It started with the photo.
Not the photo itself. The photo was ordinary, the hundredth version of a thing he had done a hundred times, a fan outside the venue with a phone and a nervous energy and the specific trembling quality of someone who had rehearsed what they were going to say and forgotten it the moment he turned around. He had smiled. He had put his arm around their shoulders. He had looked at the camera with the expression he had for cameras; not performed exactly, just the version of himself that had learned to exist in front of lenses without flinching.
The photo had been taken.
And then the person had said: can I get one more, just to make sure, the first one might be blurry — and then one more, sorry, my hands were shaking — and then actually, do you think you could sign this — producing a marker from somewhere, a programme, a piece of paper — and then my friend is going to lose their mind, they love you sooooooo much, could I maybe get a video, just ten seconds, just so I can show them —
He had done all of it.
He had stood on the pavement outside the venue for eleven minutes and done all of it with the same expression, the same warmth, the same arm-around-the-shoulder, and when it was finally over and the person had walked away looking at their phone already, already scrolling to find the best one, already composing the caption.
Not tired. Not resentful. Not anything he could name. Just… nothing. A specific blankness, the texture of a room after everyone has left it, the particular silence of a person who has been performing a version of themselves for eleven minutes and has come back to find the original version has gone very quiet.
He walked to the car.
Raul was leaning against it, watching him.
He got in.
He was in bed, not quite asleep, in the specific half-state where the body had gone horizontal but the mind was still doing its nighttime inventory, when it happened. A jolt; not painful, not electric exactly, more like a glitch, a skip, the sensation of a signal briefly interrupted. His whole head, for a fraction of a second, doing something wrong.
He sat up.
Looked at the room. Dark, quiet, the city outside his window doing its usual things. Nothing had happened. Everything was exactly as it had been.
He lay back down.
It happened again twenty minutes later. The same skip, the same fraction-of-a-second wrongness, gone before he could locate it. He lay there in the dark and waited for it to happen a third time and it didn't, and eventually he slept, and in the morning he had almost convinced himself he had imagined it.
The press event was at noon.
He had done a hundred press events. He knew the format; the table, the microphones, the questions that arrived in the same order regardless of who was asking them, the answers he had developed over years into something that was true enough to say and smooth enough not to snag on anything. He was good at press events. He had learned to be.
He sat at the table and the questions came and he answered them and somewhere in the middle of the third answer he had the feeling; not the brain zap, something different, something slower; of watching himself from a slight distance. Of being in the room and also being slightly outside it, observing the Fighter giving answers in the Fighter's voice about the Fighter's life, and the distance between the observer and the observed being wider than it usually was.
He answered the last question. Smiled at the photographer. Thanked the moderator. Walked out.
In the corridor he stopped and pressed his back against the wall and breathed for a moment and the word that arrived, unbidden, was: quiet. He was getting quiet inside. Not calm, quiet, the kind that came from something being absent rather than something being present, the specific silence of subtraction.
He pushed off the wall and kept walking.
She didn't say anything; she was Elena, she understood the value of not saying things before the other person was ready to hear them; but he caught her watching him at dinner, the specific quality of her attention that meant she was measuring something. He caught Raul doing it too, a different quality, more like listening than watching, tuned to a frequency he was trying not to broadcast.
Neither of them said anything.
The sleep got strange on the fourth night.
Not insomnia; he slept, he was tired enough to sleep, the body had not lost that. But the sleep was wrong in texture, thin and unrestful, the kind you woke from feeling like you had been somewhere that took something from you. He woke at three and lay in the dark and the brain zap came again, twice, the skip-glitch-interrupt, and he lay very still and waited for it to pass and it passed.
In the morning he was tired in a way that sleep had not touched.
He stood in the kitchen and opened the cabinet above the glasses and looked at the empty space and then made coffee and sat at the table and thought about nothing deliberately, which was different from thinking about nothing, and the apartment moved around him; Raul in the shower, Elena's door still closed; and he sat there in the early morning quiet and felt the specific weight of something being wrong in a way he still didn't have a name for.
He thought about calling the doctor.
He thought about the voicemails. The unanswered text.
He drank his coffee.
Outside, Chicago decided it was morning.