He looked up into the loose, panting drool and caught the dog’s paw before it came down on his face. He and the dog share a grunt of — what? Not despair, but something effusive and powerless like that. Rolling onto his front he pushed his weight into his hands and got up from the ground. It was not a warm or pleasant evening. Few people were about. The dog’s owner was still turning in circles at the other end of the grass, her body curled over her phone. She hadn’t seen him fall, or hadn’t looked. The dog lost interest and trotted away. Around the edge of the park, yellow light was appearing in the windows. A steamy smell like pasta water or boiled potatoes, dinners on stoves. He considered walking further, trying somewhere else, but the thought was already folding itself away, so he headed towards the park’s exit, pacing the ache out of his cold, stiff joints.

He was beginning to doubt himself. The doubt was different to the uneasiness he’d felt at the beginning, which was the unease of unknowing, of mild transgression. Lately it was more of an odd numbness. First numbness, then unease about what the numbness meant.

How had it begun? The first time was real. Waiting for a tram on a blank day, the sky suddenly worming with white dots. He remembered a silvery sweat on his upper lip, a swell and a rushing upwards. Then he was on the ground, and a hand was jabbing at his shoulder blade. Something told him to keep his eyes shut. No, was the feeling. A good, simple no. But then there were two cold fingers on the pulse in his wrist and talk of calling an ambulance, and this unsettled him. He got to his feet, keeping his gaze low. A woman with swollen ankles who had been squatting beside him rose too, a child tugging at her skirt. A man in padded cycling shorts put a granola bar into his hand before backing away, and the small ring of remaining spectators were reabsorbed into the drift and hum of the street. 

Riding the tram after this minor fuss he’d felt strangely conspicuous, as though the episode had marked him, like a stain on a shirt, and would continue to attract attention all the way home. He’d never fainted before, and he wondered if he should text someone, share the milestone. He felt glum and envious, as though something important had happened and he’d missed it. 

The second time, a few weeks later, was almost real. Distracted by a string of notifications from work, he’d left the underground station from a different exit, one he’d never used before, and this set him on an unfamiliar route towards home. He guessed his way onto a side street, passing a wine bar with a terrace where darkly dressed people were smoking and sucking the stones out of big olives. He felt their curiosity move lazily over his body as he went by. A few strides later he realised he’d missed a turning and would have to stop on the spot, turn back. He’d have to choose when and how to enact this realisation, or reenact, since the realisation had already happened and he was still walking. The people on the terrace would watch his pink face turning back towards them, they would search his face for a narrative. 

He waded into a few seconds of dull panic, then let his arms go slack. He sunk his weight into his knees and let knees, hip, shoulder hit the ground with a faltering thud. And then he just lay there, fascinated with himself. As a man from the terrace jogged over, shouting hey, hey, his heart raced and he closed his eyes. 

There was a third time like this, then a fourth, and soon the episodes linked into a sequence. Lulls in the rhythm of the sequence began to swell with expectation. Each fall left him thinking about the next. He wanted to believe that what was happening was involuntary, but in reality it had become something he couldn’t stop. He couldn't stop because he didn’t want to. The anticipation, the doubt, the moment of handing himself over to it. He wasn't sure what he meant by doing what he was doing, only that it felt true. 

So this is what he did. He travelled to suburbs of the city where he was unlikely to be recognised, usually on weekday evenings when the after-work rush was dwindling. He’d find a quiet street or a small square with only a few people around, and then he would collapse. And he would lie very still, exactly as he had fallen, eyes closed or gazing into near space, entirely unresponsive to the people who came to prod at him. After a while he wasn’t daunted by the ambulance anymore. It became part of the routine. The medics would strap him into the van and rattle along beside him, quietly impatient with his steady breathing, the absence of any immediately treatable crisis. Only when they were wheeling him inside the hospital did he begin to answer their questions. No, he hadn’t taken anything; yes, he might have hit his head; no, he didn’t remember what had happened. He tried not to hear his own voice. He would do nothing unless he was told to. The hospital trips always ended in the same way. After a few basic tests, they’d say he could go home. That there was nothing else to do but go home. 

*****

At work he shared a desk with Mike. Their monitors stood back to back, obscuring their faces from each other, but through the gap below he could see Mike’s hand on the mouse, the pockmarked mouse-mat, a can of diet Sprite. He had come to associate the sound of Mike's voice with this view, so the sight of Mike's actual face sometimes felt like looking into a too-bright light. He did not tell Mike about the collapsing, the ambulances, the walking around alone in the suburbs. 

You’d get to own the apartment, said Mike’s voice from behind the monitors. Mike had a habit of thinking up hypothetical dilemmas, pitting two unlikely or impossible scenarios against each other for nothing more than the light sport of debate. This time Mike wanted to know if he’d agree to have a finger cut off in exchange for an apartment.

Do I get to choose the apartment?
No. But it’s in a decent neighbourhood. And you can sell it later if you want. Let’s say you get to choose the finger.

They talked it through for a while, dryly, as if one of his fingers were really at stake. As if, by the end of the afternoon, he’d have lost either a finger or a recently renovated two-room flat with a south-facing balcony. He looked down at his large, flat hands. 

*****

There were variations in the way people responded to his falls: those who’d rush to be at the centre of the spectacle, bristling with excitement as they barked first-aid instructions. There were impatient types who’d slink away as soon as they heard the jolt of the ambulance handbrake. Invariably he was left feeling disappointed, without quite knowing what he’d expected. Mostly people just wanted to set him back into the stream of normality, send him on his way again, like righting an upturned beetle. This, he felt, was missing the point. But what was his point? There was a certain thrill in the sensation of strangers’ hands on his body, but it was the impersonality of this, the lack of intimacy, that was important. It was not about sympathy or attention. It was about the act of collapsing itself. Why ‘act’? He did not want to act. That was the point. He wanted the absence of all that. To refuse all agency, all decision-making. The unmediated simplicity of a body given to gravity. He often pictured a child, a little too old to be carried, feigning sleep at the end of a long car journey so that a parent might carry him to bed. Brow furrowed with the task of dreaming, draped over a giant shoulder. He wanted to be that motionless body. Limp, exempt.

*****

Certain places he longed to collapse, but could not. In the west of the city there were stone cherubs jeering from facades, bare breasted stone mermaids worn down by rain. But those neighborhoods were full of rich old ladies in furs walking small fat dogs. The ladies were both too frail and too vain to come to his aid. He thought often about the high, vaulted ceilings of the portrait museum, the shallow steps approaching the university library, a magnolia tree that in spring people were always stopping to photograph – tilting their phones upwards into its white-pink hysteria, blind to the mash of rotting petals underfoot. There was a street in the town he’d grown up in where the twin yellow globes of a zebra crossing flashed out of sync, had done so forever, night and day, year after year throughout his childhood – an eerie, stumbling, unending rhythm.

*****

He and Mike edited videos for a pet shop's YouTube channel. Not really a pet shop – just insects. A shop specialising in ants. People bought ants to put inside large glass ant farms. Rare and collectible ants. Mostly he and Mike edited short How-To videos and product reviews. This week he was editing a video in which the shop’s expert cleans out a failed ant farm to prepare it for a new colony. The expert uses a small brush to sweep the curled-up ant corpses out of the glass tank. Mike said it makes more sense to think of the colony, rather than the ant itself, as the organism; the individual ants as cells in the organism’s body. Ant behaviours are programmed based on their role in the colony. The individual ant understands the world as a system of processes and exchanges and does what it has to in order to keep the colony alive. It senses a food source and collects it, it senses danger and it attacks. It has no desires, only functions. 

Once, Mike told him about a film he’d seen, about a man who couldn’t move his body without looking at it. If he wanted to move his arm, he had to look at his arm; had to watch and intend every gesture. If someone turned out the lights, Mike said, the man would fall over. Every movement that should appear automatic became puppet-like, like bad acting. A bad actor is one who watches themselves too closely. A good actor is one who embodies their body so totally that there is no thinking, no gap or delay between real and performance. 

Do you ever do CMD-Z in your head? He asked Mike. Like you do something dumb – in real life, and your brain goes ‘CMD-Z’.
And then what happens? said Mike.
Nothing happens, he replied. 

A slab of sunlight pushed suddenly into the office. The windows had blinds programmed to respond to such fluctuations, and gently they whirred into action, rotating gracefully to re-regulate the distribution of light.

*****

He was in an ambulance again, strapped flat on his back. No sirens, no rush, just the gentle easing and surging of the engine, the bobbing of the vehicle’s suspension over potholes. One of the paramedics was watching him closely: a pale oval unmoving in his peripheral vision. He glanced in its direction then quickly away again, but the afterimage of a flat, slack mouth danced inscrutably in his mind for the rest of the journey.  

On arrival he was taken to a teal-curtained cubicle where a woman with a wrist tattoo of a shooting star pulled on a pair of latex gloves and thumbed through his hair to check his scalp. She asked about head trauma, ear infections, if this had happened before. He said no. He was led to another room with a grey bed and a machine sprouting cables with rubbery discs on the end. This had not happened before. She unrolled a strip of paper towels along the length of the bed and told him to undress, then turned away as he did so.

When he climbed up and lay back, wearing nothing but his socks and boxers, she didn’t look at his white belly or the hairless patch on each inner upper thigh where they rubbed together. She was gathering the cables, sticking the discs on his chest, wrists, ankles, applying blobs of clear gel from a tube when they would not stay stuck. He had seen something like this in movies and TV shows, but had never been compelled to understand what it was or how it worked. He hoped it would go on a long time. Her touch was neither careful or careless, it was without meaning. He wondered if the clammy moisture at the small of his back would leave a mark on the paper towel, but knew that if it did, she would not react. 

After all of the disks were stuck and the machine began to click, he felt nothing. The nurse studied the monitor intently, but he couldn’t make out the dim murmurings of its interface. He wondered what other tests they might perform, but didn’t dare ask, in case his tone or curiosity might alter their concern in some way. All he had to be now was a body. So he lay there, being nothing but a body, looking up at the ceiling while the machine did its work. 

Everything is normal, said the nurse, after only a minute or two. Then she turned away to indicate that he should put his clothes back on again, as if it were the motions of dressing or undressing, not the state of undress itself, that carried the greater shame. 

Afterwards he was pointed towards a waiting room where it became unclear if anything else was planned for him or what he should do now. He sat for a while, glancing at the receptionist behind a large perspex screen who caught his eye but did not hold it. He wondered what it would mean for him to collapse here, now, already inside the hospital, the second time in one day. Eventually he bought a packet of Oreos from the vending machine and shuffled out.

*****

Was it something he was doing, or something he gave into? The distinctions and possible contradictions bothered him. He still believed, if conflictedly, in the honesty of the collapse. But the performance – its drama, its challenges – were becoming part of the seduction too. There was the sense of working towards something, locating it, perfecting it. Through repetition his body was acquiring muscle memories, a choreography that his limbs slid into again and again. If the shape of a gesture becomes so familiar as to happen more or less unconsciously, does it appear more or less authentic? 

He could do it at home, in private, but without an audience it wasn’t the same. He would stand in the centre of his small room, feeling the dimensions of his tall, heavy figure, his head almost brushing the dust-caked lampshade that hung from the ceiling. He’d anticipate the thud and shake of his weight hitting the building’s old floorboards, the scowling but otherwise incurious faces of the neighbours below. He would stand there in the centre of the small room and think and wait, but the fall would not happen to him. 

Sometimes he lay down on the bed and committed himself to stillness, starting now, an absolute stillness until someone or something came to force him out of it. But with no one around, an itch or the buzz of his phone was all it took for him to lose conviction. Or else he’d end up dozing off, which didn’t count. Waking up cold, foggy-headed, the sound of his flatmate in the kitchen chopping something, a podcast thundering from her bluetooth speaker. Marie-Camille was the name of his flat-mate. Always the two names together, never just Marie, or Camille. They lived together but they were not friends. They upheld a tacit, mutual disinterest in each other’s lives.

Most nights after work he sat in bed with his laptop watching videos of people fainting, of people with narcolepsy, of stunt actors learning to fall convincingly without injuring themselves. When he went out on his walks he’d often leave these videos playing, the laptop turned up on its side like a birthday card to stop it from overheating on the polyester duvet. Playlists of hundreds of videos, compiled over months, set to shuffle and loop. He’d leave them playing so that he could return home some hours later to find their soft sounds and pale screen-light fumbling on the bed sheets, and could simply climb in beside them, without having to choose what to watch. 

At the heart of his falls was some inarticulable anguish about wanting to collapse – in every sense but the physical-literal – and not being able to, not knowing how. 

*****

Another street, another grey neighbourhood. He is walking, looking for a place that feels right. He glimpses a streak of himself in a large window and stops to peer into the dark space beyond. A wide green linoleum table top, a stack of plywood chairs. Not quite a school, perhaps a community centre. Is that what the place was? Little blush of longing as he thinks of laminated timetables, the smell of photocopier machines, plastic canteen lunch trays. He thinks of the scuffed wooden floors of his old high school. How well he’d known the chill of its brass door knobs, the heavy swing of the fireproof doors. How familiar the sound of his own feet in the carpeted band of corridor that curved, like a padded shell, around the exterior of the assembly hall.

He comes to a small square, then turns away onto one of the streets, goes around a block and comes back again. Other than a locksmith and a florist packing up for the day, it is a quiet, shuttered part of the neighbourhood. The roads are cobbled, but the square is gravelled with a pale, sandy grit. A large stone fountain marks the square’s centre, drained this time of year, with chubby stone animals perched at each of its four corners. Some twigs and leaves inside, pigeon shit. 

He sits on a low wall, decides he’ll wait some minutes. Through a window across the street, the dim shape of two figures embracing turns out to be one person alone, a man crouched on the windowsill, clutching his knees. The man puts out his cigarette slowly, staring fixedly at his own hand as it twists the butt into a saucer of ash. A sound of keys stifled into a pocket: the florist unlocking her bike, cycling off. A couple appears, walking with elbows looped, debating something in hushed tones. He gets up slowly and walks towards them. He looks at the woman’s eyes until they rise to meet his. He falls. 

*****

His focus is on the flatness of the ground beneath him. His cheek, chest, outer right thigh meeting that flatness. The couple talk in low voices. Yes he’s breathing normally. He senses their proximity but can’t see them from his position on the ground. One of them inhales deeply, trying to take in his smell, trying to determine whether he is drunk or homeless, whether he is clean enough to touch. Sirens approach, then fall silent at the bottom of the hill. No traffic. He hears the meaty slam of ambulance doors, the rustle of uniforms. 

Alright then let’s. Oh. Yeah exactly. Thanks, we’ll take it from here. Definitely. Thanks.
Hello again. Remember us? Could you sit up for us please?

Three firm taps on his back, more impatient than concerned. His eyes open to the black tarmac, a boot and a knee. He strains his eyes as far as he can towards the face of the crouching paramedic without moving his head, and lands on a familiar expression: the pale oval, the flat mouth. The other paramedics stand around watching. They wait. He waits. Then slowly he gets to his hands and knees. He feels the glare of the streetlights in the sweaty sheen at his hairline and on his upper lip. His clothes release a creamy scent of stale deodorant as they shift against his skin. Once on his feet he begins to walk away from them. He does his best to walk blankly, invisibly. And they watch him go, without following.

*****

In the felt-clad silence of the Uber, he slackens. Passing headlights sweep his vision. His phone lies on one thigh, plugged into the driver's charging cable, warm with furtive processes. As the car turns a curve, he watches the rosy flash of a distant radio tower miss a beat as it passes behind the silhouette of a church. The driver stares ahead, occasionally recording voice messages in a language he doesn’t understand. On the car’s built-in screen, a pale arrow reaches into a dark grid, and a clock counts down the remaining minutes until home.