There is no sound. The end of my world in this hall of the “zombies.” That’s the ceiling; this is my phantom body. I drift away. I fly through a purple sky—below me the sea, above me the barrier. The glass zone. I fly for days and days. I can feel sparks breaking off me as I begin to dissolve and disperse across an endless space. . . .

“Good morning, Mr. Skinner.”

I’m startled. The sky recedes with a whoosh. Good morning, Mr. Skinner? The words are buzzing in my head. Is there someone who can hear me on the other side of the glass?

“My name is Dr. John Saul and I’m your doctor, Mr. Skinner. I’m a neurosurgeon and I’ve operated on you several times. You had a cerebral contusion. You sustained a tear to your spleen and fractures in your right arm, knee, and five ribs.”

What?

“Your name is Henri Malo Skinner. You’ve spent the past forty-two days at the Wellington Hospital in London, Great Britain. Britain is still a part of Europe, although a majority of Britons have recently voted to change that. It’s late June 2016, shortly before seven o’clock in the morning. The city is full of tourists from places where we go on holiday. It’s ghastly.”

“What happened to me?” I ask, but he continues without answering my question.

“You’ve been living in a coma for twenty-eight days, Mr. Skinner, ever since you suffered a cardiac arrest that left you clinically dead for several minutes. You’ve already survived two bouts of pneumonia and the onset of thrombosis.”

I was dead? I suddenly understand. My father, the sea, the island, that door. I died and on the way to death I ended up—what did my father call it?—“in between.”

“If you can hear me now but cannot speak, I would ask you to give me a different signal. First, I will squeeze your hand and would be very obliged if you could give mine a short squeeze back.”

“I am here!”

He doesn’t answer.

Oh no, no, no! He can’t hear me either, and I can’t feel his hand. I cast around despairingly inside my numb body, but I feel nothing—no hand and no pressure. I try with all my might to imagine fingers clenching.

“Oh well, shaking hands obviously isn’t your thing but then it never really has been.”

What does that mean: never has been? How many times has he squeezed my hand before? He told you, Henri: twenty-nine mornings in a row. But what am I doing in London? It’s not possible. First I lived in Paris with my boy. I got married to Eddie, and we lived in . . . we lived . . . where did we live?

No, I didn’t marry. Or did I?

Coma, I’m in a coma. That’s what Dr. Saul said.