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together in a coordinated way.
    The water couldn’t be that deep—I only needed to swim a few feet. Or stand. Maybe I only needed to stand. If I could figure out which way was up. I wasn’t cold any more, just very, very stiff, as if I were wrapped in a thick layer of gauze.
    It occurred to me that I’d just been talking about Kayleigh drowning. I didn’t want to drown. I sputtered in fear. Bubbles burst out of my mouth, trailed across my face.
    Follow the bubbles. Where had I read that? Was it in a movie? If you don’t know which way is up when you’re underwater, follow
the bubbles, because they’re going up, they’re escaping the cold, black water into blessed air. I felt the bottom pressing my elbow. I tried to reach out and push off, but I didn’t move far.
    There was a terrific humming in my ears, like electricity. Electricity always reminded me of Lorena. Rivers and electricity. Canoes. Lorena hadn’t drowned, though; she’d been on the edge of the water.
    Images flashed in my head, incredibly vivid. Geometrical figures flying past, like futuristic cities, each shape glowing colorfully, creating a kaleidoscope that spun and twisted around me. Outside sensations—the press of water, the sound of my body struggling not to breathe, then, finally, giving in and inhaling—receded. Then my thoughts receded too.

CHAPTER 2
    I snapped awake.
    The TV was on.
    â€œThis is not good. This is not good,” a woman said. She was crying.
    I thought it was the woman I’d swerved to avoid in the road, that she had pulled me out of the water and for some reason taken me to her house. But I was in the same seat as the woman, like she was sitting in my lap, only she wasn’t, because she wasn’t blocking my view of the TV. I tried to look around, but couldn’t.
    I leaned forward and retrieved a cigarette from a pack of Camels sitting on the coffee table. Only I didn’t. It was as if someone else was moving me. I didn’t smoke. I never smoked.
    â€œOh, Christ,” the woman moaned. I looked at my hands as I lit the cigarette with a red plastic lighter, only again, I didn’t mean to look at my hands—my eyes just went there. They weren’t even my hands—they were a woman’s hands, slim and pale, with rings on three fingers. They were trembling. The cigarette came to my mouth and my lips wrapped around it. Not my lips, this woman’s lips. I was
watching from behind her eyes. She didn’t seem to know I was there.
    I felt her heart pounding, and that at least felt right, because I was terrified. Her heart was pounding for her own reasons, though, not mine.
    We looked toward the TV. A reporter wearing a medical mask stood in front of a hospital, its windows dancing with reflected red lights from emergency vehicles. Behind the reporter people raced around, all of them wearing masks.
    The supporting title at the bottom of the screen read: Anthrax Attack in Atlanta.
    The reporter was speaking in a breathless voice. “Peter, Emergency personnel are scrambling to find some way to handle the crush of victims in what is now being described as a terrorist attack that may have originated in the MARTA subway system.”
    I thought of Annie, hoped that somehow, against all odds, she was all right.
    I stood, or the woman stood, and went into the kitchen. We grabbed a bottle of red wine by the neck, and, as we turned toward a drawer, I caught a glimpse of the woman reflected in the microwave. It was Lyndsay, my date.
    We took a long swig right from the bottle, set it down on the coffee table, then picked up a phone, punched a number, got an “all circuits are busy” recording.
    â€œShit!” We threw the phone down.
    I tried to make sense of what was happening to me. This must be a hallucination. I was dying, and for some reason my brain was creating this vivid, pointless hallucination of what Lyndsay might be doing at this