a doctor waiting at the ER entrance. They swung him up onto a gurney and a doctor gave him two shots, one in the arm and one in the chest. When he got the chest one, Julian groaned and trembled, and his eyes opened but showed only whites. The doctor said that was a good response. It might be a day before they knew whether he would recover; she could wait here or go home.
She did both. She took a cab with the helpful student back to the apartment building, picked up the notes and papers for her next class, and returned to the hospital.
There was nobody else in the waiting room. She got a cup of coffee from the machine and sat at the end of a couch.
The papers were all graded. She looked at her lecture notes but couldn’t concentrate on them. It would have been hard to go through the teaching routine even if she had come home to a normal Julian. If Peter was right, and she was sure he was, the Jupiter Project was over. It had to be shut down. Eleven years, most of her career as a particle physicist, down the drain.
And now this, this strangely reciprocal crisis. A few months ago he had sat this deathwatch for her, brain-deathwatch. But she had caused both of them. If she had been able to put the work with Peter aside—put her career aside—and give him the kind of loving support that he needed to work through his guilt and anguish, he wouldn’t have wound up here.
Or maybe he would. But it wouldn’t have been her fault.
A black man in a colonel’s uniform sat down next to her. His lime cologne cut through the hospital smell. After a moment he said, “You’re Amelia.”
“People call me Blaze. Or Professor Harding.”
He nodded and didn’t offer his hand. “I’m Julian’s counselor, Zamat Jefferson.”
“I have news for you. The counseling didn’t take.”
He nodded the same way. “Well, I knew he was suicidal. I jacked with him. That’s why I gave him those pills.”
“What?” Amelia stared at him. “I don’t understand.”
“He could take the whole bottle at once and survive. Comatose, but breathing.”
“So he’s not in danger?”
The colonel put a pink laboratory form on the table between them, and smoothed it out with both hands. “Look where it says ‘ALC.’ The alcohol content of his blood was 0.35 percent. That’s more than halfway to suicide by itself.”
“You knew he drank. You were jacked with him.”
“That’s just it. He’s not normally a heavy drinker. And the scenario he had for suicide . . . well, it didn’t involve either alcohol or pills.”
“Really? What was it?”
“I can’t say. It involved breaking the law.” He picked up the form and refolded it neatly. “One thing . . . one thing you might be able to help with.”
“Help him or help the army?”
“Both. If he comes out of this, and I’m almost certain he will, he’ll never be a mechanic again. You could help him get through that.”
Amelia’s face narrowed. “What do you mean? He hates being a soldier.”
“Maybe so, but he doesn’t hate being jacked with his platoon. Quite the contrary; like most people, he’s become more or less addicted to it, to the intimacy. Perhaps you can distract him from that loss.”
“With intimacy. Sex.”
“That.” He folded the paper twice again, creasing it with his thumbnail. “Amelia, Blaze, I’m not sure you know how much he loves you, depends on you.”
“Of course I do. The feeling’s mutual.”
“Well, I’ve never been inside your head. From Julian’s point of view, there’s some imbalance, asymmetry.”
Amelia sat back in the couch. “So what does he want of me?” she said stiffly. “He knows I only have so much time. Only have one life.”
“He knows you’re married to your work. That what you do is more important than what you are.”
“That’s harsh enough.” They both flinched when someone in another room dropped a tray of instruments. “But it’s true of most of the people we know. The world’s full of proles and slacks. If Julian were one of them, I would never have even met him.”
“That’s not quite it. I’m in your class, too, obviously. Sitting around consuming would drive us crazy.” He looked at the wall, reaching for words. “I guess I’m asking that you take a part-time job, as therapist, in addition to being a full-time physicist. Until he’s better.”
She stared at him in a way she sometimes stared at a student. “Thank you for not