The dark lake that he thought was all around him was now seeping inside, making his lungs swell like wineskins.

“I just want to be sewn up,” Werner said.

“Yeah, I don’t know why you haven’t been,” the doctor replied before disappearing.

He lay there some more, congealing.

The curtain rolled open a few inches and a janitor took a look at him, left, and then returned with JM, who was unprepared for what she found, the bloody mess on the gurney. She had been told only that she needed to come pick him up. Werner broke down at the sight of her. She was wearing blue jeans and a wool coat, her blond hair stuck inside her scarf, which she unwound without taking her eyes from Werner. Her face, her lovely off-kilter mouth. Like the brass key, JM had somehow made the leap with him to this new world. He put one hand over his eyes, crying.

“Two is dead, I dropped Two.”

“Werner,” JM said, touching him. “What do you want me to do?”

“You have to find her,” he said. “Get somebody to go around back with you, under my window.” He wanted her to find other things as well—his glasses, his wallet, five hundred dollars in a bureau drawer.

JM sat and spoke quietly to him for a while and then stood up, rewinding her scarf around her neck, this time lifting her hair free of it before leaning over him again. She would come back; she would try to bring his friend Peter with her. He felt the soft knot of cashmere against his chest and then she was gone and someone else materialized, another apparition. A Filipina woman in pink scrubs, blurry and beautiful, with coral nail polish as flawless as the finish on a new car.

“You haven’t been sewn up,” she informed him, lifting the gauze from his wounds. “Let’s do that.”

His muscle was exposed, the ragged opening leading down to it coagulated and angry. “And you are?” he asked her.

She was the trauma surgeon. Using a tool that looked like a cross between a pair of scissors and a needle, she gave him multiple shots of lidocaine in his shoulders and torso. He looked up at the ceiling. In those paintings of Saint Sebastian, the eyes were always tipped toward the heavens. Orion in the night sky, drawing back his bow and shooting whatever was up there. All over Werner’s upper body, small pains burned like stars. He didn’t know if he could stand it and then a numbness started to move across him, and he felt impassive in his suffering.

Before the doctor could stitch him up, a nurse poked her head in. “You’re supposed to be down in eleven,” she said to the doctor, who hustled out like a student caught by the hall monitor.

Werner waited.