He had never been so frightened, he had never known that kind of pain. And when it was over, when the fever and the delirium had left him for good, it was as if part of his identity had vanished, too. As if half his life had never happened.
He was told that, after his relapse, he had not been expected to recover. “But you put up such a fight!” said the doctor, pumping his fist. Dr. Hassan was unmistakably proud of him, though Cole didn’t see how a sick person deserved credit for getting better. Dr. Hassan and other members of the hospital staff were gathered around Cole’s bed. Except for Dr. Hassan, they were all in green. They all beamed down at him, they were all proud, and after Dr. Hassan spoke, everyone clapped and the nurse Cole had bitten cuffed his cheek playfully with her bandaged hand.
Cole hadn’t been able to look any of them in the face. He hadn’t been able to say anything, either. He would never have said what he was thinking, and he was angry with Dr. Hassan, he was angry with all of them. How could they not know how he felt?
Eden knew. “Sometimes when things turn out this way, survival can feel like betrayal.”
She told him that his parents were together now, they were together in heaven, from where they were able at all times to look down and see him. He knew the story, knew that this was all it was, a story: his parents themselves had told him so. He knew that they were not able to see him, and that he would never see them again. This was what their being dead meant. And yet his mind could not take it in, that they had been here on earth—never a time in his life when they had not been here—but now they were nowhere. They had become nothing.
But you can’t be angry at nothing, can you? And he was most definitely angry at them.
None of it had had to happen, he believed. His parents had not had to die. He had not had to get sick himself. He refused to accept that nothing could have been done. His parents had been stupid, careless. His father was right: they had blown it. The whole world had blown it. He remembered all those warning articles he’d read. Why hadn’t they been prepared? Someone was responsible. Someone had to be to blame. And indeed, now that the virus had passed, this was what everyone was saying.
“Now is not the time for accusations and finger pointing. We would do better to join hands and look not back but ahead. Let us take up the vast work before us, let us pull together, as one nation, bound in sorrow by this terrible tragedy but full of hope for our future.”
When the president appeared for the first time after her illness, thin, hollow-eyed, and still so frail that she had to support herself on two canes, even among those who hadn’t voted for her—even among those who hated her—there was an outpouring of emotion. America’s mother had been brought to the brink of death, but she had survived. And America would survive, too.
In memory, it was as if he’d never left Chicago. The move to Little Leap and the house he lived in briefly there and the school he so briefly attended—all this he remembered hardly at all. Ironically, some of his most distinct memories turned out to be false. His father had brought home a new dog, a stray he’d almost hit with his car. A feisty young sheepdog that chased a cat under the porch of the house across the street and got into a fight with another dog, an old Labrador.
Zeppo, he’d named the new dog.
Only there was no Zeppo.
Dr. Hassan promised that, in time, his mind would return to normal. “Maybe you won’t be able to remember everything you want to remember when you want to remember it, but for all practical purposes your memory should function just fine.”
No one said anything, though, about what recovering certain memories might do to him.
For the first time in his life, he had migraines. He had ringing in his ears. He had constant nightmares and episodes of sleepwalking.
Occasionally, when he spoke to someone, the person would look at him blankly. Rather than what Cole had intended to (and heard himself) say, out came gibberish.