The man felt the long bones of his left calf splinter. A hormonal wave bellied up into his brain and made him gasp and stare as a long thin wail lifted, ripped into the sound of falling rain. It was his voice he heard. The administrator’s face was still inches from his own, gazing, blank. The sheet gripped the stump of his left foot fiercely; the fabric clenched and shoved as if it were a living thing trying to push itself under him. The administrator transferred his attention to the end of the man’s left leg, which was still crossed over his right, probing it with his thick middle finger. Now the man wonders if crossing his legs had been the error this amputation had corrected. It might be that sitting with legs crossed was insufficiently respectful, if in appearance only, but, now that his left foot had been amputated, he couldn’t rest the stump of his left leg on the ground directly and was compelled to keep his legs crossed. The correction might have been intended to encourage that behavior, by making it impossible to do otherwise, or it might have been a way of codifying his disrespect by forcing him to adopt that posture as a permanent attitude. The main idea was, it seems most probable, to strip from him the power to choose whether or not to cross his legs.