Eating was a trial; I had a loose tooth and stitches inside my mouth on the left side. Being bathed by someone else, as it turned out, was simply impossible once I was conscious. I was able to let Josh change dressings at first, while I was still too weak to get all the way through the process by myself. After that, I took care of it. I’d never realized how close to the full range of motion getting dressed required, until I did it when it seemed that none of my muscles would move through their full range of motion without pain. But I did it.

Josh insisted I call him that. He said since the only thing he had to call me was “Sparrow,” he was forced to give up on proper doctor-patient formality, but he would feel better if I would return the insult. He told me he learned his craft by apprenticing himself to a woman who had gone to med school and had a pre-Bang practice as a surgeon. He told me his wife had died two years ago and that he still missed her; that he had three children, ages sixteen, nineteen, and twenty-one; that he preferred vegetable gardening to flowers; that the accomplishment he was proudest of was learning to play the guitar at the age of forty-six…

In short, he flung his life open in front of me without even seeming to notice he’d done it. I sat numb, patient, and politely silent under the fall of information, intending to forget it all as soon as the words stopped sounding in the room. I needed to do with his life story what he had done with the names: equalize us, achieve parity, balance debit and credit in the accounts of the Deal.

I couldn’t do it. The ring on his left hand reminded me of the wife I’d never met. Some skill of his in the sickroom made me wonder whether he’d acquired it during his apprenticeship. A row of flowers outside the window reminded me of him in negative. There was a slow corruption of my principles going on, that I could feel, but that I was helpless to stop.

He never mentioned what he knew about me, which I didn’t understand at all. He’d examined me when Sher brought me in, and he knew I was aware of that. That part of the wall of my privacy was already torn down. Yet he never raised the subject, as if it were still private, as if we were on opposite sides of that wall. What value did he think the knowledge had, when both of us possessed it?

Theo came to visit me several times. I found I almost couldn’t talk to him. I remembered sitting in his room in China Black’s house, feeling as if we were the only people in the world who understood the language we were speaking that day. We had traded secrets and painful admissions in that language. Now, looking at him, I felt as if someone had plucked the whole vocabulary out of my brain. I didn’t think it had had any words for explaining what had happened to me, anyway. Theo looked hurt when the conversation faltered. After a while he stopped visiting.