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When he finally said it Harvey stared at him with a look of utter contempt. It was so searing, Mike couldn’t even feel upset about it. It was like a shockwave of numbness moved through his body and suddenly all the shame, all the anguish of disappointing this one most important person was replaced with emptiness. He was so confused by the sensation he found he could do nothing but stare back blankly, blink, and wait for the viciousness that he knew was coming.
“That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard,” Harvey said and then he turned and walked off, leaving Mike standing there staring into the space Harvey used to take up.
He had not been sure how Harvey would react to the news. He had imagined scenarios where Harvey was angry, scenarios where Harvey was sad, scenarios where this revelation unlocked an outward display of care and affection that Mike had always felt was there.
But he had never imagined that Harvey would call him a liar and just leave.
That Mike would spill all his fears and anguish on the floor and Harvey would just go “Nope” and act like Mike was wasting his time was not something Mike had ever considered. It hurt but in a distant, dream-like way, like he was standing outside himself watching the scene play out before him instead of living it.
“Oh,” Mike said, although the hallway of his apartment building was now empty and there was no one else around he could be speaking to. Still too in shock to process any of this, he stepped back inside and closed the door behind him.
* * * * * *
It was God’s final, most cruel joke of all.
It started with a burning sensation. Up his thigh, sometimes in his wrist. His toes would sometimes go numb for no reason at all and he would spend far too much time on his couch wiggling them trying to force feeling into the tips.
But his work at Pearson Hardman left very little time to think about anything, so he didn’t think about it until he started forgetting things. When the doctor showed him the results of his tests, Mike found himself wondering how long the disease would have lingered under the surface unnoticed and undetected if forgetting was a normal part of his experience. Would that have been better? To walk around with an internal clock strapped to a chunk of genetic C4, happy, totally oblivious, living on the cusp of one’s glorious future like any normal twenty something. Would it be better not to know?
He wasn’t forgetting big things. The names of unimportant, incidental people, the details of citations, the 28th and 37th digit of pi … one day it took him a full fifteen minutes to recall whether AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion was docket number 09-893 or 09-398. It wasn’t like he was losing huge chunks of memory, but these things didn’t happen to him. From the moment his brain could make memories, he had never struggled to recall a single number, word, a person’s face, a color or detail.
Forgetting was a new and weird experience for him. It was fascinating at first. Probably the same way the headlights of an oncoming truck fascinate a deer.
Still, it took him a few months to see his doctor about it. He told himself it was stress or lack of sleep. He considered the possibility that his memory might have some kind of hard limit that the firehose of information Pearson Hardman expected him to drink from had finally exhausted. That was an intriguing theory, but everything he could dig up on the neurological mechanics of memory made it seem unlikely. People don’t need to make space by forgetting things just to form new memories.
He didn’t mention the forgetting to his doctor. After years of underemployment this was the first actual doctor he had seen that wasn’t attached to some rotation at a clinic or walk-in urgent care. Their introduction to each other had been only three months before, when Mike had his first annual check up in four years. They hadn’t really gotten to know each other very well.
Mike didn’t mention the forgetting because Mike had never mentioned the memory thing. So when the forgetting continued sporadically and he struggled to weigh and rank the gaps, Mike wisely chose to focus on the numbness, the burning, the physical sensation that told him that something was wrong.
Healthcare was the one luxury Pearson Hardman handed him that he didn’t roll his eyes at. His doctor was surprisingly thorough. Mike expected to be pat on the head and told it was nothing. Instead he got a stream of rapid fire questions, delivered without conversation or color commentary on his answers.
Had he been feeling tired lately? Well of course. One could only fall asleep under the table in the file room so many times.
Had he been especially clumsy lately? Any dizziness? Loss of balance? Did the awkward spastic-ness that flared up whenever Jessica Pearson’s attention fell on him count?
Any tremors? His hands did shake sometimes, but was that neurological or just all the Red Bulls first year associates practically took through IVs?
Problems with memory?
“Yes,” Mike said. It was the only answer he didn’t second guess. “I’m having trouble remembering things.”
There was blood work and in the same breath the doctor ordered an MRI.
“Is that really necessary?” the alarm slipped into his voice. MRIs felt serious—like car accidents, and strange cancers.
“It’s much safer and easier than a lumbar puncture,” his doctor said.
Mike filled out the paperwork, made the appointments, let bored looking nurses strip him down and push him into a tube the churned and clanked like it was going to pound him down to nothing. It was an extremely unpleasant afternoon.
But when it was all over he knew.
* * * * * *
About an hour after Harvey stormed off Mike got a call from Donna. He had barely finished the word “hello” before her familiar voice in clipped tones snapped efficiently at him, “Clear your schedule on Saturday.”
“Sorry?” he said.
“Clear your Saturday. Be downstairs at 10 am. Ray will be waiting for you.”
“I don’t understand—”
“You will.” Then she took a breath. “Harvey’s sorry he yelled at you, by the way.”
“I know.”
He felt like he could hear her twirling the phone cord with her fingers over the line, but with months of phantom pains and numbness he no longer trusted his senses to be so precise.
“He’s just … well you know how he gets. Harvey’s seven stages of grief: anger, anger, anger, anger, scotch-and-delta-blues, ugly cry, acceptance.”
“Yeah…” Mike agreed. “Which anger are we on now?”
“I figure maybe the second stage.” She changed gears. “How are you?”
Mike shifted his weight and let his attention drift away from his laptop screen where he had the Wikipedia page for multiple sclerosis open. Words like relapsing, progressive, symptomatology and ambulation queued up an entire body of text from his memory and flooded his brain cells with information. That felt especially cruel. Now that he knew that gradually his memory would fail him he didn’t want any part of his strange lingering superpower wasting time and energy on pointless facts. He wanted it singularly devoted to remembering his people. In particular the people whose faces and presence he could not refresh with new experiences—his grandmother, his parents, his eighth grade math teacher—and the people who he shared life altering moments he wanted to savor every detail of—the look on Harvey’s face when he realized that Mike was carrying around a briefcase full of weed, the kinetic energy of Louis on the war path, the weird mothering and occasionally vampy touch of Donna.
He absolutely did not want his freak brain to start reciting stats about symptom presentation and gender discrepancies, and heterogeneous manifestations.
“Scared,” he said. “But I’ve been doing some reading.”
“Can’t you work still? Is it really that bad?”
“It’s not so bad yet. It comes and goes. The doctor says that’s normal…”
“So you can work.”
Mike found himself shrugging. Shrugging was better than crying. “I wouldn’t want to be a burden.”
There was a long pause on the line. A pause as Donna seemed to iterate through several drafts of responses. “Oh honey…” was all she could manage to say in the end.
* * * * * *
The mystery of what Harvey had planned was short lived. Saturday at 10am a black town car was waiting for Mike outside his building. And Mike was not at all surprised to open the door and find Harvey sitting in the back looking twice as pissed as he had the last time Mike had seen him.
“So,” Mike said. “Are you going to dump my body in the East River or the Hudson? I’d personally prefer the Hudson, but there’s a certain old New York charm to the East River too. Of course you could also bury me in a dog kennel upstate like Billy Bates—”
“Shut up and get in,” Harvey barked at him. The mole on the top of his eyebrow looked especially prominent, like a vein under it was popping.
Mike slid into the car but didn’t let Harvey’s attitude ruffle his feathers. The shock from before had worn off and the man’s misdirected, emotionally stunted, rage was so transparent to Mike he almost wanted to laugh about it. Instead he said, “Come on you know Goodfellas is one of my favorite movies. The homage would be awesome.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Harvey said through gritted teeth as the car pulled away from the curb.
“So … where are we going?”
Mike had a few theories but he needed Harvey to introduce the facts into evidence first.
“NYU Langone,” the older lawyer answered. Then he shot Mike a murderous glare that read very clearly DO NOT SAY IT.
Fuck that. Of course Mike was going to say it.
“Harvey, I have a doctor. They ran the tests, gave me an MRI—”
“Shut up,” Harvey snapped again, but now he had turned his head and his attention focused fully and completely on his associate-slash-abductee. “What kind of idiot throws away their entire life without a second opinion?”
Weirdly, Harvey’s slow moving temper tantrum—for all its violence and hostility—made Mike feel warm and calm. It was more than knowing Harvey cared, it was seeing Mike’s own fears and heartbreak reflected back in someone else. He put his hand on Harvey’s knee—not sure if that was the right gesture or not and frankly not caring that much either way.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said softly.
More dagger like glares. A breath drawn in so quickly through Harvey’s gritted teeth he practically hissed. “Yes, it is. Because this is bullshit and when we’ve figured out what’s actually going on I’m going to sue that quack of a doctor you have out of existence.”
* * * * * *
Once Mike knew where they were going, he knew the whole rest of the story. Donna had booked him an appointment with the top specialist in the city and Mike supposed he should be grateful that she managed to talk Harvey into restricting the scope to New York City. He wouldn’t have been at all surprised if Harvey had thrown him on a private plane and dragged him halfway around the world in order to prove that this twist of fate that was personally inconvenient to Harvey was NOT TRUE.
Of course Harvey thought he could also bend life and death to his will. Why would he think any different? Having a few weeks head start to process his diagnosis, Mike was more introspective.
Their time in the hospital involved a lot of sitting around and waiting. Not even in a room, but a lot of being deposited in hallways and waiting areas, then being shuffled over to this test or that test, all the while wondering if this battery was part of a plan or if the medical team was improvising.
Sitting with Harvey was like being in a cage patrolled by an improperly socialized pit bull. He didn’t move from his seat next to Mike, but anyone who came close got a look that made them think twice about touching.
Not even the prestigious, zillion dollars an hour specialist Harvey had arm twisted, threatened and brow beaten his way into seeing Mike was exempt.
There didn’t seem to be any point to telling Harvey to calm down. Anger, anger, anger, anger, scotch-and-delta-blues, ugly cry, acceptance… it had to run its course.
At 11:45 Mike drew Harvey’s ire by gathering up his coat and digging through his pockets.
“What are you doing?”
There was less bite in it, but just as much growl. Harvey’s eyes had been closed and he opened one to stare at Mike’s movements in the creepiest way.
“I’m hungry. I was going to get something to eat at the cafeteria.”
“No you’re not.”
“Are you going to stop me?”
Mike thought that any person who was important to Harvey must have their own seven stages of dealing with Harvey’s grief. He was on number four: impatience. Shock, annoyance, sentimentality, impatience, longing, guilt, acceptance… That was the way it would be for them, Mike was sure of it.
“No,” Harvey replied. His voice seemed a little softer. “I meant you should stay here and wait for the doctor, I’ll go down to the cafeteria and bring something back.”
Mike wanted to be mad because a part of him was craving the rush of endorphins a fight would trigger. The high of still living, still fighting, even if he was fighting with Harvey instead of along side him.
Instead he let the numbness swallow him up and said, “Okay.”
Harvey looked infinitely more uncomfortable by the agreement than he would have been by complaints, so Mike decided to do them both a favor. He grabbed Harvey’s hand before he slipped out of reach, waited for him to turn around and looked up at him in a way that he knew made him seem young and vulnerable.
“I didn’t ask to be sick. You’ve got to stop blaming me for it.”
Harvey swatted Mike’s hand away like the feeling of his skin was personally insulting. The way he stormed off made Mike smile a little. He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, letting the shuffling steps of patients and hospital staff wash over his senses like white noise.
He wasn’t sure how much time passed. He recognized Harvey’s gait—the sound of his handmade leather shoes against the cheap flooring. Harvey showed up to take him to the hospital like they were going to work immediately after. Mike hadn’t really taken the time to properly unpack that. He supposed the work wardrobe was a kind of armor for the older man. He needed to show up today as Harvey Specter, powerful, important, influential corporate lawyer. He had expected he would need to bully, badger, and threaten.
Mike couldn’t honestly imagine Harvey doing all that he was doing here in casual clothes.
But when he opened his eyes it wasn’t Harvey’s face he saw—at least not at first. It was a man about his age. He had short brown hair, parted to the side, a white lab coat with his tie slightly askew. The stranger was studying him curiously—smiled once caught, but said nothing.
“Can I help you?” Harvey snapped. He stopped at his seat, tossed Mike a plastic wrapped sandwich as if he intended to challenge this newcomer to a duel and needed his hands free.
“Harvey—”
The doctor nodded at Mike, completely unconcerned by Mike’s unpaid, uninvited, and frankly unwanted bodyguard. Mike figured working in a place like this he’d probably had his fair share of overprotective, borderline hysterical family members to manage. Perhaps Harvey was just part of the routine.
“Mr Ross, can I see your hands for a minute?”
Mike shrugged and held them out with his fingers spread wide. The stranger’s touch was warm, turning and manipulating his digits to see a few good angles.
“So… you smoke pot how many times a day? Twice? Three times a day?”
Mike coughed to clear the squeak out of his voice. “…Sorry?”
He felt Harvey tense in the seat next to him and the bottle cap of a soda gasped as the lawyer twisted it off instead of removing the doctor’s head from his body. Angry Harvey was transitioning to curious Harvey and Mike might be right there with him if the topic of conversation wasn’t his many years of abusing illegal substances.
“Oh I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. I’m a fellow working under Dr Levinson. It says on your medical history that you’re a non-smoker, but you have the kinds of callouses regular smokers have on their fingers from lighters. Most regular pot users buy into that idea that there are no negative health effects—that they don’t count as smokers because there’s no nicotine—and leave it off their history … that and the legality of it I suppose. I just wanted to double check.”
Mike found himself thinking that this young doctor was the Mike Ross to some other Harvey Specter in some other profession. It was a surreal feeling, like time traveling and meeting your own mother.
“Uhhh…”
“He used to smoke regularly,” Harvey finally said. “He doesn’t anymore.”
“Hm… really?”
Harvey’s eyes narrowed, although Mike got the impression that Harvey also saw this alternative universe Mike Ross and was hoping by directing his annoyance at the doctor it might bounce back on his protege. “He’s regularly drug tested now, and he knows I would kill him.”
“…And bury me at a dog kennel upstate?”
Harvey did not look his way. “And put him in a wood chipper.”
“Oh… Fargo, good choice,” Mike hummed.
The young doctor looked confused but opted not to engage in whatever was going on. “Well that’s … good to hear? About giving up the smoking, I mean. What’s your diet like? You aren’t vegan or vegetarian by any chance?”
Harvey scoffed and folded his arms over his chest.
“… I take it that’s a no?”
“No, nothing like that. I’m at work all the time, so I grab what I can.”
“No lunch break?”
“If you call eating a cold bagel on the sidewalk while you argue with your asshole boss a lunch break, sure.”
The young doctor glanced at Harvey as if he knew somehow that he was the asshole boss in question. But that would be weird right? He wouldn’t make that assumption because that would be weird. Normal people didn’t have their bosses taking them to the hospital and holding their hands through a battery of tests.
That would be weird.
Mike found himself staring at Harvey’s profile as the older man glared down the doctor, then kept studying the way his sideburns formed a sharp tip pointing towards his jaw long after the doctor left. There were a set of scattered, stubbily dark hairs just below, like Harvey had done a particularly sloppy job shaving that morning.
“I’m not mad at you for getting sick,” Harvey said like he needed to push the words out of his throat. It broke the silence between them but cast a more intense spell in its place and Mike found he could not bring himself to respond.
Harvey would not look at him. He stared straight ahead, glaring at the wall and gritting his teeth.
“I’m not mad at you for getting sick,” he repeated. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m mad at you for giving up.” Now he turned his head and burned that intense accusing stare into Mike’s flesh. “You didn’t even have the decency to resign properly. You sent me an email.”
As if that was the worst offense of all.
“I’m no use to you without my memory,” Mike said quietly.
It made Harvey’s rage surge. He could feel it coming off the older lawyer in waves, but instead of punching the wall—which Mike suspected he wanted to do—Harvey snorted and crossed his arms over his chest again.
“Bullshit,” he snapped.
“How is it bullshit? Without my memory, with no degree, practicing without a license … how does any of that make sense?”
Harvey didn’t answer. He’d gone back to staring accusingly at the wall, and Mike knew that his anger now was less about Mike’s decisions and more about Harvey’s fears. He had vented, the outrage had been released, only the anxiety and regret remained.
“I’m sorry Harvey,” Mike said. He straightened in his seat and joined Harvey staring at the wall. “Truth be told I just couldn’t bear it.”
“What?”
“The idea that one day I might not remember who you are—” Then feeling too exposed he quickly added, “Who any of the people at the firm are. You’re the only family I have left. It felt better to forget and not realize it then have to be confronted with the fact every day.”
Cocky and undeterred Harvey replied, “I think you will find I’m not that easy to forget.”
“Oh come on … You’re not that handsome.”
“Maybe not, but I am that much of an asshole.”
Mike laughed, actually laughed before his sadness and the hopelessness of his situation could wrestle the feeling down. It felt good to laugh, and judging by the way the corners of Harvey’s mouth twitched maybe it felt good to be laughed at too.
“Fair,” Mike said. “I can’t argue with that.”
* * * * * *
In the end the second opinion was the same as the first. Harvey’s fancy doctor spent a lot of time talking them through the MRI and Mike found his attention drifting out of focus. Rather than listening to the doctor, he found himself watching Harvey listen instead. The man was unreadable. Mike knew this was not the outcome he was hoping for, but there was no anger on his face, no disappointment, no fear, no reaction of any kind.
Mike was going to be pissed if they skipped the ugly cry phase and just went straight to acceptance. He knew that was small and petty and terribly narcissistic, but if he was going to lose his future (again), his super powers and his memories of all his precious people he at least wanted to see Harvey cry.
On second thought that would probably be way too weird.
Really, he was the one who was supposed to be comforted in this situation, but it seemed unlikely that Harvey would be able to manage it now. If there was ever any kind of remote possibility that Harvey Specter would comfort another human being.
“Hey…” Mike said once the doctor had left and they had an uncomfortable ten minutes of silence between them to let it all sink in. “Do you want to do something?”
Harvey didn’t respond more than turn his head and raise an eyebrow. In a different universe where Mike Ross’s life wasn’t falling apart that might have been intimidating.
“You’ve basically ruined my whole day,” Mike chided lightly. “At the very least you owe me a drink.”
“Do I?”
“Yes, Harvey, you do.”
The other man nodded slowly to himself. “Okay. Think about where you want to go, I’ll have Ray pick us up.”
* * * * * *
Anywhere turned out to be Pearson Hardman. Harvey made a face and crinkled his nose when Mike announced it, but Mike figured Harvey had some real nice expensive scotch, a decent music collection and it was probably the last time Mike would have the opportunity to stretch out on Harvey’s black leather couch and put his feet up.
He didn’t work there anymore, after all. A bar would be filled with loud strangers and nosy waitstaff. The office was a place of memories. Memories that were about to become a precious commodity. Mike wanted to soak up as much of it as possible, so that—maybe, hopefully—he lost the contents of every TV Guide from 1997 before he lost the details of this space.
“You know this is pathetic, right?” Harvey said as he held the door to his office open for Mike. “It’s Saturday night and you want to spend your time in the office.”
“Why not?” Mike sighed, flopping down on the couch and kicking off his shoes. “I don’t work here anymore.”
Harvey grunted, barely an acknowledgement. He poured two scotches, one for Mike and a double for himself. Mike thought about complaining but decided to accept the drink and bide his time instead. He was still kind of hoping to witness the ugly cry.
“Actually … you do.”
“Excuse me?”
“Technically speaking,” Harvey murmured. “I never accepted your resignation and never forward it to HR. So … you still work here.”
Mike blinked at him. “Where the hell do they think I’ve been for the past week?”
“I called you in sick—which turned out to be appropriate.”
There was something very shy in how Harvey spoke. All the bite and aggression from earlier gone, he seemed kind of embarrassed about the whole thing. How Mike being sick had seemed like a good cover story up until the moment where Harvey realized Mike actually was sick. Then it was just a dull edge raking across the skin.
“Harvey—”
“You don’t need to leave.” He said it quickly, staring down into his scotch and rotating the glass in his hand. “This is ridiculous, it’s relapsing remitting. You’ll have good days and bad days and it will be years before it’s a serious impairment. You don’t have to leave.”
“Harvey—”
Harvey put the glass of scotch down and watched it for a minute as if the glass might try to wander off.
“You’re not leaving,” he decided.
“I’m sorry, are you planning on holding me hostage?”
“I might.”
There was just enough wry humor to diffuse the tension that had been building.
“We’ll still be friends, you know,” Mike said.
“Friends…”
“Well yeah, I mean you made me get rid of all my other friends, so now you’re stuck with me.”
Harvey smiled a little as he took a sip of scotch. “It’s not my fault you have crappy tastes.”
“It is … kind of.”
“I don’t want to be friends.”
That didn’t feel like—it couldn’t be the end of the thought—but as statements went it was direct and absolute in a way that didn’t pull any punches.
After a beat Harvey added, “I want you here, by my side.”
Mike felt his heart speed up and a flush of heat made the skin on his back tingle. If there was any kindness in the world his plaque ridden nerves would go numb now and spare him from responding.
“I want that too.” No such luck.
Harvey stared at him—quiet, unreadable, a million possible interpretation and scenarios playing out behind his deep brown eyes but not even a ripple to touch the surface of his expression.
“Then it’s decided.”
* * * * * *
Mike ended up getting very very drunk on Harvey scotch. So drunk he was drifting pleasantly on a warm daze of distilled spirits and some soft jazz something or other Harvey had put on at some point. Not delta blues. It was a solo trumpet leisurely purring out notes. A sound that could seem very relaxed and honest or very sad depending on your point of view. But not delta blues. He wondered if this meant Harvey had stopped grieving for him.
Harvey was talking but Mike couldn’t hear what he was saying. It all felt very far away. Sensations blurred by the scotch and lulled into submission. The other man was standing over him, looking down with a mix of concern and passing regret.
“I said it’s Chet Baker.”
“Mmm?” Mike closed his eyes and inhaled the music, the moment, the smell of leather, carpet friction, stale coffee, warm vinyl and somewhere … somewhere in all of that the smell of Harvey too he figured. “Sorry what?”
“You asked who we’re listening to. It’s Chet Baker.”
“Oh... The Funny Valentine guy?”
“That’s the one—If you throw up on my couch I’ll give you to Louis for a month.”
“Pfffffftttt…” Mike rolled over on his side, letting his arm drape down off the couch and brush up against the floor. “Not gonna throw up.”
“That’s good. You keep thinking like that.”
Weirdly, Harvey sat down cross legged on the floor facing him. It was not something Mike ever expected to see—Harvey Specter on the floor, wrinkling a suit that almost certainly cost more then the couch he was so worried about Mike puking on—but Mike supposed that this did put them at eye level. And that was nice. He studied the details of the other man’s face, reaching out before he realized and tracing the edges with the tips of his fingers.
Hm. Tenderly caressing your boss’s face was probably not the best move. But Mike didn’t care—he didn’t care and he actually liked the way Harvey’s expression shifted, eyes trying to follow the touch as it wandered across his skin.
“Multi-sensory input,” Mike said. “Helps flatten the forgetting curve.”
“The what?”
“The forgetting curve. Normal humans forget 50% of new information within an hour of learning it. 70% within 24 hours.”
Harvey frowned. “For fucks sake, Mike. You have MS, not Alzheimer’s. You’re not going to forget what my face looks like.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes I do. You’re being ridiculous.”
“I’ve never forgotten anything before,” Mike murmured. “I don’t know what an average person forgets or doesn’t from a given set of memories. People don’t forget faces?”
“Not of people they’ve been working side by side with for half a year, No.”
“That’s good,” Mike sighed. “You have a pretty face.”
“Okay. I’m going to pretend you did not say that.”
“Why? You obviously think it’s true too.” He went to tap Harvey in the cheek and almost poked him the eye. “Oh God, see? That’s what my doctor said about my coordination. I’m just falling apart.”
Harvey sighed. “I suspect that has more to do with the quarter of a liter of scotch you drank more than anything else.” He tugged on Mike’s arm and attempted to get him to his feet.
“Mmmmmm… 250ml is only a bit more than one cup or 16.907 tablespoons, 50.721—something something teaspoons or point-oh-oh-oh-two-five of a cubic meter…”
“Uh-huh,” Harvey replied, uninterested. “Hey, can you stand? Come on, Ray is waiting downstairs.”
“Where to now?”
“Home.”
“Pffffttt…” Mike found himself clinging all over Harvey, virtually hanging from his neck. “Harvey, I’m not going home with you.”
“Not my home you idiot—”
“I do not put out on the first date, you understand? I want you to respect me in the morning.”
“That is extremely unlikely seeing as I didn’t respect you much to begin with. But, fine, okay, so noted.”
Mike felt himself tense up, suddenly seized on a thought that he couldn’t push down or distract himself away from “…Will we still be friends? When I’m all broken and useless to you?”
Harvey stopped. It was only then that Mike truly began to appreciate how close they were. If he leaned forward just a bit the tip of his nose would brush against Harvey’s. Eskimo kisses—the thought made him want to laugh.
* * * * * *
Daylight was the punishment he deserved. Mike groaned, considered—and half-heartedly attempted—suffocating himself with his own pillows. He was dimly aware of something clicking next to him. The pattern was uneven.
His discomfort revealed itself in details gradually. To begin with he was lying on his stomach, his shoes were off but his jeans were still on. His right arm was completely numb. Limp fish, dead to the world numb. Like lying next to a completely random body part. That’s right … his own body was becoming a corpse right in front of him. What a fate. To be zombified at 27.
It was only when Mike tried to roll over that he realized what the clicking was. Harvey was sitting up in bed—jacket and tie disposed of but still basically in his clothes from the night before—typing on his Blackberry.
Mike groaned.
“Rough night?” his boss said dryly.
Mike managed a supremely eloquent response—“Fuck off,”—before he grabbed his right wrist with his left hand and moved his dead numb arm out of the way.
After a minute in which they basically ignored one another Mike finally asked, “What are you even still doing here?”
“That’s a good question,” Harvey replied.
“Were you worried I was going to choke on my own vomit?”
“Not after I got you on your stomach—I suppose I just fell asleep.”
“Okay … but what are you still doing here?”
He was cranky. Not just because he was hungover, but because of the dead arm hanging limply at his side—and yeah it was probably just that he slept on it wrong, but it felt like a preview. If he was taking it out on Harvey a bit it was because for some reason or another it was clear that Harvey was going to demand he get to witness this. Mike Ross’s slow an inevitable decline. He wouldn’t let Mike quit. He brought Mike home and stayed with him all night. He wanted to watch the decay and that made Mike feel like he had to watch it himself too, which was the one thing he really did not want.
“Here,” Harvey said, handing him the bright orange bottle of pills that were on his night stand. “I’ll get you a glass of water.”
Precious bed space now freed up, Mike flopped down on his back. His arm was tingling and burning its way back into his body. Pinpricks scattered up the tips and through the knuckles. “Why aren’t you at work?”
“It’s Sunday.”
Oh … right.
Mike shoved the pill in his mouth and swallowed it without any water at all. Half of his thoughts were all about wanting Harvey to leave. The other half were all about how empty and alone the apartment would feel as soon as he did.
I want you here, by my side.
He didn’t want Harvey to see. Even if Harvey was right and the cognitive impairment never got so bad as carving away whole people and places. He still didn’t want Harvey to see. Because Harvey was perfect and Harvey wanted the genius boy. He didn’t make mistakes, he didn’t lose. He had a secretary who never made mistakes and perfectly organized a thousand voices and all their competing demands. He had an associate who never made mistakes and maintained a perfect memory of everything he had ever read ever. He sat perched in and office with glass walls that put him among the clouds like a super hero.
And Mike was losing his super powers. He didn’t belong there anymore. He didn’t want to be reminded that he didn’t belong there anymore. He wanted to remember that at one point he had.
But he didn’t want to go through this alone either.
“What happens now?” Mike breathed.
Harvey returned with a glass of water. The glass had spots on it, pale half moons of hard water freckling the surface. Mike sat up enough to take a sip and rested the glass against his chest.
“What do you mean?” Harvey asked.
“I mean if you won’t let me quit—” his right palm was still tingling with pins and needles. He turned it over so that it was facing him and flexed it as if fascinated by the motion. “I don’t exactly know how often the attacks will be … or how bad they’ll get.”
“I’ll talk to Jessica about it. We’ll figure something out. But you’re not going to fall apart immediately. Once you adjust to it, accept it, you’ll realize that it’s early still. You have plenty of time left—”
“Plenty of time to be your slave.”
“You said that, not me.”
I want you here, by my side.
Mike didn’t even understand what that meant. Harvey did nothing but work. He had no personal life to speak of. Best Mike could gather he was estranged from most of if not all of his family. He had no friends outside of professional rivalries and the deep intimacy of his support staff—Donna, Ray, Rene… the stage crew behind the great performance art that was Harvey Specter. What use could Mike possibly be by his side?
It was just the shock, Mike told himself. Harvey felt bad, but eventually he would accept it and realize that Mike was only going to hold him back.
* * * * * *
The degree to which the illness became part of the routine was startling. Nothing really changed. The pain and the numbness persisted. Mike kept forgetting things—but stupid things, little cracks in his perfection that no normal person would ever have noticed. Once he forgot what his area code was. Twice he needed to have his employee code for the copy machine reset because he couldn’t remember the last number. Things that simply didn’t happen to Mike Ross but were part of the banality of everyone else’s experience.
Donna put an app on his phone where he could securely store passwords and little encrypted notes to himself and showed him how to use it. “Welcome to the mortal world,” she said.
Every day he took his pill but nothing changed. He didn’t know what to expect. Perhaps the medication was only about slowing the progression. Perhaps what damage had been done was done. His doctor said it should decrease the occurrence of attacks, but Mike didn’t really see much evidence that it was.
Maybe his expectations were too high. He could still calculate ridiculous sums in his head in the blink of an eye. He could still recite books on command by the page number. Maybe the drugs were working by the standards of normal people with normal brains.
Maybe he didn’t need to be perfect.
In any case, Harvey’s version of comfort and sympathy was to throw pro bonos at him as a reward on regular intervals. So he was too busy to spend much time thinking about anything other than work.
It kept going and going and going like a wheel that was going to grind him to pulp and all the little mistakes and mental delays just kept piling up. He hated how much he noticed them. How much he worried about them. How much time he devoted to pondering if he was holding steady or slowly getting just a tiny bit worse.
“You look like shit,” Harvey said when Mike walked into his office. “Did you sleep here?”
“Yes.” He tossed down a stack of briefs as if the heavy sound of them hitting the surface of the table next to Harvey’s desk was the ultimate punctuation mark.
“Ready for this meeting then?”
His brain felt like scrambled eggs. “I don’t know … maybe? I felt my vision getting blurry around 3 am and I couldn’t figure out if that was the MS or just being sleep deprived. I think Jimmy’s figures on licensing revenues are fine. Looked good to me—”
The creak in Harvey’s chair cut him off. Harvey looked up from thumbing through the files. His brows arched just enough to register his surprise. “What do you mean Jimmy’s figures?”
“Jimmy Kirkwood, he’s another associate—”
“I know who he is.” Which was probably a lie. “I want to know why he has figures for a case he’s not working on.”
Mike pressed his lips together and shifted his weight. “We switched.”
“What does that mean?”
“….I mean we traded for a while. He was staying late drafting a contract. I needed a break … so we switched for an hour or so.”
Harvey did not seem impressed even though Mike was certain Harvey had probably done his fair share of horse trading among his fellow associates when he was in Mike’s position. Still Mike wasn’t expecting him to be quite so alarmed.
“Wait … Did you do this work or did Jimmy do this work?”
“What does that matter? It got done didn’t it?”
Wrong answer. That seemed obvious as soon as he said it.
“It matters to me who touches my cases,” Harvey hissed. He leaned back into his chair and folded his arms over his chest. “So what, you made one little mistake, caught it and then panicked and threw the whole thing out?”
He had always hated how Harvey could read him like he had a playbill with a plot summary. Yes. That was exactly what happened. He panicked. The case included a lot of numbers comparing and contrasting revenue and markets. He dropped a digit on one of them and then he started second guessing everything. By nine o’clock he couldn’t even remember what page he was on. He was fried, jumping at shadows, ready to light all his work on fire and start over. It was clear he needed a break, so he grabbed an energy drink from the fridge and offered to swap assignments for an hour. He still had a reputation for impeccable work as far as the other associates knew. Nobody outside of Harvey, Donna and probably Jessica knew that his gifts were crumbling.
It seemed like the smarter thing at the time. Better than starting completely over. And Jimmy was a good lawyer, smart, thorough.
“Why didn’t you just call me?” Harvey said.
That felt like an absurd question. “And you would do what? Come back to the office in the middle of the night and hold my hand while I cried? This is so stupid. I told you I couldn’t do this anymore but you didn’t want to hear it—So, fucking what? I got it done, that’s all you need to know.”
His little speech felt so good. Each word a firework of excitement and release. Why didn’t Harvey understand that Mike wasn’t a special snowflake anymore? His engine had burned out. He was useless to him.
But his little speech felt less good when the sounds faded from the air and all that was left was Harvey and his stare. He didn’t yell back, he just stared.
He must hate me now, Mike thought. Because Mike had promised him that his brain worked like no one he had ever met before and now that was just a lie.
Harvey nodded in the direction of his door. “Get out.”
* * * * * *
Harvey went to the meeting alone, which felt like being grounded in a weird way. It should have been hell on Earth, but like a prisoner who finally has an execution date Mike felt a strange sort of peace. He thought Harvey’s feelings about Mike asking for help from a colleague at Pearson Hardman were stupid, but at least now they were clear on where things stood. There were no more magic tricks. Mike couldn’t keep up. And in a few months … who knew? Perhaps he wouldn’t even be able to reach the level of the other first years anymore.
It was all doomed. Surely Harvey could see that now. When he came back, Mike would resign again and this time he would make sure it stuck.
“Get out of my seat,” Donna barked at him as she approached. She was carrying a big stack of files and did not look pleased about it.
“Don’t you have work to do?” she added as she lowered herself back into her station guarding Harvey’s office.
“Nothing that will matter once Harvey gets back.”
“Well then go sulk somewhere else. I’m busy.”
“I’m not sulking. What he wants from me is completely unreasonable. He said we were going to make this work and he just wants to ignore reality. I can’t be who he wants me to be.”
She glared at him and sighed dramatically. All of her movements had a kind of latent violence to them—slamming drawers and tossing cover sheets aside.
“God you’re so stupid,” she said. “Can this disease eat that part your brain first? The stupid dude part that thinks all Harvey sees when he looks at you is a database of movie quotes.”
“It’s MS, not syphilis. It doesn’t put holes in my head.”
“Well somebody should.” She punched her intake stamp down on a document with a force that felt like it might have stamped right through to the desktop below. “Of course you can be who he wants you to be. He doesn’t value your mind, Mike, he values your loyalty. Someone he can let his guard down around. Someone he doesn’t have to be perfect for. He doesn’t care about the memory shit. If you showed up to work honest and worked hard and never pulled a freak brain trick again he would be just as happy. He just wants to work on things together. With his team. Which includes you, not Jimmy.”
“Jimmy’s work is just as good—”
“That’s not the point. You needed help and instead of calling your team you hid it. You panicked and ran away, again. You told him that he can’t trust you to be honest with him.”
Mike looked off into Harvey’s office. The empty chair where Harvey would sit. The empty space where Harvey would roam. The silent record player he would touch as soon as he got back from his meeting and needed to process whatever the new set of challenges were.
“You really hurt him,” Donna said. “Stop acting like your relationship is transactional. You know it’s not. You have always known it’s not.”
* * * * * *
Harvey came back angry. But a vulnerable kind of anger. Mike didn’t need to be told, he could feel it. His own little chinks in the armor—It had always seemed so ridiculous to Mike the degree to which Harvey let these little missteps upset him. They were such minor things. He would recover, adapt and maintain his perfect record like he always did.
It had never made sense, until his own cracks began to show. When you’re perfect there’s only one place to go. Nobody gets more perfect. There is only decline. Eventually the case Harvey Specter couldn’t win would appear. Eventually he would lose a step. Eventually he would screw up in a way that couldn’t be fixed.
His anger was a diversion. He didn’t want people to see, but he had always been okay with Mike seeing.
Well he had. But that was before.
Mike thought that Harvey let him see because he wanted to use Mike’s big freak brain to fix it, but maybe it was simpler than that.
“You really hurt him,” Donna had said. Because he would not reciprocate. Because when his own perfection started to degrade he tried to run away, tried to hide it, got annoyed and ashamed that Harvey might see it. Tried to trick him so that he couldn’t see it. Then got mad and mocked Harvey for caring about any of that.
Mike stood just outside Harvey’s door. He watched as Harvey faced the window, staring out at the world and his enormous responsibility to it. Living among the clouds like a super hero.
But he wasn’t a super hero, was he? For the first time Mike appreciated how much of an honor it was to be allowed close enough to even notice that.
He shifted his weight and Harvey turned his head at the movement. The older man looked back at him. Mike felt nervous and anxious and wanted very much to learn how to say I’m sorry with his eyes. He could see the barest traces of his reflection in the glass wall that separated them. He thought he was not pulling it off at all. He looked constipated.
Harvey stared back for a long time. So long Mike found himself tapping the file folder in his hand and nervously shifting his weight again. In theory he was waiting to be waved in, but professional norms and good manners had never stopped him from barging in before. This time he didn’t want to do that. He didn’t know if his permission to see behind the facade had been revoked.
Finally Harvey retreated to the desk and waved him forward.
“What do you have for me?”
“A fix … maybe.”
Mike sat down in the chair across from Harvey’s desk. He didn’t want to talk about the case. He really didn’t want to talk about the case. He wanted to talk about everything he now understood and say he was sorry … but also not have to say it. He wanted to talk, say nothing, but somehow restore what they had only a few days before.
If people forget 75% of new information within 24 hours, what would it take for them both to forget that one terrible moment? Where were they on the forgetting curve?
“Maybe?” Harvey snorted as if Mike’s imperfection and perhaps general incompetence was his sisyphic burden to bear. “Well … let’s see it.”
He flipped through the file, nodding to himself but providing no additional feedback on what he was thinking.
“Fine,” he said.
“Fine?” Mike repeated.
“Well it’s not your best work, but you’ve already decided I’ll never have your best work again, so … yeah … it’s fine. Thank you.”
Only Harvey could make the words ‘thank you’ sound that cold. Mike leaned forward and put his hand on the desk between them—not quite touching the folder but angled in that direction like his true intention was to take it back. “You will always have my best work, Harvey. I’m sorry I made you doubt that. I’m sorry I doubted that.”
Harvey’s eyes were on the distance between Mike’s fingertips and that folder, then suddenly they were on Mike. He stared into him—long, challenging, exacting—and Mike didn’t flinch.
“You forgot about Brother Records. v. Jardine,” Harvey said, tapping the file. “But otherwise it’s good.”
“Oh come on, all Brother Records does is blather on at length about standards set in New Kids on the Block v. News Am. Publishing. Affirms precedent. It’s a footnote at best.”
“It’s vastly superior music.”
Mike almost laughed. “Are you seriously suggesting I should choose my precedent based on the Pitchfork ratings of the plaintiffs?”
“No but I would personally feel better if we could minimize the number of times I might have to say New Kids on the Block in open court.”
Harvey smiled his cocksure smirk of a smile. It was all forgiven then.
“Well, I could emphasize Playboy Enterprises, Inc. v. Welles if you want to maintain your personal brand over—oh, I don’t know—making a solid legal argument.”
Harvey opened his mouth to speak but was interrupted by the sound of Mike’s cellphone going off. He glared then rolled his eyes as if this suffering too was part of his karmic burden.
His attitude completely changed, though, when after a few seconds of clumsy fumbling Mike managed to get his phone in his hand and look down at the screen. “It’s NYU.”
Harvey’s chair squeaked as he moved it closer to his desk.
“Can I answer it here?” Mike asked.
“Yes.”
Mike stared down at the big green button that would connect him back to his unfortunate reality. He couldn’t not answer it. As much as he might prefer to put it all off and stay in this moment where his mind felt sharp and he understood himself better than he had before, he couldn’t let the call keep ringing. He needed to do this for Harvey. He needed to let Harvey see.
He stabbed the button with his thumb and put the phone to his ear. “Hello?”
“Mr Ross?” a strange voice on the other end asked.
“Um … yeah?”
“This is Dr Copelin—we met a while ago at the hospital? … I asked you about your hands.”
“Oh right… Hi,” Mike pressed the phone into his shoulder and shrugged at Harvey. “What’s up?”
“I was wondering if you could come back in this week?”
“Hmmmm… probably. What for?”
“Settle a hunch.”
Mike blinked. “Excuse me?”
“It’s better if I explain here.”
* * * * * *
Harvey insisted on coming along. In that Harvey told Donna to clear his schedule and call Ray, all without asking Mike if he could come along, and then put his hand on Mike’s back between his shoulder blades as he guided him out.
But by that point there really wasn’t anything to discuss. Harvey was Harvey. He was going to know everything because he insisted on knowing everything.
This time they were shuffled into a room to wait. Mike tried to imagine his life with regular staycations in places like this. Would he eventually organize his entire life neatly around overnights and weekend trips to hospitals? Or was MS a disease that would mainly just put him in the rewards program for urgent care as various types of healthcare workers shot him up full of steroids? He didn’t really know. All the reading he had done had been dry and scientific. Nothing about the experience of managing the disease from the perspective of the patient.
“God, I should start body building,” he murmured.
Harvey blinked at him. “Hm?”
“All those steroids … shame to let it go to waste.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s a different kind of steroid,” Harvey said. “And also you’re an idiot.”
“Just looking for silver linings—”
They were interrupted by the breezy, youthful Dr Copelin’s arrival, swooping into the room and the conversation as naturally and fluidly as if it had all been planned in advance. “He’s right it is a different type of steroid. But weightlifting is actually really good for MS patients too. Slows bone and muscle loss down.”
“If he loses any more muscle mass we’re going to have to anchor him down so the HVAC system in the office doesn’t blow him away—”
“Hey!” Mike snapped, but he didn’t have long to be outraged. The good doctor shifted towards them and suddenly all Mike could see was the cartoonishly large needle in his hand.
“What the fuck is that?”
“B-12 injection,” the young doctor answered cheerfully.
“Vitamins? … You want to inject me full of vitamins?”
“Well …. Yeah.”
Mike glanced over at Harvey who was much less infuriated by this suggestion than he expected. Instead he seemed to be studying the scene like he knew the absurdity of the large needle and the vagueness of their summons was hiding something much bigger.
“You don’t think he has MS,” Harvey finally concluded.
“He’s the right age for unset of MS symptoms, but I felt like there was too much demyelination on the spinal cord. Your B-12 levels were low on intake … the thing is, some MS patients have low B-12 and some people with B-12 deficiency present with symptoms similar to MS but they don’t actually have MS.”
The young doctor was busy fiddling with his gloves and seemed preoccupied with how his finger tips fit in the latex. He spoke automatically, reciting these facts from memory and for the first time Mike realized how people must feel when he did this at the firm. It was weird. Like talking to a spiritual medium communing with the Encyclopedia of Brittanica.
“Doctor Levinson is right, MS is more likely. B-12 deficiencies are rare in young people, unless you’re a vegan or strict vegetarian. We get most of our B-12 from meat and dairy. But there have been studies that show hydrogen cyanide from smoking reduces the absorption of B-12. Mostly we think of that as being cigarette smokers, but concentrations of hydrogen cyanide in marijuana smoke can be three to five times higher than cigarettes. There are cases of regular pot smokers experiencing B-12 deficiencies as part of withdrawal. So when you didn’t respond to teriflunomide I convinced Doctor Levinson to let me try this.”
Satisfied with the fit of his equipment the young doctor looked up and smiled brightly at them. “Right so … ready?”
If this kid handed him a lollipop at the end of this Mike was going to punch him in the face.
* * * * * *
Mike had to remind himself that touching his boss was definitely completely, unreasonably weird and unprofessional and that he should absolutely stop. But Harvey didn’t seem to mind. Mike was like a soldier found alive after years of missing in action. He could get away with whatever he wanted. His hand on Harvey’s wrist, stopping him, steadying him. Palms pressed against his shoulders, urging him back and sometimes breaking up a fight. The occasional hug where Harvey—inexplicably—rested his chin on Mike’s shoulder and sometimes turned in just enough for Mike to feel his breath across the back of his neck.
Mike wanted to remember every detail of this so badly. Every look. Every moment of contact. Every memory Harvey had of him, Mike wanted to have the corresponding puzzle piece perfectly preserved in his head.
He didn’t care if that was unfair, unnatural, or unlikely. It was what he wanted. His own little Museum of Harvey Specter that lived inside his mind.
“You cannot eat pizza for every meal,” Harvey said.
“You heard the doctor—meat and dairy, best sources of B-12. That means I’m required to order pizza with the cheese in the crust. It’s practically a health food.”
Harvey’s look of disgust was its own reward. “I can’t believe you call yourself a New Yorker.”
“At least I don’t subsist entirely on hot dogs.”
“Which are in fact an excellent source of B-12 as it happens.”
“They are not.”
“They are so. I looked it up: 30% of your daily requirement.”
“Oh God that’s disgusting. Now give me my pizza and let me finish these interrogatories.”
A small smile broke through the mask Harvey normally wore as he put the pizza box on the file room table. “Fine, but when you give yourself scurvy you’re taking the subway to the hospital.”
“Not to worry. I put pineapple on this pizza so all my nutritional bases are covered.”
Harvey snorted, “And you call me disgusting. I can’t believe you would do that to a pizza. I’m tattle-telling to your nutritionist.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“…You really need to stop coming to my doctor’s appointments with me. It’s weird.”
“Is it?”
“Yes, Harvey, it’s weird.”
“Well how else am I supposed to make sure you are taking proper care of yourself? You represent a pretty substantial investment now. I’m your supervisor. This is me supervising.”
Mike flipped open the pizza box and pulled out a slice. The cheese baked into the crust pulled apart in long, elegant strands of saturated fat laced ooze.
Harvey made a face.
“Technically, Louis is my supervisor.”
“Mmmm… okay, so I’ll invite him along next time. How about that?”
“Fuck off,” Mike laughed. “You want to sit in the waiting room with Louis looking like my two Dads? Be my guest. I’m willing to bet you don’t get through the first fifteen minutes of his detailed dietary planning for his cat.”
“…Shut up and eat your pizza, Mike.”