LITMIR.BIZ

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could come up with.

      “How bad is it?” she asked.

      He didn’t know what to say.

      “It’s pretty bad, huh?” she said. Giving him permission.

      “I kinda got the sense that it was super bad,” he admitted.

      She nodded and blinked.

      The nurse informed them that Richard had already been transferred to the ICU and gave them an idea of how to find it.

      Corvallis and Zula went down the suggested hallway, found some elevators, and began to navigate the three-dimensional labyrinth of the hospital. Other patients or medical staff were always getting in between them, and so they didn’t try to talk. Zula sent a couple of text messages, then tilted her head back to trap some tears in the pouches of her eyes.

      Finally they got to the entrance of the intensive care unit. “Here we go,” Zula said.

      “Is there anything—” Corvallis began, but she strode ahead of him and approached the nurse at the front desk. “Zula Forthrast,” she said. “Next of kin of Richard Forthrast, who I think was just brought up here. Is there anyone who can give us the rundown? We have no information whatsoever yet about his condition.”

      They found themselves sitting in a small office that, Corvallis guessed, had been placed here specifically for conversations of this type. Modern sofas formed a right-angled U around a coffee table with flowers in a vase. Kleenex boxes competed for space with Purell dispensers. Takeout menus for local restaurants were neatly arranged in a binder; the Wi-Fi password was handwritten on the inevitable Post-it note. A big window afforded a rain-spotted view down the hill to the central business district, white sky above it and gray sea below.

      A perfunctory knock on the door preceded the entrance of a scrub-wearing man in his forties. Asian-American, heavy-framed eyeglasses chosen to fit a square face. He introduced himself as Dr. Trinh and invited everyone to make themselves comfortable on the available seating.

      “He suffered an unusual complication during the procedure that caused him to stop breathing. The staff were unable to correct the situation. By the time the emergency medical technicians were able to arrive on the scene and insert a breathing tube, his heart had stopped. They had difficulty restarting it. Currently he is on a ventilator. That means that a machine is breathing for him.”

      “He’s not capable of breathing for himself?” Zula asked.

      “We don’t think so.”

      “That means his brain is badly damaged, right?”

      “We are observing a complete lack of brain function. In my estimation, he is not coming back. I’m sorry to have to give you this news. But I need to ask you whether your uncle had a living will. Did he ever make a statement as to how he wanted to be treated in the event he ended up on life support?”

      Corvallis interrupted the long silence that followed by saying, “I can work on that.”

      He knew in his heart that he was taking the coward’s way out. He suspected that Zula knew it too. Her task was a nightmare: to contact all of the other family members and to tell them what was going on while holding it all together for Sophia. And, possibly, to make an executive decision to pull the plug on the man who was the closest thing she had to a father. Merely being in proximity to someone going through all of that was enough to put Corvallis into a cold sweat.

      Tracking down a legal document seemed light duty.

      Zula nodded and spared him a little smile. “Thank you, C-plus.” She looked at Dr. Trinh. “I would like to see him, if that is okay.”

      In the college town that was his namesake, Corvallis had been raised by a father who was clearly on the autism spectrum and a mother who was within spitting distance of it. He was an only child. The household was stable and drama-free. They read books and played board games. Emotional matters were outsourced to relatives, who were all rather far away. From time to time Mom or Dad would be called upon to offer support to a relative or a family member in distress, which they generally did by wiring money, solving a logistical problem, or making a donation to an apposite charity. They didn’t go to church, which—never mind what you actually believed, or didn’t—inoculated children with a steady low-level exposure to christenings, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals. While in middle school Corvallis had started to become aware that he was not much good, compared to other people, at situations where he was called upon to express his emotions. Like the early warning signs of a dread disease, this had first surfaced when he had found himself at a party and discovered that he couldn’t dance. Movement per se he was good at—he already had a brown belt in tae kwon do—but movement expressive of feelings was impossible for him. Since then the condition had only become more pronounced.

      This lack of surefootedness extended to simple matters such as talking to strangers on the telephone and complimenting female friends on their new haircuts—two things, among many, that he would cross the street to avoid doing. The mere thought of all the telephone calls that Zula was about to have to make, the crying, the hugging, the writing of notes, tear-soaked airport pickups, long wrenching heart-to-hearts with third cousins twice removed—merely being in proximity to it, with no real expectations or responsibilities at all, was nearly enough to send Corvallis into a panic attack.

      But there was always a way out. Corvallis’s dad was the designated photographer at family reunions. He was not a hugger, but he did a dynamite job of taking pictures of people hugging; no hug could escape the sleepless gaze of his bleeding-edge Nikon. Corvallis was enormously relieved now to have a specific task in which expressing emotions was not merely unnecessary but actually somewhat counterproductive. He opened his laptop. He figured out how to get on the hospital’s guest Wi-Fi network. He forced himself to ignore all of the email that had piled up during the hour or so since he had last checked it and went to the website for Argenbright Vail. This was a Seattle-based law firm with branches in San Jose and a few other centers of the tech economy. Formerly a small, white-shoe sort of practice, it had, during the decades since Microsoft had taken root in this area, grown to the point where it now had something like a thousand lawyers. Argenbright Vail had helped Dodge form Corporation 9592, accepting payment in the form of an envelope of twenty-dollar bills, and had represented both him personally and his company ever since. Corvallis didn’t know whether Dodge even had a will, or, if he did, where it might be found, but this was an obvious place to start looking.

      Argenbright Vail occupied ten floors of an office tower that was directly visible out the window of this very room. When Corvallis dialed the extension of Stan Peterson, the partner there whom he deemed most likely to know the answer to his question, he could almost imagine that Stan was visible through one of those windows, the white French cuff of his shirt flashing as he reached out to pick up his handset. For once, the telephone gods were smiling upon Corvallis, and he was able to get through on the second ring. It probably helped that he was the CTO of a hot startup, his name, title, and photograph enshrined in Argenbright Vail’s awesome high-tech phone system and displayed on the screen of Stan’s computer at the same time the phone rang.

      “Corvallis Kawasaki, as I live and breathe!” Stan called cheerfully.

      “Stan, are you in your office? Someplace private?”

      “Yeah, let me just close the door.” Corvallis heard Stan doing so. “What’s up? Should I get Laura?” He was referring to another partner there who handled the account of Nubilant—the company Corvallis now worked for. Stan, on the other hand, was Dodge’s personal lawyer. Perhaps he was assuming that Corvallis was confused and had dialed the wrong extension. Happened all the time.

      “No, this is about Dodge.”

      “Is he in trouble again?” Stan asked with feigned exasperation that was meant to be humorous, and would have been, if Dodge hadn’t been brain-dead.

      Corvallis gave him an explanation of what was happening. Or had happened was truer, but more painful, as it captured the reality that it was not going to un-happen. Every so often, he paused in case Stan wanted to jump in with

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