so obsessed with space. I wanted to study the stars, but I sucked at math,” Laird says. He’s still looking upward and squeezes my hand, grazes it with his thumb. “Would be pretty amazing if that thing that fell in the ocean was really from another world. You believe in that stuff?”
“I think it’s probable,” I say, searching the sky for the dippers. “Awfully big place for it to be only us.”
“Well, maybe somewhere on some faraway planet or moon, two beings are together like this asking the same thing.”
“I’m going to miss you,” I say. I lean over the table and kiss him gently on the lips—too long to be friendly, too soft and quiet to be anything more than a little sad. “I’m sorry we couldn’t have met another way.”
He’s silent for a long while, pops a few Goldfish crackers into his mouth. I wonder if he’s ever fantasized about intimate moments like this with me. He pulls his iPod from the speaker dock and begins to scroll.
“The Strokes?”
“Sure,” I say.
“I’ll miss this,” he says.
Three days later, Orli shows up to the lab, carrying a Chia Pet box, and tells me that Laird passed away in the night. I had planned to meet him that afternoon, made reservations at my favorite Italian restaurant. She sounds like she spent all morning practicing what she would say to me, as if veering from her lines might cause her to implode. I imagine Laird in his hospital bed the other night, closing his eyes, drifting off to sleep. I do not want to acknowledge the pain. I imagine myself there at his side, rather than giving in to Tatsu’s desperate advances. We’d made it through T on my last visit, mostly ruled by the Talking Heads. Laird barely spoke. I asked him several times if he wanted to stop, let the album play even though he’d drifted off to sleep. He told me the last real meal he could taste was french fries, and his last real outing when he felt healthy was to a comic book store—and we both laughed at his nerdiness, his encyclopedic knowledge of Magic: The Gathering, Star Trek, and Superman lore.
“We’re having a memorial,” Orli says. She writes down the information and hands me the box. “He told me to give this to you.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I’m so sorry. Can I—”
But before I can hug her or offer her coffee or maybe my life story, which might allow her to look at me like a human being rather than some well-meaning scientist who may or may not have the hots for her dying brother, she turns away and sprints down the hall. I curl over my desk, find a playlist on my phone called “The Saddest Songs in the World.” “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M. starts right as my boss taps me on the arm.
“Aubrey, I heard about Laird,” he says. He squeezes my shoulder. The entire staff is pretending not to look at me, side-eyeing our conversation. “Just take the day off.”
“Thank you,” I say. I wash up in the bathroom and beeline to the door before anyone else can offer their awkward condolences.
When I get home, I open the box before Tatsu returns from his shift for what he likes to call “date night,” basically an evening of lackluster Thai takeout with a wonky spice rating system that somehow always results in noodles that are either too hot or exceptionally bland. I perch on the toilet and lock the bathroom door, just in case. I don’t want Tatsu to see my face twisted into every angle of grief, a primal ugly cry. I don’t want him to know what’s inside the box: a key, a photo of Laird before he got sick, his iPod, a stack of letters in sealed envelopes accompanied by a note telling me to open one each day. If Tatsu asks, I will tell him the box was full of lab samples—tissue, blood, urine. Nothing exciting. Nothing that matters.
Dear Aubrey,
If you’re reading this, it means I lost. But, of course, that was the plan. I suppose I’m downstairs now in a morgue drawer, waiting for someone to take me to you. But I’d like to imagine I’m in a photon torpedo tube on the starship Enterprise, and I’ll be shot into space like Spock at the end of Wrath of Khan. Or I’m in a space pod from 2001: A Space Odyssey, on my way to becoming a star child. You never know, right? Sometimes I imagined what my memorial would be like. What would people say? What would you say? Maybe we really did just have a friendly working relationship. But I always wondered. I liked to pretend some of our outings were dates. What if I hadn’t been that guy in the hospital? What if my mother hadn’t died and we’d bumped into each other in a music store or something long before the world got fucked? You’d be holding a Velvet Underground LP, and I’d be holding Hüsker Dü. And I’d hope whatever minimal charm I possessed would be enough. Regardless of who we really were to each other, I guess you’re still the person I’m sending this box to.