Hey, Am I Dead?

Prologue — The Intersection

The last thing you will remember clearly is the light.

Not the headlights — those come later, and they come fast, and there is no time to form a memory of them that isn't mostly just white. No, the light you will remember is the one at the intersection of West Kinzie and North Halsted, hanging on its cable in the February dark, swinging slightly in a wind you didn't notice when you were still the kind of person who noticed wind. It is red. It has been red for a long time. You are waiting for it, the way you have waited for it a hundred times before on the drive home, radio off, hands loose on the wheel, your body so tired it has stopped feeling like yours.

It is 4:47 in the morning.

You are wearing your coat with the missing button, the one you've been meaning to replace since October. Your coffee — third of the night, long cold — sits in the cupholder to your right. You haven't touched it in forty minutes because somewhere around the bridge you made a decision, and since making it you haven't been able to do much of anything except drive in the direction of home and wait for something to tell you it was the wrong one.

Nothing told you.

The light turns green.

You think: okay. Not about the light. About the decision. You think okay the way you think it at the end of a very long shift when the last difficult thing has finally been done — not relief, exactly, but the specific exhaustion that comes after you've stopped fighting something. You lift your foot from the brake.

The truck comes from the left. It comes from the left and it is running the light and it is going much faster than anything should be going on this street at this hour and you have — the investigators will later determine — approximately 0.4 seconds between the moment it enters your field of vision and the moment of impact. This is not enough time to brake. It is not enough time to swerve. It is, just barely, enough time to think something, though what you think will not be recorded anywhere and will not be remembered by you and will be gone before it finishes forming.

Later — not much later, but later — you will be standing on the sidewalk outside your apartment building with your coat un-torn and your hands clean and no memory of walking there.

You will look down at your hands like you have never seen them before.

They will look the same as they always have. That will be the first wrong thing — not the impossibility of where you are or how you got there, but the ordinariness of your own hands, the familiar chipped nail on your left index finger, the small scar at the base of your right thumb from a kitchen accident in 2019. They will look like your hands from an ordinary night. They will look like your hands from a night when nothing happened.

You will look up. The street will be empty and orange-lit and absolutely silent in the way that Chicago is silent at 4:47 AM in February, which is to say not quite silent — a distant train, a wind that moves a plastic bag in a doorway, the low hum of the city doing whatever cities do when they think no one is watching. Your building will be in front of you. Your breath will not mist in the cold air, but you will not notice this yet. You will not notice a lot of things yet.

You will reach for your phone to check the time and it will be there, in your coat pocket, right where it always is.

There will be an app you have never seen before.

A plain white square. No name. No icon. No notification badge. Just the square, sitting among your other apps like it has always been there, like you downloaded it and forgot, like it is the most ordinary thing.

You will not open it yet. First you will look up at your building — the third floor, your window, dark because you haven't been home to turn any lights on — and you will feel something that is not quite relief and not quite dread and not quite grief but lives in the same neighborhood as all three.

Then you will reach for the door handle of your building and your hand will pass through it.

Not around it. Not miss it in the dark. *Through* it, the cold metal offering no resistance at all, your fingers closing on nothing, your palm meeting nothing, the door standing solid and indifferent and entirely unaware of you.

You will try again.

And again.

And then you will stand on the sidewalk outside your building with your clean hands at your sides and the city quiet all around you, and you will understand — not fully, not yet, but in the first thin edge of a way that will widen into something you cannot close — that something is very wrong.

Behind you, three blocks east, sirens are starting.

You don't turn around. Not yet. You're not ready for that yet.

Instead you look down at your phone and you open the app and the screen is white and blank and then, slowly, as if someone on the other end is typing, a single question appears:

*Do you know where you are?*

The cursor blinks.

The sirens get closer.

You don't answer.