He said, A— was trying so hard to bring me back down to earth, trying to get me to pay attention to the outside world. He’d swapped with M—。 She’d stopped freaking out, she didn’t ask me where my pills or the drink was anymore. She just took notes, helped with all the trials I wanted to do, squabbled with A—。 At least that made me feel normal. That was their usual double act. It was only when they felt the same thing that I knew it was serious.
He said, I just wanted to be in the lab. It felt like I could sit by those two bodies, those two kids, and make time go away. I could sit next to them for six minutes, I could sit next to them for six hours. Just listening. They were my moreporks and possums. I was hearing their bodies in all that silence, all the bacteria that weren’t growing … what wasn’t building up in the gut, what wasn’t pooling at the joints. They were my silent night. I should have been doing paperwork and closing reports, but I hadn’t opened the computer in days. I couldn’t stop thinking about their palms, their hands. I touched their hands so often. I’d touched their hands before, but not like this. Even when I wasn’t touching them I could feel their skin on my skin, that temperature that wouldn’t change. I kept thinking I was touching them when I wasn’t. M— said I should probably get tossed in a rubber room, but she wasn’t scared I was nuts. She was scared I wasn’t.
He said, You know, I can’t even remember how it came together now. There was no catalyst, no revelation. I was too far gone for revelations. It was like I’d been dozy and now I was waking up. So, my two kids, the guinea pigs, they were U— and T— on their certificates, you know, their old names. I thought about using those but it didn’t seem appropriate. They weren’t around to say yes or no. I was starting to really care about that. What they would’ve thought, what they would’ve wanted. My two kids with their frozen brains and their perfect internal temperatures. There wasn’t a place on the poor bastards I hadn’t breached with a thermometer, and now I was knocking before I came into their room. Yeah, I was nuts. But I was waking up.
He said, I can’t remember how or why I brought M— and A— into the room. I was like, Hey you two, I want you to meet someone. I wasn’t trying to be a dick. I think I hadn’t slept for two days.
So I brought them into the room with the bodies and I was all, Let me introduce you to … Ulysses. Let me introduce you to … Titania.
He thought about it and added, I better say that it was Titania from Midsummer, Shakespeare, but Ulysses was for a dog my nana had when I was a child. I worshipped that dog. He was the bravest dog I’d ever met. Half Chihuahua, half pug. Nan called him Ulysses S. Grunt. Died from eating too much pizza. The dog, I mean. Nan died of pneumonia when I was a teenager.
She said: “But what about the bodies?”
He said, Well. When I said, Ulysses, I moved each of his fingers and his thumb into a fist, curled them into the palm. And when I said, This is Titania, same thing, I placed each of her fingers and her thumb into a fist.
And I was laughing and laughing like I’d kicked out a chair before someone sat down. Like, good joke. But M— threw up.
“Because, Harrow, I’d done it from the other side of the room.”
9
NONA JOLTED AWAKE with a start when she felt a tender slobbering on her ankle. It was Noodle’s terrible licky tongue investigating the bit where the bone of her foot made a bump, which he obviously thought was a friendly gesture. She could have only been asleep for a little while—the sun hadn’t moved and the big hot blue shadows of the courtyard were shimmering in the same position they always had—but she startled herself upright anyway, freaking out that she had snored away most of the Hour of Science without taking care of Noodle or even looking for whoever was watching the building. She checked Noodle to make sure his pattens were on, retrieved the bowl and the bottle, and took the dog inside.
She was very relieved to hear the Angel’s voice coming through the door and floating down the stairs, explaining why the ice cube in the sock had melted more slowly than the ice cube not in the sock. She sat down on the stairs and began assisting Noodle out of his pattens. Nona had assumed Noodle would be grateful, but he still turned around and showed her the whites of his eyes despite the fact that she was now taking him out of the pattens rather than putting them on, and he wriggled. The cloakroom door opened and out came Hot Sauce.
“What did you say?” she demanded.
Nona was bewildered. “What did I say when?”