“When I got the first call, I didn’t feel the vibration. Who knows what I was doing? Probably listening to this guy drone on about his bad experience on ayahuasca. I was drunk. The bar was loud. It wasn’t until I went to the bathroom that I checked my phone and saw all the missed calls.

“It had seemed surreal at the time. Sitting on the toilet in the tiny bathroom of that bar, the walls plastered with posters of naked people. Men and women. Hairy asses and waxed vulvas staring at me as I fumbled with my phone, trying to call the number back. Then my phone slipped into the toilet bowl and when I fished it out, the screen was frozen, blinking on and off, until finally it darkened and I couldn’t turn it back on. I shrugged, put it in my back pocket and went back out. Ordered another drink. Left early with that nameless guy and fucked him. He had a signed drawing of Madeline, the picture book character, on the wall.” In real time, I shrug, too.

The next part is harder to tell, of course. How I woke up with my broken phone and started my lazy trek back to Manhattan, not in the mood to sit through breakfast with this guy. It wasn’t until midafternoon, when I finally went to the Apple store to get a new phone, that I listened to the five voice mails left for me. I’d forgotten I’d even gotten those calls.

He was driving back from a Q&A at a college in Pennsylvania. He had been invited to stay the night at their alumni house, but he wanted to get home. He had told the lecture organizers that he had some important lunch meeting the following day, which I’m sure was met with quizzical looks, since the following day was Sunday. Only I knew the truth, that he hated sleeping anywhere foreign. Had since my mom died, a vestige from his years raising me.

He was coming off the New Jersey Turnpike when it happened. They said that there was nothing that could’ve stopped it, that maybe if it had been a dry night, the car wouldn’t have skidded so much, wouldn’t have hit the guardrail and turned over. But it was really his own body that failed him, a heart attack mid-steer, that made him lose control of the vehicle.

Some kind motorist had pulled over and called 911. No other car was hit. No one else was hurt. He was still conscious then, and he’d told her to call me, told her my number, which of course he had memorized, before he’d lapsed into unconsciousness. And she’d called on her own phone. And called and called, to no avail.

He had died a few hours later at New York Presbyterian Hospital.