Prince had crossed over to the next life once more and had left behind nothing but a shell. He was lying in bed, wrapped in a green fleece blanket with bubblegum-pink lipstick on his lips and glimmery eye shadow around his sunken sockets. A lustrous bronzer on his cheeks. You’re beautiful again, Starman, I said, surveying my handiwork.

A few hours earlier, I’d crept into the airless bedroom with a mug of coffee for him, just like I did every morning. Black with a single cube of sugar in a chipped mug bearing the image of a Romanian castle and a caption in medieval script that read, I’m not yelling, I’m Romanian.

Someone should track this mug’s journey around the world, I thought. We weren’t in Romania, but Morocco, outside a big city in the middle of the country, between the Sahara Desert and the Atlas Mountains. I walked over to the bed and put down the mug, and it had only just touched the dark brown surface of the nightstand when I realized that Prince wasn’t silently watching me approach—he was dead. Stone dead. I held a hand over his mouth: no heat, no breath.

In that moment, it was as though all my senses sharpened, as though I’d stepped through an invisible membrane and into a new dimension, one where everything flowed and blended together and merged and expanded until it was somehow more. Prince’s face was gray and lifeless, but his eyes seemed to follow me around the room. There was foam at the corners of his mouth, his face had distended and contorted as he breathed his last, he bore no trace of a smile, his eyes had clouded over. Had he cried out? Had he been afraid? This wasn’t his first time. He’d done it again and again and again. Crossed over into yet another life. So why wasn’t he smiling?