He was free. He bolted upright and loped down the hall.

Once in the elevator, he looked in its high-gloss panels and smoothed his hair. He hadn’t quite trusted the suite mirrors. He looked good enough. There’d been no bruising. He had not one cut.

He felt enthusiastic. He decided to hire a car from the concierge. Given the medical worries, driving was less than wise. There were three guys behind the desk. They were European. They had small noses. One of them asked for room number and passport. He gave both. Hands flickered over the keyboard, confirmations surfaced. Soon he was in a honey Benz, seated on its august leather, his Mumbai driver coasting one of the five lanes of a shimmying highway.

He used to talk to the drivers. It was taxis back then. Now he knew every story they had to tell. All were sad. None had remedy. He wanted something. He looked around at the bottled water, the maps, the magazines.

“A satellite phone,” Hoseyn said in Hindi. “Where can I buy one?”

The driver took the next exit.

After a trip to an ATM, they wound their way around a number of warehouse districts until they reached an import-export business owned by a friend of the driver. Hoseyn doubted the guy’s phones would be what he wanted, but, then again, no one he knew would be there, and that was good. Most conventionally available sat phones were terrible appliances anyway. But this would be his—all his. He made sure the service provider would not display his number as private for anyone with Caller ID. Then he asked the driver if he would mind registering it in his name instead of Hoseyn’s. They agreed on a payment for this favor, and as they backed out of the warehouse lot, Hoseyn cradled the device like a boy at Nowruz.

They drove to the desert. It heaved before them, fabulous curtains of sand, ridged into heavy ripples. Their color was ecru, and the air so still they seemed fixed, like resin. The driver sped the rolling roads these Dubai emirs had just made, up and down, making calls to get the right elevation and latitude for the satellite phone, adjusting position based on how well he could hear a man on the other end. His brother, he said. It took at least twenty minutes. Hoseyn would have waited twenty hours.

When the driver finally parked, turned off the engine, and handed the phone back, Hoseyn couldn’t summon his own phone number to mind. It felt as if he had a dowel in his cortex. It was like choking, only worse. Then he remembered. He pushed down on the numbers deliberately. They were precious to him.