The Infinite Sea

He nods. “Maybe that’s why you don’t know it.”

63

AFTER THE EVENING meal I don’t eat and the forced banter and the minuscule awkward silences that drop between our sentences, and after the board comes out of the wooden box and he’s set up the pieces and we flip to see who’s the home team and he wins, I tell him I think I can handle my own fielding, and he smirks, Yeah, right, let’s go, girl, after he’s sitting beside me on the edge of the bed and after weeks of learning to let go of my rage and embrace the howling emptiness and after years of erecting fortress walls around pain and loss and the feeling that I will never feel again, after losing my father and losing Teacup and losing Zombie and losing everything but the howling emptiness and that is nothing, nothing at all, I silently say the word:

HI

Razor nods. “Yeah.” He taps his finger on the blanket. I feel the tap against my thigh. “Yeah.” Tap. “Not bad, though it’s cooler when you do it in slo-mo.” He demonstrates. “Get it now?”

“If you insist.” I sigh. “Yeah.” I tap my finger on the bedrail. “Well, to be honest I don’t really see the point.”

“No?” Tap-tap on the blanket.

“No.” Tap-tap on the rail.

The next word takes over twenty minutes to trace:

HLP

Tap. “Did I ever tell you about my summer job before there were no more summer jobs?” he asks. “Dog grooming. Worst part of the job? Expressing the anal glands . . .”

He’s on a roll. Four runs and not a single out.

HOW

I won’t get an answer for another forty minutes. I’m a little tired and more than a little frustrated. This is like texting with someone a thousand miles away using one-legged runners. Time slows down; events speed up.

PLN

I have no idea what that means. I look at him but he’s looking at the board, moving the pieces back into position, talking, filling in the tiny silences that drop, stuffing the empty space with chatter.

“That’s what they actually called it: expressing,” he says, still on the dogs. “Rinse, wash, rinse, express, repeat. So freaking boring.”

And the black, soulless, unblinking eye of the camera, staring down.

“I didn’t understand that last play,” I tell him.

“Chaseball isn’t some lame-ass game like chess,” he says patiently. “There are intricacies. Intricacies. To win, you gotta have a plan.”

“And that’s you, I guess. The man with the plan.”

“Yes, that’s me.”

Tap.

64

I HADN’T SEEN Vosch in days. That changes the next morning.

“Let’s hear it,” he tells Claire, who’s standing beside Mr. White Coat looking like a middle-schooler dragged into the principal’s office for bullying the scrawny kid.

“She’s lost eight pounds and twenty percent of her muscle mass. She’s on Diovan for the high blood pressure, Phenergan for the nausea, amoxicillin and streptomycin to keep her lymphatic system tamped down, but we’re still struggling with the fever,” Claire reports.

“‘Struggling with the fever’?”

Claire’s eyes cut away. “On the upside, her liver and kidneys are still functioning normally. A bit of fluid in her lungs, but we’re—”

Vosch waves her off and steps up to my bedside. Bright bird eyes glittering.

“Do you want to live?”

I answer without hesitating. “Yes.”

“Why?”

The question takes me off guard for some reason. “I don’t understand.”

“You cannot overcome us. No one can. Not if you numbered seven times seven billion when it began. The world is a clock and the clock has wound to its final second—why would you want to live?”

“I don’t want to save the world,” I tell him. “I’m just hoping I might get the opportunity to kill you.”

His expression doesn’t change, but his eyes glitter and dance. I know you, his eyes say. I know you.

“Hope,” he whispers. “Yes.” Nodding: He’s pleased with me. “Hope, Marika. Cling to your hope.” He turns to Claire and Mr. White Coat. “Pull her off the meds.”

Mr. White Coat’s face turns the color of his smock. Claire starts to say something, then looks away. Vosch turns back to me.

“What is the answer?” he demands. “It isn’t rage. What is it?”

“Indifference.”

“Try again.”

“Detachment.”

“Again.”

“Hope. Despair. Love. Hate. Anger. Sorrow.” I’m shaking; my fever must be spiking. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Better,” he says.

65

IT GETS SO BAD that night, I can barely make it through four innings of chaseball.

XMEDS

“Heard a rumor going around they took you off your meds,” Razor says, shaking the quarter in his closed fist. “True?”

“The only thing left in my IV bag is saline to keep my kidneys from shutting down.”

He glances at my vitals on the monitor. Frowning. When Razor frowns, he reminds me of a little boy who’s stubbed his toe and thinks he’s too big to cry.

“So you must be getting better.”

“Guess so.” Tap-tap on the bedrail.

“Okay,” he breathes. “My queen is up. Look out.”

My back stiffens. My vision blurs. I lean to the side and empty my stomach, what little is inside my stomach, onto the white tile. Razor leaps up with a disgusted cry, toppling the board.