Mabel looked over at Don. He’d come back from a meeting at the paper ruing the demise of journalism. He said the Room was filled with young reporters, unfortunately too many of them hired to fill quotas, who had no understanding of the mechanics. Here he was in bed now, cross-laced with the mechanicals for apnea. Black straps under his chin and above his forehead kept a mask over his mouth and nose. A tube from his mouth pronged to a machine on the nightstand. Its motor and electronics combined to make a noise equal in decibels to his snoring. The difference was forcing air through his pathways. Unaided, a flap at the back of his throat blocked his breathing once the relaxation of sleep began. He would gasp. He would struggle. He would bat around the bed. The few times he hit her, she got bruises. After a while, he went to the sleep clinic and came home with the REMstar.

The doctor said they would sleep better. In theory, she did. She probably, over time, got more hours than before the snoring machine. On the nights when she couldn’t sleep for her own worries, she viewed the device as intruder. It sat there, casting into the future, the ventilators to come, the minor ills and never-too-serious procedures that precede them, the night as night. She would try to talk herself out of it. He looked, with his tubing, like a supersonic pilot. She should imagine him in training for astrophysics.

She didn’t know about the end of journalism. She knew she was reading obituaries more than before. She went for age first. Headline usually told that. No matter the age, she read the cause of death. If the deceased was under fifty, she read the whole obit. If over, she got picky. Her favorites were actresses. Many of them were names she didn’t recognize. They’d been famous in their day. That always humbled. So too, at first, did the stories. Then she saw. These ladies so often shared the same trajectory. The hard times, the trying and trying, the one big chance, the breakthrough, the prime, the height, full powers, maturity, mastery, a falling off, last revival, advancing decline, last song, final appearance, usual obscurity, sometimes ruin, survived by some. The statesmen were less regular. So too royalty, business owners, artists, and famous wits. Though the last of these she saw less often. It had once been a something to be. Now in its anachronistic dotage, being a wit was as sad, sad as night and the mask and the tube and the straps.

She took her medicine, which was to walk the house.

Don didn’t hear her leave bed. He couldn’t. Once she did a tap dance—though she’d never learned tap and, being barefoot, lacked metal. It was a jig. Her emancipation, without divorce, could be here now if she saw it thus. She would just have to re-see her life. All was the same, but all would be different if only she could re-see it. Out in the hallway, she imagined not being.