Gregory’s parka hung on a peg by the door, his woolen beanie still in the pocket—the same he’d been wearing when he collapsed on the street five days before his father’s death. Dennis watched him lace up his boots. “It’s that easy?” he said.
“You haven’t felt it from my side,” Gregory said, and they laughed—it was a joke among their friends that Gregory’s consciousness, being marooned inside him, was an unfathomable mystery.
Gregory had been taking a short walk the day he’d passed out, to escape the vigil at his childhood home. A shrunken, crumpled version of his father lay inert on his parents’ king-size bed, little more than a head with sensors attached to upload his consciousness to a blue Mandala Cube. Everyone else had managed to seem essential in the crisis: Gregory’s two sisters and brother, even his mother’s old friend Sasha was there from California, taking messages and brewing pots of tea while her husband, Drew, ran interference with the doctors. Gregory alone had no role. Each day he feigned industry before slinking miserably to his childhood bedroom and sorting through old Magic cards. Each morning he felt a greater dread of returning to Chelsea and resuming the charade. Too many people loved his father. There were too many siblings, too many rooms in the house, too many visitors: an endless worshipful parade of friends and colleagues and favored journalists and devotees seeking wisdom, insight, comfort. No one wanted to let him go. Well-wishers gathered outside the Chelsea house in the sleet and rain; they chased away the haters （most of whom went silent once the vigil began） and held up cloth banners that could be seen from the windows. “We love you, Bix.” “Thank you, Bix.” “Don’t leave us, Bix.” Dozens of intricate paintings of mandalas.
Gregory had just bought a bottle of mango juice and was chugging it outside a Seventh Avenue bodega when he noticed a bright ring throbbing in his middle vision. Next he knew, he was on the pavement gazing into the worried faces of strangers. At St. Luke’s Roosevelt, where he went by ambulance, he received a diagnosis of low blood pressure, likely from undereating. Dennis met him there, and they rode the subway home—Gregory’s family had enough to deal with. But the next morning he awoke too weak to cross the room. The distance from his waterbed to the Chelsea townhouse seemed to divide and subdivide infinitely, and a weight of impossibility thrust him back. He told himself that his presence at the house made no difference—one more, one less—but he knew that nothing short of paralysis could excuse his absence from his father’s deathbed. And so he was paralyzed, peeing into bottles for the first two weeks, cared for by Dennis when he was home, unable to attend the funeral.
After the funeral, doctors came: the kind who drew blood and the kind who asked questions about suicidal ideation （too exhausting to contemplate）。 His sisters, Rosa and Nadine, came, flopping onto one side of Gregory’s waterbed and causing tidal waves that nearly pitched him off the other. They uttered long paragraphs that amounted to “We’re worried” and further paragraphs that amounted to “You’re depressed.”
“I just need to rest,” Gregory said.
His brother, Richard, was too buried in Mandala business to visit （translation: was punishing Gregory for his absence）。 His mother came, of course. Gregory was her youngest and had breastfed for so long that he actually remembered doing it. She watched him intently, her scrutiny eroding her respectful distance from his bed. “What, Mom?”
“What?”
“You’re staring at me.”
“What else would I do?”
“I don’t know, read a book. Look at your phone.”
“I’m here to see you.”
“？‘See’ doesn’t have to be constant. Or literal.”
“I’m a literal lady,” his mother said. “Fine, I’ll look out the window.” She did, and Gregory shut his eyes and let himself drift, but when he opened them, she was watching him again. “Dad loved you,” she said. “And he knew you loved him. I’m concerned that you’ve lost track of that.”