The Slow Part

The ice pack had gone soft against Soren's knee, and he kept pressing it back into shape while they waited for the therapist to call him in.

"Say the whole sentence again," Maya said. "The one the doctor said."

"Which one."

"The one that bothered you."

Soren looked at the poster across from them. A cutaway leg, all the colors of the inside of a person. "She said the bruise would clear up in a week but the cartilage was different. She said I should be careful with it now because cartilage takes a long time."

"How long."

"That's the part. She said sometimes it doesn't really come back at all."

Maya frowned at the poster. "That's weird. Your skin comes back. You scraped your whole arm off in third grade and it came back."

"I know."

"So why does the shiny stuff on the end of the bone get to be special."

Soren shifted the ice. "That's what I want to know. Everything heals. That's the deal. You break it, the body sends stuff, it fixes it."

"Sends what stuff, though," Maya said. She wasn't really asking him. She was looking at the poster the way she looked at things she was about to figure out. "When you cut yourself. What's the first thing that happens."

"Blood."

"Blood." She said it slowly. "Every time. You bleed. Even a tiny cut, there's blood."

"So?"

"So the blood is the delivery." She pointed at the red lines threading all through the poster leg, into the muscle, into the skin, splitting smaller and smaller until they were almost too thin to draw. "Look how many there are. They go everywhere. That's how the fixing stuff gets there. Roads."

Soren leaned forward, which pulled his knee, which he ignored. He found the muscle on the poster, laced with red. He found the skin, dotted with red. Then he found the end of the bone, the pale blue-white cap where one bone met the next.

"Maya."

"I see it."

"There's no red on it."

They both stared. The cartilage in the diagram was drawn clean and smooth and utterly without a single one of those red roads running into it. All around it, the leg was full of them. The cartilage sat in the middle of all that traffic like an island nobody had built a bridge to.

"They forgot to draw them," Soren said, but he said it the way you say a thing you already don't believe.

"They didn't forget." Maya stood up and put her finger right on the pale cap. "They didn't draw them because they aren't there. There's no blood in it. At all."

Soren pulled his notebook out of his jacket. He drew the joint fast, the two bone ends, the smooth caps, and he left them white. Around them he scribbled the red until his hand ached. Then he sat looking at the white part in the middle of all the red.

"Then how does it eat," he said.

"What?"

"Everything alive has to eat. Every cell. Even the ones I can't see. They need food and they need to get rid of garbage, and the blood does that, the roads do that. If there are no roads to the cartilage." He stopped. "It's still alive. It's not dead. It's on my leg right now being alive with no roads to it."

Maya sat back down slowly. "There's stuff around it," she said. "Wet stuff. Joints are wet inside, right? That's why they're slippery. That's why your knee doesn't squeak."

"Fluid," Soren said. "There's fluid in the joint."

"So the food's in the fluid." Maya held her hands up, palms facing, a little gap between them. "And the cartilage is just sitting in it. Soaking. Like a tea bag but backwards. The food doesn't get delivered. It has to drift in. On its own. Slowly."

Soren wrote the word soaking. Then he wrote drift. Then he put his pen down, because he had understood the doctor's sentence and it had turned into something much bigger than his knee.

"That's why it's slow," he said. "Everything else gets a delivery. A whole fleet, rushing the repair stuff right to the spot. The cartilage just has to wait for the food to wander in from the water around it. There's no rushing. There's no fleet. There's no roads to send one down."

"So when it's hurt," Maya said quietly.

"There's nothing to rush in and fix it fast. It fixes at soaking speed. Which is barely."

They sat with that. Somewhere behind the door a machine beeped.

"So the knee I have right now," Soren said. "This exact cartilage. Some of it I basically have for keeps. The white part on the poster, the part with no roads. It doesn't get do-overs the way my skin does."

"You have it since you were born," Maya said. "You'll have some of the same actual stuff when you're old." She turned to look at him, and there was something almost frightened and almost thrilled in it. "That's the slowest thing in your whole body. It's slower than everything. It waits for water."

Soren looked down at his knee under the soft ice pack. Under the skin, under the muscle full of roads, there was a small quiet island that fed itself by drinking from the dark, that had been there his whole life, that would take its time.

"Be careful with it," the doctor had said, and he had thought she meant this week.

The door opened and the therapist said his name. Soren stood up, slow, keeping the weight off the knee, and put his foot down on the floor as gently as if he were setting down something that had been asleep for eleven years and he did not want to wake.