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  I raise one eyebrow, but she ignores me, pulling the large knife from its sheath and then reaching over to my wrist. She holds it steady—her warm hand feels good on my skin—and then slips the knife between my wrist and the plastic binding. She is focused—I can feel her breath on the small hairs of my arm—and then she pulls quickly, snapping the plastic easily, like she’s slicing through butter.

  I try to raise my arm, and it hovers for a second above the edge of the railing before falling limply back to my side. The small effort exhausts me.

  Lisa turns to the other wrist, releasing me.

  “Thanks.”

  “You said that already,” she says quietly. I can’t quite read her tone of voice, whether that’s a good or bad thing. She looks to the heart monitor, like it has an answer. “My heart’s been racing. I don’t know if it’s the stress or caffeine.”

  “You’re beautiful.” The word “beautiful” rushes out, seems to float in the air, like mist.

  “Ah, the drugs are talking,” she replies. But she pushes me over gently, electrodes, wires, and all, and neatly curls up beside me. Then she reaches out and slips her hand under my hospital gown, which causes a pleasant shiver. The gown has cartoon ducks on it, and I momentarily wonder if it’s part of hospital psychology to lull one into childlike obedience, but then—ouch!—Lisa pulls an electrode off my chest, a couple of hairs with it. She expertly slips it under her T-shirt, placing it directly across her breastbone so quick the monitor doesn’t even skip a beat. Immediately the peaks and valleys of the monitor become more erratic. Blipblipblipblip, long pause, blip.

  “See?” she says.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  She yawns.

  Another loud crack of thunder rattles the windowpanes, followed by a flash of light that reflects across the linoleum floor. I don’t want to say a word. I can’t take the chance that she’ll leave, and I feel that this moment is tentative, like a wild bird has just landed on my shoulder. I don’t know what any of it means, her being here beside me, and I don’t really care. It’s enough. It really and truly is enough.

  CHAPTER FIVE: BARDO

  I once took a religious studies class in college, Tibetan Buddhism of all things, because the professor was known to smoke dope and go easy on the grades. I remember almost nothing, because it was just a filler class, an alternative to the history requirement. But there is one thing that stands out: the bardo.

  A bardo is a state in between one and another. There is the bardo of birth, of waking consciousness; there is the bardo of dreams and the bardo of death. I sometimes wish I’d paid more attention, but my professor had this droning voice that made it difficult to concentrate in class. I’d start out with the best of intentions, pen in hand, fresh sheet of notepaper in front of me, but once he started throwing around words like trikaya and dharmakaya, my mind drifted off to other things, like whether it was pizza or turkey tetrazzini day in the cafeteria. But the bardo stood out, this idea of an in-between place. And when my parents died, I felt like my life, up to that point seemingly stable and permanent, was in fact nothing more than a motel room—I couldn’t seem to land anywhere solidly. It all felt so transitory, like I could put my hand against a wall and it would pass through.

  Lisa changes that.

  Lisa sits in the purple chair, comfortable. We both know the routine now, and it’s strange how this hospital room feels like a home of sorts. We know the nurses by name: Nurse Barbie is actually Pamela (not Pam, not Pammy; you have to say Pamela, or the next time you’re due for your sponge bath she will be rough). We’ve heard all the gossip, (Dr. Conway’s marriage is on the rocks—his wife had an affair with her psychiatrist.) And we’ve learned that Village People doctor is actually Henry. He played lead guitar for a metal band in the eighties—even wore Day-Glo spandex and platform shoes. Sometimes he and Lisa talk music; she rattles off the names of bands that sound like jokes to me, but he nods seriously, like they share a religion.

  Time drags in the morning, and early afternoon is deadly boring, but everything lightens when Lisa appears at the door promptly at 3:30 P.M. The outside world somehow clings to her—I can almost smell the light rain that beads her wool hat—and she always carries a paper bag with some treat for me: my favorite donut, the latest issue of the New Yorker, or a new addition to the serious vitamin regimen she swears by and which colors my pee different shades of orange.

  And although I am getting better, from what no one really seems to know—my diagnosis is being assigned to that amorphous category of “undetermined”—a part of me doesn’t want to. A part of me could stay here, like this, forever.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Lisa says.

  She digs through the large bag she keeps her laptop in. Yesterday she showed me a video on YouTube; she was playing drums for a band that broke up three months ago, Pandora’s Lunchbox. The lead singer got a job at a big insurance agency in Florida, and the guitarist moved to New York to get married.

  “I had it framed,” she says.

  She hands me a black wooden picture frame, but where a picture would be is instead a neatly cut article from the Devonshire Eagle.

  My obituary.

  STAFF WRITER DIES IN HAUNTED HOUSE

  Staff writer Dimitri Petrov, known by his byline D. Peters, tragically drowned to death on Halloween after falling into an old well at the Aspinwall mansion. He was 23. He is survived by nobody. Anyone who wants to watch the exciting video of the events leading up to his death can view them online at the Devonshire Eagle website, sponsored by Doug’s Automotive on Fourth Street. (Half off your next tire rotation.) He will be missed.

  “Classy. I take it Nate wrote the piece?”

  Lisa smiles. “Anyone else you know who would use your obituary as advertising space?”

  I frown. “The ‘drowned to death’ part really bugs me. I mean, if I drowned and I’m being written about in the obituary pages, then ‘to death’ is redundant. Don’t you think?”

  “Check out the back.”

  I turn the frame over. And there, in the corner, is my toe tag.

  “I had to bribe Henry with free concert tickets to Buddy’s Holly to get it. The hospital would freak if they knew you had it.”

  I’m speechless.

  “You like it?” she asks, concerned.

  “This is the best thing ever. I love it.”

  She visibly relaxes. “I knew you would. Doug says hi by the way. He made you lasagna and put it in your freezer. Also your spider plant is dead. He forgot to water it.”

  “I have a spider plant?” Oh right, Doug’s housewarming present from a year ago, which I believe I killed when I mistook the glass cleaner for the water spray.

  “I want to see the video,” I say. “The one Nate posted.”

  Lisa shudders. “No, you don’t.”

  I don’t push it.

  Somehow parameters have been set between us. We don’t talk about “that night,” we don’t talk about anything personal (my one innocent query about whether she grew up in New Goshen was met with stony silence), and we don’t talk about what will happen when I leave the hospital. (Does she only visit me out of pity? Once I’m well, will we still see each other?) We don’t talk about if we’re just friends or more than that, and we don’t talk about feelings in general or feelings for each other specifically. I pretend not to notice the scar on the back of her neck; I don’t ask about where she goes home at night or who sends her text messages on her phone that make her frown and swear quietly to herself. I try not to think at all about my cold and lonely apartment or that thing called reality. We exist in a hospital room bubble, paid for in full by the Devonshire Eagle’s health insurance company, with fringe benefits provided by Jessica, Grace Memorial ace executive assistant, who really does give us anything we ask for.

  Which reminds me.

  “What do you want to eat tonight? Should we send Jessica to Worcester for Indian or to Albany for Chinese?”

  Lisa thinks about it. “It’s
always cold when she drives so far.”

  I reach over for a room service–style menu. I have pleasantly discovered that one of the benefits of staying on the sixteenth floor is that there is a different chef for us VIPs, one who can actually cook.

  “Steak?”

  “Lobster salad for me,” says Lisa.

  “Consider it done,” I say, buzzing Pamela. “But we only have two more days. We should think of something exotic for Jessica to chase down. Like jellied eel confit.”

  Lisa flips the page of Rolling Stone. “I like Jessica. And I don’t see the reason to torture her. It’s not her fault you ended up in the morgue.”

  I don’t share the sentiment. Personally I feel like I’m owed millions, or maybe even billions, for emotional distress alone, but my calls to lawyers have revealed that unless you’re left permanently damaged, like you get a sex change instead of a Botox injection, the courts don’t care much for medical suffering. I’m told I’m lucky to be on the sixteenth floor and to get on with my life.

  I sigh. “You’ve become a lot less fun since I died.”

  Lisa sticks her tongue out at me. It’s a nice tongue.

  Two more days. Forty-eight hours. Two thousand eight hundred and eighty-eight minutes.

  “Lisa…” I start to say, then stop.

  She looks up. The lamp casts a shadow over her face.

  “Two more days until I get out of here. Into the real world and all that.”

  She glances down at a spot on the floor, as if there is something suddenly interesting there.

  “Do you still want to go on a regular-people date?”

  Half smile. “So are you finally asking me out?”

  “I guess you could say that.” The heart monitor is long gone, and now there is only the sound of a nurse walking down the hallway, the clock on the wall ticking. Lisa slowly puts the magazine down on the table, taking her damn time about saying anything, letting me hang.

  Finally she begins, somewhat hesitantly, “I just want to be—”

  “If you don’t,” I interrupt, desperate to avoid hearing the hated word “friends” voiced aloud, “that’s cool too. Not cool I mean, just I’d understand.”

  “Honestly, Dimitri, will you let me finish what I was going to say?” She walks over to my bed, pushes my legs over and settles on the edge. Her sweater is pink and fuzzy. “Are you always this—”

  “Neurotic? Yes.”

  She shakes her head at me as if I’m an impossible case, which I am. A strand of yarn is unraveling from her sleeve, and I tug at it, wrap it around my index finger.

  “I’ll shut up now.”

  “Thank you. What I was trying to say was I just want to be clear. You keep talking about a regular-people date, and I’m not regular people. My life is… complicated.”

  “Complicated is fine; everyone’s life is complicated.”

  “Not to the degree mine is.” She sighs and places her hand in mine, turning it over. A deep, inscrutable look passes over her face. “Sometimes when people find out about this complication, they head in the other direction. Quickly.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Not yet. I will, I promise, but for now I just want to keep things simple. Like they are now. Does that make sense?”

  “Sure, I agree completely.” I haven’t the faintest idea what she’s talking about, but since this is heading outside the dangerous “friends” waters, I’d agree to just about anything. “So Lisa Bennet, would you like to go on an irregular-people date with me?”

  Now she smiles, a real smile. “What would we do on an irregular-people date?”

  “I don’t know. I have a feeling it involves garden gnomes, the New Goshen Bridge, and golf clubs, followed by pizza.”

  “That could be interesting. But people here are very attached to their garden gnomes.”

  “Very true, and I’d never suggest vandalism for a first date. These would be virgin gnomes, freshly bought from Kmart and ready for sacrifice. How about Friday night?”

  “Friday could work.”

  “What time should I pick you up?”

  Again, the shadow of hesitation; she turns her head slightly away, and her hand goes limp in mine.

  “Maybe we could meet somewhere?” she asks in a quiet voice.

  “Meet somewhere,” I say in a rush. “That’s actually what I meant to say. Because picking you up would be—”

  “Complicated.”

  “Now you’re finishing my sentences.”

  She leans over, smelling like lemon, honey, and something woodsy, like sandalwood. Her lips lightly brush against mine. “Thanks, Dimitri. For understanding.”

  But seriously I couldn’t care less what her complication is, because it feels like home when she kisses me. It feels like I finally have a place, a reason, to stay.

  A clatter wakes me up; Nurse Pamela pushes an old woman in a wheelchair down the empty hallway. The woman mutters something unintelligible while she pulls nervously at her lank gray hair; she wears a light yellow bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, not the standard hospital issue. I look over to the purple chair, but Lisa is gone to wherever it is she goes at night; she has been painstakingly ambiguous about where she lives. It’s always over there, or close by, or around the corner. I hate it when she leaves without waking me first.

  The clock says it’s midnight, which means no TV, no calls to the kitchen for a snack. And I’ve discovered that nothing ruins one’s circadian rhythm like being in a hospital where there’s always something squeaking or beeping, where muffled announcements are constantly made over the intercom—“Paging Dr. Harrison; Dr. Harrison, line one.” It’s like trying to sleep at the DMV. So although I should try to go back to sleep, I’m as alert as if I just drank a triple-shot latte.

  Fuck it.

  Then I see Lisa’s laptop on the small table by the door, covering her copy of Rolling Stone and the hospital’s copy of Reader’s Digest.

  I really shouldn’t.

  Sometimes I’m stunned by the quantity of personal information my own measly laptop carries about me. My photos are all digitized, every blog I read is tracked by my RSS feeds, and every website I visit is documented by my browser history. There is a cookie trail of all my interests lodged in some digital sphere, which will one day consolidate the collected data of six billion souls and vomit out—I don’t know—personalized infomercials for deodorant and car wax. I have three hundred and fifty-two virtual friends I’ve never met and couldn’t place in a crowd, kind souls who feign an interest in my snide comments about crappy movies. And this all makes me wonder if the preliminaries of dating could be more efficiently handled if we simply exchanged laptops with one another; we could skip past the mozzarella stick appetizers and awkward moments—“So what was your major in college?” “Any peanut allergies I should be aware of?” It would all be right there, digitized bits and pieces of true biography—no white lies, no need to pretend a liking for cats and Friends reruns.

  My fingers tap against the rail of the hospital bed. This would definitely be a violation of the “it’s complicated” parameter.

  What the hell.

  It’s a relatively simple matter to slide off the bed—cold air whooshes up my hospital gown, peppering my ass with goose bumps—and then grab the laptop and slip back into bed before Nurse Pamela walks back down the hall. If she sees that I’m up it’ll be a good dose of sedatives for sure, so I turn over to the window side, pretending to be asleep, and surreptitiously press the power button.

  Of course Lisa has a Mac. Already we’re at different ends of the universe.

  Her desktop background is a hand-scribbled flyer for some punk band I’ve never heard of, Yuck Fou. So far, so good—I’m glad it’s not something cheesy like puppies.

  Her documents folder contains mostly music files, so I click on over to her photos. They’re blurry cell phone pictures, bands playing in subterranean-style bars and shirtless guys jumping into a mosh pit—that kind of thing. Then there�
��s a series of one lead singer in particular. He wears tight, ripped jeans, his hair is jet black and lank, like he just rolled out of bed and hasn’t showered in, say, a month, and he’s either shooting heroin or has decided to stop eating altogether, because through his white T-shirt I can see the angular bones of his rib cage. There are three snapshots of him slamming his guitar on the stage, two of him looking off into space, gripping the microphone tightly, and one of him crashed out on a sagging plaid couch. Maybe Nurse Pamela should give me some of those sedatives after all.

  A different series of photos, taken outside, show a plain white farmhouse. There’s a young girl with pink rubber boots and thick braids; she’s working on a dilapidated snowman that sports a Mohawk formed from carrots. Then the girl is throwing a snowball at the holder of the cell phone, and shortly after she must have taken over the phone itself, because next is a snapshot of Lisa. She’s wearing my favorite wool hat and mittens, her eyes are sweetly closed, and she’s laughing.

  A spasm of guilt hits me, but it’s not enough to keep me from clicking over to her browser. Lots of band sites bookmarked, but also mental health websites: St. Augustine’s Medical Center; Metro West; Odd Fellows Home; a few websites about schizophrenia; and one, disturbingly, called the Sibling Abuse Survivor’s Network.

  Okay, now I feel like an asshole. I’m about to click out, shut down the whole thing, when I remember that part of my obituary that said there was a video of the events leading up to my death.

  Who wouldn’t want to see that?

  I hop on Devonshire’s sadly outdated website, which is primarily loaded with advertising: “Pascali’s Fine Liquor—Six-Pack Sundays, Buy One Get the Second Half Off”; “Alizbozek & Sons—New Goshen’s Widest Selection of Coffins.” I find Nate’s video masterpiece slotted under a car commercial and hit PLAY.

  Everything has a slightly greenish hue—Nate’s camera did indeed have night vision. And oh sweet Jesus, there’s Maddy bending over to pick up her dropped lighter. I must have been occupied with pouring Lisa her coffee, because I would never, never have forgotten what proves to be a disturbing reveal of Maddy’s butt crack poking up above her white leather studded belt, which failed its purpose of holding up her hot pink pants.