Page 15 of Starrily (Perks of Being #2)

Chapter 15

T urning immaterial had really put a damper on the evening.

On the whole of Simon’s life. His wishful thinking hadn’t worked—hell; the fading was getting worse. His entire arm. And now Callie had seen it, too, and he wasn’t sure if the constricting feeling in his chest came from the anxiety about his condition or from the shock of her witnessing it.

Maybe both.

“What do you mean, you’re turning into a ghost?” She threw her hands in the air. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

Simon rubbed his left arm but felt no relief at the touch. He couldn’t deny it—a minute ago, it had been gone. Well, he saw it, but he could also pass through it. And he could pass it through Callie.

He shrugged. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.” What if she didn’t believe him? What if she thought he was crazy?

“No, it doesn’t! Being a ghost makes zero sense!”

“I didn’t say I was a ghost yet—”

“This is not the time to argue semantics.”

“I’m not arguing.” He reached out his hands to calm her down. “I’m only trying to find an explanation.”

“I swear if this is a prank …”

“How could I make my arm disappear as a prank?”

“I don’t know. I …” She turned away, put a hand to her forehead, then turned back. Tears glistened in her eyes, and it hit him—she wasn’t angry at some supposed prank. She was afraid. Scared for him . “When something unexplainable happens, people like to jump to conclusions that involve the supernatural,” she said.

“True.”

“There has to be a better explanation. Why would turning into a ghost be the best one?”

“Well.” He sat back down on the blanket, careful of his arm, as if it had been hurt. He extended the other one in an invitation, and Callie kneeled next to him. “Remember my car crash? When I’d been badly hurt?”

She nodded.

“I was in a coma for days due to my brain injuries. From what they told me, I even had no brain function for a bit.”

“That’s awful. You’ve made a remarkable recovery.”

He had. The doctors called it miraculous: one day, he was practically a vegetable, and a week later, all that was left to remind him of the injuries were the surface-level scratches and stitches on his head.

“That’s not all, though. When I was there, in the hospital, I died. Maybe for seconds, maybe for minutes, but I did.”

“You mean, they had to revive you?”

“Not exactly.” How could he explain the strangeness of that time? He couldn’t tell her about Raleigh. That was too much to pile onto her, and now wasn’t the time. Maybe it would never be.

“So what happened?” Callie asked.

“I think I died, and then I was brought back to life. Not zapped with a defibrillator by the doctors, but actually brought back by some other force.”

Callie closed her eyes as she shook her head. “Simon … I understand it must’ve been a traumatic time for you, and you probably don’t remember most of it. People in conditions like yours can have vivid dreams. Maybe you dreamed something strange was happening, that you floated above your body or saw a tunnel with light in the end—”

“No. I know something strange happened.”

“Then how come nobody else does? You’re an important person. If you had died, or even nearly died, surely it would’ve been in the news.”

“Everett helped keep it under wraps. He didn’t want more chaos or the company’s stock to drop.”

Callie snorted. “Sure, can’t have that.”

“Point is, something happened, and this is the result. I think whatever force resurrected me is taking it back. It’s being reversed.”

“That’s why you believe you’re turning into a ghost?”

“What else could it be?”

“Anything. Literally anything else. A strange medical condition.”

“That no one’s ever had before?”

“There’s a first for everything.”

He wished she was right. A medical condition sounded much less frightening than what he’d conjured up. And if it could be fixed—well, he had enough money for treatment. It was a whole lot better than becoming a ghost.

And yet, in his heart, he felt it wouldn’t be that simple.

“You told me once that you try to make the most out of your life,” she said, somber.

He shrugged. “I’d already been close to death. Or dead, even. There’s no point in not enjoying it. Only now …” He looked at his hands, resting in his lap. “It seems death wants me back.”

“Don’t say that.” She stood and bit her nail. “That’s not happening. Death isn’t a person or a force, and it doesn’t direct anything. Whatever’s happening to you, we’ll fix it.”

“How?”

“I’ll figure it out.” She paced around for a bit. “Tomorrow. I need to sleep this through to get some ideas.” She turned and walked toward the observatory.

Simon stayed on the blanket for a few minutes more, staring into the empty night. Don’t be all glum. Callie was the smartest person he knew, and the most stubborn. If she said she’d find a way to fix his condition, he believed her.

We’ll fix it , he kept repeating to himself. No reason to despair. It was just a little glitch in his body. We’ll fix it . This was no tragedy.

In fact, the only tragedy of this night was that the bed in the living quarters would go unshared.

By the time they returned home, Callie had a plan of action. Simon glanced at it while she was typing it on her laptop and saw a bunch of bullet point lists and underlined sentences—not too different from the project on her work computer. She was taking this seriously.

And he couldn’t be more grateful because, currently, she was his only hope. Unless someone decided to take mercy on him and make his condition disappear; but Simon believed he’d tempted fate too many times in the past few years to get off this easily.

In San Francisco, they went straight to QueLabs. Callie led him to a part of the building he’d never been to before and introduced him to a physiologist colleague of hers, Nigel.

“You’ve got to give me more than ‘his arm hurts,’” Nigel said, readjusting his glasses as he looked from Callie to Simon. “What kind of pain? How severe on the one to ten scale? Is this the first time you’ve had this type of pain?”

“Just do the check-ups, please,” Callie said.

“Do the check-ups,” Nigel muttered. “This is a complicated matter, you know? Nobody tells you to just look at some stars.”

But eventually, Callie pleaded Nigel into submitting Simon to every possible exam imaginable. Blood tests, urine tests, blood pressure, sugar levels, lung capacity … ultimately concluding with a run on a treadmill, while being hooked up to several monitors.

“All right, that’s enough.” Nigel gestured for Simon to stop.

Simon leaned on the treadmill handles. “I fail to see what having enough stamina to run for fifteen minutes has to do with my arm,” he said to Callie, quietly, so Nigel wouldn’t hear.

“We don’t know anything about your condition, therefore we must try everything,” she said. “Whatever is amiss in your body, we’ll find it.”

“Admit it.” He winked at her. “You just wanted to see me sweat.”

She gently slapped his shoulder and turned to Nigel. “Anything?”

Nigel looked at his list of results. “All normal. He’s got so much healthy cholesterol that it might actually look like he’s got too much of it if you took the measures separately …” he looked at Simon. “Just so you know, in case you get measurements taken elsewhere. And apparently, you have the stamina and lung capacity of a marathon runner.”

“Thank you, Nigel.” Simon smiled at the physiologist.

“The pain in your arm could’ve been something random. Happens to all of us.”

“All right.” Callie worried her nails. “The lab is closed for today, but tomorrow, we’ll take a CAT scan and a PET scan.”

“You’ve got that here, too?”

“We have everything you need,” she said. “And we’ll use that everything until we find something.”

***

Three days later, Callie was still where she’d started. Not a single scan or examination revealed anything unusual about Simon. He took it all with his typical positivity; one more successful exam meant one less cause for concern, right?

She wished she could feel the same.

She’d spent all her hours off work reading research that could give her answers and writing stuff down, and her working hours thinking about what else she could do. She’d been so preoccupied with Simon that until her fourth day back at work, she hadn’t even started processing the data from the observatory. At that point, she was so tired of not getting anywhere regarding Simon’s condition that she simply had to focus on something else, even if only for a few hours.

Her galaxies awaited. She downloaded the packets of data and opened them with her software. Sort the graphs of blackbody radiation …

Blackbody.

She picked up her phone and made a call. “Simon, you have to get here right away.”

“With that kind of urgency, I can only assume you found a solution,” Simon said as he met her in the lobby. Callie headed down the hallway, and he fell into step with her. “So, tell me, Phoenix. How are you going to fix me?”

She wished he didn’t sound so cheerful. Or maybe that was a good thing. Somebody had to be the optimist. “I didn’t find a solution yet. But I have an idea.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Blackbody radiation.”

Simon furrowed his eyebrows. “Should I be worried?”

“Not that kind of radiation. Blackbodies are objects that absorb all light. Like stars, although they’re not perfect blackbodies. They have high temperature, which is why you can see them, but if they had a much lower temperature, say that of a human body, they’d be in the infrared spectrum. Invisible to the human eye.”

“Never thought I’d hear a pick-up line like this.”

“Huh?”

He paused, leaned on the wall, and ran his hand through his hair. “Hey baby, are you a star at human body temperature, because I sure can’t see you?”

Callie put her hands on her hips. “I’m trying to tell you something!”

He pushed himself off the wall. “I know. You’re saying I could become invisible because I’m … stretching the light in weird ways?”

When her theory was thrown back at her, it did sound foolish. But it was the only thing she had. “Of course, blackbodies are inorganic, and a person can’t just become one, but … perhaps you’ve mutated, somehow.”

“I was still able to see the disappearing part of my body, though.”

“Maybe because it’s your body?” she tried.

“Mutant, huh?” He smiled. “Someone has been reading the X-Men comics too much.”

“Please.”

“So my superpower is invisibility?”

“It’s not a superpower.” She stopped and stared him down—or up, as their heights went. “It’s a medical condition to be fixed.”

“You know, that’s what some people said about the X-Men, too—”

“Simon!”

“All right, all right.” He raised his hands. “Fix me, doctor.”

She led him to another lab and opened the door into a small room—empty, with white walls and floor and a single window looking out into the hallway. “We use this for various experiments. It has an infrared and ultraviolet camera installed. If your arm is distorting the light, the camera will catch it.”

“But we’ll have to wait until my arm, or any other body part, actually does it.”

“Yes. You’ll have to remain here until it happens.”

“Here—” he looked into the room and back at her. “You mean to keep me in this little box?”

“If it’s true and a strange mutation has occurred, this could be an incredible breakthrough for scientific research—”

“I’m not one of your science experiments!” He let out a frustrated sigh.

What the hell was she saying? A breakthrough? “No, of course you’re not.” She went to him and cupped his face. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to help. I don’t know what else to do. There’s nothing left I can think of.”

He covered her hand with his. “I know. I … excluding the car crash, I’ve never been ill. I’ve just realized I hate hospitals. Or, in this case, the labs.”

“You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

Simon glanced at the room. “I’ll do it,” he said. “But at least tell me I can keep my phone.”

Callie might have been emboldened by her idea, but there was nothing joyous or gratifying in watching Simon waste away his hours in the tiny white room. She didn’t want to go in there and risk disturbing the readings—the experiment had to be done properly and be perfectly controlled.

And she hated it. Simon had a bit of entertainment from his phone and was regularly delivered food, so he wasn’t being driven mad in a white room, but it still felt wrong—an antithesis to everything he was. Contained in his little sardine can when he should be free to enjoy life.

She took breaks to check up on him, and every day, as she finished work, she came down to talk to him.

“There she is, my lovely jailer,” he said on the third day as she entered the lab. He rose from the mattress and walked to the window. He spread his fingers on the glass. “Hey. Let’s pretend I caught a deadly virus, and you’re here to cure me.”

“That’s not—don’t even say that.”

“It’s gonna be fine. They always heal them in the movies.”

She let out a half-desperate laugh and matched her fingers to his, separated only by an inch of glass.

“I believe in you, Phoenix,” he said. “Would you like to hear a poem I’ve been composing? Mind you, it’s the first one I’ve ever written, and I don’t think I have any talent with poetry, but three days in a white room makes a man do strange th—” His hand lowered from the glass as he staggered.

“Simon?” She pressed her nose to the glass to see what was happening.

“My foot.” He hobbled toward the center of the room. As he came fully into view, his left foot was gone—invisible—from ankle downwards. Simon carefully sat and lowered the leg until only the visible part was seen above the white linoleum floor.

Callie gasped and jumped back.

“The camera’s got it, right?” Simon yelled.

“Yup. Yes, we have it!” She ran to the control room, as Simon added—probably to himself—“Whoa, that’s a tricky balancing act.”

Camera feed. Callie looked at it hungrily, inspecting Simon’s signature. It was the usual mix of red and yellow, as expected from seeing body heat on an infrared camera.

“Is it still happening?” she yelled into the hallway.

“Yes!”

She looked at the camera again. No difference in his foot. No shifting of light. She dragged herself back to the window.

“Now it’s gone.” Simon gingerly tested the foot first, then stepped on it. “And?”

“No change.”

“Maybe you missed it.”

“It’s a live feed. I would’ve seen it.”

“Then what?”

“Nothing.” She banged her forehead on the glass. “I’m stupid. Why did I think this was the solution? You’re not a star—”

“Thanks for crushing my dreams.”

“—and you’re not a mutant.”

“Sadly,” Simon said with a tilt of his mouth. “It’s all right, Phoenix.”

But it wasn’t. His condition still existed—and from the data, it was getting more frequent. Worse.

“Does that mean I can get out of here?”

She nodded against the glass, and Simon exited the room.

“Hey,” he said, turning her face to him. “You tried. I couldn’t ask for more.”

“You should go home and take care of yourself.” Even she was exhausted—she couldn’t imagine how he felt.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then.” He winked at her as he walked toward the door. “Let’s get back to normal.”

His words haunted her into the evening and chased her into a restless sleep. She twisted and turned in her bed, pulling the sheets down, then up, then back down again.

Back to normal. She’d love that more than anything—but it wasn’t possible. Deep within, she knew it. There was something wrong with Simon, and it wasn’t going away.

And she was all out of ideas. At least those that could be supported and proven by science.

I’m turning into a ghost.

Impossible. There were no ghosts. Unless …

There were some facts she couldn’t deny. All existing energy had to go somewhere. It could transform into another kind of energy but never disappear. Humans were energy. Maybe there was something left after death—another type of energy that neither humans nor infrared cameras could perceive. Something outside the scope of known science.

Callie didn’t need Theia to wake her up that morning; she was up bright and early and headed to the kitchen, where she made her tea and stared into a spot on the wall as she slowly sipped it.

She couldn’t help Simon. She knew nothing of ghosts and the paranormal. No, that wasn’t true. She knew something. But she’d chosen to forget as much of it as possible a long time ago. One half of her heart begged her not to do it—to not open all those old wounds, to not let the pain back in. The other half … it knew that might be Simon’s last chance if what he’d assumed was true. If he had died once and was brought back—and now being taken away again.

Away from her.

Decide, Calliope , his voice echoed in her mind. Decide .

She arrived at work first and managed to act almost normal. She put her bag on the desk, got another cup of tea, checked her email—all to maintain her steady routine. But her fingers shook as they hovered over the keyboard, and her stomach was tied into knots.

“Good morning,” Simon greeted as he entered the office. He looked crisp and clean like he hadn’t spent the past three days as a lab rat. “What’s on the schedule today?”

She stood and wrung her hands. Out with it —there was no point in delaying. “We need to go visit my family.”

Simon lifted an eyebrow. “Why?”

She took a deep breath. “Because they’re the ones who speak with ghosts.”