Charlie cried until he couldn't remember what had gotten him started. Gradually the tears dried up and he could breathe again. Don really did look dead from this angle, in this light. Charlie checked his brother's pulse again, just to make sure. He stood up and wiped his eyes on the tail of the scrub t-shirt they'd given him to replace his own. Charlie remembered that his own shirt had looked like a Lizzie Borden relic when it was cut off of him in the intake ward; it had been unceremoniously dumped into a bio hazard bin. He didn't want to think about that any more.
Without any clear destination in mind, Charlie wandered out to the main hallway. Los Angeles was a big city, always brawling, and you would never know it was 5:00 AM—the hospital was as crowded and hectic as ever. Charlie let himself be swept along, thinking how the patterns of moving people could be described by fluid dynamics equations, until he ended up in the neonatal ward at the far end of the hospital. He was about to turn around, reminded himself not to forget to eat (but no more coffee, he thought), when it occurred to him that he'd never held an infant. Wait, that could't be right. He was nearly thirty. Certainly at some point in the past thirty years…no, the more he thought about it, the more certain he became. Charlie had always been the youngest of whichever group he was in; the topic of children didn't come up frequently in his mostly-male department. He might never again be this close to children this young; he stepped up to the big window that looked into the nursery. Wasn't really hungry any way.
Larry had once said that children were wormholes. Or course, Larry had also once said that we all had the same number of minutes, and that was patently untrue. How could that be true? Even if you started counting from the same point, took the absolute value of all minutes from life to death, some people just had more minutes that others. Charlie looked at the bassinets—thirty, five rows of six—and wondered how many minutes that room held and why they were not divided more evenly. He'd told Don, the other day, that math described pre-existing patterns, but he thought now that time was an exception. Sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour, but twenty-four hours to a day and thirty, or thirty-one, or twenty-eight days to a month. That was pretty arbitrary. And then, what about Daylight Savings Time? Time didn't even obey the scientific method, for that matter, because it was irreversible. A math equation could be balanced and run forward or backward, but time went in only one direction. Charlie could subtract one from two and end up with his original number, but he could never work his way back to the way things had been the day before yesterday. There would always be a tiny chip missing from the bone in his right arm. Unlike energy or matter, time couldn't be transferred. It couldn't be saved. You had to use it while you had it, 'cause once it was gone, it was gone.
Charlie wondered if anyone would ever discover a law of conservation of time, a way of redistributing the minutes unused by people who died. He liked to think that one of the tiny bundles in one of those bassinets had ended up with his mother's extra minutes, just as another baby might some day end up with his. He was still standing there, small against the big window, when Amita found him.
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