He had a choice: die quietly or dramatically. The traveler always had a sense he’d die in 
Mexico City—but not that he’d die in a blue chair in the waiting room for the Uno bus.
	On the plane his heart had been irregular: continued so in the cab on the way to the 
station. Then it came in—the full force of it not the elephant on the chest he’d heard described, 
but a sense of implosion, collapse, sledge.
	He ran the numbers: the hospital distances, the survival figures, the sum of critical 
minutes, the chaotic constellation of faces in the crowd as he would lie on the tile floor, the 
temperature of the air, the cooler temperature of the tile.
	So he stayed: leaned back, lurched a little in the relative privacy of the Uno waiting room, 
and listened to the sounds inside his death.
	Work going on: chiseling of concrete, sheetrock being sawed, a metal ladder stuttering 
across the floor. His eyes closed. The television above: a woman’s voice, threatening & sexy: 
Solo yo, Antonio. Solo yo. A suitcase being rolled across the tile, the rhythm of its wheels over 
grout-lines. Coins being tossed into a metal tray. Now the sawing of metal—certainly tin—the s
hrill of tin, the cheapness of tin.
	He did not exactly lose consciousness then, but left his dream of sound and saw: desert, 
jungle, rivers, bare feet across bare, clean soil.
	Then the words, aloud: I’ll never see Oaxaca, Hidalgo, Zimbabwe—then, when they lay 
him across the bank of chairs, when they felt for the pulse—grammatical to the last, nor Congo,
 inaudible except to the young station clerk leaning over him whose eyes resembled his 
daughter’s, who took it as one word, perhaps his last name.
	Norcongo, she whispered, now fully his daughter, his head in her right arm, her left hand 
on his chest, saying it again, rolling the r most tenderly, sending those o’s deep as they go, 
Norcongo, this last breath from the mouths of the living.