“We gotta call the newspaper,” a doctor said.

“No,” Werner said. He looked straight ahead, not at any of them. “I just want you to sew me up.”

A young resident began babbling. He had worked in that hospital for a while, he had seen extreme things, people in bad circumstances, people shot in the head, et cetera. You couldn’t imagine the shit he’d heard, the stories people came in there with. “But yours is the most amazing,” the resident exclaimed, his professionalism totally breaking down.

“Get him out of here,” Werner said.

They wiped his face with something cool and antiseptic but left the rest of him covered with soot, dirt, and dried blood. They wheeled in a crash cart, took X-rays, and stuck EKG leads to his chest in a careful constellation.

“Can you relax that?” the nurse asked, nodding toward his right hand. She was popping open packages of sterile tubing, preparing to put IVs in his arm, run fluids and antibiotics.

Werner’s left hand was open, but his right was clenched into a fist. He opened it for her.

Resting on his palm was the brass key to the old mahogany wardrobe in his bedroom, where his underwear was kept. He had snatched the key out instead of turning it. For a second, he had a grainy flashback of himself groping dumbly at the tall dark door, whirling in panic. He stared at the key, this thing he had brought with him from his old life.

“I dropped Two,” he said.

The nurse stopped momentarily to glance down at her feet and then under the gurney. “I’m just about done,” she reassured him. As she taped the IV in place and flicked her fingernail at the tubing, another nurse came in and without apology or ado reached under his sheet and inserted a catheter. It felt swift and brutal, like plugging a burning wand into a socket, and Werner cried out, finally, in indignation.

Everyone left. He was propped up on the gurney with things sticking out of him, unrecognizable to himself. He wiggled his toes. They were still his toes. He bent them and they bent.

The rolling table next to him was made to glide under and over a hospital bed; on its laminate surface rested the brass key with its single tarnished tooth. Werner should have been dead, but he wasn’t; that part, he still didn’t get. Down at the bottom of the gurney were his toes. He moved them back and forth again like levers.

The officious pink curtain that moved on little ball bearings was quiet now, a thin membrane between Werner and the world.

He waited.

“Mr. Hoeflich,” the doctor said.

Werner opened his eyes. It was the guy who seemed to be in charge, or anyway the one who was tallest. He was going bald in a handsome way and seemed a little bit like an athlete, one of those TV doctors who played hoops out back on a slow night in the ER.