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Griffin."
    He went across to the bed and, after listening a moment with his stethoscope, asked for something. The nurse passed him a
     syringe. He tapped at the man's ribs a time or two, then, holding the syringe like a dart, jabbed it into his chest.
    "Pressure's going down. O2 up to 84."
    A second nurse came over carrying a bundle, pushing a bedside table. She set the bundle down, tore open the tape sealing it
     and unfolded greenish-gray material from around a stainless steel tray, coils of rubber tubing, surgical instruments in clear
     sterile packages.
    With one of those instruments Bailey punctured the chest again just below the syringe. With another that looked like a combination
     between cooking forceps and needle-nose pliers he threaded a rubber tube into the chest, stitched it in place, and attached
     a plastic bottle.
    A chest tube, for pneumothorax. At one point before she died, Baby Girl McTell, Alouette's baby, LaVerne's daughter's baby,
     had five of them.
    "Okay, looks good. Let's get a stat chest to confirm. Good catch, Nancy. ABG when you're ready?"
    The nurse was listening to the man's chest. She glanced up and nodded, moved her stethoscope to the other side. The second
     nurse was tossing instruments into the tray, disposables into the trash.
    Bailey came back across the floor.
    I nodded towards the man on the bed between us. He hadn't taken his eyes off Bailey the whole time. Now the eyes swung to
     me. Still, empty, depthless. Like shallow water. His face, though deeply lined, with hard planes and full features, somehow
     just as emotionless, just as blank.
    The word wiped came to me. Then a flurry of synonyms: erased, undone, deleted, obliterated, expunged, dissolved, consumed.
    Bailey again shook his head.
    "Always hard to say, especially at first, with cases like this. The trauma itself can temporarily short-circuit everyday connections.
     And sometimes people come up with really weird responses to emergency dings. He was beaten on the head. Almost certainly there's
     been some degree of anoxia. We don't even have any way of knowing what kind of shape he was in before all this."
    Again he began scrubbing his hands at the sink.
    "We'll watch him. I'll have neuro in for a look. Not much else I can tell you right now. Could be a whole different ball game
     by morning."
    He'd hung his lab coat on the end of the bed. As he reached for it, the man on the bed said, "You got my book."
    We both turned.
    "What?" Bailey said.
    "My book. You got it."
    "He was carrying a book when he came in," I said. "They found it in his clothes downstairs."
    "Who are you, sir? What's your name?"
    "You got my book."
    "We have to know who you are, sir."
    "You got my book," he said. Then, politely, added, "Sir."
    I got the book from the inside pocket of my coat and handed it to him. He took it: thefirst time he'd moved. He looked at
     the front cover, turned it over, opened it and looked inside. Then he looked at me and nodded.
    "My book."
    And that was it. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
    I moved out to the waiting room where, mostly alone, I passed the night watching the dreary banter of talk-show hosts and
     guest celebrities, a rerun of The A-Team in which the boys defended a Vietnamese giocer in East L.A. from marauding Latino gangbangers, a couple of movies whose plots,
     characters and climactic car chases were indistinguishable.
    There might be no connection at all between David and this patient, of course. He could simply have found the book somewhere; come across
     it in curbside trash, a basement, some abandoned room or building.
    I wasn't sure I wanted to think too closely about where or how he might have found it. For a long time now, years, when I
     thought of my son at all, I had assumed he was dead.
    But this man might have found the book at a shelter of some kind, maybe in New York; it could have made its way there, even
     been left there by David himself. Or at a church, the kind in which people take refuge,