RANKED BY BLOOD

He remembered dying.

The first thing that occurred to him wasn't where he was, nor the sky overhead or the hard ground underfoot or the noise of traffic somewhere nearby. Just that. The memory of a knife entering his body below his left ribs and his legs giving out, and the feeling of cold wet concrete coming up to meet him. He recalled the streetlight would dim and flicker. He recalled his thoughts of his sister. He recalled the man walking away and not running and, It was the weirdest part, he didn't even run, he's like, 'Well, that's not worth the urgency of running, I'm just going to walk away.'

He recalled his death and he'd awoken to look at the sky, but it was the wrong color.

Ethan didn't move for a long time.

How long he could not have said. Long enough that he felt the chill of the ground under his feet, and then the noises, cars, far-away voices, a hum of machinery two or three streets away. Long enough that his brain tried to come up with an explanation and finally gave up and rejected it all because none of them worked. He wasn't in the alley. The ground beneath him was level and arid. The part that didn't make sense, that his mind would always go back to, always turn over and set down and pick up again, was that he was breathing.

He wasn't breathing at his death. He knew this to be a fact.

Ethan sat up.

The jolt made him dizzy and he had to place both hands on the ground and wait it out. He was shaking with fear. He looked at them — at his own hands and the knuckles he knew and the scar on his right index finger that he had gotten from a box cutter incident three years ago — and felt something else: it wasn't fear or relief, but it was in the terrible middle ground where the mind exists when it doesn't know what to label what it feels.

He was unmarked on his side.

He slapped his hand on that. At the point where the knife had penetrated, right under the ribs on the left. Nothing. No wound. No blood. Not even a tenderness. He pushed harder, unable to believe, and only his own ribcage and the fast beating of his heart were to be felt.

He made a noise, involuntary and barely audible, like something a person lets out when they can't hold it in anymore when he has to release something the mind has yet to master. He put his hand over his mouth and sat down on the ground where he didn't know and shook.

He shook some while. It was not something of which he was embarrassed. He was dead. He was almost sure that he had been dead and he was sitting on dry clean pavement in a coat that he didn't own, with his heart pounding against his ribs, and no explanation for anything. Shaking appeared the right thing to do. Shaking was the only thing one could do.

As it passed he could see over it, and he looked up.

The street in front of him was known, like a word in a language he didn't know. it was familiar in form, but not in details. It was properly laid out. The spacing of the grid, the density, the specific type of urban noise produced by cities that have reached a stage of development beyond their own planning. However, the buildings were not the right heights. There were different signs. And to the east, above all that the city had ever seen, and to the east where nothing else ever stood before him, tall as an impossible tower that stretches up forever, lit in a twinkling blue-white, the slow rhythm of something breathing.

He looked at it for quite a while.

There were people walking down the sidewalk, and Ethan was watching them, focusing on them like a man who is searching for something familiar to cling onto. They looked normal. They dressed normally. They walked quietly, like an ordinary Monday night, and nobody was watching him but —

He was aware of it slowly. How you know there is something wrong with a room before you can find out what it is. People were slowing. No stopping, no staring, but slowing in a specific manner of people who have received a notification and are focused upon that notification while walking. He observed three people pass through in quick succession who were looking at their wrist with the same look on their faces – something between alert and curious – but kept going.

Their wrists.

Ethan took a first proper look at the closest of people. Man wearing a work jacket passing close by. Ethan could not read what was on his wrist, but there was a thin sheen of white light glowing faintly on his wrist.

He looked at his own wrists.

Nothing. Bare skin.

He glanced at the person who was next. Band. The one after that. Band. The woman unlocking the storefront across the street. Band. The young person carrying the backpack. Band. The man who makes deliveries coming around the corner. Band.

Every single person.

Ethan lowered his sleeve over his bare wrist and knelt very still on the ground, trying to breathe slowly as his mind did what it had tried to avoid since opening its eyes: it accepted that wherever he was it wasn't where he had been. Same city shape. Same sounds. A homelike texture from a hard-lived place for a long time.

Different sky. Different tower. Wristbands on everyone who passed him.

He was dead. He knew that he had to be dead.

He was now here, in a coat he didn't own, with forty-three dollars in the pocket – he found them when his trembling finger went searching, and bare wrists in a world where a bare wrist, apparently, was the sign of something that was not yet good, that he could already feel.

This kid who was across the street was pointing at him. Said something to the woman next to her. The woman glimpsed at him, her eyes on his wrists, and took the child's hand, and they walked faster.

Ethan looked on at them.

He remained on the ground for a few minutes longer. Then two. He was not strong enough to stand up. He was not ready for anything but to sit here and be alive when he shouldn't have been and trying to find the bottom of what he was feeling so that he could put his feet on it. There was too much. Grief at some loss that he had yet to express. The illusion of the knife's presence. He remembered the feeling of concrete being cold under him and no one coming. That his sister's face showed up when it happened over and over, that her face was always her face when she didn't want him to see she was afraid; that her face didn't look at all like his sister's face.

She had died for two years before he did.

He placed the palms of his two hands on his eyes and took deep breaths.

When he took his hands away the street was still there. There still stood the tower. There were those with the glowing wristbands walking past him, as people do, and he knew no reason why. Some of them looked at him on the ground and turned away, a scheme that the city has practiced over the years, avoiding people that have learned that it is more expensive to acknowledge than to ignore.

He was a man sitting on a sidewalk. He didn't have any wristband. Together apparently these two facts told something significant enough for a woman to remove her child from the sight of him.

Ethan put his hand flat on the ground. He pushed himself up to his feet. He stood on the sidewalk of a city he didn't know and with his knees threatening to buckle, and he looked at the tower that was on the east side, the tower that was pulsing slowly blue, and he tried to find something he could use, something he remembered, something he could use in the shaking and the grief and the absolute disorientation of a man who remembered dying.

It was among all the rest, he found it.

He was alive.

He didn't know how. He was unaware of where. He didn't know what the wristbands were or what the tower was or why the sky wasn't the right grey. All he knew was that he was standing up when he should have been in an alley off Pelham Avenue with forty-three dollars and a knife wound and nobody coming.

He lived and he was on his feet, that's all that mattered right now.

He made a decision on a course of action. He started walking.

He wasn't quite sure what he was doing there. That was fine. For twenty eight years, he didn't know where he was headed. Minus this time, he was breathing.