“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?”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Wow,” she repeated, underscoring what she clearly took to be a miracle and countering the tint of skepticism she detected in my reaction. She sighed and tilted her head to look at my left foot. “Not bad, eh? Maybe this is my true calling.” She looked down at the laptop for a few seconds, then blew a bubble with her gum that snapped like a slap. “God.”

“What?”

“I can’t believe we’re almost thirty.” She shook her head. “Fucking crazy.” Over the last year that had become her go-to word. Everything was “crazy” nowadays — a bus ride, pistachio gelato, venture capitalism. “But we’re still good friends, right?” she asked with a wink.

“We’ll see how these nails turn out.”

“I feel like —” She leaned over and took a sip from her giant mug of oolong tea. “I honestly feel like my life hasn’t changed since we were teenagers. Like this last decade?” She made a fart noise and a little sideways slash through the air with her hand. “I mean, our parents had fucking kids when they were our age, you know?” A bit of polish dripped off the brush onto my foot and she wiped it up with her finger. “But we were fucked from the start. We became teenagers the year of 9/11. And now we’re leaving our twenties with fucking Donald Trump,” she said, gesturing to the laptop.

“It’s not a done deal.”