“Yes … it’s fine … no one else will be here. And anyone who wants to be here needs to call before coming.”

“Okay.”

She slapped her forehead. “I shouldn’t have said that … about coming to stay with me … I’m sorry … I didn’t mean to jump to conclusions. Oh, God, this is so weird. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Maybe I’m just tired. I’m like really tripping now.”

“Don’t apologize. I understand how you feel.”

She lay back on the sheets. “So come, then. Don’t stay alone. Come stay with me. I’ll look after you.”

“Thank you so much … I really need you right now.”

“Will you hold me, Fire, and tell me that it’s right to feel this way? Will you tell me I’m not out here on my own?”

“You’re right to feel this way.”

“I need you to say it while you’re holding me though.”

“I promise. But now I have to go.”

“Okay. But call me.”

“I will.”

“Promise?”

“I will.”

Sitting in the sickly spray of fluorescent light, Fire unbuttoned the neck of his shirt and prepared himself for the worst as the Filipino nurse approached him with the set jaw and blank eyes of a giver of bad news. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he followed her to an adjacent hall, where without preamble she presented the facts. Overdose of sleeping pills. In and out of consciousness. Serious condition. No sense in waiting. Go home and rest.

She turned and walked away, leaving him to stare at her figure being absorbed into the dull gray walls. At the end of the corridor, a pair of double doors opened slowly, admitting to the waiting room another frazzled soul, who would sit in a hard plastic chair under frigid lights and wait for the facts while learning to associate bleach with the odor of death. His hands behind his back, his head held erect, Fire tried to shorten his depth of field like a camera, not wanting to record in sharp detail the scene before him—the knotted faces, the whining children hurriedly dressed in the middle of the night—all of this while a drone streamed in through his spinal cord and up through the base of his skull, filling his head with nothing but the sound of its own nothingness. Then quickly now, as tears filled his eyes, the room began to melt from solid to liquid.

Margaret, who had brought him Ian’s letter, was almost upon him before he saw that she was the person who’d come through the door. How was she connected to this? But before he could ask or guess, she flung herself against him.

Phil, she told Fire, was her boyfriend. She and Ian had broken up.

“It was all so sad,” she said—her face was pressed into his chest—“because it had all begun so suddenly and was about to end the same way.”

The facts marched into his skull, where they shouted down the white noise. Phil and Margaret. Margaret and Phil. How? Why? In what time frame? All this while he held her, absorbing her shudders and convulsions, soaking them up with his body, adding more weight to his soul. He needed to go soon. He needed to be looked after as well. He was sorry, he said, thinking of Sylvia’s lap now, but he couldn’t give her anything more than facts.