Eventually it makes me feel worse, so I play a game in my head where I create stories for people waiting outside the ER with me: The guy with the oxygen tank is Jimmy. He’s made a crash landing from Mars and hasn’t adjusted properly. That other guy with the bloody hand had a fight with a mirror. The mirror won.

Eventually, around ten, after three hours that felt like three days, my mom comes into the waiting room.

I jump up and she gives me a hug. “Is he okay? What happened?”

“He’s okay. Come on.” She pushes the doors to the ER open. As soon as we step in, we’re submerged in the chaos of other people’s emergencies. I block out the sounds of computers and monitors and people in pain and doctors with instructions.

“What happened?” I repeat, hurrying to keep up with her.

“They don’t know what happened exactly. It was some sort of neurological episode. He lost consciousness at a bad time and was lucky not to really have hurt himself.”

“I don’t get it, though.”

“It’s like a stroke, but not exactly.”

“What do you mean, not exactly?” We stop in front of a wing with ten beds, all with their curtains drawn around them.

“That’s part of what’s so frustrating about his sickness, Cham. They don’t fully understand it. It’s related to his brain degenerating, but they don’t know exactly how.”

“Well, that’s stupid.” I glare at a nurse wheeling a cart of some unidentifiable red liquid, as if it’s her fault that science doesn’t have all the answers.

My mom kisses my forehead. “He’s not himself, okay? It was traumatic getting him here. He’s very confused about where he is, and they’ve given him meds, so just…” She trails off.

When she opens the curtain, the rings scrape the metal rod.

“Hi, Daddy,” I say. He looks very small under the blankets with his salt-and-pepper hair staticky against the pillow. Either these hospital beds are ginormous or I never realized this particular quality about humans: how utterly tiny we are in the face of everything that happens to us.

I approach his bed and touch the cool metal railing. “Hi, Dad,” I say again. My voice is too loud or too perky or too high-pitched. Everything is wrong. He turns his head and jolts his arm toward me.

“They’re keeping me locked up here. I’m a prisoner. You gotta get me out of here, Cham.”

My eyes widen and nearly fall out of my head. I look at my mom, wishing that she’d warned me better or that she’d fixed this already. She takes his hand in hers.

“It’s okay, Scott, they’re just doing some tests on you. They’re here to help you.”

“No, they’re out to get me. Look at them in their uniforms,” he says as a nurse walks by, fumbling with her stethoscope. “I’m gonna sue them. I’m gonna sue them all.”

A bit of spit flies from his mouth and hits me like acid rain. This isn’t my dad. This isn’t the person who held my hand in the car after I lost the spelling bee because it’s impossible to spell tomato with an E.