Jonathan fell quiet, and his eyes scanned the lobby, eventually settling upon Hank, the only white-coated figure in the room.
“Fine,” Jonathan said. “I’m leaving.”
He looked back at the nurse and the towering guard. “I don’t want to spend my last days in a fucking jail cell,” he said. “Maybe another hospital will have a goddamn heart.”
From his post in the ER, Hank felt like he had been watching the world move through the stages of grief, inching closer and closer to some form of acceptance, a new notion of normality. But it seemed to him that, at every stage, more and more people had been left behind, trapped within each phase, unable to transition out.
Some were stuck in the early throes of denial: A few blocks from Hank’s apartment, a dozen demonstrators often gathered to shout their assertions that the strings were a hoax, a government ruse, and that any accurate string predictions were merely self-fulfilling prophecies, testaments to the weak human spirit so easily swayed.
The bargainers pleaded with God to lengthen their strings, promised to turn their lives around. And perhaps those still refusing to open their boxes were engaged in a kind of bargaining as well, Hank thought. Every day that they didn’t look at their strings, they bought themselves more time in an unaltered life.
But the people imprisoned in the more emotional stages, mired in anger or depression, were the easiest to spot and painful to watch. Jonathan Clarke belonged to the angry.
Hank waited as the sullen man exited the ER, and the feeling that had been growing inside of him since all of this began—a virulent sense of his own impotence—seemed to boil over in that moment.
At the close of his shift, Hank told his supervisor that he would be resigning from the hospital at the end of the month.
Amie
May was unusually warm that year, the early morning sunshine hinting at the sticky summer heat to come, and Amie decided to walk across Central Park to her school on the east side instead of waiting for the crosstown bus.
The park was one of the few places that felt rather unchanged. Sprinters and bikers still rushed by, while joggers pushing strollers swerved past Amie on the walkway. Children climbed atop playground equipment and slid down plastic yellow slides, their parents and nannies watching from nearby benches.
Unfortunately, the beautiful weather did not go unnoticed by Amie’s students.
“Can we have class outside today?”
As soon as Amie walked into her classroom, the predictable question came from a predictable culprit, a precocious boy with a smattering of freckles. His constant requests—Can we eat lunch during class today? Can we watch a movie in class today?—always roused the others, though Amie secretly admired his tenacity.
She looked at the entreating eyes of her fifth-graders. “I don’t think that would be a good idea, since the pollen outside can make some of your classmates sneeze and cough, and we wouldn’t want that,” she said.
Her explanation sufficed for most, though a few sneered or rolled their eyes.
Truthfully, she wouldn’t have minded leading class outdoors. She sometimes dreamt of herself as a college English professor, inspiring devotion in her students like Julia Roberts in Mona Lisa Smile. She pictured herself surrounded by a ring of eager scholars, seated on the quad with open novels in hand, notebooks and coffee cups strewn through the grass.
But bringing a rowdy group of ten-year-olds outside just wouldn’t do.
“All right, now, who wants to talk about the ending of The Giver?” Amie asked.
She called on Meg, who was seated near the window as usual, though the desk next to her, once occupied by her best friend Willa, was now empty. Amie had been informed by the principal that Willa’s mother, upon learning she had only a few years left to share with her daughter, took Willa out of school for an indefinite sabbatical abroad.
“I guess I felt . . . hopeful,” Meg said. “Jonas’s world is scary and unfair and confusing, but he gets to escape it in the end. And even if we don’t really know what’s waiting at the bottom of the hill, those lights down below make me feel like it’s someplace nice. So, maybe, I don’t know, whenever things feel scary and unfair and confusing for us, there’s another, nicer place that we could find, too.”
Amie wasn’t quite sure what to say. Her students were young, they didn’t use fancy words or figures of speech, they didn’t quote philosophers or historians, but sometimes they simply left her speechless.
“That’s beautiful, Meg, thank you. How does everyone else feel?”