Hey, Am I Dead?

Chapter 2 — The Body

His name was Danny and he had been dead for, he said, about three months.

He said it the way you say *about three months* when you mean you stopped counting because counting was making it worse — the careful vagueness of someone who has made a deliberate peace with imprecision. He was sixteen, or had been sixteen, and he was wearing a Cubs jacket that was too light for February and he didn't seem to feel the cold any more than I did, which made sense, and he had the particular self-possession of a teenager who has survived enough difficult things that one more difficult thing has simply been filed under the same category.

We stood across the street from my accident scene and he looked at me with the evaluating expression of someone who has learned to assess newcomers quickly, the way ER staff assess incoming patients — not unkindly, just efficiently, cataloguing visible damage before asking for the history.

"Your car?" he said.

"My car."

"Truck ran the light?"

"Apparently."

He nodded slowly. "Kinzie and Halsted is bad for that. Third one I've seen there."

I looked at him. "Third accident?"

"Third one like yours." He said it carefully. Not cruelly, just with the particular care of someone who has learned to deliver difficult information without editorial. I recognized the skill. I had spent years developing it myself. "The intersection does something. I don't know what exactly. Eleanor says it's always been that way. She says some places are just — thin."

I had no idea who Eleanor was. I filed it for later.

"Danny," I said, because he'd told me his name in the first thirty seconds, the way people do when they're lonely enough that introductions feel urgent, "how long have you actually been here?"

He met my eyes.

"Three months," he said.

He wasn't lying, exactly. I would learn later that he was doing something more complicated than lying. But that came later. That night — that endless, strange, cold-without-cold night — I took him at his word, because I had enough to deal with and because he was the only person in the greater Chicagoland area who could see me and I was not in a position to interrogate my sources.

"Okay," I said. "Tell me the rules."

He almost smiled. "Most people cry first."

"I'll cry later. Rules."

He looked at me for a moment with something that might have been respect and might have been recognition and might have been relief — the specific relief of someone who has been waiting a long time to be useful to someone. Then he turned and started walking and I walked beside him, and he told me the rules.

---

The rules, as Danny understood them, were as follows.

One: you couldn't leave. Not the city, not even a defined radius of wherever you'd died. The boundary wasn't visible and it wasn't consistent — sometimes it was six blocks, sometimes twelve, sometimes it flexed for reasons that had no apparent logic — but it was absolute. He had tested it in the first week, methodically, the way I already respected him for. He'd tried the L, tried a cab, tried walking north until his legs simply stopped carrying him forward, the way legs stop at the edge of a dream. The boundary was there. You couldn't cross it.

Two: mechanisms were mostly unavailable. Doors, locks, switches, engines. Objects existed and could be touched — paper, fabric, food you couldn't eat, books you couldn't read past the cover without the pages fanning through your fingers — but systems were out. He theorized it had something to do with intention, with the difference between a thing and a thing designed to do something. I thought about this for a while as we walked and decided I didn't have enough data yet.

Three: time moved but didn't track. He was fairly sure it had been three months but he'd lost the ability to follow individual days somewhere around week two. The in-between, he said, was bad for time. Things happened sequentially but the sequence didn't always accumulate the way it should. You'd look up and a week had passed. You'd feel certain it had been an hour and find out it had been a day. He had stopped wearing his watch because the hands didn't move consistently and it was more distressing than helpful.

Four: other people could sometimes feel you, even if they couldn't see you. Not always. Not reliably. But occasionally someone would shiver in a room where you'd been standing, or hesitate in a doorway you'd just walked through, or look up from their phone with the unfocused expression of a person who has just heard something they can't identify. Children did it more than adults. Animals did it almost always.

"My cat," I said.

"Yeah." He nodded. "Pets know."

I thought about Pigeon, behind my door, crying into the empty apartment. I moved that thought to a part of my mind I wasn't using right now.

Five: you faded. This one he delivered differently from the others — a slight change in his cadence, the pause before it that you learn to listen for. Not physically, he explained. Or not exactly. You didn't become transparent or start walking through walls — the walking through walls was a choice, or could be, once you got used to it. What faded was *internal*. Memory, primarily. The longer you stayed, the more of your previous life eroded, not all at once but in the way things erode in water — the sharp edges first, then the shape, then finally the essential thing underneath. He had lost the sound of his mother's voice at around the six-week mark. Not her face, not the fact of her — but the specific frequency of her, the thing that made her voice hers, gone like a word you know you know but can't retrieve.

He said this flatly. I understood that the flatness was load-bearing.

"How do you slow it down?" I asked.

"You don't, really. Eleanor says the app helps. Keeps you — anchored, she says. Like writing things down." He glanced at my coat pocket, where my phone was. "You got the app?"

"Yes."

"Answer the questions." He said it with the quiet urgency of someone passing on advice they wished they'd received sooner. "Even when they're bad questions. Especially when they're bad questions. It doesn't stop the fading but it slows it. Something about articulating what you remember — like, the act of stating it makes it more solid."

I thought about the question I had answered at the accident scene. *I'm starting to.* Whether that counted.

"What's the app?" I asked. "Where does it come from?"

He shrugged. "Nobody knows. Eleanor's been here since the forties and she doesn't have a phone, obviously, but she says there was something else back then — she's vague about it. Something that served the same function. She thinks it's the in-between itself. Like, the place knows you need an anchor and provides one." He paused. "Or something else provides it. She's not sure those are different things."

I nodded. I was building the list in my head. I was keeping myself inside the list.

We had walked, I realized, back toward the accident scene. Not all the way — we were half a block west, at the edge of the police tape's reach — but close enough that I could see the lights still turning, the paramedics still working. I had been watching the scene peripherally for the last ten minutes without acknowledging that I was doing it. Some part of me had navigated us back here. Some part of me was not done with the accident scene yet.

Danny stopped walking. He seemed to understand.

"You don't have to look," he said.

"I know."

"Most people need a while before —"

"I'm okay."

He was quiet. Which was the right response, and I noted it.

I turned and looked at the scene properly, for the first time, the way I had been avoiding doing since I'd identified the paramedics' register and understood what it might mean. The fire truck was packing up — whatever they were needed for, apparently, was resolved. Two of the four paramedics had stepped back from the car. The young woman with the dark hair was filling out something on a tablet, her face neutral and professional and totally unreadable to anyone who didn't know what that specific neutrality meant.

I knew what it meant.

I had worn that face. I had practiced that face in the mirror in my third year of nursing because I couldn't seem to keep the grief off my own when I needed to be in the room for a family and I had been told, not unkindly, that my face was an issue. You develop the neutral face or you break down, and breaking down is not useful to the patient's family, and the patient's family is who matters in that moment. I had developed the neutral face. I knew it on sight.

The paramedic with the dark hair was wearing the neutral face.

They had shifted into the other register.

I stood on the sidewalk half a block from my own accident and understood, in the way you understand things that your brain has been holding at arm's length and can no longer, that my body in that wreckage was no longer being treated as a problem to be solved. It was being treated as a situation to be managed. There was a difference. I knew the difference the way I knew my own hands.

Danny didn't say anything. He stood slightly behind me and to the left and said nothing, which was exactly right.

I stood there for a while.

The thing about being a nurse is that you develop a relationship with death that most people don't have. Not a comfortable one — comfort was never quite the right word — but a *familiar* one. You understand it as a process rather than an event. You understand that the line between alive and not is in practice much blurrier than it appears in movies and legal documents, that people spend a great deal of time in the vicinity of that line before they cross it, and that the crossing itself is usually quiet, usually mundane, usually attended by paperwork. You understand that what comes after — the body after, the body that is not a person anymore — is an object requiring management and documentation and care, but a different kind of care than before.

I understood all of this professionally.

It turned out professional understanding and personal experience were different subjects entirely.

I watched the paramedics work with the practiced efficiency of people wrapping something up, and I felt the grief arrive, finally, in its full form, unmanaged and without the benefit of clinical distance. It was not dramatic. That surprised me. I had imagined, in the abstract, that grief would be loud — that if I ever had occasion to grieve something this large it would announce itself with some kind of appropriate enormity. Instead it arrived the way serious things often do in hospitals, which is quietly, in an ordinary moment, without warning or ceremony. I was standing on a Chicago sidewalk in February and I was dead, or something very close to dead, and nobody could see me, and my cat was locked in my apartment crying, and I had not said goodbye to anyone, and the last thing I had decided before the truck ran the light was something I was not ready to look at yet.

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth. Ridiculous gesture — I had no breath to steady, no physical symptom to suppress. But the body remembers its old coping mechanisms even when the body is something new.

"Hey," Danny said, quietly.

"I'm fine."

"You don't have to be."

I lowered my hand. "I know." I took what felt like a breath. "I know. I'm just —" I stopped. Started again. "I keep waiting for it to be wrong. For one of those paramedics to look up and start working again. I keep — I know what I saw. I know what the neutral face means. I've worn the neutral face. I just keep expecting —"

"Yeah," Danny said. "That part takes a while."

"How long?"

He was quiet for a moment. "I'll let you know when I get there," he said.

I looked at him. He was staring at the accident scene with an expression so carefully composed that the composition itself told me everything about what it was composing over. Sixteen years old, Cubs jacket, three months in the in-between. I wanted to ask him about his own accident, his own scene, his own moment of standing on a sidewalk and understanding the neutral face. I didn't. There would be time for that. There was, apparently, a great deal of time.

"The app," I said instead. "You said answering the questions helps."

"Yeah."

I took out my phone. The app was still open, the second question still waiting:

*Do you know what you need to do next?*

I thought about what I needed to do next. I thought about it practically, clinically, the way I thought about the first minutes of a shift — what was the state of things, what were the immediate priorities, what could wait.

I typed: *I need to understand where I am and what the boundaries are. I need to find whoever has been here longest. I need to figure out if there's a way back.*

The cursor blinked.

A new question appeared:

*What are you most afraid to remember?*

I stared at it.

"Bad question?" Danny asked. He was reading over my shoulder, I realized. Or trying to.

"Yeah," I said. "Bad question."

I put the phone in my pocket without answering.

Across the street, the paramedics were closing the ambulance doors.

"Where do you sleep?" I asked Danny. "Or — is that a thing? Do we sleep?"

"No," he said. "We don't sleep."

I thought about the nights ahead. The endless, sleepless, February nights, with a city full of people who couldn't see me and a cat who could hear me and a question on a phone app I wasn't ready to answer.

"Okay," I said.

"You keep saying that."

"I know."

"Does it help?"

I considered. "It holds the place," I said. "For when something more accurate comes along."

He nodded slowly, like someone who had been waiting for language to describe something and had just been given it.

We stood there a while longer, the two of us, watching the street empty out. The police tape caught the wind and twisted. The fire truck was gone. The ambulance pulled out slowly, no lights, no sirens — no urgency now — and moved east on Kinzie and turned and was gone.

The intersection was empty.

The light at West Kinzie and North Halsted turned red, and held, and then turned green again, for nobody.