Page 34 of Middlegame

(Or maybe she won’t, because there’s no way to explain this so normal people will understand: he barely knows how to explain it to himself, and he has the situation burning bright as tinder in his mind, illuminating the dark corners. Here there be monsters, he thinks, and knows if he survives this, if they survive this, there won’t be any more Friday nights with Alison. She’ll never understand why he ran off campus when he needed medical help, why he put himself in danger, why he risked breaking her heart like that. There are no words in their common language to explain why he’s doing these things, and that’s the final nail in the coffin they’ve been building between them, to bury love with honors.)

Roger reaches the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and JFK as the sky rips open and begins pelting down rain. He’s a little bit grateful as he races for the ledge sheltering the payphone. No one knows you’ve wet your pants when you’ve been drenched by a September storm. The water is frigidly cold, but that’s incidental; as long as he has enough feeling in his fingers to feed the quarters into the machine, he can—

If the first seizure was a flash of lightning, the second is a roll of thunder. He feels his knees buckle, feels his cheek hit the brick sidewalk hard enough to bruise the entire side of his face, and the world goes sapphire blue before it fades to black, and he feels nothing at all.

When Roger opens his eyes, the rain has stopped and the shadow at the back of his mind is almost gone. There are people walking by on the sidewalk, some with umbrellas still hoisted high, looking at him with the calm disregard of people who can’t find anything more interesting on television. Sitting up is harder this time, more like it should be after a major medical event. The quarters are spilled all around him, gleaming silver under a veil of rainwater. Curiosity and caution appear to have fought each other to a draw, keeping him from being robbed blind. He fumbles for as many quarters as he can, hands shaking, knees aching from their second hard impact in under an hour.

He feels drunk as he staggers to his feet and reels toward the payphone. The distance is short, but it’s enough to wind him; he stops, hand pressed against the rough brick wall, chin tucked toward his chest, trying to suck in enough air that he won’t sound like a crazy man when he starts making calls. Everything is getting hazy and strange. There’s a third seizure lurking, the granddaddy of them all, slinking closer like one of Dodger’s horror-movie monsters. It’ll have him soon, and then it’s lights out forever. No more words.

This is the line past which words can’t help him.

Or maybe they can. “Dodger,” he hisses, and for the first time in his life, he doesn’t give one flat fuck who might hear him or judge him for speaking to his imaginary friend. He throws himself forward into the void, into the space they’ve always made between them, the one that lets him use her eyes as she uses his. “Dodger, what did you do?”

She doesn’t reply in words; words were never her strong suit, and if they’re slipping away from him, they must have abandoned her completely. Instead, her eyelids flicker open, and he has a glimpse of blackberry brambles, twisted and wild and cradling the last of their late-summer berries; California’s growing season seems to go on forever, ending resentfully, resuming the second the weather allows. It’s an alien world, or it might as well be, filled with creatures whose motivations are as incomprehensible as pi.

“Dodger. Talk to me.”

She doesn’t talk to him. They’ve almost never picked up feelings from each other, but maybe this feeling is a language all its own: deep contentment, mixed with a bitter apology that cuts to the bone, knocking the air out of him. She closes her eyes. Not fast enough. He sees the blood on her fingertips (red through her eyes, red, red, red), her outstretched arm the only part of her body that’s in her view, and he knows she predicted this call, this frantic attempt to reach her; she has organized herself with a mathematician’s precision, concealing anything that might tell him what she did, where she pressed the razor, how deeply she bore down. The fingertips were an accident. He knows that, too, and what they represent, how much blood she’d need to lose before she wouldn’t understand that he’d see. He doesn’t think she’s asking to be saved.

He doesn’t think she understands that she’s taking him down with her—and at this point, he doesn’t think she could do anything if he told her. She’s too far gone.

“Fuck quantum entanglement,” he mutters, and opens his eyes, and picks up the phone.

Getting the number for Stanford University is easy: the operator is happy to provide it, even happy to connect him for an extra quarter. His vision is blurring around the edges, what little color he normally sees leeching out of the world, like Dodger’s taking the rest of it with her on her way out the door. He closes his eyes, not to reach out, but to remove one more distraction from a world that seems increasingly full of them. He doesn’t have the time to let himself lose the thread of the narrative now. It’s too late it’s too late the line has been crossed it’s save her now (and save himself in the process) or save her never.

“Your princess is in another castle,” he says, and laughs, and is still getting his laughter under control when the ringing stops.

“Stanford Administration, how may I help you?” asks a sharp female voice. It is the voice of someone with no time to waste on nonsense, who will hang up on him if given the slightest reason.

Roger opens his eyes. Looking at his increasingly blurry feet, he says, in as polite a tone as he can pull from his exhausted reserves of energy, “Hello, ma’am. I need to speak to Professor Cheswich, please.”

“Professor Cheswich’s office hours are eight to ten on weekdays. He’s not currently available for student calls. I can put you through to his voicemail.”

Damn. Damn. Those stupid time zones again. Voicemail will be too late; he knows that, would have known it even without the glimpse through Dodger’s eyes, without the blood on Dodger’s fingertips. Time is running down. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but if there’s any way to connect me now, this is important. I’m one of his daughter’s classmates, and Dodger isn’t at school.”

“I don’t believe this is a matter of sufficient importance—”

“Please.”

Hundreds of miles away, on the other side of a continent that might as well be a world, Patsy Sinclair stops. The despair in the boy’s voice is shockingly strong, but more, there’s a command there, and part of her wants to answer it. Part of her wants to do whatever he’s asking her to do. And it’s a loud part. It seems like it’s a part worth listening to.

Patsy Sinclair has been a secretary for thirty years. She’s good at what she does; she knows how to winnow the wheat from the chaff, as it were, when making sure that cranks and weirdos don’t get through to the faculty in her care. She’s heard it all, from the honors students desperate not to be held accountable for plagiarism to the slackers praying for one more chance. This boy . . . this boy sounds like he’s dying. Or like someone else is.

When she speaks again, her own voice is gentler, softer, designed to calm. “It’s all right, son. What’s going on?”

“Please. Dodger was talking about hurting herself, but we didn’t think she’d do it, only she’s not here, and I think she’s done something terrible. Please, can you try his number?”

“All right,” she says. There’s a breathlessness to her tone, and Roger knows he has her. Maybe, in the absence of Dodger, he’s a decent liar after all.

(Maybe it’s something else. But whatever it is, this is not the time.)

The line clicks. The line rings. The blurriness keeps spreading across Roger’s field of vision, creating a narrowing tunnel leading down, down, down into the dark. It’s like a rabbit hole. Any moment now Dodger will appear, wearing the White Rabbit’s waistcoat and watch, and tell him he’s going to be late. It’s all falling apart. It’s all going to pieces.

I’m not bleeding, but I’m suffering the effects of blood loss, he thinks, and that third, final seizure noses a little closer, like a dog straining toward its master’s hand. He isn’t its master, but it doesn’t know that. It will love him to death. We weren’t supposed to go to Wonderland, he thinks, and the Impossible City is burning, and it will all be over soon.

The line rings, and then—miracle—someone answers. “Professor Cheswich’s office, Professor Cheswich speaking.”

“Sir, I’m a friend of your daughter’s, and she’s bleeding to death in the gully behind your house.” He’s too tired to lie anymore. He needs to frighten this man into immediate action. “She has a spot under the blackberries. She’s been going there since she was a kid. It’s not too late, but she’s lost a lot of blood. You need to hurry.”