I nodded. “Take care. Don’t burn your mouth on that coffee; its hot enough to self-combust.” I smiled, and she laughed a little as she moved down the hall. I watched her disappear around the corner, then realized there was no point in sticking around. I called a cab from the reception desk, and an hour later I was stumbling into my apartment. I downed a couple of the extra-strength Tylenol they had given me at the hospital and crawled into bed. I dreamed of concrete walls coming toward me at impossible speeds and of a woman whose face kept changing from Dianne’s to Grace’s and back again.

GRACE

THERE IS ONE THING I do remember.

I am down at the bottom of the ocean, where the water is like ink and the sunlight doesn’t reach. I don’t breathe, but somehow that’s okay. Something is trying to pull me back to the surface, but it’s far away and I’m tired and I don’t have the energy to swim up. I lie on my back, the soft sand of the ocean floor beneath me, the water pressing in all around me, and I sleep.

Then there’s blinding light and a heat that evaporates all the water, and I’m left on dry sand with a sky of pure white above me. The heat doesn’t hurt, even though it is strong enough to turn the whole ocean to vapor, and it seems to be in me as well as around me. Then a sound envelops me: music unlike any I’ve ever heard before. It’s not just that the melody is unfamiliar, but the instruments and meter—even the notes themselves are different. They seem three-dimensional, like you could grab each one as it floats into the atmosphere. I know without a doubt that I am in heaven.

The music changes. Now it is a voice speaking to me without words. I can’t open my eyes to see the speaker, but I desperately want to; the light is so bright that it’s hurting my eyes even while they’re shut, and I know if I open them I’ll go blind. The musical voice is outside me and inside me at the same time. As it enfolds me it creates images in my mind: the face of a man, scared, talking to me. I know this man needs my help, but I don’t know what to do to help him, I don’t know what is wrong.