The best answer I have is that there was something in the way he said I’ve felt it happen, in my own body — some recognition in it, some claim of kinship with the shrieking child in bed seven that I could not dismiss and did not fully understand.

It did not sound like a volunteer wanting to feel useful. It sounded like a man who knew the fire from the inside offering to sit down in it with her.

He went to the sink and scrubbed in. It was hard to watch. The water splashed and jumped off his shaking knuckles, and he worked the soap up his scarred forearms with a slow, deliberate care, as if concentration could steady what would not be steadied.

He pulled on one of the blue disposable gowns, and it stretched tight and comical across the breadth of his back, the ties barely reaching around.

He looked absurd. He looked enormous and out of place and faintly ridiculous, a giant in paper armor.

Then he turned toward bed seven, and the ridiculousness fell away, and what was left was something I did not have a word for yet.