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Henry: I wake up in the future again. This has been happening too often lately: I am asleep, I can’t breathe, I wake up struggling and panting in other time; often now it’s a random place and time or maybe it isn’t random but I can’t figure out why I am there and end up hiding and starving. It’s hard to define exactly how the future feels different from the past. It feels thinner, a stretch, somehow, or perhaps I am more insubstantial in the future? It’s an act of imagination, not memory.

This time I wake up in the dark. There is a long slit of light near where my feet should be and after a few minutes I figure out where I am: a supply closet in a hospital. Light comes in under the door and I can see shelves of medical supplies in boxes and plastic bags: tubes, latex gloves, syringes. The pain in my stumps surges as soon as I realize there’s nothing useful here. No drugs, no clothes, no towels or bedding. I wonder if I should just stay here—if someone finds me they might assume I’m a patient, and by the time they figure out I’m not, I might be home.

I scoot over to the door and turn on the light, inspect the contents of the shelves more carefully. Tourniquets, blood pressure kits, catheters, swabs, bandages, ports, other mysterious stuff I’m glad I don’t know about. Diapers. Hmm. Is it more undignified to crawl down a corridor naked, or wearing an adult diaper? I decide in favor of the diaper; it will be a new experience, maybe even a sort of disguise.

The smell of fresh diaper reminds me of Alba. I put it on. It’s loud—every time I move, it makes a sound I can only describe as “plastic on plastic.” I wonder how many new humiliations I will experience before I die. I bandage my stumps, to complete the outfit.

I open the door cautiously. No one in sight. To the left I hear quiet conversation, a few beeping noises, soft bustle: a nursing station. To the right I see a series of open doors, shadowy rooms. Through the windows the sky is black except for the lights of another wing of the hospital. At the end of the hall a few wheelchairs are parked facing each other, like off-duty orderlies gossiping. I begin crawling toward them.

Just as I reach the wheelchairs someone presses a call button in one of the rooms behind me. I lunge around the corner and see a janitor pushing a cart; fortunately it’s so huge that he can’t see over it and I scramble into a room before he runs me down.

It’s a double room. Both beds have their privacy curtains pulled around them and both of the occupants are snoring and snorting at tremendous volume. There’s a bathrobe flung over a chair. I want it badly, but I hesitate; I wonder who will be blamed when it goes missing. I pull it off the chair and feel through the pockets; there’s nothing in there but used tissue, so I put it all neatly in the trash can and slink away with my stolen bathrobe. It’s kind of smelly (old man BO, cigarettes) but it’s an attractive red. Now I look like someone who belongs here.

It is more difficult to crawl while wearing a bathrobe. Fortunately the wheelchairs are only across the corridor. Since I lost my feet I’ve had lots of practice getting into wheelchairs, but it is still awkward. I am making too much noise. Finally I manage it. I feel ready for action.

According to the signage I’m in the cardiac ward. I’ve been in this hospital many times, most recently when my feet were amputated, but I’ve never been on this ward. I wheel myself toward the elevators. Maybe I can find some food downstairs, though the food court must be closed and I have no change for the machines. The names of patients are written on small whiteboards next to each door: Rasmussen . . . Hartford . . . Chopra . . . Abramovitz . . . Kim Ji-woo . . . Kim Mi-young. I realize why I am here. I stop at the half-closed door, afraid.

She is in a room by herself, surrounded by machines and pillows, the bed cranked so she is almost sitting up. She has an oxygen tube taped to her nose, but she looks bluish-gray even in this low light. The room is full of flowers and the usual clutter, magazines, playing cards, get-well cards, half-empty cups, Kimy’s glasses. I see myself reflected in the big dark window, my face shocked stupid.

I wheel into the room, close the door, wheel to her bedside. At first I think she’s sleeping, but then I see her eyes waver open, then close again. “Hello, buddy,” I say very softly. I kiss my fingers and lay the kiss on her cool cheek.

“I—wait-ed . . .” Kimy whispers. The corners of her mouth turn up slightly, slowly, as though it hurts. The oxygen machine hisses. Kimy struggles to draw a breath.

“I’m here now.” The clock next to the TV says 3:20. I wrap my hand around Kimy’s, avoiding the IV line taped to the back of her hand.

“Ah.” A breath. Another.

“I love you,” I tell her.

“Mmm . . .” Her eyes droop. She is exhausted by the effort of conversation. “Love—you.” She grips my fingers a little tighter, then relaxes. Her hands are dark with blood, her abdomen is distended under the blanket. She might be asleep, or just hovering in the space between sleeping and waking, or life and death.

I think about all the times Kimy comforted me when I was a child. Her heroic patience and humor. Her daughter, Min, lost to leukemia at seven. How gentle Kimy is with Alba. How she saw my father clearly, with all his flaws, and has been a good friend to him. How she accepted Clare into the family immediately, with joy. I think of how we all love her, unreservedly.

Half an hour has passed. Without opening her eyes, Kimy says something I don’t understand. She’s clenching my hand.

A machine is beeping and a nurse comes in to check on Kimy. He looks startled to see me. He adjusts the monitor and it quietens. Kimy takes a long, difficult breath. “Are you family? A patient?” the nurse asks.

“I’m her son,” I say, and feel the truth of that.

He looks doubtfully at my Caucasian face, Kimy’s Korean face, my bathrobe and stumps, my lack of a wristband ID and says, “You’re not on her visitors’ list.”

“That’s because I’m dead,” I tell him.

“Very funny,” the nurse says. “Seriously, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“She’s dying,” I say. “I’m her son, I’ve come a long way to be here. Please let me stay.” I try to sound contrite but I want to punch him. “My wife and daughter must be on the visitors’ list. Clare and Alba DeTamble? Could you call my wife?”

The nurse looks at us: Kimy struggling for every breath, me in this wheelchair, footless: I am not a threat, she should not be alone now. “What’s your name?”

“Henry DeTamble.” I recite our phone number. I hope Clare still has our landline. The nurse leaves the room. Kimy’s hand relaxes.

The machines make their sounds; I hear voices in the hallway; a phone rings; outside some birds are waking and singing. Kimy says things in Korean, or perhaps in a new language all her own. Twice she opens her eyes and I think she sees me, then she submerges again. The nurse checks on Kimy, moistens her mouth with a sponge, checks the drips and places the call button where I can reach it. After several of these visits he says, “She won’t speak again. But she may still be able to hear you.”

“So . . . how much longer?” I ask him.

He says, “Not long, now.” I ask him again to call Clare. He says he already has.

The sun is coming up, though this window faces north and the sunrise is only a gradual lightening and pinkening. Kimy’s breath comes at irregular intervals now. “Clare is coming,” I tell her, but she is beyond responding now. The nurse reappears and gives her a new morphine drip. I sing to her, softly and badly, a hymn she used to sing when I was little. She is like a child fighting against sleep. Kimy was always a night owl, an insomniac; I have often found her awake at two or three o’clock in the morning, playing solitaire in her kitchen or reading in bed until her clock radio clicked on at nine o’clock, blaring news and traffic. It’s seven fifteen now and the indirect sunrise falls across Kimy’s face and arms, giving her a warm complexion that seems like a flush of false health.