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Be still, sir-" Her head turned away. "Anyone get his name?"

From across the room: "Lewis Griffin. "

"Be still, Mr. Griffin. Please. Work with us here. We know the pain's bad. "

I formed a slurry of words that failed to make it from mind to tongue, then tried again, something simpler: "Yes. " When I was a kid we'd practice doo-wop songs in the tile bathroom at school. That's what my voice sounded like.

"I can give you something to help. " She spoke across me, someone at the other side of the gurney. Gobbledy, gobbledy, fiftymilligobbles.

"There. Should start easing off pretty quickly… Better?"

"Mmm. " Was it? My voice feathery now, floating. Not that the pain had gone away or diminished, but I didn't care anymore. I turned my head. Sideways room the size of a dancehall. Glare everywhere. Someone on the next stretcher was dying with great ceremony and clamor, half a dozen staff in attendance. I saw tears running down one nurse's face. She looked to be in her early twenties.

" You've been shot, Mr. Griffin. We can't be sure just how serious it is, not yet. Bear with us. Can you feel this?"

Something ran up the sole of my right foot, then the left.

"Yes. "

"And this?"

Pinpricks on both hands. First one, a pause, then two, like Morse. A tattoo, drummers would call it. Tattoo needles.

"Mr. Griffin?"

"Mmm. "

"I asked could you feel that. "

"Yes ma'am. " But I felt a tug towards something else, something other-body and mind borne on separate tides, about to wash up on separate shores.

"Super. Okay, Jody, let's get blood work. ABG, SMAC, type and crossmatch from the way it's looking. X-ray's on the way, right?"

"So they tell us. "

Meanwhile connections between myself and the world were faltering, as though tiny men with hatchets hacked away at cables linking us, cables that carried information, images, energy, power. The world, what I could see of it, had contracted to a round tunnel, through which I sighted. On the rim, just out of sight, images sparked and fell away into darkness. Beautiful in the way only lost things can be. Then darkness closed its hand.

"Music. "

"What?"

She leaned close.

"Music. There, behind all the rest" Like the sound of your body coming up around you deep in the night, creaking floorboards, snap and buzz of current within walls, this singing in wires a house, a body, requires.

Nietzsche said that without music life would be a mistake. Danny Barker breathed it in and out like air. Or Buddy Bolden: carried through slaughter to cut hair at the state hospital, remembering all his life how once he'd banged the bell of his horn on the floor and got the whole town's attention. Walter Pater.

"He's hearing the Muzak overhead," someone said.

What all art aspires to, the condition of.

'That's an old Lonnie Johnson tune," I told them.

"I can't see," I said.

Suddenly she was close again and I smelled her breath, tatters of perfume and sweat, suggestion of menstrual blood, as she leaned above me.