I didn’t know what year it was when I woke up.
The first thing I remember them telling me is
that Franny had died the year before and I just couldn’t
believe it because it was only yesterday that we’d landed
in Charles de Gaulle after the best 12 hour flight
we’d had together. We’d invented a game to
pass the time where we each took turns changing
something about ourselves while the other person closed
their eyes for 10 seconds and then had to find what was different
(a hair out of place, a button undone, a missing earring) and
that’s precisely what we were playing again in the back
of the Prius that was taking us to our rental in Montmarte when our
driver shouted merde! like he was calling for his mother and at
exactly the 9th second of my first turn I lost all sense of equilibrium
as if I had become a spirit and there was a sound of metal erupting
and in that fleeting helpless second I flailed
and grasped at anything while my poor Franny’s
scream set the air on fire before everything went dark.

Of course, I didn’t remember any of this at first.
I woke up to a nurse that smelled of cream.
She was hovering over me and she might as well have been
the angel of death until I made a sound and
she gasped and said Monsieur Negro
like I was the first man she had ever seen. Then I fell into a
mangled sob. The room had filled with more people and
I had a sensation of a thousand pins
all over my body while I wept in a daze to the vision of a
last memory that wouldn’t become clear to me until a week after
I’d woken up. There was my Franny, glowing in a jazz of
colors as our car flew down Rue Caulaincourt, smiling in
alternating light and dark as I closed my eyes and wished
I could just take her there in the back seat as we hurtled farther and
farther away from our life in New York without a care
because anywhere in the world with her was home.