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he choked, which would serve him right.
    The stab of anger at someone he still loved made his belly hurt so much he couldn’t talk anymore. He heard a horrid high-pitched sound. In his study, someone was cutting through thick bones while the animal was still alive.

17
    HE MUST HAVE passed out. When he woke up he was in the hospital again, with tubes coming from his arm. He could still hear the whirring blade, though, and felt like he wanted to vomit his insides onto the floor. “I can’t bear this alone,” he said.
    “I’m here,” Esther said, sitting by his bed again.
    “Why did he do this to me?” he said.
    “The doctor moved you because they can give you stronger narcotics here.”
    He’d meant to Kafka, of course. That he’d been Kafka’s friend had been his greatest honor; more than that, Kafka had been—this was never hidden from Elsa or Esther, or anyone—Max’s true love in this life, the only one to whom he’d wanted to be faithful; and this one true love, this Kafka, had betrayed Max by forcing him to betray Kafka, just as Franz had known he would. Thus Max had been faithful to no one, and all so that Kafka could play the egoless, self-denying saint.
    It was hard to die feeling like that about Franz, maybe because to lose faith in him was to lose consolation altogether. If Franz’s longing for the absolute had been a sham, there wasn’t even the possibility that God existed. The universe became infinite, but not as Franz had imagined, as a series of courts within courts that put one off and passed one on, yet let one continue to believe, but as a vast, desolate emptiness that would draw all of Max’s particles apart into its silence. It made Max want to scream.

18
    MAYBE HE HAD. A middle-aged nurse had appeared with a tray with a hypodermic needle on it. She asked his name, said they had to check each time before administering morphine.
    He stared at her in bewilderment. He could have swornhe’d seen her before, that she should know who he was. That she didn’t confused him, made him forget that himself. He looked about the room to find his name, but as he did, he lost other words, like the noun for the role of the woman in the room, or for the brightly colored things in bowls. If he couldn’t say who he was, those things wouldn’t tell him their names. The world would stare back at him blankly.
He had to remember his own name
.
    But before he could find it, the nurse relented, put the tray down on the night table, and picked up the silver needle.

19
    HE RAN DOWN A STREET in Tel Aviv, but the city seemed unfamiliar, the buildings older and smaller. He knew he was still chasing a name, but the harder he ran after it, the faster it sprinted ahead of him, like in a fairy tale.
    In a doorway ahead a man petted a small lizard with a ridged back. The ridge reminded the running man of his own hump and made him wonder if the people in the windows thought the oddly shaped scurrying creature looked ridiculous.
I need to hide my hump
, he told himself, and—as in a fairy tale—that became a refrain he repeated with each step.
    He ran past the doorway, and the man held the lizardout to him and smiled. The man had perfectly cut fingernails that reflected the glint of the sun. That sight made the heat today seem pleasant, and he began to walk rather than run. Not having his name began to worry him less, too. In fact, he felt lighter for the loss; after all, the absence of a name gave him the freedom of the city. He could go to a bar if he wanted—not that he did, but he
could
—or to the houses of ill repute, and all without worrying about maintaining his reputation, because he didn’t have one anymore. Of course, if no one knew who he was, he might indeed have to go to those low places to buy company for himself.
    That prospect made him sad, and he distracted himself with the thought of visiting a restaurant he’d heard about, the sort of place where one could chat with other people who also had