“Mr. Hoeflich, would you like a shot of morphine?” the Italian doctor asked. He stepped away from the table for a moment and then stepped back with a different needle.

Werner didn’t even have to answer. They gave him a shot, but he could still feel what they were doing; they gave him another, and a moment later he felt normal.

“My lungs,” he said.

“Bronchoscopy,” the Italian doctor said. “As soon as we’re done here.”

A few minutes passed.

“Will it hurt?” Werner asked.

“It won’t be pleasant,” the doctor said pleasantly.

One of the people standing around, a nurse wearing Christmas-tree earrings, left to call him in sick at Glorious Foods. Werner couldn’t remember the number but she said she was happy to look it up.

“Ask for Jeff,” Werner said. “Make sure you’re talking to him.” He closed his eyes for a moment; when he opened them, the nurse was back.

“He was worried you were burned,” she reported and went to work unwinding from a portable machine a flexible steel shaft the size of a drinking straw. The shaft had a camera on the end of it and the doctor began feeding it into Werner’s nose, inch by inch, driving it like a spike into his brain.

He arched up on the table, and people scattered for an instant, a flock of birds rising and then settling again, this time with three men on top of Werner, trying to hold him down. He came loose, flailing, and another man materialized and piled on. Werner fought silently, the spike probing into his head, his utterly private reaches.

“Give him a sedative!” somebody said, panting, and a moment later he couldn’t move.

The thing pushed its way down until it was in his lungs. He felt like he was drowning. It was worse than being trapped in the fire, being inanimate, like something already dead. He sank to the bottom of the lake, into the slippery weeds. The camera emitted a bead of light, peering at his bronchi.

“It looks okay,” he heard the Italian doctor say.

Up in the ICU he was still partially submerged as they tugged him from the gurney to a bed, a drowned man bumping against the pilings. The ICU was gleaming and technical, separated into pods, each with its own nurses’ station.

“Whores,” a man said to the ceiling. “Whoring whores.”

The man was covered in gauze and a sheet; nothing but a blackened forearm and a pale horned foot were visible. It was like one of those all-night labyrinthine dreams where everywhere you turn, there is some bizarre oversize thing occurring. Werner manually tugged one leg over and then the other, helping to arrange himself between the cool railings of the bed.

“Fuck,” the man said intently through his teeth. “Fucking fuck.”

“He’s a homeless gentleman,” the nurse confided, “set on fire by a group of kids.”

“I’m sorry,” Werner said.