A famous man died recently. His obituary was in all the papers, and his death was mentioned on the television news. He was famous for something that happened before you were born and until you’d read the notices, you didn’t know who he was.

But you saw his name on the day of his death, on the cover of a book you didn’t buy. This chance encounter makes the news seem personal. Perhaps you were thinking of him at the moment he stopped living; perhaps it was a distaste for death that made you turn away.

In photographs, he is wearing clothes styled in a distinctive decade. Their tailoring suspends him in double disbelief – he belongs to the past and he stays there, even though he went on living for the length of at least another life time.

The incident that brought the famous man his fame was of international political significance. News readers refer to it using the definite article, as if it lives in working memory. It must have dampened the lives of people you’ve met for a few days, or weeks, as the saga chose its ending, but for you it is part of innevitable history: the other-time that happened before you began to breathe.

For the next few weeks the incident aches across your shoulders. Familiar things like buildings and transport and the languages you speak seem suddenly caused by this single affair. You wish you didn’t know the texture of your life owes so much to the body of the famous man, a body that has failed to draw another fistful of air into its lungs.

You begin to cultivate random events. You start wearing odd socks and laugh out loud at the joyful coincidence of grabbing two that could pass for a pair. You do not try to anticipate where the doors to the train will arrive on the platform. You carry on doing this until the imposition of order occurs to you like an invention.

Someone else is watching the death unfold across news media, too. He recalls the incident from inside skin sprinkled with liver spots. His memories are fragile, and being replaced by each celebrated white and grey pixel.

Late at night, the famous man’s newsprint grin is still the last image you see. It reminds you to feel small. You dream of the unphotographed moments of his life, in technicolour.