But the darkness didn't last.
The cold he felt suddenly grew warmer.
The weight of his body felt different from what he had gotten accustomed to over his 48 years. Then came the muffled sound of a woman crying. His breath caught as he tried to call. Instead of a voice, his lungs burned. He tried to speak but couldn't.
Somewhere in the far distance, a voice shouted:
"¡Es un niño! ¡Gracias a Dios!"
And as if swimming through the void, John began pushing toward that unfamiliar sound. It echoed, as if bouncing off the walls of a dark cave. As he swam, his confusion began to melt into hope. Maybe it's not actually over. Maybe I got my second chance after all. A laugh welled up in his chest — or where he thought his chest should be.
"I knew it couldn't be," he thought. "It just couldn't."
With that burst of excitement, he surged forward toward the voice and finally opened his eyes.
But there was no laughter. Just a piercing cry — not from him. From him?
The world hit him all at once. It was bright with overexposed lights pouring in from the ceiling. Creeping up his nostrils was a pungent mix of antiseptic and sweat. The static noise in his ears cleared up to reveal frantic voices echoing in a language he barely understood. Spanish. Spanish?
Wait… is this hell?
He tried to lift his head but couldn't. He tried to call for a doctor, but no voice came out. He tried to curse, but all that he could produce was a helpless, strangled wail.
¡Es un niño! ¡Gracias a Dios!
Hands gripped him, so big they might have belonged to giants, he thought, before some older, drier part of his mind scoffed at the word. Giants. What could I be thinking? The hands swaddled his tiny body, bringing him close to a chest that felt strange. Her voice was warm and close, and her tears fell onto his face like rain.
The woman smiled through tears. "Gabriel… mi angelito…"
Gabriel. Who the hell is that?No — my name is John. Senator John Whitaker.
But no one heard him.
And in that moment, John understood, with a horror sharper than anything death had offered him: he wasn't in hell. He slowly raised his hands to his face, and his breath caught. Staring back at him were not the weathered palms of a grown man, but tiny hands.
I can't speak. I can't move. Why can't I move?
He tried to scream, but the sound that escaped him wasn't words. It was a wail.
His mind raced, but the flood of thought was disjointed. Where am I? Why can't I understand them? Why is my voice so weak?
As he struggled to gather his bearings, fragments of his past life surfaced and dissolved like broken television static. There were memory shards showing polished marble floors of the Senate building, the smooth leather of his chair, the roar of a chamber cheering a vote he'd called correct before he'd even finished reading it.
Then, sharper than the rest, one memory rose whole and refused to dissolve.
A committee room. The particular stale smell of a coffee urn that had been reheated too many times. A young staffer, Priya, though he'd never once used her name to her face, sliding a folder across the table. A funding measure for a shelter along the southern border: medical staff, formula, the unglamorous arithmetic of keeping infants alive through their first weeks in the country.
He remembered barely opening the folder before initialling the box marked NO.
He remembered saying that generosity had to end somewhere, that a nation was a house and a house needed a door.
He remembered Priya's face void of anger. On her face was a tired, practised blankness, the look of someone who'd expected nothing else from him. He remembered the satisfaction he'd felt walking out of that room, certain he'd done the "responsible" thing.
He hadn't thought about that folder in years. He thought about it now, in a hospital that might have been the very kind he'd voted against, and something in his chest, whatever passed for a chest now, twisted.
"No, no. That doesn't belong here," he tried to say, and only a thin, wet sound came out.
The woman, Maria, he would learn, held him tighter, murmuring in the language that stung his ears. He hated the sound of it. He hated it the way a man hates a mirror that shows him something true.
His memories of his past life were still there, sharp in places, muddled in others. They no longer arranged themselves the way they used to.
I am important. I am someone. I make decisions. Powerful decisions.
But here, in this body, decisions were not a thing he was permitted to have. Here, there was only hunger, and cold, and a woman's arms, and none of it cared what he had once been.