I’m playing that I’m still asleep, that I haven’t heard her wake me. I’m drifting back off, scrambling eggs, warming up the leftover T-bone in the microwave, looking for the sugar bowl and the milk. The dog has the paper in his mouth.

“Did you hear me?” she says.

I hear her. She knows I hear her. I hear her every night, and it never fails to discourage me. Sometimes this getting up and down seems to go on forever. I’ve even considered separate beds. But so far we’ve just gone on like we nearly always have.

I suppose there’s nothing to do but get up. But if only she knew how bad I don’t want to.

“Louis. For God’s sake. Will you get up?”

Another time I was stationed at a small base on the North Carolina coast. We had to pull guard duty at night. After a four-hour shift my feet would be blocks of ice. It would take two hours of rubbing them with my socks off, and drinking coffee, to get them back to normal. The wind came off the ocean in the winter, and it cut right through your clothes. I had that once, and now I have this. The thermostat clicks. It’s doing its small, steady job, regulating the temperature of two human bodies. What a wonderful invention. I’m mixing batter and pouring it on the griddle. Bacon is sizzling in its own grease, shrinking, turning brown, bubbling all along the edges. What lovely bacon, what pretty pancakes. I’ll eat and eat.

“Are you going to get up or not?”

I sigh. I think that if I was her and she was me, I wouldn’t make her do this. But I don’t know that for a fact. How did we know years ago we’d turn out like this? We sleep about a third of our lives and look what all we miss. But sometimes the things we see in our sleep are more horrible and magical than anything we can imagine. People come after you and try to kill you, cars go backward down the highway at seventy miles an hour with you inside and you’re standing up on the brake. Sometimes you even get a little.