In the middle of the night, a grim rattle radiates from Pinky’s chest. He rolls onto all fours on the hard ceramic tile and yowls at the knives in his knees. His joints scream at him—his poor joints, where everything comes together, where everything falls apart. He braces his hands on the toilet and pushes himself to standing over the course of several minutes. It is all too much. He slips on his sneakers and heads to Brooklyn B.’s door, where the flowery wreath winks at him with judgment. He tells himself to knock. One fist, one small motion, that’s it. That’s all it is. But that’s not all it is. He doesn’t deserve her help. Not when he refused to help her with her stupid sticky window, or whatever it was. Coop has not given enough to take. How hard would it have been, to help when she asked? What would it have cost him? And would it be so bad?
But what does she know about dactyls? What could she possibly do? He rips a fabric flower petal from her wreath and tosses it to the floor. Forget it. He marches down the interminable hallway, fueled by fury. At the empty nurses’ station, he commandeers an electric wheelchair, one of the old ones that doesn’t hold a charge anymore. He pushes it back to his room. He swaddles Pinky in towels and sweaters, placing her on its seat. He pushes her to the front entrance, which is out of order, of course. The automatic door panels won’t slide open. He bashes his fist against the broken motion sensor, shouting, ramming the wheelchair into the glass. It takes all of him. The door finally jerks open with a rush of cool air, and his eyes water. It is not crying. It is something else. He rolls Pinky across the cracked parking lot, through the tall weeds. They are under the stars, though he can’t see them. He knows they are there. Stars that are billions of years apart from each other, yet somehow right next door.
He is swallowed up by the bigness of the night. It is so vast he might spin away into the void. His hearing sharpens: crickets and cicadas and the raspy croak from Pinky’s throat, the squeal of rusty wheels, his own effortful breath. There are too many noises at odds with each other. Scraping, grating, clashing. Then falling slowly towards unison, where, for one crystalline moment, they are in perfect rhythm with each other before they dissolve again into chaos. It goes on and on like this: unison, chaos, unison, chaos, until Coop can hear what is truly happening—that there is no difference between the sounds, there has never been a difference, they are all one and the same. His heart has changed shape since he wrapped it around Pinky, and it pulses now with a new beat: Alone together. Together alone. He rolls onward. He does not know where they are headed. He does not know how much time they have. He only knows they must break free.