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When Stephen had walked to the pop-up grocer, he’d remembered Wong wanted to make dinner with him, some kind of pasta. He’d remembered there were three main items he needed to buy. He’d remembered flour. He’d remembered parmesan. It had taken him twenty minutes zigzagging through the aisles to remember that the plan was truffle pasta, and that they needed mushrooms.
He was the Sorcerer Supreme. He was a genius, first a neurosurgeon, and now the Sorcerer Supreme.
He was supposed to remember these things.
So when Wong started with the dough, and the recipe (the one in his head, he was too stubborn to listen to SEO slop from white ladies) called for eggs, and Stephen remembered that no, there were more than three things on that list, and one of them was a dozen large cage-free eggs —
He wished he was still a student, so Wong could smack the living daylights out of him.
“This has been happening more recently,” Wong said. They both knew what “this” meant: the lapses in short-term memory. They both knew what “recently” meant: after the year that, for Wong, was only a second.
Stephen caved in. After spending so much time together, he found Wong was less difficult to read. Wong was disappointed. At the eggs. At Stephen. Maybe not Stephen.
He still should have known better.
“Hey,” he said. and Stephen did the most bizarre thing humanly possible: he walked across the kitchen countertop and fell into Wong’s arms. It felt indulgent. Strong, warm, close.
“Do you want to sit somewhere more comfortable, or do you want us to stay here?” Wong asked, which must have been the record for the longest sentence he had ever uttered. It struck Stephen, while still in Wong’s arms, with Wong supporting the weight of his thick skull, that Wong was, in fact, not upset with him.
On the couch, Wong sat by him and held his hand. He ran his fingers through Stephen’s hair and asked, “When will you learn that you’re not so special?”
Knowing the science made it worse. You think you know because of the neuroscience textbooks you’ve memorized in med school with little effort. But it’s another leap entirely to learn that you aren’t special. That you’re not supreme, extraordinary, or strange at all.
Stephen’s throat was dry. He boiled with frustration. So frustrated he wasn’t over it. So angry he couldn’t stop thinking about how long it was. How many times he’d been maimed to death. How long he was trapped, so trapped, and so scared.
Wong whispered many words to him, words like sturdy pillows.
“It’s okay.”
“You’re okay.”
“You’re all right.”
“I’m right here.”
Wong’s sweet, buttery voice seeped into Stephen like the fingertips in his scalp. He knew Wong would keep whispering those words until an inkling of him began to believe that all the words, the words he was whispering and the words in medical textbooks, would flow through his meninges and into his veins.