Sometimes there was a voice in my head that narrated events as they unfolded, as if it were writing my biography as I was living it, as if the audience for such a life’s story was only me. But I rarely got the chance to put this voice to paper—by the end of the second day, when I got down to the first floor and found myself last in line to bathe in what was now cold, gray water, the voice had vanished.

