In Berlin at Ostbahnhof I step outside of the train station after slowing to give a longing look to the McDonalds within, above the little diorama of the alpine village in the window display and the sculpture made of oyster shells. My phone to my lips I hold the microphone symbol and I record a voice note for Ben. I tell him that Sonya has just got on the train to Warsaw and I’m alone now for the day, and I’m going to go back to my hotel and sit in the lobby and read and drink coffee for a few hours, and does he want to meet me later on?

I release the microphone symbol and the message sends and immediately I hold press play and hold the bottom of my phone to my ear so I can listen back to what I said and check it makes sense, but also – mostly in fact – to check the cadence is good, because I enjoy speaking and have come to treat voice notes as a sort of minor art form – a chance to experiment with the flow of words and tones, good practice for – something or other.

And while I’m listening to myself and feeling satisfied I’ve got the intonations right, I glance to my right and see a patch of grass beside the road with some trees on it – not a park, too small to be a park. Just the sort of grass you have around train stations and airports and shopping centres where there’s a bit of space to be filled and it’s better to have grass than concrete; no one will ever sit on it, no one will ever picnic there. And on this patch of grass are police.

Many police – perhaps fifteen officers. Fire fighters too, maybe five, or seven. Men and women, mostly young. They don’t look stressed, but they don’t look bored. They look awake. There is a tape around the grassy area, a blue and white tape stretching from tree to tree. A fire engine is there, and some police cars. I no longer hear what my voice recording is saying, because I know this is unusual, and that there must be a reason for this, and before I can fully formulate the thought I know what it is: the mound of blankets in the grass. My stomach knows what it is before my brain.

I know I shouldn’t look, but I look. I don’t stop walking, but I look. They can’t have been there long. They’re unravelling the blue tarpaulin now to cover up the mound of blankets. I wonder if the person under the mound of blankets is simply very sick. No: they would not send fifteen police officers for a very sick person. The person under the mound of blankets is dead. I can see their feet. A police officer lifts one foot, as if to check something, and drops it again, and in the way it falls to the earth I know beyond all doubt that the person under the mound of blankets is dead.

I stare into the blankets. Some gravity within draws my gaze and I feel its pull and struggle to look away. I feel an awful desire for knowledge – to know what lies beneath the mound of blankets. What it looks like – what happens to us. The blankets are mostly closed, but there is a darkness higher up, at what would be face height: a shadow that suggests an opening. The space around the void seems to throb; the person under the mound of blankets grows enormous in my field of view, shrinking and paling everything else. I believe I can see flies, hear them, but I can’t possibly see flies or hear them because I am twenty metres away; it’s not possible.

I do not feel sadness or empathy for the person under the mound of blankets. I notice this immediately. I notice it because it shocks me. More than the shock of the body: the shock that I don’t feel anything. It is just an ugly thing, lying on the grass, twenty metres away from me. I only look at it for a few seconds – perhaps ten in total. I turn my back, deliberately, to stand and face the traffic lights. Okay, I tell myself, you have just seen something very bad. It’s normal to feel whatever you are feeling.

I am feeling nothing.

It’s normal to feel nothing.

Perhaps I feel nothing because I am a sociopath.

You’re not a sociopath. You’re probably in shock.

I don’t feel in shock. I just feel nothing.

I wish I hadn’t looked for so long.

Me too.

I think the person under the mound of blankets was probably a homeless person. In the news in the days to come there is nothing about a body being found at Ostbahnhof, which confirms it: this was not a murder. It was a homeless person, who laid down beneath a mound of blankets one evening and stayed there. I walked past the same patch of grass the night before. I find myself wondering whether the mound of blankets was there, then, in the dark. I imagine so. People do not call the police to a person who has been lying in a park for one day. They call the police after the same mound has not moved for two – or three – or five days.

I walk up the road, away from the grassy area with the police tape. I hope I am not traumatised, but I am unsure. I don’t feel traumatised. I don’t know whether you feel it in the moment. My heart beats normally. I text my friend: I have just seen something really bad. I sit on the pavement outside the hostel and play Tetris on my phone, because I read somewhere that if you play Tetris after seeing something bad, it stops long term memories from forming. I don’t know; pseudoscience. Maybe the twisting turning blocks occupy the same bit of mind that’s usually used for branding short term memories onto long term brain fat.

I think about how there is a dead person three hundred metres away. People pass on the pavement, heading towards the train station. Don’t go down there, I want to tell them, but of course they will think I’m crazy. I still don’t feel empathy for the dead person. I think I don’t feel empathy because I don’t want to feel empathy. I think if I really think about it – imagine them as a baby, a happy child growing up, a teenager in school, struggling with exams, falling upon hard times, dying alone under a mound of dirty blankets on a patch of grass outside a train station – it would be too much. The scale of such a horror is too much. Better to be numb. But this lack of feeling – it scares me too. I would feel reassured if I cried, reassured in my own humanity. I don’t cry.

I order a coffee and a piece of cake in the lobby. I drink and eat slowly over the course of the next hour. I feel okay.  I don’t tell my family that I have seen a dead person on the grass under a pile of blankets with a police officer lifting and dropping their foot. I don’t want to spoil their mornings. I read my book, in a big sofa chair, and drink my coffee, and when I feel myself thinking too much about the dead person, I pause my reading and play Tetris for twenty minutes.

At one o’clock I am due to meet Ben for an afternoon relaxing by the river. I collect my belongings and leave the hotel and walk down the road, past the East Side Gallery, and I think about the dead person for a time, but then the living people in my way on the pavement require my thoughts, stepping through and around them as they take photos, and the sun is bright so I put on sunglasses and read the graffiti, and I leave Sonya a voice note that is six minutes long and only one of those minutes is devoted to the person I saw on the grass who is dead and who did not know they were going to die when they climbed under that mound of blankets to rest.