What hit him first was the heat, then the stillness. Nursing assistants loitered at a desk, looking worn, not tending to patients. Some of them registered shock when they saw him, knowing he had not stayed at Memorial for the storm. The patients he passed were almost naked. He found his eighty-two-year-old mother covered in sweat, lying on a wet bed. She greeted him with a smile and told him she was thirsty. She was, she said calmly, “in a mess.”
