Rays pierced my blindness, cutting blackness into swatches of vision, and I

saw that I was apparently suspended midair, for I could look down and see that I had no body. A spongy, circular floor was directly below me. Outside its perimeter, tiles of tessellated turquoise and black marble supported swerves of amber that, after a moment, I saw were chairs and a long table. An adolescent girl sat at the table with a gold stylus in her hand. Her hair was the color of

a violin, slant-cut across her left eye, cropped high over her small right ear, and highlighted with a few tiny firepoints of gemdust.

She touched the stylus to a moonpiece, a silver shadow-smudged disc compact as a watch face, and the clarity of my vision sharpened. I saw the vague line of

her eyebrows, the topaz light in her tight stare, the carats of sweat on her forehead and upper lip, the cilia rimming her nostrils, the pulsebeat in her throat, the faceted lump of her Adam's apple-and realized that she could be a he.

He touched the stylus again. My vision pulled back, and I saw him or her sitting in a swerve of amber, wearing black silk pajamas with red dragon-veins.

I looked away, surveying where I was: Slabs of jasper circled us like dolmen rocks, the spaces between them paned with crystal sheets flecked with mica. I peered upward into a boiling light of dust motes towering into thermals of acid clouds. The warm air smelled of jasmine. "Where am I?"

The hermaphrodite touched the stylus to the moonpiece on the amber table and told me, with lips not in synch with what was spoken: "You are dead."

Blue words squiggled in the air before me:

702-gram heart with a moderately dilated right atrium and a 0.3-0.5-cm hypertrophic right ventricle with focal fibrosis; the terminal episode originated in the left ventricle with its 1.5-cm hypertrophy and 5 x 4-cm anteroseptal and 9 x 7-cm posterolateral infarctions. Cause of death: arrhythmia. Subject: Outis, Charles.