same absolute arrogant control of the space, like everyone else was there only by his permission. His eyes slid over me—droopy eyelid, gimpy leg—with a casual assessment that set my teeth on edge.
“You know about your uncle’s brain tumor,” he said. “Yes?”
“Yes. He was diagnosed a couple of, I think August—”
“He’s had a brain hemorrhage. It’s fairly common: the tumor disrupts the tissues, erodes through them, and eventually you’ll have bleeding. The blood created pressure on the brain. That’s what made him lose consciousness.”
“Is he—” I was starting to say Is he awake yet or possibly Is he dead, but the doctor kept talking like I didn’t exist.
“We’ve stabilized him. A hemorrhage like this can make the blood pressure unstable—his was all over the place, when he came in—so we’ve given him medication to keep that under control. Now we’re just going to keep monitoring and see how he does. We’ll hope he wakes up soon. It all depends on how much damage has been done.”
I realized who he reminded me of: the shitbird neurologist, back when I had been in hospital, brushing past my desperate questions like everything about me was too unimportant even to register. “Is he going to—” Going to be OK was wrong, obviously Hugo wasn’t going to be OK, but I didn’t know how else to—
“We’ll have to wait and see,” the doctor said. He punched a code into a keypad by the door, thick blunt fingers. “You can go in and see him now. Second room on the left.” He held the door for me—and for Rafferty, who hung back, letting me go in ahead—before he nodded and strolled off down the corridor.
Rich stench of hand sanitizer and death, a girl sobbing somewhere. Hugo’s room was small and overheated. He was flat on his back; his eyes were a slit open and for a moment I had a wild burst of hope, but then I saw how still he was. His skin was grayish and sagging back from his face, leaving his features standing out too sharply. Wires and tubes poured out of him, fine and flexible and nasty: a tube spilling from his open mouth, another from his bony arm, another from under his sheet, wires sprouting from the neck of his gown. Machines everywhere, beeping, bright-colored zigzags running across a monitor, numbers flickering. All of it was horrifying but I clung to it all the same—they wouldn’t be bothering with all this stuff unless they thought he had a fighting chance, surely they wouldn’t, would they?
A nurse—Indian, soft and pretty, glossy hair in a neat bun—was writing something on a chart. “You can talk to him,” she said, nodding encouragingly at Hugo. “Maybe he can hear you.”
I pulled a brown plastic chair to the bed and sat down. “Hugo,” I said. In the edge of my vision Rafferty moved the other chair into an unobtrusive corner and sat down, settling himself for the long haul. “It’s me. Toby.”
Nothing; not a twitch of his eyelids, not a movement of his lips. The machines beeped away steadily, no change.
“You’re in hospital. You had a brain hemorrhage.”
Nothing. I couldn’t feel him there. “You’re going to be fine,” I said, ludicrously.
“I’ll come back soon,” the nurse said gently, to all three of us, hooking the chart onto the end of the bed. “If you need me before that, you can push this button. OK?”
“OK,” I said. “Thanks.” And she was gone, almost soundless on the rubbery floor, the open door letting in a faint trail of sobbing for a moment before closing behind her with a soft whoosh.
Hugo would hate this place, everything about it. Maybe he was deliberately staying in a coma so he wouldn’t have to deal with it, I wouldn’t blame him— “Hugo,” I said. “The sooner you wake up, the sooner you can go home. OK?”
For a moment I thought his mouth tensed as if he was trying to say something, around the tube, but then it was gone and I couldn’t be sure it hadn’t been my imagination.
There were a hundred things I wanted to tell him, ask him. Maybe one of them would reach him, deep amid the darkness and the wingbeats and the swags of clinging cobwebs. I had been there too, not so long ago; if anyone could find the way through that shifting labyrinth to Hugo and lead him back, surely it would be me.
But there was Rafferty, an angular shadow filling up my peripheral vision, turning