“How can it be up that high when he’s asleep?”

“I don’t know. Mr. Ricco? Mr. Ricco?”

Aziz fluttered his eyes. He affected a groan.

“He’s conscious. Are you in pain?”

It was morning. He was no longer in the curtained space. There was a window and two other people in beds closer to the door. They were sleeping. The sunlight from the crack in the blinds was a blue kind of gold. On the beach in Arzew, the rocks would get so warm. Lying on them, feeling their heat, he had often slept away an afternoon. He was very little then, and his sisters were still at home. It was usually Anissa who came to find him. It was because of her they called him Hmaam. This came about because they could never keep their eyes on him. You are always flying away, his mother told him. I turn my back for half of a moment, and you have wings. “He is a pigeon,” Anissa said. And it stuck.

He tried to remember. There was a nurse earlier. He had said something. How had he gotten here? That was it, that was what was before this morning. The last thing he could remember seeing was the Parisian on the kitchen floor after the robed woman had kneed him. Could the Parisian have hit him? He must have been in a fight. He touched his head again. The pain was excruciating. The skin on his face felt very tight, stretched thin.

He heard a cart being pushed in the hall. A woman laughed softly. Another woman told her something. He glanced over at his roommates and saw that one of them, an old man, was awake and looking toward the door and the hallway sounds. Another old man, not as old as the other one, stirred in the bed next to Aziz. A phone rang, much louder than was needed to hear it. It was on the windowsill, right near Aziz’s head. He tried to position himself so he could answer it, but this was surprisingly time-consuming. Then a nurse sailed in and picked it up. “Mr. Ricco,” she said, “this is for you.” She brought the receiver to him and gently helped him wedge it against the pillow and his ear. Then a dull bell sounded outside the room and she went away again.

“Aziz?”

“Rafik?”

“Thank God. Oh, thank God. I have been crazy.”

Aziz looked at the two old men to see if they were curious and would hear him speaking Arabic. He yelled “Hey!” as loud as he could. They made no motion. They were sick and hard of hearing. “Rafik?”

“Aziz, listen, we are going to get you out of there, but we had to take you. Your heart—Heather thought it had stopped beating. And we could not find your pulse. And you were out. Cold.”

“How—”

“You don’t remember?”