On Monday I went to work. The coughing had gone away. For a little while I regretted refusing Anna’s offer to meet up, but when I considered it I realized that taking a day off at home might have been the thing that helped me feel better. A day off early on might save several days of illness; I’d learned to give myself breaks when I needed them.

I wore a mask at work because it was a nice thing to do. I didn’t know if I was contagious, and although masks were a bit awkward, no-one would comment on me wearing one, because that wouldn’t be a nice thing to say. If I were honest with myself, my intelligent and motivated coworkers weren’t always nice–but the ones on my immediate team tended to be alright.

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Chloe shortly after walking into my office. She’d seen the mask.

“Nothing, probably,” I said. “I had a cough. Just taking precautions.”

“Wise.” If she thought of hanahaki, she didn’t bring it up. “Well, I’m here to talk about the Saber account.” Chloe started giving me some details about one of our customers. She spread papers on my desk. I paid attention as best as I could.

I had a notebook to write down every detail. It wasn’t obvious which details would be most important until later, so I just wrote down everything. Often I didn’t even need to reference the notebook, but in case I needed the notes, I would have them.

I sometimes wondered if taking notes was what made them useless, as though writing things down was enough to write them down in my brain as well. I also kept a dream journal that I never read. Most of my dreams were stress dreams, but the few lucid ones made it all worth it.

Chloe was still talking, so I tried to refocus.

“I’ll send you the conversation later,” she said. There had been an email exchange with the Saber customer. “Harrison wants to move up the deadline, but I don’t think we can give him what he wants. Let him down gently.”

“I will.”

“Good.” She smiled a very red smile; Chloe wore lipstick. “I think you can absolutely handle the consultant position.”

I had been angling for a promotion for several months. I didn’t need the pay bump, necessarily, but I was saving twenty-five percent of my income and donating another ten percent to charity. If I were promoted, I’d be able to increase both of those by at least five percent. My happiness and the happiness of others might depend on it.

Number-go-up wasn’t super motivating to me, so I’d keep going to the soup kitchen. However, increasing the amount I donated would have positive effects.

Chloe knew this and was trying to help me. She’d been at the company for two years longer than I had, and had finished her degree, so she was naturally higher rank. She was a bit older than me and a bit wiser, I supposed. I would be promoted to equal rank with her if things went well. No doubt she’d be promoted above me again in short order, but I would be happy to follow her as far up as I could go. My intuition told me that she'd be CEO one day, of this company or another.

She had complimented me a moment ago, about how I was ready for a promotion.

“Thank you,” I said. It wasn’t like me to have difficulty concentrating. In school I’d done meditation to perfect that ability. I looked at my notes, and they seemed a bit sparse.

“Graham is going to join you on the visit next week, by the way,” she said. “It should be a good experience for him. Make sure you do your little didact routine, help him understand how to communicate with the customer.”

“Absolutely,” I said. I liked Chloe. She seemed to make a point of helping the new hires find their bearings, and although she was tall and intimidating to most, I was taller still and friendly enough to compensate. We were like the good cop and the bad cop.

I knew for a fact that she used me to help less capable people rise. We had a conversation about it once. Chloe really was motivated to help people succeed, even unmotivated people like Graham. Her altruism wasn’t the same flavor as mine, but I could respect it. She felt like any success she caused was her success as well.

I usually tried to convince my coworkers to donate a fraction of their salary to charity, just like I did. Few listened–but if even one did that would be very effective altruism indeed. Maybe I wanted to empathize with their feeling of generosity.

Chloe was still talking about my meeting with the customer and Graham.

“Tell him to pay attention to this person in particular,” Chloe said, bending over and putting her finger on an org chart. Her blouse opened a small amount. I felt my face redden and I looked at her finger on the table. I stared hard at a picture of a person from some other company, someone who’s name I couldn’t remember even when it was written right below his photo.

At least I had been wearing a mask.

Chloe used her good looks to push people around at our company, I knew. She wore makeup every day, and if you hadn’t gotten used to her energy she would be intimidating. She also softened her appearance and demeanor when we went on customer visits, to disarm those at other companies with the halo effect. I’d been proud of myself when I noticed it was deliberate. However, noticing Chloe’s attractiveness might cause more problems than it solved.

—

I could be confident my illness wasn’t hanahaki, I thought, because getting a glimpse of Chloe’s cleavage hadn’t made it worse. I spent the rest of the day crunching numbers and calling people. Each conversation was a dance of its own; I had files full of notes for each customer and how to relate to them. I had a connection with each. It was exhausting, but at the end of the day I always felt like things were going better than they had been the day before.

The work flew by. By Wednesday I felt as right as rain.

Wednesday was the day I went to the soup kitchen. A weekend would be more convenient, but that very fact meant that they needed more help on Wednesday, so that’s when I went. I stood on the line between two other servers, savoring the burnt meat smell and the certainty that if I’d had a cold, I had overcome it. I could smell the kitchen, after all.

Nights at the soup kitchen were hectic, so there wasn’t much time for talking with the other volunteers. That would come later, after it had calmed down and most of our patrons had a meal in front of them. Boris, the leader of the soup kitchen, encouraged us to interact with the patrons to give them some human connection and a sense of normalcy.

I liked to go out and sit at one of the tables to listen. Many of our guests were homeless, of course, but people from all walks of life were there. People down on their luck, or ill, or unemployed, or getting out of relationships. Geniuses who read too much to keep a steady job; the free-spirited who chafed under any power structure; the stupid whose insights were never blunted by social niceties. Regulars going through their routine. Proselytizers looking for new converts, mostly among the volunteers who seemed to turn over way faster than the patrons.

I loved listening to them all. Their triumphs were pure and their misfortunes were harrowing. Over and over I reminded myself how lucky I was for my health, my job, my home, and my dependable friends. Gratitude led to happiness. Helping the less fortunate led to the same, at least when I could sit with them and hear what they had to say.

Donating ten percent of my salary didn’t even come close, in terms of motivation. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if I was actually selfish, or if it was just hard to convince my hindbrain of the true utility of number-go-up. I wanted to help people, right? I genuinely cared, whether I saw how it helped them or not?

Yet, donating money did nothing for me, and listening to strangers did everything.

I was at a table with a regular, Joseph, and a new volunteer, Emma. I told them some of these thoughts: why I volunteered, and how motivating it felt. Joseph was the one who had asked. He was older and religious. He had a predilection toward asking personal questions, and was as genuine as he was crazy.

“Geeze, I should have gone first,” said Emma. She was twirling a strand of blonde hair around one of her fingers. “My reasons are really dumb compared to that.”

“I’m sure they’re not,” said Joseph. He often ate at the soup kitchen in the evenings, but mostly spent his days holding a sign in the streets. “God teaches us that every action done with good intentions is valuable. I’m sure your reasons are just as beautiful as Milo’s.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s going to sound really dumb.”

“We all contribute in our own ways,” said Joseph. He was giving Emma an out, but she didn’t take it.

“I just came here to become a nicer person,” she said. That gave us some pause.

“Is this about the incident,” I started to ask.

“Yes! I shouldn’t have yelled at him, it’s not his fault!” A week prior, a regular–a homeless man named Jason–had dropped his tray during the busiest time of the night. Emma had yelled at him, catching everyone’s attention. I tried not to wince when I remembered it. “He hasn’t been back since my–my–outburst.”

“Did you try apologizing to him?” I asked.

“I tried, but by the time I calmed down enough to realize I should, he was gone!” She took a bite.

Emma had prepared six meals for strangers since then, and was eating some of the seventh. Emma lived with her mother, I knew, and had decided to volunteer when she wasn’t at a part-time job. She volunteered a lot.

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“I have anger issues,” she said. “I’ve known about it for a long time. That’s why I came here.”

“Therapy is another place to seek guidance,” said Joseph. I nodded, but couldn’t help giving him a look. Had he ever been to therapy? His sign was sitting by the door–it said ‘Repent,’ but beneath that it said ‘God Forgives All.’

“I can’t afford that,” said Emma.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But Joseph does have a point. A soup kitchen is a good place to volunteer, but it’s very… stressful here. It’s not exactly the best place for learning equanimity.”

Emma waved a hand. “Maybe. Still. I remember coming here with my mother a few times, long ago. It was after Dad disappeared… that's a story for some other time. The point is, it made a big difference in our lives to get food here. Bigger than I’d realized at first.”

“Ah,” said Joseph. “Your journey has brought you back, to continue the Lord’s work.”

“I just remember how kind this one volunteer was… she gave me some extra cobbler, because she saw I was scared, and she tried to cheer me up. Later she came over and made sure we had supplies from the bucket.”

There was a bucket full of extra shampoo, toothpaste, etc, that hotels sometimes brought when they changed their stock. We left it by the door.

“I just thought that I’d like to be that sort of person. The sort of person who can help people in their darkest moments–who wasn’t afraid to face them when their emotions were out of hand.” She turned to me. “Like you, Milo.”

“Me?” I asked, sheepishly.

“You’re always so calm–so patient with people. Even when they are saying some of the stupidest things.” She grinned. “You make fun of them, sometimes, not that they ever notice.”

“Well, thank you, I guess.” I would cherish this compliment until the end of time. “But why do you think that your reason wasn’t as good as mine? Self improvement is incredibly noble, especially to help others.”

“An admirable resilience and grace,” added Joseph.

“It’s ‘cause I’m a bad person,” said Emma as she blushed. “I just need to be a better person, it’s not ‘cause I’m actually good.”

“We all need to be better,” I said. “The admirable thing is that you are actually doing something about it. Have I told you about effective altruism?”

“Yes,” said Joseph, at the same time that Emma shook her head. I explained to her what I meant about donating ten percent of my salary, and about how effective altruists were just like her: people who wanted to be better. I told her I aspired to the same.

“You have to earn a lot of money to do that,” she said. “I don’t, so…”

“Even a little bit makes a difference,” I said, with some hesitation. I sometimes forgot what I was saying, and who I was saying it to. “But having more money does help.”

Income was a risky topic in the soup kitchen. Nobody there knew that I earned good money. I was worried that if they did, it would make things harder for me, because I’d have to keep refusing requests. Many of the regulars recognized me. Money would help many of them, but I couldn’t reasonably give all of my money away.

I could see that Emma had made the inference that I didn’t want to talk about it, and was letting the subject lie. For that I was grateful. She may have been prone to outbursts, but I was certain that beneath it all she genuinely wanted to help people. Emma had been there almost every night since she’d started, even after embarrassing herself, and I still only went once a week after two years.

Once a week was just enough for me to feel like I was doing good. I wondered, once again, if I was really motivated by the right things. I sighed, and then I started coughing.

“Are you alright?” asked Emma.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, waving a hand. “Throat’s been a bit irritated lately.”

“Suffering from lungache?” asked Joseph, and I almost facepalmed. “Ask the Lord for guidance, and he will give you the strength you need.”

“If it’s hanahaki,” said Emma, “you should just ask your crush out. Rejection is the fastest cure.”

“It’s not hanahaki,” I snapped, and her brow furrowed. “Besides, won’t rejection make it all worse?”

“Only if you get rejected… or if you’re an idiot and can’t handle rejection.”

“I think I’m safe,” I said, taking another drink of water. “You seem to know a thing about it. Have you ever had the illness?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“How’d you deal with it?”

“The obvious way.” She stood. “It’s not like I care, but don’t wait too long and end up in the hospital.” Joseph nodded solemnly and stood up as well.

I watched Emma walk away. She had a drive for self-improvement that I admired, one that I liked to think I had myself, but her temper really could be an issue. She was two years younger than me, thin, with shoulder-length blonde hair.

Emma was pretty in a very fierce sort of way.

I shook my head and wondered if all the talk of hanahaki disease had affected my thoughts. I went to the back to help the other volunteers clean up.

—

The next day was pretty rough. The meeting with the Saber group had been delayed, again, but I just wanted to get it over with. I thought about canceling my plans with the Brookes, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’d had a rough week and I really wanted to see them.

On Friday I spent most of the day talking to Graham, preparing him for what could be a difficult interaction if we ever got around to it. I ended up going home early. I justified it to myself by remembering I’d still be over hours, and that I’d get plenty of overtime during the customer meeting.

In truth I was just looking forward to having dinner with the Brookes. I’d not seen them for weeks; I owed it to them. After work, once again wearing my mask, I went to the neighbor’s place. Mrs. Brookes greeted me at the door with a smile that quickly became a frown.

“If you’re sick you should rest,” she said. “Don’t feel–”

“I’m not even that sick, I coughed once yesterday, and I wanted to be extra safe.” Her frown didn’t go away, and I felt like a little kid again. I sighed. “I just want to grill some meat and have an easy time… but… maybe you’re right.”

“Health is the most important thing, dearie.”

“But I was looking forward to this.”

“If you are sick you are sick, and you’ll have to take that mask off to eat.” She looked back into the house. “You probably do need a break. Bella says that you’ve been overworking yourself, volunteering and running all the time?”

“That’s considerate of her, but it’s not true at all.” I worked out half as often as Diana, and I was at the soup kitchen way less than half as often as Emma.

“Why don’t you sit on the deck and let Rob grill for you? He’d love the chance to return the favor, and you can take it home with you.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Of course. Let us know if we can help in any way, like getting you things or doing some chores.” That was almost the same offer I’d given to them, three years ago. They hadn’t been sick, physically at least, and they hadn’t taken me up on it until I’d dragged a lawn mower over and said ‘I’ll stop if you insist’.

“I really appreciate it,” I said. “I’ll walk around to the back.”

The grill sat on their deck next to a weathering picnic table. Huge cottonwoods surrounded the deck. The trees covered it in shade and stillness.

It was a relief to sit down amongst the trees and just hear the wind blowing gently through the leaves, making the chimes tingle. My house was small, the result of a subdivision of a plot, but the Brookes owned a full-sized backyard with some full-sized relaxation.

When Mr. Brookes came out a few minutes later I helped him start the grill. We got to talking as he started on the burgers. They were berry burgers rather than actual meat, and thus a bit cheaper, but I preferred it that way.

“I’m going to have to insist that you take your burger home to eat it,” he said.

“That’s fair.”

“Is there any other way we can help you?”

“Nah,” I said. “Just being here helps.”

“I’m glad to see you, although I wish you weren’t sick.”

“I don’t think I’m really sick…” I said, but I realized I was lying to myself. I’d been feeling various shades of ill all week. “Shoot. I should probably go to the doctor at some point, huh?”

“If it’s been bothering you for a while, yeah, I’d make an appointment. Unless it’s hanahaki disease.”

“It’s not that,” I said. It was easier to hold onto patience when surrounded by the trees, and when talking to Mr. Brookes. He was an older guy, an ocean fisherman who had retired to become a tax consultant. I respected him.

“If you’re sure. I denied that myself, long ago. I couldn’t admit how I felt about Liz until I started coughing up petals.” He chuckled.

Mr. and Mrs. Brookes had both caught hanahaki right after meeting each other. They had cured each other shortly after that. It was a very romantic story, one of teenage love. In fact, there were framed petals in their hallway to symbolize their love. It was a story they could bring up whenever someone noticed the petals.

Fake petals, of course, which was good. The real ‘petals’ were gross. They looked like tiny, soft pink leaves–but ultimately they were membranes that contained disease. Some people did try to save them, like some people saved locks of hair, but I also found that somewhat disgusting. Hanahaki petals wouldn’t keep as well as hair.

“How long were you sick before you told her?” I asked.

“A few days, maybe a week. It goes fast when you are young.”

“It must have scared you.”

“The illness? Not really. It only affects the very top of your lungs.” He flipped a burger. “That’s why you usually don’t get it over and over, maybe once or twice. The scars make you immune.”

“My gym friend was telling me that it reduces your lung capacity.”

“He’s right,” said Rob, and I didn’t correct him. I didn’t need anyone else asking about the women in my life. “By ten percent or so, which I wouldn’t think is very severe.” Diana would think that ten percent was severe; she wouldn’t let herself be five grams of protein under, or a hundred calories over. She followed her limits every day.

“I read that older people sometimes die from it.”

“I’ve heard that as well,” he said. “If I outlive Liz, I expect that’s how I’ll go. I’d just miss her too much.” I didn’t want to think about Mr. and Mrs. Brookes getting old. They were on the higher side of middle-aged. That meant that I’d get to know them for decades more, I hoped. I knew you couldn’t always count on things like that, but after my parents had disowned me, the Brookes were the closest thing to parents that I had.

“Wouldn’t you want to stick around as long as possible, for Bella’s sake?” I asked.

“Perhaps. She’ll hopefully have her own family by then, and her own concerns.” He put one of the burgers on a bun, then put the whole thing in a container. It was faintly ridiculous to go to such lengths. I could have tossed the burger through my own window.

“Thank you,” I said. “Well, I suppose I’d better go back, then.” At least I could play videogames without exposing anyone to risk of illness.

“The doctor is a good idea,” he said. “Why don’t you schedule an appointment?”

“I will,” I said as I stood up. “Tomorrow.” I heard their parrot squawking in the house. That was something it always did when someone was coming or going. It was a nice bird to Mrs. Brookes and Bella, but mean to just about everyone else.

“Don’t forget,” he said. “If you ignore it, the disease gets worse.”

“Hanahaki?”

“Any disease,” he said. I nodded. I wouldn’t lie to myself and ignore an illness because it was inconvenient. My strength was that I could face the truth. I resolved to schedule a doctor’s appointment the next day, even if it would be embarrassing and expensive. I could afford a bit of both.

“I’m home!” said Bella from the door to the deck. I smiled at her, forgetting for a moment that she wouldn't be able to see it through the mask.

“I’m glad to see you,” I said. “I was just heading out, though.”

“Aww,” she said. “You’re sick? Is there any way I can help?”