4. Dante
DANTE
A wet drop splatters against my cheek, and my eyes fly open. Above me is only darkness, necklaced in fog. I lift a hand instinctively. Another drop follows and hits my knuckles before gliding down and slipping beneath my watch. It’s cold like sleet, but viscous, slower than water should be.
A shiver courses down my spine, something deep and primal I can’t quite suppress. Then logic reasserts itself. I find myself intact, dressed, and alone, so I shift my attention to the surrounding world.
Manhattan is dark. It’s as if a mythological creature has arrived, sucking away light and leaving cool blue and navy shadows in its wake.
Buildings I should know by name and market value stand as hollow silhouettes, their edges bleeding into the fog.
And yet they seem unfamiliar, terrifyingly so.
The city is quiet as well. Not another soul scurries along the sidewalks, no lit windows pierce the gloom, no bell ringers call out for donations.
The perpetual symphony of horns, voices, and mechanical life—the background score of New York I'd long since learned to tune out—has vanished.
The city has been placed in a box, muffled, lightless. And me with it.
I take a step forward. My shoes should click against the pavement. Italian leather slapping against concrete is a sound I've heard ten thousand times. Instead, there’s nothing. The impact registers through my body, but no sound follows.
I stop, staring down at my feet. Take another deliberate step. Then another. Each one lands in perfect silence, the sound swallowed into nothing.
The absence unsettles me in a way I cannot quantify. I stumble slightly, catching myself with an ungainly half-step that would normally produce a sharp scuff against the sidewalk. Still nothing.
My breath comes faster—an inefficient response I cannot seem to control. This isn’t how sound works. This isn’t how physics operates.
Rules, it seems, have been rescinded without notice.
"I've found that gravity seldom shows mercy."
The stranger’s voice hits me wrong. I recognize it, but I shouldn't. I'm not a man who loses track of details, yet the sequence of events leading here fragments when I try to grasp it. I walked home from the office. There was the elevator issue, then Callahan, I followed him outside and...
The rest scatters. I remember falling, but not how I got back up. I remember headlights, but I'm standing here intact.
This kind of informational gap is unacceptable. I don't operate in uncertainty.
"Ah, I see I've registered for you."
A man appears where there'd been only fog. There’s nothing remarkable about him, certainly not by Manhattan standards. Middle-aged, wearing a cashmere sweater and scarf, with one notable feature. A head of tousled golden curls. He smiles, producing dimples in both cheeks.
His look is casual, but too precise to be accidental, the kind of studied perfection that costs more than it should.
He has the face of a model just past his prime, softened by indulgence and money, with an air of someone who’s never had to produce anything of actual value.
The type who haunts charity galas, hawking virtue as if it were a luxury good.
"Registered?" I finally speak, surprised at how my voice emerges crisp and clear. My throat aches like I haven't used it in years. I reach up, pressing fingers to my neck, expecting to find some injury. The skin is smooth and undamaged.
The man nods toward the empty street. "Slipped on the ice?"
"There isn't any ice here." The words escape before my memory catches up. My foot hitting sleet. The sudden tilt of the world. Headlights cutting through darkness.
I take a step back.
The man's brow furrows, adding years that his initial appearance concealed. He could be thirty or fifty, but his eyes carry a weight that suggests decades of accumulated knowledge.
"Traumatic endings make the transition more difficult," he says softly. Everything about him reads soft—clothing, voice, demeanor. Cashmere given human form. And I’ve never had patience for softness.
"If you'll excuse me, I'm running late."
I push past him, despite having the entire sidewalk at my disposal. My feet move forward soundlessly, in a way that makes my spine tighten.
"For what?" the man whispers.
I stop, turn back to find him standing beneath a streetlight's glow. Snow drifts around him, collecting in his hair and on his cheeks. He doesn't brush it away.
"Pardon me?"
"What are you late for?"
"That's none of your—"
"You don't have to tell me. But I'm curious if you know yourself."
My mouth opens with a sharp retort, then closes. The words I want, words filled with deflection or sarcasm, slip through my grasp. I press my tongue to my teeth, buying time. The silence grows heavier. I don't know the answer.
Where am I going? Is this morning or evening?
Was I heading to work? Home? I'm not dressed for a run.
Whatever task I'd set myself, I can't recall it.
I slide my hands into my pockets, seeking my phone.
Nothing. Just perfectly tailored silk and empty air.
Air so still it feels like the entire city is holding its breath.
The man has remained in his place, haloed in light, the only animate thing in this frozen tableau. But there's something in his expression, a decisiveness I recognize from boardrooms and negotiations. He knows something, and he's waiting for me to catch up.
"Where are we?" The words come out louder than intended, echoing against the silence.
He chuckles, a self-conscious sound, and shrugs. There's something deliberately unhurried about him when I most need efficiency.
"That's a more complicated question than you might assume."
Heat flares in my stomach. I stride back toward him, closing the distance until I can examine his eyes. Hazel. Multifaceted, like they're hiding layers of information.
"I don't recognize this street," I say, using a tone that ends discussions. "What part of the city is this?"
The man looks up at the falling snow that glows in the streetlight. "By chance, have you heard of Buddhism?"
"What?" I scoff. Religious lunatic. That explains everything.
I must have hit my head when I fell. I need to figure out where I am and get home.
Since he's literally the only person on this street and my phone is conspicuously absent, I’ll have to tolerate his ramblings to see if he can help me navigate to a locale more familiar. "Of course I have."
He huffs a soft laugh and looks out at the city's alien skyline. “But of course. You're from the city. Educated." Another chuckle, a shake of his head. “A friend once told me the Buddha said wrong questions don’t lead to liberation.”
I don't know why I'm entertaining this except I genuinely can't remember where I am, and anxiety burns steadily warmer in my gut. I have gaps where memories should be. I was walking home from work—no, I was leaving my building. I slipped. Headlights approached and—
"What do Buddhist texts have to do with anything?"
He smiles again. He doles them out like pennies, casual and endless, the pastime of a man with no real work to anchor him. An influencer, maybe, manufacturing charm for a living. What a waste of a life.
"You asked what part of the city we're in. But that's not the most helpful question." He delivers this like I'm supposed to extract meaning from his cryptic nonsense.
"What is the most important question, then?"
"Where are you? That is the question to ask.”
"I'm in New York City."
"Are you?" The snow around him has stopped mid-fall, suspended in front of his raised brow—a held breath, tiny spots of light in a world swallowed by darkness.
I stare at the frozen flakes, my breath catching. Snow doesn’t pause in mid-air. Physics doesn’t take coffee breaks. Yet there they hang, dozens of crystalline fragments defying gravity with the casual indifference of a magic trick I didn’t ask to witness.
The man follows my gaze and smiles as though he watches natural laws violate themselves every morning. As if cities regularly suspend their weather patterns for dramatic effect.
I tear my gaze away from the still snow, focusing instead on his face, on something concrete, measurable. I can handle a conversation with a delusional street philosopher. I cannot handle a world where fundamental laws have been rescinded without notice.
"Fine then.” I straighten my shoulders, adjusting my coat with deliberate precision. If I maintain proper posture, proper diction, perhaps logic will follow. “Where am I?”
His eyes hold a glimmer that could be humor if humor had teeth. "You prefer simply stated facts, yes?"
"Yes. Ornate speech wastes time. And time is the most valuable resource." The certainty of my position wavers, though. There's something fundamentally wrong about this entire scenario. Something that makes my skin crawl.
The man's eyes catch the light, honey-gold from certain angles, holding depths like ancient tree rings, concentric circles of witnessed lifetimes.
My watch grows heavy on my wrist. Too heavy.
A faint ringing builds in my ears, a climbing whine that carries the promise of something terrible about to fall, as if the world itself is holding its breath for impact.
“Very well, then. You're dead."
The words strike like a verdict, final and immovable.
I open my mouth to argue, but nothing comes out. The hands of my watch face glint in the dim light. Locked at 8:03, no matter how many times I’ve tapped the glass. My pulse should hammer, demanding proof of life, but when I press two fingers to my throat, I feel nothing.
No. Impossible.
I’m standing. I’m breathing. My coat is on my shoulders, my shoes on my feet. These are facts. I can manage facts.
But through the gaps in my mind, something flickers. Headlights—too bright, too fast—splintering the sleet. The sickening tilt of the pavement. The weightless moment when my body was no longer mine. A horn blaring. Impact.
The memory shoves through me with the blunt force of a train, and my chest seizes, the impact happening again, real as the collision itself. My thoughts fracture into useless shards. Watch is frozen. Sound is gone. Snow is hanging mid-air. Physics doesn’t stop. Time doesn’t stop.
Yet it has.
My breath shortens. In. Out. Too shallow. Too fast. Logic is a slipping rope, every argument sliding out of my grasp. I drag my hand through my hair, tugging hard, trying to force myself awake, back into order, back into anything that makes sense.
But the watch still reads 8:03. And those headlights burn through my memory with the intensity of overloaded circuits, shorting out every rational process I've spent decades perfecting.