He remembers the day his left foot was amputated. It had been raining. The administrator was different then. This was not particularly long ago, maybe not the last time that there had been a period of repeated showers, but almost certainly not further back than the time before that. The interval between periods of repeated showers was long, but not as long as the interval separating periods of sustained high or low temperatures. The administrator had interviewed him for a long time that day; so long that he felt his eyelids droop, and his head begin to dip, and he couldn’t be sure what he was saying, or even if he was still speaking. The administrator’s simple questions, which were all so similar that they seemed to require of him the same answer in a series of very trifling variations, became muffled and unmanageable. They were like clouds shot through with beams of fierce light, alternately numbing and jarring him. It must have been obvious that he was exhausted. He wondered how he must have appeared to the administrator, and if he might have nodded off while continuing to speak, even while continuing to answer the administrator’s questions. They weren’t questions, really, so much as they were statements with which he was supposed to agree, and his answers weren’t really answers either, so much they were only paraphrases of the statements put to him.