My face was burning at this point. I was furious at him and myself but most of all at that fucking man and his ball cap. I slammed the bag of food into a garbage can as we boarded the tube in seething silence. We rode five stops as lone continents. Whose onus was it to apologize? And for what? Soon a sadness overtook us that seemed huge and shapeless and belonged to both of us equally and also to everyone on the tube. At Dalston Junction he shifted towards me and placed his head on my shoulder. And we rode the rest of the way home as a couple.

“It looks like toe fungus.”

“Shut up, no it doesn’t,” Ana said. She was painting my nails on Osama’s bed. Sassy Saffron. “It’s a good November colour.”

She had just come from visiting Nana Ana in a Sofia hospital with her parents and was crashing with us in London for the week. As she played aesthetician, we watched the 2016 American election live feed on her laptop on mute. She started talking about her trip and her time spent visiting with her grandmother in the hospital. “Honestly, I can’t believe she’s still alive,” I said. “She must be close to setting some kind of local record.”

“Oh you don’t even know the half of it,” she replied, rubbing the excess polish off on the lip of the bottle. “As she was having heart surgery, she stopped showing any vitals. Like, total flatline. But then they finished the surgery, sewed her back up, and she woke up.”

“No.”

“And when the nurse asked her how she was feeling, she began describing every single surgical instrument the medical team had used during her operation. She even repeated comments they’d made to one another. Like… verbatim.” Ana searched my face for a reaction, so I raised my eyebrows in disbelief. “Her ears and eyes had both been blocked by gauze coverings, not to mention the fact that she was literally brain-dead for half of it. But she could recount the details of the operation because, according to her, she had seen it all while hovering above her body.”

“Hovering?”

“Yeah.”

I leaned back. “Do you believe her?” I could see a new local myth already forming. Maybe a new shrine.

“My parents were there, they saw it all happen.”

“The hovering?”

She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean; I mean how else do you explain what she knew?”

“It’s possible she just overheard them.”

“Jordan, she was brain-dead. She was showing absolutely no brain activity. And, I mean, if she heard them then that has, like, extremely troubling implications for what we consider ‘clinically dead.’ ”

“I feel like it has some troubling implications for the state of anaesthesiology in Bulgaria.”

“Like, does the mind live outside of the physiology of the brain?” she continued, ignoring my jibe. “When the brain dies, does the mind have the ability to remain aware?”