The smell was always the same. Disinfectant, the hot plastic of the machines, and underneath all of it — impossible to cover, impossible to forget — that faint sweetish thread Simon had learned to recognize two years earlier, with his father, and that he now knew by heart the way you know a song you never want to hear again.
The monitor had stopped making noise twelve minutes ago. He knew because he'd checked the clock, because he didn't know what else to do with his eyes, with his hands, with that body that felt like his own only out of habit. The flat line was still there, on the small screen no one had bothered to turn off. No one except the nurse, who had finally pressed a button and said something — I'm sorry, take all the time you need — in the voice of someone who has said it a hundred other times that week and already knows that no words really help at all.
Simon hadn't cried. Not there, not in front of her. He had only looked at his mother — smaller than he remembered her, smaller every week, as if the illness were taking away even the space she occupied in the world, not just her time — and he had thought, with a clarity that disgusted him, that it was finally over. Over, the night shifts at the hospital after eight hours at the office. Over, the forms, the signatures, the calls to the insurance company that kept him on hold for forty minutes with a cheerful little tune that made him want to smash the phone against the wall. Over, everything.
It wasn't relief. Not exactly. It was just that there was nothing left inside him that could react any other way.
His father had passed two years earlier. A different tumor, a different body, the exact same room — not that same room, but an identical one, on the same floor, with the same view of a parking lot full of the cars of people who'd come to visit someone who, unlike him, still had someone coming to visit them. Simon had cared for his father alone for eight months. He had learned to change the IV drips, to turn a body that could no longer turn itself, to pretend not to smell it when the smell had become stronger than the body itself. He had asked for help, back then. He had called, written, knocked on doors that closed one after another with excuses that got more and more elaborate — work, family, you know how it is, I'll call you — until he stopped asking, because asking and getting nothing hurts more than never asking at all.
And now, again. His mother. Alone. Again.
He left the room without looking back. Not because he was strong. Because if he'd stopped for one more second, he might never have been able to move again, and there were still papers to sign, a body to hand over to someone else, a hallway to cross that seemed like it would never end, with that white light overhead buzzing faintly, a hum that was working its way into his skull like a nail.
It was at the end of that hallway that he saw her.
Giulia was leaning against the wall near the exit, arms crossed, coat still on as if she'd only stopped by for a moment, as if she had somewhere else to be. They hadn't been together in four months. They hadn't ended badly — they'd ended tired, which to Simon seemed even worse, because at least anger gives you something to hold onto, while exhaustion leaves nothing, just a person-shaped hole where someone used to be.
"How are you," she said. It wasn't really a question. It was the kind of thing you say because it needs to be said, not because you actually want an answer.
Simon stopped a yard from her. He still had the image of the flat monitor in his eyes, and for a second he seriously thought about telling her everything, throwing every single hour of the last two years at her — his father, his mother, the nights at the hospital, the fact that no one, no one, had ever once called to ask how the hell he was holding up — but instead he only said:
"She died a quarter of an hour ago."
Giulia nodded, and for an instant — just an instant — Simon thought that maybe, maybe this time, someone would actually come closer to him. Instead she said:
"I'm so sorry, Simon. Really." A pause. Then, in the same tone, as if it were the natural continuation of the sentence: "Listen, I know this isn't the time, but I need the house keys. The old ones — I never gave them back. My lawyer says it's better to settle the lease thing this week."
The keys.
His mother had been dead for fifteen minutes and the first thing — the first thing — anyone asked him for was a set of keys to an apartment they hadn't even shared in months.
Simon laughed. A dry, joyless rattle that came out of his throat before he could even decide to let it. "The keys," he repeated, as if saying the word twice might make it mean something different. "Right. Sure. Let me check if I still have them on me, between the tissue they gave me on the ward and the death certificate form."
"Simon—"
"No, it's fine," he said, and felt his voice crack somewhere in the middle of the sentence, but he didn't stop. "I'll bring them to you. Really. Tomorrow, the day after, whenever the hell you want. Right now, though, if you don't mind, I have to go back inside and sign the papers to have my mother's body taken away, so if we could maybe postpone this absolutely fascinating conversation—"
"You always do this," she said, and there was something in her voice that sounded almost hurt, as if he were the one being unfair in that moment. "You shut down. Every time."
Simon didn't answer. Not because he had nothing to say — he had more than enough — but because he knew that whatever came out of his mouth right now would come out wrong, twisted, ugly, and he didn't want to be the guy screaming in a hospital hallway while two nurses walked by with a gurney. He took a step back. Then another. And he left, leaving her there, with her unasked-for keys and her sorry face that hadn't done him any good at all.
The stairs were just ahead, past the waiting room. Simon took them because he didn't have the patience to wait for the elevator, didn't have the patience for anything, right then — every second he stood still was one more second to think, and thinking was the one thing he didn't want to do.
It was on the first landing that his phone buzzed.
He ignored it for the first two rings. On the third, he pulled it out only to turn it off, and instead found himself reading the notification that had appeared on the lock screen.
Marco (Office): Simon, I know you've had a family issue but you can't keep skipping shifts like this. If you don't show up tomorrow morning at 8 sharp we need to have a serious talk about your contract. This isn't a threat, it's just how things are. Sorry about the situation but the company needs people who show up.
Simon stopped halfway down the stairs.
He reread the message. Then reread it again, as if on the third try the words might rearrange themselves into some kind of order that made sense, one where the phrase "sorry about the situation" wasn't followed, in the very same line, by a threat of termination.
"Right, of course," he said out loud, to himself, in the empty stairwell. His voice bounced off the tiled walls and came back to him colder than he'd sent it out. "Of course. Obviously. Why wouldn't it be."
He thought back over all of it in that moment, all at once, as if someone had dumped a box full of glass shards over his head and now he had to walk across it barefoot. His father, dead alone despite Simon being there every single night. His mother, dead fifteen minutes ago, with him as the only human being present in the room. The friends he had called — not one, not two, no one — when he needed someone to bring him a coffee at three in the morning in a hospital hallway, and who had instead sent him messages full of little hearts and "let me know if you need anything" from people who knew perfectly well he would never ask for anything, because asking, by now, disgusted him just as much as getting nothing in return. Giulia, who wanted her keys. His boss, who wanted a living body behind a desk by eight the next morning, no matter how many dead bodies Simon had had to bury that week.
"Fuck it," he said, still alone, still in the stairwell, and this time the word came out with a force that hurt his throat. "Fuck all of them. Seriously. All of them."
He went down the last flight almost running, not because he was in a hurry to get anywhere — there was nowhere he actually wanted to go — but because he needed to burn the energy off somewhere before it exploded out of his chest. He reached the hospital's main entrance, the big glass one, with the cold metal handles that smelled of disinfectant too.
Outside it was dark. Of course it was dark — it was almost ten at night, he'd spent the entire afternoon and part of the previous night in that room, had lost all sense of time hours ago.
He put his hand on the handle. And in that moment, for the first time since he'd walked out of his mother's room, he stopped completely. Not to think about anything in particular — there was nothing specific left to think about, he'd already gone through every single person who had let him down in the last twenty-four hours and had nothing left to analyze. He just stopped because his body, quite simply, had nothing left to give.
He closed his eyes.
He didn't pray. He hadn't believed in anything for years, and he certainly wasn't going to start that night, with the smell of the hospital still on his clothes and the keys to an apartment that wasn't his anymore still in his pocket. He didn't ask for strength, didn't ask for justice, didn't even ask for things to get better, because he already knew asking was worth shit — they'd proven that to him every possible way in the last forty-eight hours.
He asked for only one thing. The only thing that, in that moment, seemed truly worth wanting without feeling ridiculous about it.
I just want to disappear from this world. From all of it. That's it.
He pushed the door with more force than it needed, eyes still closed, and let it slam shut behind him with a sharp crack that echoed through the silence of the evening.
When he opened them again, there was sun.
Simon stood still for a second. Two. Three.
He said nothing, at first. He couldn't even form a complete thought — there was only a huge white noise in his head, like when you stare at a light that's too bright and your brain refuses for a moment to process what your eyes are sending it. He could still feel the tears on his cheeks, warm, not yet dry, and at the same time he could feel — what? What the hell was he feeling?
His legs shook. Not from fear. Or maybe a little from fear, but mostly from something that had no precise name, something halfway between disbelief and that hysterical laugh you let out when your body no longer knows how else to react to information too big to process all at once.
And in fact he laughed. A dry, broken laugh, almost a sob dressed up as something else, that came out of his throat while the tears — the real ones, the ones for his mother, for his father, for two years of life spent giving everything to people who had given him nothing back — were still there, warm on his face, mixed with that laugh that he himself couldn't tell was closer to crying or to pure madness.
"Seriously?" he said, out loud, to no one, to the sun that shouldn't be there, to the world that had just changed under his feet without asking permission. "What the fuck is this supposed to mean?"