Seven Minutes
Naru
There was no up in the place she came from. There was no down, no near or far, only the pressure, and the pressure was everything. It pressed from all sides at once and had been pressing for so long that the word long had worn away to nothing. It pressed the way the deep sea presses on a thing that sinks, except that the sinking never ended and there was no floor to strike.
And then there was a crack.
She did not see it. She had not had eyes in an age. She felt it the way a drowning thing feels the first thread of cold current from somewhere above, and she went toward it with everything she had left, which was hate. Hate was the only thing the pressure had not been able to crush. It had crushed her name down to a single sound. It had crushed the war to a handful of burning images that repeated and repeated. It had crushed the faces of those who had fallen beside her until she could not tell them apart. Hate it had polished instead, the way water polishes stone, until it was smooth and hard and perfectly round.
She came up through the crack into the world like something breaching.
The world was loud. Not with sound. She had no ears yet either. It was loud with want. Every little flicker of life in it was wanting something, and all of it poured into her at once: hunger and loneliness and envy and lust, millions of small hot currents pulling in every direction, a whole ocean of wanting, and she had been made once to swim in exactly that. She remembered this much. She had been an angel of the deep. She had moved through the longing of the first people like light through water and shown them what they could become.
They had turned away. They had let Him throw her down.
She hated every flicker in this ocean, and she was so hungry for them she could have screamed, if she had a throat.
Calvin
The call came in at 02:13, and Deb read it off the screen while Calvin pulled out of the station lot: female, late twenties or early thirties, unresponsive, possible overdose, hotel on Harlow Street, caller hysterical.
"Hotel," Deb said. "Party, then."
"Probably."
It was a Thursday. It was always a party on a Thursday at the Marlowe. He had been there six times in the past year and knew the service entrance, the elevator that stuck on the ninth floor, and the night manager who always met them in the lobby with his hands pressed together like he was praying. Tonight the night manager was already outside under the awning, and he did not wait for them to get the stretcher out before he started talking.
"Twelfth floor, the corner suite. It's her, it's the singer. Please be quick. Please be discreet."
Calvin did not know who "her" was until they were in the elevator and Deb held up her phone. The video on the screen was blurred where it mattered, and the headline above it had four words in it that Calvin did not want to read. The name under it was Morgana Gray. He knew the name. Most people did, one way or the other.
The elevator stopped on nine, the way it always did, and then shuddered and went on.
The suite was full of people who did not want to be there anymore. They stood against the walls with drinks going warm in their hands. Someone was crying. A man in a velvet jacket was talking fast into his phone, low, about lawyers. Nobody was in the bathroom with her. They had all come to look and then backed out again, and the door stood half open, the light inside too bright and too white.
She was on the floor between the tub and the toilet, on her side, and she was the wrong colour.
Calvin knelt. Deb was already opening the bag. He put two fingers to the side of the woman's throat and held them there and counted and felt nothing. Her lips were blue under the dark lipstick. Her eyes were half open and fixed on the grout between two tiles.
"No pulse," he said. "Starting compressions."
He rolled her onto her back and put the heel of his hand on her sternum and began.
Naru
She found the woman by the way she was leaving.
In all that ocean of wanting, one current was growing weaker, thinning out, the way the last warmth goes out of a body of water when the sun is gone. It came from a small white room high up in a tower of stone and glass, and it was the only thing in the world that did not pull at her. It was letting go. Naru went to it the way sharks go to a slowing heartbeat.
The flicker lay on a cold floor, curled around itself. It still wanted something, faintly: to have been seen as more than the thing they had all decided it was. It was a small wish, a human wish, and it was going out.
A second flicker knelt over the first and was hammering at it.
Naru could not see bodies yet, only the want inside them, and his want was so plain she almost laughed. He wanted to matter to someone. He wanted it so badly and for so long that it had worn a groove in him, like a riverbed. It was the kind of wanting that makes the loneliest ones easy to catch, and on another night, in another age, she would have caught him for the pleasure of it and dragged him down and let him feel the whole cold weight of the deep on his chest until his wanting stopped.
But he was in her way.
Every time his hands came down, the thinning flicker on the floor jolted, and held on a little longer. Every time he pushed his own breath into it, it steadied. Naru pressed close, closer than she could ever have come to anything alive in the world before the Fall, and waited, and loathed him for every second he bought the dying thing. She could feel the gap opening in the woman, the place where the soul was loosening its grip. It was nearly wide enough. It was nearly empty.
Let go, she told it. She did not know whether it could hear her. Let go, little thing. Nobody is waiting for you. Look at them standing outside the door. None of them will cry for you tomorrow.
The man hammered on.
Calvin
Two minutes. Deb had the bag-valve mask on her and squeezed on his count, two breaths, and he went back to the chest.
Three minutes. The naloxone went in. Nothing.
He could feel her ribs under his hands. He had felt ribs crack before, and hers did at the third minute, a soft wet give under the heel of his palm that he felt in his own stomach. He kept going. You kept going. That was the whole of it.
Four minutes. The pads went on. The machine talked in its calm woman's voice and told everyone to stand clear, and they stood clear, and her body jumped and settled and nothing changed on the screen.
"Resuming compressions," Calvin said.
Someone in the doorway said, "Oh my God," and Deb told them to get out without looking round.
Five minutes. His arms had begun to burn. His knees ached on the tile. There was a smell in the bathroom of sweat and vomit and some sweet perfume that had been poured over everything like syrup, and underneath that, something colder. He noticed it the way you notice a draught. The bathroom had no window. The air conditioning was off. It was cold in there anyway, cold enough that the sweat on the back of his neck turned chill, and he had the sudden childish feeling that someone was standing very close behind him, bent over his shoulder, watching his hands.
He did not look round. He counted.
Six minutes. He looked at Deb over the woman's body, and Deb looked back, and neither of them said it. He would give it one more round. One more, and then he would call it, and write the time down, and go out into that room full of people with warm drinks and tell them.
Naru
The soul let go.
It did not tear, the way she had expected. It loosened, all at once, the way a hand opens in sleep. For a moment the small white room held two bodies' worth of wanting and one empty space where a third had been, and the space was the shape of a woman, and it was still warm.
Naru went in.
Calvin
Under his hands, the heart kicked.
He felt it before he saw it on the monitor. He stopped so fast Deb nearly lost the mask, and he put two fingers to the woman's neck, and there it was, fast and hard and strong, much too strong, like something beating on a door from the other side.
"Pulse," he said. "I've got a pulse."
She dragged in a breath. It was not the thin, wet, rattling breath of someone coming back from an overdose. It was a huge breath, a breath that bowed her back off the tiles, the way a swimmer breathes breaking the surface after far too long under the water.
Her eyes opened.
Naru
Light.
Then everything else, all at once, falling on her like a building.
Weight. She had weight. She had not had weight since before the stars were hung. It pressed her down onto something hard and cold, and the hardness pressed back, and every place it touched was a new, separate, screaming thing. A back. Shoulder blades. The flat of a skull on tile. A pain in the chest so bright it was like a star lit inside her ribs, and a taste in the mouth, sour, burning, and a man's hands pulling away from her sternum.
And memories. They came pouring in through every crack the soul had left, and they were not hers.
A kitchen with a yellow table and a mother who smoked at the window. Seventeen and leaving on a bus. A hotel room much like this one and the red light of a camera and a man saying just be yourself, sweetheart, they'll love you. Money in an envelope. Money in a bank. Name after name after name in a comment section. A microphone in her hand for the first time and the terrifying, perfect silence of a crowd holding its breath. The night the old films found the new audience and the phone would not stop buzzing on the dresser. A bathroom. A small glass tube. Just enough to stop feeling it. Just for tonight.
A lifetime, twenty-nine years of it, cheap and short and bright as a match.
It filled her. It stuffed itself into every place where the deep had been, pushed the pressure back and back until the pressure was only a memory of pressure, and the hate went with it. The hate did not vanish. She felt it sink away beneath the woman's life like a stone dropped into a well, down and down, until she could only barely hear it hitting the bottom. The vastness went with it. She had been an ocean a moment ago. Now she was the size of a woman on a bathroom floor, and she could hear her own name only as a word, a small one, like a coin turned over in a pocket: Naru.
For better or worse, she was small again.
The first thing she saw with human eyes was a man's face above her. Thin, pale with shock, sweat running from his hairline, lips parted. He was looking at her the way no one in all those memories had ever looked at the woman she now was. There was nothing in it that wanted her body. It was pure astonishment that she was still here.
She knew his wanting. She had felt it a minute ago, from the other side of the world. It was the same groove, worn just as deep. And now, looking at him through Morgana's eyes, for the first time in an age it did not make her want to drown him.
It made her want to say thank you. The thought was so human, and so strange, that she nearly laughed, and her cracked ribs made her gasp instead.
Calvin
Her eyes were blue.
That was his first clear thought, and he would remember later that it came before any of the other thoughts he should have had. Pupils. Responsiveness. Airway. Before any of that, the thought was: her eyes are blue. A clear, pale aquamarine, like the water in a swimming pool with the lights on at night, and something was moving at the bottom of them, very far down.
She looked at him. Directly at him. Not the unfocused, frightened look of a patient waking up with a tube in their arm and strangers on top of them, the one he had seen a thousand times. She looked at him as if she already knew who he was.
Then her face crumpled with pain, and she gasped, and was only a patient again.
"Ma'am," he said, "you're at the Marlowe. You're okay. You had an overdose. We're going to take you to the hospital. Can you tell me your name?"
Her lips moved. Her voice was hoarse, scraped raw by the tube and the vomit.
"You kept going," she said.
He didn't know what to say to that. Deb said her pressure was coming up, and asked for the collar, and the room came back: the machine beeping, the man in the velvet jacket in the doorway saying is she alive, is she alive, oh thank Christ, the crying woman crying louder. He got the collar on. He got her onto the board. His hands were shaking, which they had not done on a call in years, and he told himself it was the adrenaline.
It was 02:31 when they wheeled her out of the suite. The corridor was full of phones.
He did not sleep when he got home. He sat on the edge of the bed in his uniform trousers with the cat pressing its head into his hand and the phone lit up in the other, and searched her name, and scrolled.
He scrolled past the video with the blur in it. Past the headlines and the comments. Past the concert photos, all smoke and purple light, and the stills from the old films he didn't open. He went back further. Interviews. A photoshoot for a magazine, four years ago. A clip from a stream where she was laughing at something off-camera, her hair falling over one side of her face.
In every one of them, when she looked into the lens, her eyes were brown.
He sat there until the window turned grey, and then the cat got bored and left, and he was still sitting there, the phone gone dark in his hand, thinking about the cold in that bathroom, and the feeling of someone standing very close behind him, watching.