Joanna and Ernie wave at me as I make my way up the stairs, and when I get closer I can hear them talking about Duck. Apparently there are still people down on the beach watching the explosions, which are happening less often, but there’s still the occasional thud.

There are more flowers in the Duchess’s room today, plants from the greenhouse. One contingent says it’s wasteful to grow anything that’s purely decorative since there’s only a small space to grow things on the island; people like Nick who say, “We don’t have capacity to carry passengers.” Since the Duchess has been bedridden, more of the garden and greenhouse space has been taken up by flowers that are just flowers for flowers’ sake. So there.

There’s a new orchid that must have been smuggled in from the Bad Place. I can’t imagine anyone growing something like that here. An orchid will die in such a sunny room, but I guess it’ll outlive the Duchess. A dead orchid would look pathetic—bent, empty twig of a stem, any flowers that managed to hang on curled and limp like cold French fries—and even though this one looks okay right now, I know what’s going to happen eventually, and that makes it hard to look at, so I put it on the floor by the dresser on the other side of the room. There’s a pot of bushy flowers with yellow middles and three white leaves on each blossom sitting on the book we were reading, and now the cover’s all bloated from water draining out of the bottom, and the edges of the pages are stained.

I know she isn’t going to get better, but I still listen hard to the rhythms of the machines that mime her life for her. I watch her closed eyes and try to read the movement beneath her eyelids.

But it’s not Morse code. It doesn’t mean anything.

I hear footsteps and pick up the book. The cover is soggy and I don’t like holding it. And I don’t understand the guilty feeling in my stomach. I was just watching her. She’s my friend as much as theirs. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Except maybe wanting her to stay here with me. I feel guilty for being selfish.

I think of us as climates constantly threatened by storms that always break somewhere else. The empty immensity of things, the great forgetting that fills sky and earth . . .

Between words I listen to the machines breathing for the Duchess’s body, pushing air in and pulling it out again. Her heart beats a pulsing LED landscape. Her blood is a single red line.