The ceiling had forty-seven cracks.
He had counted them in the first week, when his hands still worked and the pain was still the kind that permitted distraction. He had counted them again in the second week to confirm. Forty-seven. A prime number. He had filed this alongside other things that were true and useless.
That was eighteen months ago.
The first month had been the best month, which was not saying much but was saying something. His hands had worked. Not well — the necrosis had already claimed his feet and was moving upward with the patience of something that had nowhere to be — but his fingers had closed around things. He had held books. He had typed, slowly, with two fingers on a tablet propped against his knees. He had written his mother a message that said the doctors say the progression rate is atypical and she had written back I know, I talked to them and that had been most of what they said to each other in those weeks because neither of them had language for the rest of it.
By the end of the first month his hands had started going dark at the fingertips.
By the middle of the second month he could not close his right hand into a fist. By the end of it the tablet had been removed because there was no longer a point in having it there.
He had not complained about the tablet being removed. He had noted its absence and adjusted.
The smell had arrived so gradually that he had not noticed it becoming the dominant fact of his environment until the day a nurse held her breath.
She was careful — professional, the kind who remembered which side he preferred and never asked about his family. She had stood at the foot of his bed adjusting his chart and held her breath for approximately four seconds and then exhaled very slowly through her mouth, and he had watched this happen and filed it without reacting.
He did not blame her.
By that point he had been smelling it himself for weeks. Not dramatically — not the smell of horror stories, not something that announced itself. Something quiet and biological and persistent, the smell of tissue that was no longer maintaining itself. It had moved into the room the way damp moved into a wall — gradually, completely, until it was simply the character of the place.
The bandages helped contain it. The dressings that took two nurses to change and that he had learned to make no sound during, because making sound changed nothing and cost something he no longer had to spare. Under the bandages: both arms from the wrists up, his torso in sections, his neck on the left side, the spreading patch below his left ear that the oncologist had described with the careful neutrality of someone reading from a script.
The oncologist had a script now. Kael had noticed this around month four. The specific sentences had stopped varying. He had memorized them.
In the second July the signals to his arms stopped.
Not all at once. Over the course of a week, his nervous system made what appeared to be a cost-benefit assessment and decided that maintaining the signals was no longer returning value. His legs had been gone since spring. His arms followed in summer. He had lain in the center of himself like something housed in a container that had stopped answering, and he had looked at the ceiling, and he had counted the forty-seven cracks, and he had recited capitals: Reykjavik, Ulaanbaatar, Yamoussoukro, Naypyidaw. He had the order of bones in the hand memorized. The hand that could no longer move. He had run the bones anyway because they were his and no one was going to take the memorized version from him.
His throat had gone in August.
Not completely — he could still swallow, which was how he was still alive, but the necrosis had reached the musculature involved in speech and what came out when he tried to form words was a wet, compressed sound that did not resemble language. He had evaluated the effort required to produce this sound against the outcome it produced and concluded that the ratio was wrong. He had stopped trying to speak.
The nurses talked to him anyway. He appreciated this, in the way he appreciated things that cost other people something and were offered regardless.
His left eye had gone in October.
Not sight — infection. Something opportunistic that had moved into the compromised tissue around the orbit and established itself there, and the eye itself was still present but had stopped being useful in any conventional sense, the vision in it reduced to a smear of light and color that corresponded only loosely to what was actually in front of him.
His right eye still worked.
This was what remained: one functioning eye. The capacity to swallow. The ability to think, which the necrosis had not touched, which he found either fortunate or ironic depending on how he looked at it, and he generally looked at it as fortunate because the alternative framing was not useful.
He tracked the ceiling with his right eye. Forty-seven cracks. Crack number seven, primary, with lateral extension — he had argued with himself in that first spring about whether the branching constituted one crack or two and had ruled it one, with an annotation. He was strict about methodology.
His mother had not visited in nine months.
He had worked out the reason over the course of several nights, running it through the same flat analysis he applied to everything, and the reason was not complicated. She had three children. He was the oldest. His sister was fourteen and his brother was three years old, and their mother was working and managing both of them and paying the hospital bills, and at some point the hospital bills and the management of two children and the maintenance of her own ability to function had collectively exceeded the bandwidth available for sitting in a room that smelled like what this room smelled like and looking at what he looked like now.
He did not consider this monstrous. He considered it arithmetic.
What he had thought about, in the longer immobile nights, was the hospital bills. She was still paying them. He had no way to tell her to stop — no functioning hands, no voice — but if he could have communicated one thing it would have been this: the money was not doing what money was supposed to do. It was not producing an outcome. It was maintaining a condition, and the condition was not improving and had not improved and was not going to improve, and the money she was spending on it was money that his three-year-old brother would eventually need for something that might actually help.
He could not tell her this. He could look at the ceiling.
He looked at the ceiling.
The IV stand breathed.
The pain in his right arm was a seven. It had been a seven since approximately eleven PM — consistent along the same path, shoulder to wrapped fingers, the same path it always ran. He did not adjust his position because there was no position available to him, and a seven that was stable was preferable to a six that was moving.
He had memorized the staff rotation. He knew who checked him at three AM and who checked him at four, knew the sound of the meal cart versus the medication cart, knew the exact degree to which the corridor light shifted at five AM when the exterior sensors registered dawn.
He looked at the forty-seven cracks with his one working eye.
He thought, as he sometimes thought in the long immobile hours, that there were two ways a person could look at what was happening to him. The first was that his body was being taken from him, piece by piece, in the specific order the necrosis had decided upon — feet first, then legs, then arms, then voice, then the left eye, and eventually, in whatever order it chose, the rest. The second was that his body had been taking a very long time to finish the job and had not managed it yet.
He had always found the second framing more accurate.
He was still here. One eye. No movement. No voice. Still here, looking at forty-seven cracks in a ceiling that had no opinion about whether he continued.
He did not know what he expected to happen next. He had stopped expecting things around month six. Expectation was a form of energy expenditure and his energy was allocated elsewhere.
At some point — he did not track the exact time, he had stopped tracking time after midnight because tracking it made the nights longer — his eye closed.
He had not decided to close it. It simply closed, the way things sometimes ended without announcement, without ceremony, without registering as significant until it was already finished.
The ceiling disappeared.
The IV stand stopped.
The smell — which had been the constant of eighteen months, the one thing that had attended every waking moment of this room without interruption — faded. The way a sound faded when you moved away from it. And then it was gone, and what replaced it was a dark that was not the dark of a room at night but the dark of nothing in particular, and then even the dark went, and Kael Maren, who was seventeen years old, who had not moved in seven months, who had not spoken in five, who had watched the world through one eye for three, who had memorized forty-seven ceiling cracks because there was nothing else left to memorize —
stopped.
The grass was grey-green.
He registered this before anything else. Then he registered that he had registered it — that his eyes were open, plural, both of them, and the left one was working, and the sky above him was not a hospital ceiling, and the thing he could feel against his face was wind.
He lay in the grey-green grass and looked at the sky and did not move.