The light blinked. In the hallway, it dimmed, went out, dimmed, and then was gone. No, she thought, it couldn’t be a power outage. Must be some kind of test. She looked at her watch. It was close to eight-thirty. She looked out there but couldn’t tell if it was brownout or what until the nurse, now carrying a flashlight, appeared a few doorways down. He was speeding around and called out to Mary, “Something wrong with the nonemergency generators. Just sit tight. There’s a flashlight on the wall in there. Just, just take it down and make sure it’s working.”

Mary went back and found the red plastic wall mounting. When she pulled down the flashlight, it made a spatting sound. She saw that punctate bits of red had chipped away. She switched the flashlight on and off a few times. No use, it was dead. The fluorescents were blazing in the room, though, and, most key of all, the monitors were bright and working. She was glad Frank wasn’t on a ventilator. But others in this ward were.

She went into the hall to see what she could do. Another nurse rushed her way. “Can you,” she said, “can you take this and Scotch it to the door?” She was carrying papers; some said VENT and some said NO VENT. She gave Mary a NO VENT and pushed the tape dispenser close to her finger. “Take it,” she said. Mary pulled off some tape and watched the nurse go to the next door. “Here,” Mary said, “I’ll help.”

“No. No! You’re not authorized. Please, just, just go back into your husband’s room. We need to get these soldiers out of here in case, and the halls, we can’t have unauthorized personnel in the halls. Please. All NO VENTS need closed doors. Okay? Just close the door and go inside.”

She was frantic, and it was natural to mistake Mary for a spouse. Mary left it alone, taped up the paper, ducked into the room, and closed the door.

She sat down on the yellow vinyl chair. It looked as if Angela or somebody had drawn a lot of suns with crayon on construction paper and decorated the room with them. There was also a mobile made out of hanger wire that carried Styrofoam stars painted red, white, and blue above Frank’s head. She got up and looked out the window. They were on the fifth floor. She could see lights had gone out elsewhere. Some buildings—nonessential, she hoped—were in darkness. This was a messed-up situation. And they were supposed to have made some changes after the paper wrote up the lousy care here.