Another waiter arrived with more wine for the vets.

"And he wonders whether he has an internal injury and which organ and how serious and how disabling and so forth. Because he wants to make a journey."

"Is he pissing blood then?" the bearded man said.

"No blood in his urine."

"If you make him piss blood you can do a nice little bit with a kidney. We might help you there."

"I don't want blood in his urine."

"Readers all that squeamish?" the woman said.

"No, you see the pain is frontal."

"What about the spleen?" the second fellow said.

Bill thought a moment and couldn't help asking, "Does a dog have a spleen?"

This was very funny to the others.

"If they don't," the bearded vet said, "I've made a nice career doing splenectomies on furry midgets."

He had a big chesty laugh that Bill liked. Bill's first wife despised him for liking doctors because she thought he was contriving to outlive her.

"Let me add one thing," Bill said. "My character has a tendency to drink."

"Then his spleen might indeed be enlarged," the second vet said. "And a large spleen is easier to damage and might bleed and bleed and cause quite considerable pain."

"But the spleen is on the left side," Bill said. "My character feels pain on the right side."

"Did you tell us this?" the woman said.

"Maybe I forgot."

"Why not change it to the left side and do the spleen?" the bearded vet said. "It would actually bleed nonstop, I expect. Might be a nice little bit you could do with that."

The waiter came with the brandy and Bill held up a hand to request a formal pause while he drank the thing down.

"But, see, I need the right side. It's essential to my theme."

He sensed they were pausing to take this in.

"Can it be upper right side?" the second man said.

"I think we can do that."

"Can we give him some pain when he takes a deep breath?"

"Pain on breathing. Don't see why not."

"Can we make his right shoulder hurt?"

"Yes, I think we can."

"Then it's absolutely solved," the woman said.

The bearded vet poured the wine.

"Lacerated liver."

"Hematoma."

"Local swelling filled with blood."

"Doesn't show externally."

A waiter came with Bill's dinner and put it on the other table. They all watched it for a moment. Then Bill went to the table and got the plate and utensils and squatted at the vets' table, cutting up his meat.

"So it's the liver that's dealing out this misery. As he sort of suspected. What do I do with him next? What does he think and feel?"

The woman looked at the second vet.

"Feel faint?"

"I should think."

"No blood to head," she said to Bill.

"What else?"

"His blood pressure's falling and his abdominal cavity may be on the verge of acute infection."

"But he wants to take a trip," Bill said.

"Completely out of the question," the second vet said.

"What sort of trip?" the woman said.

"An ocean voyage. A cruise or passage. Not very long or trying."

Bill poured some wine into his glass and looked from face to face.

"Completely and totally implausible," the bearded vet said.

"No, we can't have it," the woman said. "Can't let him do it. Stretches the limits. Absolutely no."

Bill drank his wine, caught up in the fun.

"But if he only feels faint? No blood to head? This is why people go on cruises."

"Sorry, no," the woman said.

The bearded vet said, "If you give him the symptoms we've agreed upon, the only plausible recourse is a doctor."

"Or you'll simply have to send him into a coma."

Bill finished cutting his meat before taking the first bite. He stood up and looked for a waiter.

The air had a clear and happy tang.

"No offense, people, but we're not talking about a parakeet. This is an otherwise healthy human being."

"Otherwise healthy. That's a cute touch."

"The trouble with healthy humans, otherwise or not, is that they don't let their doctors do the jobs they're trained to do."

"Animals first, last and always," the woman said, gripping the edge of the table and pushing forward in her chair.

Bill caught a waiter's attention and waved his empty glass, pointing into it with the other hand. The bearded vet poured the wine.

"All right," Bill said, "I'm ready to make my character yield to professional advice and wisdom. What exactly would a doctor do if someone in this condition showed up in his office?"

"He'd call a bloody ambulance, wouldn't he?" the bearded vet said.

They were having a great time. The second vet got a chair from Bill's table and dragged it over and Bill sat down and ate another piece of meat. The waiter arrived with brandy and they ordered more wine.

They decided to go to a nightclub along the coast, a place where Lebanese in large numbers took their exile and longing. Bill sat jammed in a corner of the taxi feeling muddled and blurred. Muzzy. This was a word he hadn't heard or thought of in many years. The vets were trying to get the driver to improvise a verse for Kataklysmos, an important local feast in memory of the flood.

The club was large and crowded. A middle-aged woman with a hand mike moved among the tables singing laments in Arabic and French. Bill sat drinking at the end of a banquette packed solid with the three original vets and two others found wandering outside. The original woman let him lay a bent hand on her loamy thigh. A champagne cork shot out of a bottle about every forty seconds. Bill thought he saw his book across the room, obese and lye-splashed, the face an acid spatter, zipped up and decolored, with broken teeth glinting out of the pulp. It was so true and real it briefly cleared his muzziness. Couples stood clinging on the dance floor and a champagne bottle exploded in someone's face, the man standing in a creamy flash of blood and foam and looking down at the damage to his suit. There were fashion references everywhere, women wearing skull jewelry and several young bravos in camouflage sunglasses and pieces of militia gear. Arguments spread around the room, the champagne came sluicing with a bang and Bill thought there was a two-hearted mood in the air, a reflectiveness at the center of the noise and babble, a yearning for home that had a secret hidden inside it, the shared awareness that they did not want to escape the war, that the war was pulling them into it and they were here to join hands and death-dance willingly past the looted hotels and the fields of tumbled stonework. And he looked at the weird little man in whiteface going up on the small stage to sing "Mack the Knife" in Louis Armstrong's voice, a perfect chilling imitation of the famous sweet-potato growl, and Bill hated hearing that sound coming out of a fold-up body that lives in a suitcase, it was awful, it was damn scary, but the vets were fascinated, not a whisper or blink, it was the shark song they'd been waiting for all night, the cataclysmic verse.

It hurt to breathe. He moved his hand along the woman's thigh. There was something about her hair being cut straight across the forehead that made him think he was feeling up a teacher in a storeroom filled with the new-penny freshness of school supplies. Oh God make her let me do it to her. Later in the men's room Bill and the bearded vet walked right past each other without a word or sign. Seemed natural enough in the episodic course of a long night among strangers in a distant city. It felt to Bill that a life had come and gone since the segment on the promenade with a sea breeze and colored bulbs.

When he woke up on the hotel bed he was in his shorts, still wearing his socks and one shoe. It took him a while to figure out where he was. Once he had this settled he tried to recall how he'd made it back. He had no memory of leaving the nightclub. It frightened him, it made him see himself banging into walls, stagger-drunk in the dark somewhere. The danger of the world is immense. He saw it now, how dumb and lucky he'd been, testing that peril. There was one cigarette in the pack. He took off his shoe and had a smoke. Strange to think of himself in lost time, managing any number of delicate maneuvers, shuffling, trailing the hash of a lifespan. It frightened and humbled him but also made him feel darkly charmed.