through their waving tips while sun-made sustenance drops down in tubes just inside them. A colossal, rising, reaching, stretching space elevator of a billion independent parts, shuttling the air into the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting possibility from out of nothing: the most perfect piece of self-writing code that his eyes could hope to see. Then his eyes close in shock and Neelay shuts down.
HE WAKES DAYS LATER in the hospital, strapped down and vised. Tubes restrain his arms and legs. Two wedges press against each ear, arresting his head. He can see nothing but ceiling, and it isn’t blue. He hears his mother shout, “His eyes are open.” He can’t understand why she keeps sobbing those words, like they’re a bad thing.
He lies in a cloud of narcotic unknowing. Sometimes he’s a string of stored code in a microprocessor bigger than a city. Sometimes he’s a traveler in that country of surprise that he’ll come to build, when machines are at last fast enough to keep up with his imagination. Sometimes monstrous, splitting tendrils come after him.
The itching is insane. Every spot above his waist is unreachable fire. When he drops back down to earth again, his mother is there, curled up in the chair next to his bed. A change in his breathing wakes her from her sleep. His father is there, too, somehow. Neelay worries; what will his employers say when they discover he’s not at work?
His mother says, “You came down out of a tree.”
He can’t connect the dots. “Fell?”
“Yes,” she argues. “That’s what you did.”
“Why are my legs in tubes? Is that to keep me from breaking things?”
Her finger wags in the air, then touches her lips. “Everything will be fine.”
His mother doesn’t say such things.
The nurses ease him by degrees off the pain drip. Anguish sets in as the drugs dry up. People come to see him. His father’s boss. His mother’s card-playing friends. They smile like they’re doing calisthenics. Their comfort scares the crap out of him.
“You’ve been through a lot,” the doctor says. But Neelay has been through nothing. His body, perhaps. His avatar. But he? Nothing important in the code has changed.
The doctor is kind, with a tremor when his hand drops to his side, and eyes that fix on a blank spot high up on the walls. Neelay asks, “Can you take the vise-things off my legs?”
The doctor nods, but not in agreement. “You have some mending to do.”
“It’s bugging me, not to be able to move them.”
“You concentrate on healing. Then we’ll talk about what happens next.”
“Can you at least take off the boots? I can’t even wriggle my toes.”
Then he understands. He’s not yet twelve. He has lived for years in a place of his own devising. The thought of countless good things passing out of his life doesn’t quite occur to him. He still has that other place, the heaven in embryo.
But his mother and father: they fall apart. Awful hours set in, days of disbelief and desperate bargaining that he won’t remember. There will be years of supernatural solutions, alternative practices, and miracle cures. For a long time, his parents’ love will make his sentence worse, until they finally put their faith in moksha and accept that their son is a cripple.
HE’S STILL LYING in the traction bed, days on. His mother has stepped away on an errand. Maybe not by chance. His teacher comes through the doorway, all warmth and energy, prettier than he remembers.
“Ms. Gilpin. Whoa!”
Something goes wrong with her face. But then, people’s faces always look wrong, from his new vantage place, underneath them. She comes near and touches his shoulder. It freaks him.
“Neelay. I’m glad to see you.”
“I’m glad to see you, too.”
Her whole torso trembles. He thinks: She knows about my legs. The whole school knows. He wants to tell her: It’s not the end of the world. No crucial world, anyway. She talks about the class and what they’re reading now. Flowers for Algernon. He promises to read it by himself.
“Everyone misses you, Neelay.”
“Look.” He points to the wall, where his mother has taped the giant fold-out card signed by the entire ninth grade. She breaks down. He’s helpless to do anything. “It’s okay,” he tells her.
Her head jerks up, crazy with hope. “Neelay. You know I never meant . . . I never thought . . .”
“I know,” he says, and wants her gone.
She pushes her face back with two splayed palms. Then she reaches into