army contractor, had been plagued by asthma for all of his twenty-one years. After living his life as a drowning man, his final breath, nineteen seconds after the car bomb detonated, entered him effortlessly, the easiest inhalation of his life, through the metal trachea jutting from his chest, and into his collapsed lung.
But Sonja only knew him as a corpse. The handful of amphetamines that had propelled her through a sleepless night lingered in her veins. She wheeled him into the trauma ward on a hospital bed, and sat beside him as moths fluttered overhead. His head lolled to the side and his eyelids snapped open. She began speaking with the corpse—who was, in all respects, a wonderful listener—and became so engrossed in the hallucination she lost track of the real world behind her where Akhmed’s footsteps sounded in the corridor.
“Honor the dead?” Sonja was saying, her face level with that of the corpse. Akhmed watched from the doorway. “Yes, but only if the dead are honorable. No, of course I’m not casting aspersions. It’s okay if you feel rotten. You just died. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Now, I must ask if you can see my sister down there. Yes, I know it’s crowded, but please have a look. I can wait. And while you’re at it, would you save me a chair? Oh, I should have known it would be standing room only.” Akhmed couldn’t see her face, but her exhausted voice was enough to make him ache. “You say you’ve had trouble breathing?” she said, speaking into the tailpipe as if into a microphone. “It appears you have a bronchial growth.” When she took the man’s face in her hands, Akhmed stepped into the room to save her from whatever was happening inside her head. “There are no characteristics to distinguish the cranium of a cannibal from that of an ordinary man,” she told the corpse. “But I can tell we would have had a grand time, you and I.”
Two hands, on her shoulders, pulled her gently from the corpse before it could answer, before it could tell her if Natasha was down there with him.
“Not you, too,” Akhmed said, wearily. His skin was a degree or two warmer than the corpse’s. His navy pes, a size too small, still roosted on the back of his head. “Someone here has to stay sane.”
The big oaf led her to the office that was her bedroom. He was like a pool of water she’d fallen into; she hit, hit, hit and he was still there, around her. She’d been awake forever. The flap of moths was overwhelming. In the office, he pushed her into the overstuffed executive chair. “You need to rest,” Akhmed said, in a tone of authority obviously an imitation of her own.
“And who do you think you are to order me around?” she asked. Already she missed the corpse. He was a much better conversationalist.
“I think I’m someone who slept last night.” He scanned the bookcase, selected the thickest book from the bottom shelf, and dropped it on the desk. “A medical dictionary. If you won’t read Tolstoy, read this. It will put you to sleep in no time.”
When the door closed behind him, she scrutinized the dictionary, wary of subterfuge. She hadn’t opened the book in years. A surgeon of her skill had no need. Slowly, fearing further hallucinations hid between the covers, she opened the book. It was just as dull as she remembered.
But she was already in, and the crowded little script calmed her. The definitions had the stately reassurance of orthodoxy, reminding her of the prewar years, when she had relied on the reference book to complete her weekly assignments, when she had sat at her desk, her ears plugged with cotton balls, as that awful thudding Natasha called music had pounded from the next room, when she still believed the meaning of a thing was limited to a few tersely worded clauses, but nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all other things to fulfill its own.
Her fingers shadowed the thin pages and the words appeared written on her skin: the average weight of a hand, interpretations of a knuckle. A shawl of post-high drowsiness wrapped itself around her. She hated to admit it, but Akhmed had been right. Then, halfway through the book, at the bottom of the 1, 322nd page,