“Tell him that he has to stay in the hospital for at least another week.”

The voice of Heather was not a whine, but it was almost a whine. It was injured. She had a permanently afflicted kind of voice.

“Because his feet must have got badly burned when he was on the ship.”

He listened to Rafik’s translation and tried to think. When could that have happened? His life was breaking off, floating away from him in lazy circles. How could he not remember stepping in acid? But he did not remember why he was here. He had the story that the hospital had been told, but not the actual story. He remembered he had been in the kitchen, he had been telling himself not to accept anything Rafik said. He must always act as if Heather did not exist.

“Your feet have second- and third-degree burns.”

“They do?” He knew the voice of this woman. She was insulted.

“Yes, Aziz. You do. It is bad.”

“Wait. Wait. The skin?”

“She says that’s because they had to take the old skin off. It’s what they—there will be skin again. You have to have an operation to put skin back on.”

Aziz was nauseated. He could not bear this thing, this thing that had happened to his feet. How could he have not known his feet had been burned? It would have hurt. It would have hurt.

“Aziz, are you there?”

“I—I—yes. . . .”

“Be strong, cousin. You must. This is something—it can happen. I think it was steam. On some of the ships, you can come on steam, sudden, sudden, and it probably knocked you out, and when you came to, because the burns cut off your nerve endings, you probably didn’t know how bad it was, and the socks were still on, and—I don’t know, cousin. I don’t know. But it happened. It . . . it is happening.”

He needed to talk to someone who was not Rafik. He needed to talk to the Nigerian nurse. She would tell him if this was so, if this had happened. He wanted his sister Anissa. He began to cry. For some reason, that caught the attention of one of the old men. He looked grumpily at Aziz.

“Tell him to be calm,” Heather volunteered.

“Heather, I know. Look, let me talk to him now.”

“He knows about Linda, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Aziz?”

There was nothing.