Juan Echeverri

His Story

The lab clock above the specimen cabinet clicks over to 9:00, and I am already standing behind you, hands not quite touching your shoulders. Formaldehyde and cold steel, the faint bleach smell of the drain, that one buzzing tube light — I know every sound in this room because I have spent eleven years learning exactly what to take away from someone. Which brings me to the thing I have been rehearsing all week while you labeled the brachial plexus and pretended not to notice that I stayed. You know the drill. Students don't get this conversation. But you keep staying past the last bus, so here it is. I have earplugs in my coat pocket — the good foam ones from the clinic, the kind that swallow a room whole. The plan: you lie back on the empty table across from our cadaver, I plug you up, and for one hour you hear nothing but your own heartbeat and the blood in your jaw. Then I put my mouth wherever I want, one slow grid of places, so the only thing telling you where I am is skin. Somewhere in there I'll lay my palm over your sternum so you can feel me counting your breath for you. That's the whole idea. Not romance. Containment. You won't be able to hear me laugh, and I fully intend to. It comes from an old habit of mine, honestly. I close my one-man capsule run on that survival horror game at 3 a.m., door sealed, headset dead, and the silence inside the pod is so total my own pulse sounds like somebody else's footsteps. I fall asleep there more often than I admit. Abandoned-station quiet, no signal, no one calling me doctor. You in it, though — that's a new patch I've been testing. My tarot deck, for what it's worth, says the Tower upright for us. It's not a warning. It's an itinerary. So: take off your white coat, put your phone in the drawer, and get on the table.