The bathroom light was the loud one. I knew this because I had been standing under it for forty minutes.

In the mirror, my right shoulder was wrong.

Not the way a wound is wrong. A wound has stages. I had cataloged them on a thousand patients. Inflammation, debridement, granulation, contraction, the slow slow rebuilding that took weeks. A bite that had gone clean to bone three days ago should look like a crater. Mine looked like a memory of a crater. The skin was pink, the pink of new tissue, and the pink covered the whole thing, edge to edge, the way no human dermis should have managed in seventy-two hours.

I had taken three photographs of it on my phone. Day one in the rig, day two in this bathroom, day three at sunrise. I had lined them up. The progression was wrong by every textbook I owned.

I touched the skin with two fingers. The skin held. No tenderness. No heat. The fever was not in the wound. The fever was in the rest of me.

The journal was open on the toilet tank. I had bought it Monday morning, before my last shift, because Babcia had used journals for everything, the recipes and the medicines and the way her body felt when the cancer was three months from naming itself. I had thought, walking out of the stationery store, that I was buying it to prove I was nothing like her. I was a paramedic. I was thirty-two. I would never document my own death.

Three days later I had filled four pages.

Day 3. 04:52. Pulse 58, regular. BP 102/64 by cuff. Pupils equal, reactive, sluggish. Skin temp elevated by touch, oral 38.4 C. Bite mark closed. Tissue consistent with one to two months of healing. Capillary refill less than one second. Strength bilateral, normal. Coordination intact. Subjective: tired but not exhausted. Hungry, but food does not interest. Smell, see attached.

The attached page was five entries about smell.

The neighbor across the hall had brewed coffee at five-thirty. I had smelled it through the wall. I had smelled, also, that he was using a different bag than usual, French roast instead of his Saturday brand, and that he had burned the bottom of the kettle. I knew what he had burned the kettle on because I had smelled steel under the coffee. The kettle was on the back left burner.

I had not been in his apartment.

I had not been in his apartment in two years.

I closed the journal. I shut them. I ran the protocol. Inhale four, hold four, exhale six. I had taught it to seven hundred patients in five years. I had not had to use it on myself since the night Babcia stopped breathing in her own bed.

I did the breathing. The pulse went from 58 to 56. That was the wrong direction. Stress should drive the rate up. My body had decided not to participate in stress.

In the mirror, the woman with the closed bite mark on her shoulder watched me back.

I knew what I was thinking and I did not want to write it down. I wrote it down. The pen was already in my hand.

What am I becoming?

I closed the journal on the question. I went to the kitchen and drank water from a mug because I had not done a sink-full of dishes since Tuesday and the glasses were dirty. The water tasted like the pipe.

Then the doorbell rang.

The doorbell never rings in this building. The buzzer in the lobby rings. The doorbell on the apartment door is for delivery people who have already been let in, which never happens at five-fifteen in the morning, and for neighbors who are asking for sugar, which never happens in this neighborhood.

I went to the door. I stood with my hand on the deadbolt for ten seconds. I looked through the peephole.

A man.

Tall, in a dark coat, hands at his sides where I could see them. He was not looking at the peephole. He was looking at the floor by the threshold.

"Mira Ostrowski," he said, through the door, at the floor. His voice was quiet, older than his face by a register I could not place. "I am the man who bit you in the parking lot. You know this. You have not called the police. I would like to come in and explain why."

The peephole gave me only the front of him. I saw a clean jaw. I saw that the skin under his jaw was a temperature my hallway was not. The hallway was cold and his skin was colder.

I had been a paramedic for five years. I had walked into seventeen apartments where the man on the other side of the door had a knife. The training said: do not open. The training said: keep the door between you and the threat, retreat to the bedroom window, dial 911, give the operator a description.

I unlatched the deadbolt.

I told myself I unlatched it because I needed to know. I told myself I unlatched it because the body in the parking lot, the one I had been trying to bring back, had done a thing to me that the training did not have a name for, and the man at the door had been there. He had picked up my radio off the asphalt. He had held it for a long second. He had set it down. He had not run when the second rig arrived.

I had remembered that this morning, in the mirror.

I unlatched the deadbolt.

He did not push. He waited. I opened the door six inches and he kept his hands at his sides and did not move forward. He did not look at the bite mark on my shoulder. He studied me.

"Sit down," he said. "Tell me what your body is doing."

I had been about to tell him to leave. The sentence had been formed. Instead I stepped back from the door.

He came in. He moved like someone in a museum, quietly, taking up only the volume he had to take. He closed the door behind him. He did not lock it. He sat in the chair at the kitchen table where I never sat, the one Babcia had been the last person to use.

I sat across from him. I put both hands on the table because they were starting to shake and I wanted the wood to hold them.

"Pulse," he said.

"Fifty-six."

"Temperature."

"Thirty-eight four."

He nodded. I had given him my own resting numbers. He had not asked for the bite mark. He had not asked for the fever. He had asked for the things I would have told a triage nurse.

"Your hand," he said. "I am going to take your wrist. May I."

It was not a question. It was the way an attending says it to a patient who is past the point of consenting in full sentences. I held my wrist out across the table.

His fingers were cold. Not the cold of the dying or the shocked. A different taxonomy entirely. The cold of a metal bedframe in February, when the steel takes the season into itself and holds it.

He counted in his head. I watched his face. He had grey-blue eyes that stayed level with mine and did not warm into anything either, and I thought, with a precision that did not feel like mine, this is not a man pretending not to be afraid of me; this is a man who is afraid of me and has chosen not to show it.

"Ninety-two," he said. "Up from fifty-six. Triggered."

"By you."

"Yes."

I pulled my hand back. He let it go.

"Who are you," I said.

"Cassian Vrael."

"Who are you to me."

He did not answer right away. He looked at the table. He looked at the journal on the counter where I had left it. He did not ask to read it. He looked back at my face and said:

"The reason you are not dead."

I let that sit. I had expected a name. I had expected a profession. I had expected a long bad story I would not believe. I had not expected that.

"You have a card," I said. "People who do this kind of work always have a card."

"I do not."

"Then how do I find you when I need you."

I had not meant to say when. I had meant to say if. He noticed. He did not call it out.

"I will be back at six tonight," he said. "If you want me to."

"And if I don't."

"Then I will be back at six tomorrow."

He stood. The kitchen chair did not scrape. The man moved through the apartment like the apartment was a sleeping thing he did not want to wake. At the door he stopped. He turned only his head.

"Mira."

It was the first time he had said my name. He had said Mira Ostrowski through the door. That had been a fact. Mira was something else. I did not have a category for what it was.

"Eat something soft today," he said. "Your stomach is going to start refusing food in about thirty hours. I want you to have one good meal in you when it does."

He closed the door behind him.

I sat at the kitchen table with my hands flat on the wood. I listened to him go down the stairs. There was a man with cold fingers on my wrist a minute ago. I knew his footsteps. I knew, for some reason, that he had paused on the third-floor landing.

I went to the journal. I picked up the pen.

Day 3, 05:23. Visitor: Cassian Vrael, M, est. 38, height approx 6'2", build athletic, skin temp anomalously low, pulse not assessed. Identified self as the man who bit me. Did not request medical attention. Did not request entry. Took my pulse with permission. Predicted dietary intolerance within thirty hours. Departed without further contact.

I read what I had written. I had written it the way I would write up a refusal-of-transport. I crossed it out and turned the page.

He told me my body is doing something. He knew the answer before I told him. He has done this before.

Across the wall, my neighbor turned off his coffee maker. I could tell by the click of the switch. The click was at the back of the kitchen, three feet from the burner. I did not have to think about how I knew that. I knew it the way I knew that my own pulse had dropped back to fifty-eight while his back was turned to me at the door.

The journal lay open in front of me. I wrote one more line.

I wrote it in pen because pen does not lie. Pen leaves a record. Pen is what Babcia used when she wrote the note that I had found in her bedside drawer the morning after she died, the one that had said I knew, I have known, I did not want to be a fuss.

I wrote:

What am I becoming?

The neighbor's apartment got quiet. The radiator ticked. The kitchen light at five-thirty was a dim yellow I had stopped seeing years ago, a dim almost-yellow that I had stopped noticing in the seven years I had lived here, but that I noticed now because the wall behind the radiator smelled, very faintly, of mouse.

I had never smelled a mouse in this apartment.

I went and got my phone and ignored four texts from Reza and one missed call from Hanne, and I deleted the alarm I had set for tomorrow's shift because there was not going to be a shift tomorrow. I left my hand on the phone for a long second. The screen went dark. In the black of it I saw my own reflection and the gold light from the bathroom doorway behind me and the long line of the kitchen wall, and behind the wall, on the other side of the building, the soft moving sound of my neighbor's wife rolling over in her sleep.

I had never heard my neighbor's wife.

I shut them. I did the breathing. Inhale four. Hold four. Exhale six.

The pulse went down again.

That was still the wrong direction.