Part Three: The Cup
It was not a modern cup. That was the first thing Nathaniel registered. It was made of metal — bronze or copper, perhaps, though the surface was so darkened with age that the base color was difficult to determine — and it was small, no larger than a child’s fist, with a slightly flared rim and markings along the outside that looked like words in an alphabet Nathaniel did not recognize. The cup was warm. He could feel the warmth of it from where he stood, a gentle, living warmth, the warmth of something held for a long time in a pair of hands.
Inside the cup was a liquid. It was clear — not quite water, not quite not-water — with a faint luminescence that Nathaniel initially attributed to the overhead lighting, and which he later, in conversations he would have with various people, struggle to describe adequately. He would say things like “it caught the light differently” and “it seemed to move even when it was still,” and the people he was describing it to would nod in the patient way that people nod when they think you are exaggerating, and he would stop trying to explain.
The boy held the cup in both hands and looked at it for a moment. Then he looked at Elliot. Then he dipped two fingers of his right hand into the liquid and, with a slowness that was almost ceremonial, he pressed his damp fingers to the center of Elliot’s chest, just above the pale blue hospital gown.
Nothing happened for several seconds. The machines continued their indifferent monitoring. The ventilation hummed. The green line on the monitor moved in its flat, small patterns that Nathaniel had learned to read as the landscape of his son’s diminishing life.
Then the line on the monitor changed.
It was not a dramatic change — not the sharp spike that appears in films when someone is resuscitated — but a change nonetheless. A slight deepening of the rhythm. A stuttering, as though something was waking up. The blue line, which had been almost flat for two days, began to move in a new pattern, more variable, more alive. Elliot’s color — he had been so pale since birth that his face had taken on an almost alabaster quality — shifted slightly, almost imperceptibly, in the direction of warmth. And then the child’s breathing changed. The monitors recorded it before Nathaniel felt it: a deepening, a filling-out, as though the lungs were remembering what they were for.
Nathaniel was crying, he realized. He had not noticed when it started.
Nurse Sandra, who had finally made her way down the corridor, appeared in the doorway and saw the readings on the monitor and made a sound that was not a word. She pressed the call button on the wall and within ninety seconds the room contained a doctor and two nurses and an additional monitoring technician who had been passing in the corridor and had been grabbed by the arm. They checked and rechecked the readings. They examined Elliot. They looked at each other and then at the readings again.
“Something has changed,” the doctor said, in the tone of someone stating a fact that they do not yet have the language to explain.
The boy was standing near the window by this point, watching all of this with his arms at his sides and an expression of patient calm.
When Nathaniel turned to speak to him, he was gone.
