The Ramsey County building in Saint Paul has a marble lobby with very high ceilings and a great deal of noise in it, and on the sixteenth of January there were about thirty people waiting in plastic chairs for a licence.

A young woman in a white trouser suit was doing her lipstick using a phone camera.

A man was holding a bunch of supermarket flowers away from his body at a strange angle.

Five weeks earlier I had sat in those same chairs beside a man who kept wiping his palms on his jeans.

I had said to him, that day: “You’re shaking.”

And he had said: “I’m dying.