The same question God put to Eddie earlier. Only now do I understand how she must be feeling. The air feels heavier, and many things that once seemed important no longer have any significance.

FIVE MINUTES LATER I’m standing beside C7. I have no idea how or why I came to be here or what I expect from my father. I want to tell him about Maddie, Eddie, and the rest. Tell him I’d no idea I was like Jon Snow.

I hear Scott say, “He’s in a coma, Valentiner. Why can’t you get that into your thick skull?” But who else am I supposed to talk to? I can’t think of a single other person with whom I could discuss the fact that I don’t want to leave a girl I don’t know alone at the end of a corridor. Only him.

Or Eddie. She knows all about reality crashes. But if I told her about Maddie, then I’d have to tell her about my mother and everything else. So I’m here, having pulled on the rustling smock and put on the stupid mask through which I sound like Darth Vader with a bunged-up nose. I’m here because my father looked at me, and there was something in his eye that gripped me and wouldn’t let go.

Now my father’s face is a no-man’s-land. His wrinkles are silent. They’re no longer laughing, no longer suffering or thinking. His body too is more hunched than before, like an abandoned house.

I search for him. With Maddie just now, I detected a distant glimmer of loneliness and expectation. I think of God’s circles. My father is on the outer edge of life. I try to find him. “Hi, Dad,” I say quietly.

When someone’s ill, seriously ill, you tend to forget all his or her other characteristics. Timothy, a boy in our class, contracted a rare form of cancer and died a year later. All anyone who remembered him ever said was how brave he was, as if fighting cancer had been his full-time job. Nobody mentioned that Timothy had also been the best at cannonball dives into the pool and had once rescued a kitten from a tree. So I try to view my father as not only sick, as more than almost dead. He would know what I should do.

God comes up to the bed, breaking my concentration. “Samuel.”

The two of us gaze at my father, and I reach for my dad’s hand and squeeze it. He doesn’t squeeze back.

“He isn’t there,” I whisper.

“No. His soul’s left its home.” Dr. Saul’s voice sounds different, as if he himself has just woken up from a long slumber.

“Will it ever find its way home?”

“If we take good care of it, yes.”