“Where is he now?” I asked.

She shook her head. “He was here. I promised to call him. I don’t want to look at him right now. I know he didn’t mean to. I just, just can’t take him right now.” She squeezed her hands more tightly together. “Erik, I signed a paper saying they could put something into her skull. They wanted to know if she was allergic to iodine.”

Everything was being done. That was the word. As I sat there in the waiting room beside Miranda, I found myself on the inert side of medicine, where neither heroism nor failure is possible, where time expands and ordinary numbers on a clock can’t register it. With every hour of coma the prognosis worsens. There are exceptions, even miracles, but they’re rare. And so we waited. The mostly blank walls, the stale odors, the unintelligible chatter, the sounds of beepers, the round face of the man with dreadlocks in the chair opposite me, and the queasy artificial light of the hospital had an almost hypnotic effect as we waited. For a while I stared at a torn, crumpled blue-and-yellow potato chip bag that lay beneath an empty chair, and then at the red cylinder of the fire extinguisher. The awful accumulation of meaningless sensory information became a leaden presence in my body that would have been boredom if it weren’t for my underlying hunger to know. Miranda’s parents and two of her sisters had arrived by the time the neurosurgeon, Dr. Harden, appeared, but he couldn’t tell us what would happen, only what had already happened. Eggy’s coma score was 10. Her pupils were normal. She had no broken bones, just a few bumps and bruises. She had been given Rocuronium, a paralytic drug, to keep her quiet, which had already worn off. A ventilator was helping her breathe. The CT scan had shown no contusions or hematomas, an enormous relief, but there was some edema, some swelling. Mild, he said. Still, he wasn’t sure what it meant. They wanted to err on the side of caution and keep checking, so they had inserted a catheter to measure her intracranial pressure, which at the moment was normal. He looked about my age and had the brisk, confident manner of an expert in his field. His tone was sympathetic, and yet I felt irritated by a bland quality in his eyes, which I later realized may have been simple exhaustion. Nevertheless, I knew the man saw what he was trained to see.