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