“Thank you. It was my pleasure.” The Rose rubbed his hands. Strong hands, capable of working many tension-filled hours at a stretch. He felt the hardened tendon in his left hand, and Plante caught the gesture.

“Dupretransconjecture?”

“Yes.”

“Is it operable?”

“It is, but it’s risky—for a surgeon.”

“I’ve heard it’s caused by a massive shock to the central nervous system.”

The Rose considered this, and said, “Both Reagan and Thatcher have it.”

“Which would figure,” said Plante with a smile.

“I suppose it would.”

“It might recover with sobriety.” A discreet tap on the door signalled that the next patient had arrived. The men shook hands.

There was a Russian bath at the rehabilitation centre, which the Rose found a great help in the morning when he was low. The steam cheered him up, and he imagined it was purifying his spirit. He hadn’t known it was there until one of his group asked him along.

It is a fact that a lot of long-term addicts approaching mundane things newly sober find them terrifying, and one of the strengths of the centre was not allowing patients to isolate themselves too much. This was a problem for the surgeon who, for most of his life, had had most things his own way.

In his group was a man named Dave, whom the Rose took an almost instant dislike to. Dave was known as DD, short for Denial Dave, because in spite of the fact that he had been consuming in excess of a bottle of gin per day for the last ten years, he would not admit to being completely powerless in the face of alcohol. The Rose’s aversion to DD at the first group-therapy session no doubt stemmed from the fact that Dave reflected his own denial—but this initial impression changed when Dave took him along to the bath and showed him the ropes with all the tenderness of a Jewish mother. And although when they said their goodbyes Dave was still vigorously denying he was an alcoholic, the Rose rarely entered a steam bath without a thought for DD, and wondered if he’d ever ‘got it’.

Once he had gained confidence and started coming to the bath on his own, he discovered it wasn’t dissimilar to the one he’d been to as a boy with his dad, which was in the neighbourhood where his grandmother lived. When they visited the old lady, his father sometimes took him to the baths. He soon learned how to control the steam at the rehab, and took to dropping by the baths in the evening before turning in.

On the next to last evening before his scheduled departure, he was savouring a moment alone in the steam before bed when he sensed a presence near him more by the extra heat created than anything else. Nothing felt amiss, and he didn’t bother to open his eyes. He may have dropped off for a moment, because he suddenly felt very hot, and came to to find a vapour swirling around him like a fog. A vague outline moved and sat on the marble bench adjacent to him. The skin of the figure was dark against the white-on-white of the room. He felt his own skin prickle without reason.