TWO YEARS AGO
Neo falls asleep teaching me about sarcasm. He explains the use of irony in literature is often to show that surface appearance can directly oppose actual meaning. Sarcasm is a way of using irony to hurt my feelings. I’m paraphrasing, but by the second hour of me still being unable to pick out a sarcastic remark, Neo gives up and goes to bed.
I asked if it was ironic that we call fallen angels devils. He said he’d tell me once he went to hell.
Nightmares sometimes visit him in the early stages of the night, so I remain, an afterthought in my chair across the room. Unwanted guests in Neo’s mind make him squirm, the sheets rustling. He moves like he’s being restrained, his body tied down by an invisible weight. Every time that happens, I bring my chair to his bedside and hold his hand. A tether to something real, even in sleep, calms his breathing.
I may not know much about irony, but I do know a lot about sick people. I know when they need more care than they let on. Ever since the day Neo cried on his bathroom floor in my arms, I haven’t let that slip my mind.
Once the first hour of his sleep has passed, I leave Neo to better dreams.
My people-watching hulls have been neglected lately. However, fate has other plans. When the elevator doors open, the last thing I expect to walk in on is a wild girl mercilessly kicking a vending machine.
“Urgh!” A bright, fuzzy sock leading to a dirty white sneaker slams against the glass. The girl huffs from the effort, hospital gown swaying around her bare legs. Her fists clench at her sides, clutching some of the material. She stares down the machine like she could kill it.
I really need to pay attention to what floor I get off on more often. Rectifying my mistake isn’t an option when the elevator doors shut behind me.
Patient kicker snaps her neck in my direction at the sound. Her hair swings with her movements, red, tinted like fire. She stares like she could kill me.
I blink, my wish to exist less, drifting into the territory of wishing I didn’t exist at all.
“You want my picture?” she bites.
“Uh- I- I don’t have a camera.”
“What happened to you, anyway?” She looks me up and down, frowning. “You get hit by a bus or something?”
“Uh-”
“Urgh!” she sounds, interrupting me. Another swift kick is delivered to the machine.
“You have to push the button longer and reach your hand into the compartment,” I tell her.
A bit of nostalgia pricks my curiosity, disturbing its slumber.
Putting my hands up in surrender, I step forward, press the button beneath the keypad, and reach my arm into the mouth. The display beeps, the inside clicks, and two bars thump to the bottom. I take them out and offer both the way you would a dinner tray.
“They all do that?” the girl asks, far calmer now that there’s food in her hands.
“Just this one.”
Amusement crawls to her face as she takes my offering. Her features come to light, chapped lips curving, stretching fresh cuts on her cheek.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Nothing.” Her fingers trail the glass scuffed from her kicks like an apology. “Just that broken things seem to like you.”
Broken things. How endeared she seems by those two words, just as Neo is.
“Are you alone?” I ask.
“My mom’s asleep in the room,” she says, sinking to the ground beside the vending machine, enemy turned friend. “Here.” She holds out one of her bars. “Sit with me.”
Honestly, a bit afraid to refuse her, I take it. She unwraps hers with impatience, sitting cross-legged, head thrown back. I settle next to her, about a foot away.
“You never seen a chocolate bar before?” she asks. Before I can answer, she reaches into my lap, bites the corner of the wrapper, and skins it with her teeth. Then it’s handed back to me, less like an offering, more like a handshake. “I’m Sony.”
Sony.
All of Sony’s acts are full-bodied, I notice. There’s aggression to her, like Neo’s too candid words. At the same time, youth peeks through her manner. Her eyes and hair are bright in their shades, a middle of the night excitement only a child could wear.
“I’m Sam,” I say.
She smirks, knocking our chocolate together like champagne glasses. “You look like hell, Sam.”
“You don’t look that great either.”
“Yeah.” Her chewing slows. “It wasn’t a good day.”
“Did you get hit by a bus too?”
I joke. Neo says I’m awful at it. Every time I attempt one around him, he throws a book at my head. Not Sony. Sony likes my joke. She even laughs, nudging my shoulder with such harshness I almost fall over.
“Do you like hiking, Sam?”
“Hiking?”
“I went hiking yesterday. I think it’s my favorite thing in the world.”
I swallow. Bruises climb her arm, a similar age to the scratches on her face.
“Is that why you’re here?” I ask. “Did you get hurt?”
Sony stops chewing altogether, bright eyes dull behind a veil of something that brings her pain. They draw to her lap much like her hand draws to her stomach, as if observing a memory.
“Yeah,” she says, but it’s a lie. “Have you ever been hiking?”
“No.”
“Oh, it’s amazing, Sam. You have to try it.” She pokes me for emphasis. “I was so close to the top of a mountain, you know. I could see the ocean from up there and everything.” Her voice gains a breathy quality, wondrous, like rather than a drearily lit hall and a trio of steel elevator doors, the sea folds out before us.
“I wish I had wings,” she says, like a kind devil that used to have them on her back. “I could’ve flown free over the water forever.”
I find this intimate. Listening to someone get lost like that. It’s akin to reading Neo’s words that he lets too few people see.
Sony grins, chocolate staining her teeth. “You should come hiking with me one day.”
Sony and I talk most of the night. I discover hiking and chocolate for the first time. Chocolate, as Sony and my tastebuds teach me, is one of the greatest things in the world, right up there with Wuthering Heights. Sony says she doesn’t read much. I tell her about Neo. At first, she doesn’t believe that he’s a real person. She tells me about her mother, a temperate woman who raised a beastly thing. Sony laughs at herself some more. When she grows restless, I show her around the hospital. By the time dawn stretches through the windows, Sony returns to her room and presses endless kisses to her mother’s face.
After that night, Sony is discharged. I don’t see her for some time. That vending machine misses our nightly conversation. I let myself trail the scuff marks in her memory. I even show Neo chocolate. He tells me chocolate isn’t a discovery and that I’m dumb. I ignore him, and we share candy bars while watching movies.
A few months later, while I sit barnacled to a bench on the third floor, reading through Lord of the Flies, a familiar fire crackles.
“Where’s Sam?”
I look up, red hair and a backpack colored with markers standing at a decentralized unit.
The nurse working at said station, not in charge of Sony or me, cocks her head to the side. “I’m sorry?”
“The person yay high, sort of weird-looking,” Sony says, motioning with her hands. “C’mon, you can’t miss ’em. I mean, the kid’s never seen chocolate before.”
“Sony?” I call.
She turns around.
“Sammy!” A cheery giggle shakes through her chest at the sight of me. “Hah. That’s a nice smile you’ve got.”
“You look good,” I say. Her face is void of cuts–freckles dance across her nose, not a dull mark to taint her color.
A wink couples her whisper. “Bus just missed me.”
Swinging her backpack off one shoulder, Sony rummages through trinkets, clothes, and whatever else crammed in there, pulling out a chocolate bar. “I got you this just in case you were here.” She pats my head like a puppy’s.
“Sony.” A woman appears behind her, matching freckles and older brilliance coloring her skin. “We need to go see the doctor now, honey.”
“Bleh.” Sony’s mother rolls her eyes, wrapping an arm around her daughter. Sony melts into the touch. “I’ve gotta do boring crap now. But I’ll find you afterward. Let’s have fun!” She unfolds my palm with force, writing her room number with a pen from the bottomless backpack. Her tongue sticks out between her teeth, her handwriting crooked, unsteady like a toddler’s.
My neck cranes to read it, Sony’s fingers smoothing over the numbers.
“Don’t leave, okay?” she whispers. An oxygen therapy tube sits around her neck, and her voice is frailer than it was the night we met. But Sony’s joy doesn’t falter even when her breathing hollows.
As she goes to follow her mother, I squeeze her hand and watch her disappear down the hall.
Two nights later, Sony has surgery. It takes six hours, so for six hours, I sit outside Sony’s room with her mother. She asks if I’m Sony’s friend. I nod and tell her Sony gives me chocolate. A pleased expression takes her, the one mothers wear when they remember their children’s idiosyncrasies. The memories soothe her for a moment, but the thought of those memories being all she has makes her foot tap, quickens her heartbeat, and chews her lip. I ask Sony’s mother if she’d like to walk with me. She nods. I take her to Sony and I’s vending machine.
Six hours later, Sony wakes in her bed, silly from the anesthetics. Her mother doesn’t wait for doctors’ approvals. She goes to her daughter’s side, pressing endless kisses to her face. She tells her she’s proud of her and that she can have all the chocolate she wants. Sony hums, hooked up to so many machines, her body exhausts from merely being awake.
I’m not sure what Sony has exactly. So many different illnesses target respiration. Suffocation is one of death’s favorite methods. Sony’s disease ravaged her lung and left her with infection after infection that her body couldn’t handle on its own.
But Sony isn’t the kind to submit to anything.
She still has wings to grow.
“Sammy!” A smile greets me as I walk into her room, rounding her bedside. Sony takes my hand, the same one with her room number, and presses it to her chest. “Feel! Oh, sorry, that’s my boob. But look!”
The breaths beneath my touch are hollow, Sony’s mouth open to take them.
“That side’s empty now,” she whispers. “Only one lung left.”
Drugs lull her eyes closed with every word, and I can’t help the bit of sadness between them. For a creature so full of life, half of Sony’s adventures have been taken.
She lets out a dry chuckle. “I don’t think I’ll be doing much hiking anymore.” Her head turns limp on her pillow. “But at least I can breathe.”
“Let’s just breathe then,” I whisper.
“That sounds good.”
But it fades all too quickly. The air and fluid filling the empty space in her ribcage object to her joy. They rein in her leashless energy and her bouts of laughter. At least, despite the pain, they leave her strength intact, the flame I met kicking in the night far from being snuffed out.
Sony squeezes my hand. “Don’t leave, okay, Sam?”
I sit beside her.
“Okay…”
Sony’s recovery is quick. She eats like an animal, always in need of a napkin. She tries to run before she can stand, shoelaces untied. The times she almost falls flat on her face from trying to skate on her IV pole exasperates both her mother and me.
Sony teaches me about racing. She wants to race absolutely everywhere, at any time. Down the hall, upstairs she can barely climb, to the elevators, to the bathroom, to her room, everywhere. She likes games too. Board games I’ve never heard of, puzzles she’s too impatient to finish, and red light, green light (which is essentially a race).
The day she says she wants to read, I bring her to Neo.
—
“Wow, you’re tiny. Damn, you’ve got a lot of books.”
I didn’t take Sony’s lack of boundaries into account before opening Neo’s door without warning. She walks in, her focus split between the boy in the bed, the stacks of papers, and the books on the floor. Even her attention span likes to race.
“Hi, Neo.” I greet him with last week’s chapter in hand, setting it on the side table. “Do you have the next part for me?”
“Who the hell is that?” His pen points at the girl flipping through one of his books, scatterbrained eyes fixating on all lines at once.
“Your name’s Neo? Neo like Neonate?” Sony asks, trotting to his bed. “You kind of do look like a baby.”
“Neo like Neo. Don’t touch that.” Neo, like Neo, swipes the book from her hands. Sony jumps like she’s been barked at.
“Grumpy baby.”
“Saaamm,” Neo drags out the syllables in my name, his eyes wide, begging for an answer to his earlier question.
“Neo, this is Sony,” I say, prideful like I’ve found a delightful pet and brought it home. “She gives me chocolate.”
Neo raises his lip, annoyed. “What are you, a dog? You can’t just follow people around because they give you things.”
“That’s what I did with you,” I mutter, turning my chin away.
“Ooh, pretty,” Sony sounds, hands behind her back as she ogles the papers on Neo’s lap. “Can I read it?”
“No! One weirdo is enough. Shoo.”
“This is the next chapter,” I say, bending to Sony’s level and trying to catch whatever I can through the gaps.
Neo groans. “I need to start locking my door.”
But he never does. Neo spends the whole day with Sony and me. First, we stake out the cafeteria, waiting for the perfect opening to steal some apples. Neo calls Sony a klepto for stealing a lollipop from the bin. Our spoils of thievery taste even sweeter in the garden, where we take to a bench near the middle. Overhead, the cool autumn breeze spreads clouds against the blue.
“Neo, let’s play a game,” Sony says.
“No.”
“Okay, so, you have to pick a cloud and figure out what shape it is. You go first. What does that one look like to you?” Sony points straight up, her finger following the moving shapes across the sky.
“A cloud,” Neo chews, not even looking.
Sony flicks his forehead.
“Hey!”
“That one looks like a bird! You see the wings?” Sony pulls me by the shirt collar so I can see from her vantage point. Our baby grumbles, crammed between us. Watching more clouds go by with the time, Sony swings her legs back and forth, as enamored with the sky as she is with the sea. With wonder, she whispers, “I’ve always wanted wings.”
At first, Neo scowls every time Sony and I walk through his door. He complains when she talks too much and turns away when she wants to play games. He goes so far as to try and escape us, practically running. He’s yet to learn of Sony’s love for racing.
After a time, Neo begins doing what writers do. He listens to Sony. Sony says senseless things, childish things, no matter the audience. She observes, she questions. She’s unafraid to exist to her fullest. Her fire burns hot, and Neo is small. He gets cold easily.
When I bring apples, Sony brings a child’s imagination. She reads his stories with audible gasps, tangible tears, and snorting humor. Those reactions let Neo look at her. Not with a scowl. With a kind of gratitude that only writers understand.
Sony asks me why Neo’s books and stories are mine to hide during parent visits. When I tell her, a sad look plagues her eyes.
That night, once Neo’s parents are gone, silence sits in her mouth. We walk into his room together. Sony sits on the bed and wraps her arms around him.
“You okay?” Neo asks.
Sony rests her head on his shoulder.
“Yeah,” she whispers. “I just missed you, silly baby.”
—
The weather starts to bite in the last week of November. Our climbs to the garden become less and less frequent. We blame it on the wind instead of Sony’s lung. Her smiles have started to thin. Her laughter is raring. The freckles on her nose are pale. Neo and I don’t race her anymore. We take the elevator rather than the stairs. Soon enough, Sony can barely walk without collapsing.
Her heart monitor beeps throughout autumn’s end like a metronome. I keep my own count, holding her hand as my finger trails the pulse in her wrist.
“Neo,” Sony says, her voice a raspy thing.
“Yes.”
“Why do we have diseases?” she asks, looking at the ceiling as if she could look through it and see the clouds passing by.
Neo sighs, playing with Sony’s other hand, fidgeting with her knuckles. He’s wearing her sweatshirt, a neon one with smile written in a curve at the center.
“Illness is temporary,” he explains. “Injuries borrow our blood, infections use our cells, but our illnesses are different. In a way, they’re self-inflicted. An error in the code. This kind–well–it owns us, it hurts us, because it just doesn’t understand.”
Language is flawed. That’s what he means.
We don’t have diseases.
They have us.
They found a home in us.
“Why can’t we make it understand?” Sony asks, fear trembling from her throat.
Neo bites his lower lip to keep it from shaking. He’s grown attached to the fire between us. So much that he tucks red strands behind her ear and pretends he isn’t holding back tears.
“We have soldiers in our blood,” he whispers, like the start of a bedtime story. “They’re ruthless and unbiased. To them, there’s no difference between who they’re meant to protect, and an enemy.”
The metronome slows. Sony’s lung matches the beat of her heart.
“They’re blind. You can’t convince them of their wrongdoings.” Neo says. He continues to pet Sony’s hair. “The irony is lost on them.”
Like an apology for the sins of our sickness, Neo drops his head to her shoulder and holds Sony till she falls asleep.
—
Winter arrives. When it does, death no longer waits for Sony.
Little by little, the fight tilts in her favor. The inflammation in her lung goes down with every step she climbs and every laugh she manages. One day, she puts on her dirty white sneakers and steals apples in the early morning. Neo and I wake to the sound of her chewing and her chuckles as she watches cartoons.
“Neo, let’s do a puzzle,” she says.
“I hate puzzles.”
“You adore puzzles. And it’d be great if we actually finished one.”
“Fine. But only because you’re disabled.”
Sony snorts. “Your back’s screwed. Soon you’ll be disabled like me.”
“Yeah, yeah. You got any corner pieces?”
—
“Sam.” Someone whispers my name. I wake to Sony’s head in my lap. “Look, Sam,” she says, holding up Lord of the Flies with the giddiest grin. “I read a whole book. See? I can’t wait to tell mom.”
The wild children in it, the ones who held onto their humanity past their hardships, remind me of her. My devil searching for her wings. I fix the breathing tube over her lip and tell her I’m proud while she flips through the page she’s conquered.
Sony gets discharged in February. Every check-up she has, she practically rams into Neo and me with hugs and thousands of kisses. She even starts coming to the hospital for visits. We have puzzle nights once a week.
—
One day, Sony comes to the hospital without calling first. Neo and I watch movies in an empty waiting room, Eric’s shift allowing us to sprawl out on the chairs past our bedtime.
Sony walks through the door like a lost soul. She wears nothing but pajamas and those dirty white sneakers. Her eyes stray, from the ground to us to the hand squeezing her arm.
Neo and I sit up, making room for her between us.
“Are you okay, Sony?” I ask. She looks at her shoes, tapping the soles together.
“Yeah,” she says, her voice a distant thing. Concern crinkles Neo’s forehead. Sony sniffles, her jaw locking, unlocking. “I’m a little cold, I guess.”
“I can get you chocolate if you want,” I say. Sony scoffs, her hand ruffling through my hair as she pulls me in, nuzzling against me. For the lack of cuts, bruises, and wheezing in her breath, silence ruminates around her like a fog. “Was today not a good day?”
My quiet is a constant, a formulation of my curiosity’s wish to listen. Neo’s quiet is verbal. On paper, he’s as loud as they come. Sony’s quiet is made of sorrow. It aches in her chest beside her heart like she could breathe from it. Tonight, it brings her here. It steals from her fire and her full-bodied movements. It tears her down, half of herself left to live.
“No,” Sony breathes. “It wasn’t a good day.”
“Sony.” Neo beckons her gaze. He crouches in front of her, reading her pain like lines in his stories ready to be erased. “What happened?”
Sony’s jaw quivers with her lips. A smile forged like a shield spreads across her face, if only to convince her she isn’t trying not to cry. Her eyes shut to the question. Then it comes from her, like a confession. A sin. An irony.
“My mom died.”
Neo doesn’t move. He simply looks up at her, his hands on her knees.
Blue and red touch Sony’s face, the ambulance that brought her here tonight still fresh in her mind. She tries to laugh, a dry sound, the kind I never want to hear. It’s an insult to her true laughter.
“She wasn’t sick,” she says, like the greatest tragedy of her life is a sick joke of its own. “She just died in her sleep.”
Sony is a gladiator. She was born to conquer mountains and race the gods. She even raced death and won, crossing the finish line, her body broken, but her soul still childish and alive. Shame cowers in fear of her and defeat never knew her name till now.
I think of Sony’s mother that day, sleeping in her daughter’s room. She wasn’t sick, never was, but she never looked twice at Neo and me either. She never let discomfort through her hands as she brought us gifts and treats. She always asked about our days rather than our health. Her warmth, like her daughter’s, knew no bounds. Sony’s mother was one of those people who would give anything just to see her child happy. Not in her expectations, not in a vicarious future, but wearing her own joy, climbing her own mountains. It’s a rarer thing to find in parents than you may think. Having to lose her and not knowing why brings Sony to the edge.
Reasons are illusions. Their absence is common. If only it weren’t their presence that keeps people sane.
Sony starts to cry, holding her chest as if her lung could fall from her ribs. Neo takes her by the shoulders. He holds her upright.
“Is someone coming for you?” he asks.
“No,” Sony shakes her head. “It was just her and I.” The last words come out in whimpers. Tears spill from her eyes. Neo wraps his arms around her, hand in her hair, the other gripping the shirt at her back.
“I didn’t get to say goodbye,” she says, sinking into him as she once did with her mother. I kiss her temple as she sobs with her whole body. I hold her from the side, my arms overlapping Neo’s.
“I wish I had wings,” she cries.
“It’s okay, Sony,” Neo whispers, caressing red strands of fire lost in rain. He holds her tight, taking my hand in the process. “We’re not gonna let you fall.”
Sony learns something that day.
She learns that death isn’t playful.
Death is sudden.
It has no taste for irony or reason.
It doesn’t wait for another tick of the metronome.
It doesn’t wait for goodbyes.
Death is a taker, plain, direct, no tricks up its sleeve. And it will give you nothing in return but a last endless kiss for those you leave behind.
—
Sony’s mother had a lot of money. Like a child, Sony puts no value to it. Lawyers meet with her about inheritance, wills, and many other things Sony doesn’t want to talk about while planning to spread her mother’s ashes.
Sony’s estranged family tries to contact her, but she never calls them back. Money’s gravity is stronger than tragedy’s. Sony knows that.
Eric sets up a ventilator in his apartment’s second bedroom. He’s known Sony’s mother for a long time and therefore, Sony. She stays with him for some time. When she spreads her mother’s ashes in the sea, he goes with her.
Sony finds joy again. She doesn’t seek it out. It lays waiting in unfinished puzzles and adventures she’s yet to have.
Children filled the space her mother left behind. Eric takes her to the oncology wing, where her dramatic readings of bedtime stories and notorious games of hide and seek are great successes.
She finds peace in letting Neo steal her hoodies and stealing forbidden fruits. She and I carry the story box to the gardens and play the sky’s games when Neo’s parents visit him.
Sony’s lung, sadly, doesn’t live well on its own. The hospital keeps a steady hold on her, only relinquishing when that single organ missing its other half finds the strength.
Years later, when our lives fall into steady rhythms, no metronomes to be found, Sony’s fire learns to burn on its own. I give her a piece of paper, a mock puzzle piece, telling her to chase the half that’s been stolen.
For Sony,
I’ll steal you a pair of wings.
