That was June twentieth, so summer was spinning around us in full force. The city was crowded with traffic and day-trippers, white toy dogs on leashes, flower and popcorn vendors, kids on skateboards, old people with canes and walkers, corner ice-cream carts. It was a snow-globe kind of summer day—seagulls everywhere floating down, the sky a dome of unbroken blue. One day later, on June twenty-first, Paul died of cerebral edema. This, I later learned, is similar to what climbers die of at high altitudes, and what deep-sea divers sometimes succumb to after they ascend. The brain swells and presses outward against the skull, and the optic nerves are under so much pressure they smash into the back of the eye. The brain literally gets too big for the head, crowds the plates in the skull, rearranges the gray matter. In his bed at sea level, wedged between his rows of stuffed animals and stacks of books, Paul probably had a terrible headache. He probably had a funny sweet taste in the back of his throat. He had diabetic ketoacidosis, I was later told.
Later I was told many things. That Paul had likely been nauseated and incontinent for weeks before this, that as his brain had started to swell in the last twenty-four hours, he went partially blind, lost consciousness, slipped into a coma. That, while this last part was happening, he was left uncared for in his bed at the summer house—that instead of taking him to the hospital, instead of giving him the insulin and liquids he needed to survive, Leo had made pancakes and read him books, and Patra had tidied the house and emptied the litter box, and I had moved pieces around a Candy Land board. His parents had taken him for a long drive in the car, while his babysitter had hauled into his room stones and leaves and pinecones. I’d brought in yard waste, they said, incredulous.
What were you thinking? I was asked on the stand. I could not bring myself to say that it was Europa’s capital, that pile of leaves and rocks on the bedroom floor. I could not bring myself to tell them what I’d meant to tell Paul—who, when I’d seen him last, had been looking out from his bed with just one open eye. Half his face had been smashed against a pillow. No one lives in Europa, I’d wanted to tell him when he got back home. Not yet, maybe not ever, but the capital has been built and there are trains that go on the ocean floor, and submarines and floating cranes, and it’s not a city for people. It’s not for fairies or aliens or anything cute and fantastical. It’s just a city, I’d wanted to say. It’s just a city, with trains and diggers and bulldozers and roads.
This is how I remember leaving Duluth. Patra needed help folding up the cotton blanket, which we shook free of grass, and I remember how those blades were so green in the sun they were almost blue. When we got to the car, Patra and Leo had a short discussion about what to do next, and it was decided that we head back to Loose River early, that afternoon. Leo wanted Patra to walk back and check out of the hotel while he waited with Paul in the car. They had a little argument about it, actually, the first argument I heard them have. They didn’t yell at each other or raise their voices. They just stood on opposite sides of the car and squinted at each other in the sun, first disputing who should stay with Paul in the car and who should go back to the hotel and pay, and then, caught in the orbit of arguing, they switched right into bitter apology, Patra pleading, “I’m sorry, Leo,” and Leo responding, “No, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have let myself get upset over such a little thing. You stay with Paul. I’ll go back.”
Paul sat this out in the backseat. I stood near him in the open car door, near him but not too close. He didn’t want to be touched. “The weather is under me,” he said, and I couldn’t help smiling.
“You’re under the weather, you mean.”
He was too busy drinking to respond. After taking a few sloppy sips of lemonade, and then, sweating instantly from the effort of this, taking a gulp or two from the plastic water bottle Patra produced—after dampening the whole front of his shirt with some combination of lemonade, water, and saliva, he set his head against his car seat, took a shallow breath, and closed his eyes.