The call comes at 6:43 PM, just after Sybil has pulled out of their laboratory’s parking lot. At 6:46 PM, he is executing a glaringly illegal U-turn and the student’s face has gone blank and alien. They drive. The scientist gives directions, but the worn-down cab of the truck is otherwise silent. Nothing that breaks the creeping tension; the graduate student watches the city move through her window.

We’re not far off, now. We turn onto the hill on which the hospital sits, and you can see a cyclist barreling towards us. Caught through the window like this, the woman with her bike is just another one of Zeno’s still lifes. Caught, she is red faced and wrecked, her black hair in shocking disarray. She isn’t wearing a helmet.

Can you feel it like I can, the way the student has curled in on herself at the sight? Look at her clenched fist, the flare of her nostrils. It’s strange, don’t you think? Our actor can call up personas on demand. Why not now?

Syb parks. At the front desk of the hospital, the scientist is required to provide ID and to sign a visitor’s log. The man signs after her, and they are both issued name tags.

The man’s chest now reads:

Guest: Sybil Tao

Patient: Mika Speyer

Room Number: ICU West, Bed 11

The graduate student puts her badge on her shoulder. From the man at the front desk, they learn that the ICU is on the sixth floor. In the elevator they find a nurse, and she’s kind. When she selects the floor for them, the scientist thanks her with a smile. It’s warm and happy. It’s terrifying.

Watch again, closer, and you will begin to see what has me caught. When the woman smiles, there are seams in its manufacturing. They are small; the expression is almost perfect. But there is something uncanny in it, something lurid that one could be excused for missing, perhaps, from far away.

The nurse gets out at the fourth floor, and so they are alone when they reach the sixth. The graduate student’s face is blank as they walk through the greyed out green and dingy grey of the hospital halls. Every door is shut. Once in a while they pass a bay filled with easy-to-sterilize chairs. Above, televisions play the local news on mute, though no one is there to watch. The ancient screens flicker through footage of the summer fires that decimate the land to the north of the city.

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The students walk the labyrinthine hallways in the digital firelight; time passes. Later, they find the dingy grey and greyed out green of the ICU’s door tucked into a blind corner. There’s a phone on the wall to the left of the doorway, and so Sybil lifts it. He repeats the code that they were given at 6:43 PM to the nurse who answers. The student stands dumbly at his side until they are buzzed into the room and we are all awash in the sounds of the ICU.

A heart beats in four parts, a round of ventricle calling to ventricle by way of resolute valves. The heart should be quiet; it’s a personal account. In this room, though, ailing hearts beat out their rhythms in a monotonous dirge. Together they are predictable, a canon in a dozen parts that swell to occupy the room. But there are soloists, too, carving out their own niches in the drone. Limping and leaping and skittering ahead, they dissonate. The hearts beat and they beat and they beat and they beat; the unsteady tide breaks time into uneven fragments, the scene between each unanticipated knell stark, one crystalline moment to the next. In one: nurses rushing, their faces livid in the creeping darkness. In the next: one nurse turning to look at the entering students with her lips tight.

Below the dirge there is the sound of breathing. The feeble privacy offered by curtains doesn’t block out the hiss and drag of illness, doesn’t fade the queer thumping mechanical breath of someone who is not quite present. The dim bulbs of the ICU spotlight the patients and the nurses behind those curtains and so you can watch as they act out their shadow plays to the staticky waves of the breath and the blood of the hospital.

Bed Number 11 sits with its curtain open to this relentless tide because its occupant can’t hear anything anyways. Mika’s skin is sallow, colored by the bulb but also by the jaundice that has crept under her skin. It’s Mika’s breathing that’s got that mechanical quality; there’s a machine just over her shoulder beeping in synchrony with the disquietingly jerky motions of her chest.

Let’s sit down back here by the window and give the students a moment with their friend. We all know that Mika’s overdosed on some opioid, and that she’s probably going to die. Our student doesn’t yet know how long Mika’s oxygen supply was restricted before she was found, however, or that the opioid was some synthetic thing from the silk road with a structure so twisted that the blood tests couldn’t even pick it up. She doesn’t even really understand why anyone would say that Mika is dying, since her vitals are all in range of reasonable and all that seems wrong is her inability to wake up.

A tableau, as seen from the window seats:

Mika lays spotlit and yellow on top of devastated bedding, her frighteningly bloated arms and legs sticking out from the papery hospital gown. Her legs are strapped into what look like blow up braces. Nothing in Bed Number 11’s alcove is moving except Mika’s chest, that lurching up-down-up-down with no smoothness to it at all. To her left Syb stands framed by the ugly yellow curtain that echoes Mika’s skin, his face pale and unreadable. To her right, the plant scientist, whose lilac hair has been faded to a dull red-brown by the ICU. The grad student has taken Mika’s hand, and with their two hands held together like that you can see the white crescents that the student’s fingernails press into Mika’s swollen flesh.

“You’ll hurt her,” says Syb.

“Oh,” says the graduate student, blank, and she leaves the ICU.

After a moment, Sybil follows her. He finds her in one of those peculiar bays, curled in the chair in the furthest corner with that bloodless gaze fixed on the television screen. The forest fires shine on her face; she doesn’t turn her head when he sits down. He waits.

“Cal will be here soon,” the botanist says to the television. “As a patient.”

Syb says, “Oh.”

“I could stop it,” she says. “I won’t.”

Mika can’t hear anything anyways, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter that we’re all out here with the student instead.