almost fevered. She’s bleeding into him the same way she’s bleeding into the dirt. Everything is fluid. Everything needs someplace to go. Time is running out. He knows that like he knows the shape of his own skin, like he knows the shadow lurking at the back of his mind, threatening another, worse seizure. There’s no way he should be doing this in this condition. He shouldn’t be doing anything but going to the hospital. But there’s no time, time is running out, there’s no time keeps running through his mind, a jumbled string of words that barely holds together as it tumbles end over end, and he knows the hospital won’t save him. He couldn’t say how he knows: just that he does.
Right now, he’s accepting the fact that given a choice between running off by himself immediately after a seizure or going to the hospital, the right choice puts him on the street. If he goes to the hospital, they’ll both die.
He hits the sidewalk at what feels like a hundred miles an hour, trying to relax into the motion, to level out his breathing, to find comfort in the act of running. He can’t. Even the shape of his own skin is starting to feel wrong. It’s too long, too lanky, stretched too tight across the bones. He doesn’t want to think about what that might mean, and so he runs, as hard and as fast as he can.
The sky is a bruise, pulsing with clouds, heavy with the promise of more rain. The air is electric. This is a Frankenstein day, ready to strike out at any moment. He darts across the street without looking, hearing the horns blare behind him and not looking back. He can’t look back. He’s not one of the rich kids, whose parents will trust them with a phone, and he doesn’t know any of them well enough to ask to borrow their phones, not when he’s seizing for no apparent reason, not when he’s running out of time. There’s a payphone half a mile up the road, at Harvard Square. He has a handful of quarters in his pocket, intended for feeding into parking meters when he takes Alison out on Friday nights. She’ll understand if he has to borrow a few dollars. She’ll see that he was helping a friend.
(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