After the administrator had left, with his habitual decorum and gentle speech, the man stared at his severed foot, still in its battered shoe, lying on its side just a few inches away from the burning, trembling stump of his ankle, with the sheet of amputation fabric clenching and almost gnawing what was now the end of his leg. Rain dripped from the shockingly white, sheared bones. Nausea swept through him. He started to shake, and all his blood seemed to pool in his center. He couldn’t remember when his foot wasn’t there, lying on its side, in front of him anymore, but it didn’t happen right away—not anything at all like right away—and he didn’t see what was done with his severed left foot. The fabric dropped away some time after that, plopping to the ground like a sated parasite, and the administrator had collected it and folded it and placed it in a large inter-office envelope. It was from this envelope that he had at first extracted a greyish sock, which he handed to the man. He told the man distinctly to put it over the stump, and the man had done so immediately, with a flash of gratitude. The sock was itchy and tight, and the man didn’t want it on him; he was grateful to have received a direct, unambiguous order. It was like a gift: something he could do, and do at once, that would, in some small measure, satisfy the administrator. This was so much better than their conversations and his reports that he would have done any number of meaningless, enervating tasks under explicit instructions instead, if that were permitted. Evidently, the sending institution did not prohibit administrators from issuing commands, but perhaps standards discouraged them from doing it, or, as was more likely, restricted the use of unambiguous language to particular circumstances, like medical emergencies. Before the amputation sheet, which was by this time a flabby, sallow, almost rubbery membrane, was inserted into the envelope, he had been required to write a brief account of certain aspects of his recovery directly onto it, using a gleaming steel pen the administrator had provided. The tip of the pen wrote by applying heat to the membrane, which caused it to pucker into letters, and, as the man continued to write his account, which was dictated to him by the administrator, the membrane, which at first had seemed so loose that it was on the point of liquefying, parched and curdled into something like hard vellum. The administrator had sealed it into the inter-office envelope and written something in one of the empty fields on the outside, using his personal, dull-grey stylus. The man was also required to sign for his foot. The administrator had withdrawn, from somewhere in his enormous greatcoat, a thick, leather-bound notepad that bristled with insertions and dangling paper tapes. “Press hard,” he’d been told. The administrator extracted a sickly green carbon of the receipt from the pages, inserted it into a clear plastic badge, and handed it to the man. “Clip it to your lapel, just below your second tractate tag but above the second button. It must be visible at all times, from now on, until you are instructed otherwise.” The badge was still there, but exposure had clouded it so much that the receipt, now faded to colorlessness, was illegible inside it.