When someone sleeps they become a child again, perhaps because in sleep one can do no evil and one is unaware even of one’s own existence. By some natural magic, the worst criminal, the most inveterate egoist is made sacred by sleep.

After I’ve been here for nearly an hour, I stop reading and look at her, lying in bed, existing. Her crocheted beige slippers are still under her bed, even though she’ll never use them again. She’s going to die very soon.

The clack of the wall clock tears gristle apart. Each beep of the heart monitor shrieks alarm. The machine that breathes for her sucks and drops, a blue accordion in a tube, pulling in hard hope, and giving up.

She has a heart that works, that bleeps the machine and pulls a line across the screen.

Clack, bleep, suck, drop.

I am her brain. I can’t tell her race; her skin is worn, brown, seasoned. She could be my grandmother. Her cheekbones are the edge of the cliff. The skin underneath curves in at a dangerous angle, then hollows, soft as soil and brown and ridged and marked. Too much like a skull. Her eyes are closed. Oxygen goes in through the tube taped to her nose. Her mouth open and soundless, letting a draft sweep through the curve of her face.

Clack, bleep, suck, drop.

I am her lost mind.

It’s time to go, but it’s hard to leave the swim of flower smell and the softness of the Duchess’s room, so I read to her, just a little more.

We sleep our lives away, the eternal children of Fate. That’s why, if I think with that feeling, I experience an immense, boundless tenderness for all of infantile humanity, for the somnambulist lives people lead, for everyone, for everything.

“Aha!” Gretchen’s voice from the doorway stabs the silence. “I’ve figured out her game. She finds the most depressing book on the island, recites a little every day in that lugubrious tone you can’t really strike after adolescence. All us Wrinklies slide into comas as well, and the island’s all hers.”

Gretchen and Frances, one of the nurses, are giving me little teasing grins. “Quick, Dr. Diaz,” Frances gasps. “Take my pulse. I think my will to live is still hanging on by a thread.”

“We’ve got your number, junior.”

“Devious shit, kid.”

If I were holding Storytime, I would have brought juice boxes and rung the bell. Sorry, I don’t take requests, but if you don’t like what I’m reading you could always try, I don’t know, not mooching in doorways listening to private conversations like an analogue NSA. You probably expect me to read a bunch of lovely stuff, Celia Thaxter poetry or, like, Wordsworth or Emerson or whatever. Well, fuck that. I’ll read what I want.