Sanjay said nothing. He lifted his hand and held it before his face, turning it slowly back and forth as he gazed at it with the same mute puzzlement, as if he couldn’t quite decide whom it belonged to.

“Bab … cock?”

More footsteps outside; suddenly Gloria was in the room. She, too, was wearing her bedclothes. Her hair, which she tied up in the daytime, fell halfway down her back. She seemed a little out of breath, having evidently run from their house to follow him. She ignored Michael, who by now felt less alarmed than embarrassed, like an incidental witness to some private marital drama, and marched straight to her husband’s side, taking him firmly by the elbow.

“Sanjay, come to bed.”

“This is my hand, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she replied impatiently, “it’s your hand.” Still holding her husband by the elbow, she glanced toward Michael and mouthed the word “sleepwalking.”

“It’s definitely, definitely mine.”

She heaved a sigh. “Sanjay, come on now. Enough of this.”

A flicker of awareness came into the man’s face. He turned to look about the room, his eyes alighting on Michael.

“Michael. Hello.”

The earphones were gone, hidden under the counter. “Hey, Sanjay.”

“It seems I have … taken a walk.”

Michael stifled a laugh; though what, he wondered, had Sanjay been doing at the breaker box?

“Gloria has been good enough to come after me to take me home. So that is where I’m going to go now.”

“Okay.”

“Thank you, Michael. I’m sorry to have disturbed you in your important work.”

“It’s no problem.”

And with that, Gloria Patal had led her husband from the room, taking him, presumably, back to bed to finish whatever it was he’d started in his restless, dreaming mind.

Now, what to make of that? When Michael had told Elton about it the next morning, all he’d said was, “I guess it’s getting to him like the rest of us.” And when Michael had said, “What it? What do you mean by it?” Elton had said nothing at all; he seemed to have no answer.

Brood, brood, brood—Sara was right; he spent far too much time with his head stuck down the hole of worry. The signal was between cycles; he’d have to wait another forty minutes to listen to it again. With nothing else to occupy his mind, he called up the battery monitors on the screen, hoping for good news, not finding it. Bell plus two, a hard wind blowing all day through the pass, and the cells were below 50 percent already.