Hey, Am I Dead?

Chapter 1 — 4:47 AM

The first thing I learned about being dead — or whatever I was — is that you don't feel it.

I mean that literally. I kept waiting for some sensation to arrive, some physical register of wrongness, the way your body knows before your brain does when something is badly wrong with it. The cold sweat before the diagnosis. The lurch in the stomach before the car accident. I spent twelve years as a nurse waiting for bodies to tell me things their owners hadn't figured out yet, and I was good at reading them, and my own body was giving me absolutely nothing. No pain. No cold. No hunger, no fatigue, no the-floor-is-tilting feeling I associated with the end of a double shift. I felt, physically, like a person who had just woken up from a very good night of sleep and stepped outside into weather that suited them.

This, I would come to understand, was its own kind of horror.

But that was later. At 4:47 AM on the sidewalk outside my building, what I felt was mostly embarrassed.

This is a thing nobody tells you about crisis: the embarrassment. I had just watched my hand pass through a door handle. I had done it twice. And my first coherent emotional response — before fear, before grief, before any of the things you'd expect — was a hot, specific mortification, the same feeling as when you push a pull door in front of a crowd. I looked around to see if anyone had witnessed it. The street was empty. Of course it was empty. It was 4:47 in the morning in February and I was, with increasing likelihood, dead, and I was checking to make sure no one had seen me fail to open a door.

I put my phone in my pocket. I did not answer the question on the app. I was not ready to interact with mysterious apps on phones I did not remember unlocking. I had a policy, generally, of dealing with one impossible thing at a time.

The door.

I looked at it. Standard issue Chicago apartment building door, metal frame, thick glass panel in the middle, the kind that sticks in summer and swings too easily in winter. I had opened this door approximately four hundred times. I knew exactly how much force it required, the particular resistance of it, the way you had to lift slightly as you pulled because the bottom hinge was loose. I reached out again, slowly this time, with full attention, and tried to wrap my hand around the handle.

My fingers went through it like it was a projection. Like it was a very convincing photograph of a door handle. Like I was the photograph, and the door was real, and the two of us were simply operating in different registers of the same space.

I stood back.

*Okay,* I thought. *Okay.*

I had used that word a lot in the last hour, I was realizing. It was doing a lot of work. It was holding the place where more accurate words would eventually have to go.

I tried the door eleven more times. I know it was eleven because I counted, in the same automatic way I count compressions during a code, keeping the number in the front of my mind so the back of my mind can work on the problem. On the fourth try I used both hands. On the sixth try I threw my shoulder into it, a full body attempt, the kind of commitment that should have at minimum bruised me. I felt nothing and moved through nothing and ended up standing inside the vestibule of my building, which would have been a victory except that I had passed through the closed door to get there and was now standing in the small tiled entryway staring at the row of mailboxes with my heart doing something that felt like pounding even though I was increasingly unsure I had a heart.

I had passed through the door.

Not opened it. Not found it unlocked. Passed through it, the way air passes through a screen — the obstacle simply failing to register me as something that needed to be stopped.

I stood very still for a moment.

The vestibule smelled like it always smelled: old wood and someone's takeout from earlier in the night and the particular damp-coat smell of a Chicago winter building. A bike was locked to the staircase railing on the left, the one that belonged to the guy on the second floor whose name I had never learned despite living here for three years. A piece of junk mail was halfway out of the mailbox belonging to 3B, which was mine.

I reached for it.

My fingers touched paper.

I pulled. The junk mail — a credit card offer, thick envelope, the kind that feels important so you'll open it — came free in my hand. I held it. Solid. Real. The corners were sharp against my fingers. I could feel the slight give of the paper, the smoothness of the envelope's coating.

So I could touch *some* things.

I filed this away in the part of my brain that was already, automatically, building a list. I had always been a list person. In nursing school my clinical notes were legendarily thorough. My preceptor had once told me that my notes read like I was preparing testimony for a trial, which she had meant as a mild critique and I had taken as a compliment. Lists meant control. Lists meant there was a system, even when there wasn't one yet.

**Things I could not do:** open the front door of my building. (Test with more doors required.)

**Things I could do:** pass through closed doors without opening them. Touch paper. Presumably touch other objects — further testing required.

**Questions that required answers:** Why. Why. Why. Why. Also why.

I put the credit card offer back in my mailbox.

I took the stairs to the third floor. I could feel them under my feet — solid, the familiar creak of the fourth step from the bottom, the landing where someone had duct-taped over a crack in the baseboard and the tape had started to peel. All of it present. All of it real. I climbed the stairs in my building at 4:47 in the morning with the complete sensory experience of climbing stairs, and arrived at my door, and stood in front of it, and already knew.

I tried the handle anyway.

Nothing.

I pressed my palm flat against the door. I could feel the surface of it — wood, slightly cool, the faint texture of the paint. I could feel the door. I just couldn't operate it. Couldn't turn a knob, couldn't push a bar, couldn't interact with it as a door in any meaningful way. It was as though the category of *mechanism* was unavailable to me. The object existed. The function didn't.

I leaned my forehead against it.

From inside my apartment, faintly, I heard my cat.

Pigeon is not a loud cat. She is small and gray and has an air of permanent mild grievance, and her vocalizations are generally limited to a sound I can only describe as a very compressed complaint — not a full meow, just the suggestion of one, a noise that implies she could meow if she chose to but considers the effort beneath her. She makes this sound when she's hungry or when I've been gone too long or when she wants to sit on my lap and I am occupying my lap with other things.

She was making it now, on the other side of the door, with a regularity and desperation that told me she had been making it for a while. She knew I was there. Or she knew something was there. Or she was simply hungry and I was in no way part of her calculations at all — cats were not always the supernatural early warning system they were credited as being.

I pressed my forehead harder against the door. The wood was cool and solid and real and completely indifferent.

*Pigeon,* I thought. *I'm right here.*

She kept crying.

I straightened up. I made myself straighten up. I pulled out my phone and I looked at the app again — the plain white square, sitting there, waiting — and I made myself not open it. Not yet. I had one more test to do first.

I walked back down to the vestibule and out into the street. Through the door, both ways now, and still nothing — no sensation, no resistance, not even a change in air pressure as I stepped through glass and metal into the February night.

*Okay,* I thought. *So it's not that doors are locked to me. It's that the mechanism of a door is locked to me. I can walk through space. I can touch objects. I cannot operate intentional systems.*

Then I turned east, because the sirens had stopped about three blocks east and I already knew what I was going to find and I had been making the decision not to walk toward it for the last fifteen minutes and I was out of reasons to keep making that decision.

The accident scene was exactly where I knew it would be.

Two police cruisers, their lights turning the wet street red and blue and red. An ambulance, back doors open. A fire truck — they always sent a fire truck, I knew that from the ER, they sent a fire truck and half the time the firefighters stood around the perimeter looking large and vaguely purposeless unless there was something burning, which there wasn't. There were four paramedics that I could see. There was a cop stringing yellow tape between two signposts, the tape unspooling in the slight wind.

And there was a car. My car. A 2019 gray Civic that I had owned for four years and paid off eight months ago, and which was now not recognizable as a car at all on the driver's side, the metal folded inward in the particular obscene geometry of a side-impact collision. The truck — a commercial vehicle of some kind, logo on the side that I couldn't read from here — had been moved to the curb and was largely intact.

I walked toward it. I walked toward it and no one looked up because no one could see me and I was learning to stop expecting them to. I walked through the yellow tape and it passed through my body like a beam of light and I stood in the middle of the accident scene in my untorn coat with my clean hands and I looked at my car.

The paramedics were working on something in the wreckage. They were calm but efficient, which told me everything I needed to know before I could see clearly — calm-but-efficient was the register of people who were doing their jobs and did not yet know whether their jobs were going to result in anything. They had not shifted into the other register. There were two registers and they had not shifted yet.

I stepped closer.

I saw myself.

I won't describe it in detail. Not because I can't — I could, clinically, the way I have described a hundred scenes like it in handoff notes and incident reports — but because there is a difference between professional observation and this, between watching a body and watching *your* body, and I had not understood that difference until this moment. I had thought my clinical detachment was a personality trait. It turned out it was a distance mechanism, and the distance had just been removed.

I stood there for a long moment.

The paramedics worked.

I watched myself the way you watch something that your brain refuses to fully process, taking in details in fragments rather than as a whole. The coat. The missing button on the coat. The coffee cup somehow still in the cupholder, unspilled, absurd in its mundaneness. My left hand, visible through what remained of the window, the chipped nail on the index finger.

One of the paramedics — young, a woman I didn't recognize, her dark hair pulled back — looked up for a moment and said something to her partner. Her partner nodded. They kept working.

I thought: *they're not in the other register yet.*

I thought: *that might mean something.*

I thought: *you should probably answer the question on the app.*

I took my phone out of my pocket and I opened the plain white square and the question was still there, blinking, patient as something that has all the time in the world because it exists outside of time entirely:

Do you know where you are?

I looked at the wreckage. I looked at my hands. I looked at the paramedics working with calm efficiency on something that was, in the clinical sense, still unresolved.

I typed: *I'm starting to.*

The cursor blinked.

Then a new question appeared, slowly, letter by letter, like something being figured out in real time:

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

Across the street, leaning against the wall of a closed bodega with his hands in his pockets and his breath not misting in the cold, a teenage boy was watching me.

He was the only person at the scene who could see me.

He raised one hand — not a wave, exactly. More like an acknowledgment. The way you nod at someone in a hospital corridor when you're both heading to the same code.

I put my phone in my pocket.

I walked toward him.

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End of Chapter 1