“Not enough.” Tears fully threatening, she cut the words shorter. They came out sounding wrong, choppy and clammy at once.

“You have to hope he improves.” His words were perfunctory, but he said them with a luster of kindness unusual for him.

“I look at him in that bed,” she said, giving up. “I just—I just …”

“Challenges everything you thought you knew.”

“Exactly.” She turned to him. He was searching her face. He moved his hand to her forehead and pushed aside a piece of her hair.

They talked a little more, none of it as difficult. After an hour or so, they got out of the old hall and back to Baz without anything else passing between them.

•  •  •

Mary walked through Ahwaz as Will’s wife, son Baz trotting between them. The heat sagged her. She had a step in the mission coming, a particular task assigned to her. She succumbed to forgetting it. All along the city avenue, she gave up, into the office building, to the elevator, Will pushing the up button. There was air conditioning, but it was flagging.

Oil-industry men were here. They waited for this elevator, murmuring of refining, service, supply. In Ahwaz there were no longer just Iranians, but European and Asian businessmen, united by petroleum, speaking schoolhouse English, the only tongue they could half manage between them all. Baz wanted Mary to think of the ancients. This, he’d told her on the drive, was the lower extension of Mesopotamia, just east of the Fertile Crescent, the Iranian portion of humankind’s earliest civilization. As their Khodro motored south, the temperature of the highlands burned away, and their unseasonable August had turned soupy.

The elevator had come. Mary, Will, Baz, and the businessmen tried to fit. Will, last to enter, pushed four. Nothing happened. He hit the doors. The gears caught above them. Nothing moved. He hit more floor buttons—five, six, at eight they started going up. They got out at seven and walked down to four.

They found the office. Will told the receptionist they’d arrived for their appointment. His Farsi must have worked, because she handed him a clipboard. He was filling it out when a man walked out. This way, he said. Mary took Baz by the hand.

They came upon a doctor in a white coat, who ushered them into a room. A woman followed them in and handed each of them an ice pack. No names were exchanged; no greeting was necessary.

“I apologize,” the doctor said in English. “It’s fifty Celsius. The government should be shutting down the city. Instead they lie and say it’s forty-four.”

“Where is she?” Will asked. They had come for the hotel maid.

“One moment,” the doctor said. He went to the door and spoke to someone waiting there.

The ice pack was already warming. She wanted the scarf off, the manteau too. Will was glazed with sweat, his color reddened. Baz looked groggy.