The day had been rainy. He was soaking into his clothes and turning to mush. Water sluiced down his neck from his saturated hair. Rain pooled in the palm of his limp left hand, lying beside him on the bench, between him and the former administrator, as if he were offering the rain to the administrator. His legs were crossed, and his left foot hung in space. He had just started back again from the brink of sleep, tossing his head weakly upward and trying to see the falling petals of rain in among the rain-blackened tree trunks, bright yellow leaves plastered flat to black mud, the veiled river coiling and heaving in high tide, and beyond it there were the impassive, empty windows streaked with the black shadows of rain, behind which there was supposed to be some kind of movement that he must watch for and would never see. The administrator said something he couldn’t quite make out, not much more than a low murmuring that might have been addressed, he now thinks, to someone else, listening remotely, and simultaneously leaned down. Bending at the waist, the administrator leaned down toward the ground and pulled something transparent and luminous out between his hands, like a sheet of transparent paper, and this was then slid edgewise through his left ankle, stopping halfway through as the sheet became rigid. The administrator’s face was only inches from his own and watched him, neutrally. The sheet continued to slide through his ankle with a faint crinkling sound, until he felt the weight of his left foot drop from the end of his left leg, and he heard the hollow sound his foot made inside his shoe when it struck the ground. The transparent sheet, flexible again, wrapped itself around the stump at once. Not a drop of blood spilled from his leg. He smelled burning flesh. That’s what the administrator had said when he leaned down. “You’re going to smell bar-b-que,” he’d said softly.