As he got up from the floor, he remembered his mother. All the shades were drawn, the time of day not clear. He must find the phone.

The apartment was many cheap possessions. What caught his eye were the posters of Madonna that seemed to come from Algeria. She looked French. Maybe one was a Madonna impostor—but no, she was the real Madonna. It was always a guess with her changing hair. He looked at her belly, smooth like milk. Did Rafik’s girlfriend have such skin? How could any woman who was really what he knew a woman to be want a man such as Rafik? He scanned for pictures of someone who might be Heather, but there were no photos of friends or family, only Tour de France shots of cobrahelmeted racers that had been torn from a magazine and pasted on the back of the front door and spiraled through the hall into the living room; could it be a map of the tour’s winding through the hills of France? He followed it along the wall. Oh, here was a photograph of Rafik! He had put himself, on his bicycle, right in the race, next to a pair of crashing bicycles, as if he had pulled ahead of them.

And the sofas. One of them was not actually a sofa, he realized, but a cot, which had been outfitted with pillows to make a sofa back. The pullout sofa was a futon that folded. His place of rest, the chair, was a baby-blue plastic lounger that was part of an outdoor furniture set, the rest of which—a side table, a chair, and a footstool—were nearby. There was not a phone that he could see.

He turned the corner to the kitchen. There was a folding card table, two television tray tables scrunched against it, a school chair with a desk attached, and two beanbag chairs, which were too big to fit in the kitchen and had been squeezed up as narrowly as they would go against the wall, propped tightly with three ironing boards and a clothesline tied to the refrigerator. This was probably the bed for the one with the weekend girlfriend. There was a long pole with a shower curtain leaning against the wall—the privacy for the kitchen. By the sink, he saw, was the phone, attached to the wall.

He dialed but got a sound and a recording in English. He did it again and got the same. He looked at the phone and puzzled awhile. This too would have to be shown to him. But he was patient; this was how it was. He stared at the phone even so. He was so close to putting his mother at ease. To have gulped beer and told stories, when Rafik and the others could have shown him how the phone worked. He did not think. The Egyptian situation had been the same. He had not thought it through.