It was early in the morning, still dark. Driven by a strange compulsion, I pulled back the blanket covering my wife. I fumbled in the pitch-black darkness, but there was no watery blood, no ripped intestines. I could hear the other patient’s sleeping breath coming in little gasps, but my wife was unnaturally silent. I felt an odd trembling inside myself, and reached out with my index finger to touch her philtrum. She was alive.

—

When I woke up again the ward was already light.

“Goodness, you’ve been sleeping so deeply,” the young girl’s mother said. “You didn’t even wake up when they came and brought the food.” She sounded as though she felt rather sorry for me. I saw the meal tray that had been left on the bed. My wife hadn’t even opened the rice bowl, had left the meal tray untouched, and gone…where? The IV had been pulled out too, and the bloody needle was dangling from the end of the long plastic tube.

“Where did she go?” I asked, wiping away the traces of drool from around my mouth.

“She was already gone when we woke up.”

“What? In that case, you should have woken me, you know.”

“Even if I’d tried to, you sleep like a log…of course, I would have woken you if it had seemed like something had happened.” Her face reddened, either from anger or simple confusion.

I adjusted my clothes and rushed out, looking around impatiently as I passed down the corridor and came to the lift, but my wife was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t have time for this. I’d told them at the office that I’d be two hours later than usual getting in; right now my wife should already have been being discharged. I decided that when I took her home I would tell her, and indeed myself, that we should just think of the whole thing as a bad dream.

I took the lift down to the ground floor. She wasn’t in the lobby, so I hurried out into the hospital garden, out of breath but making sure to scan the area thoroughly. The only people in the garden were those patients who had already finished their breakfast. The early-morning chill, which would pass off soon enough, was fairly mild even now. You could tell who was a long-term patient based on how they looked—whether fatigued and gloomy, or peaceful. As I drew near the fountain, which was dry, I noticed that there was some kind of commotion; the people gathered there were all looking at something. I pushed my way through them until I had a clear view.