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her to stay in bed, or did people simply compliantly slip onto these hard beds with their stiff, many-times- darned sheets the moment they were designated “patient”?
    “Did you find the things?” she asked her husband, reaching out with the towel from the end of her bed to dry the sleet from his drooping black curls.
    “Yes, all of them,” Elliott said, and just then Laura

    dropped the towel and groped back, her arms rowing, as if for an imaginary chair. Her eyes revolved away until only a slim sliver of the blue iris showed, and her hands clawed as if she were attempting to grasp her own wrists. Elliott dropped the bags and shouted for the nurses, who came in a group of three. They all watched as Laura’s feet slowly attained a perfect level en pointe.
    “Don’t worry, Mister Banner,” the young one said. “She won’t bite her tongue. She doesn’t feel this.”
    Laura’s jaws were scissoring, her teeth grinding louder than a cement mixer in the silence of the predawn. “It will end in a moment. I’ll get Doctor Campanile.”

    H

    e stroked Laura’s sweaty forehead and smoothed back her clean hair. “You smell
    good,” Dr. Campanile told Laura. “Do you feel odd?” “Only tired, as if I’d gone running.”
    “Sleepy?”
    “No.”

    “That’s good, too.”
    “You didn’t see it,” Elliott pleaded. “It must have hurt her terribly.”
    “I know patients who have grand mal seizures chronically, and they say there is no pain,” the doctor told him. “They feel as if they are far away from their own bodies. They can hear, however.” He spoke softly, then, “Well, I think it is time to call your daughters now. She is fine, for a good while perhaps.”
    “They’re on their way. Will they see this? When it happens again? There was no warning.”
    “No. I hope not. I can’t say for certain. We will let them wait outside. I’ll be right outside. Every moment. The office I am in is only three doors from the nurses’ station. I’m still searching, Mister Banner. I’m speaking online with a neurosurgeon in Australia. He’s had some success with preserving a life, but not with much brain function . . .”
    “That would be all right,” Elliott told the doctor. “I would care for her.”
    “It would not be all right, Ell,” Laura said. “I don’t
    want that.”

    “Laura, let him check it out, at least. For me.” She sighed. Elliott left to find a glass of water.
    “Doctor,” Laura said, as he fiddled with the lines in her IV, summoned a nurse to inject something, “only for relaxation,” he promised. “Am I forgetting something?” He paused thoughtfully. “I have seen so many deaths, so many rooms in this place ringing with anguish for unfinished lives. I have watched children die. In my experience, the worst deaths are the deaths of those
    who have failed to love their lives.”
    “I do love my life,” Laura said. “It is a small life, though.”
    “But a complete life. I don’t mean completed, but lived. So, for you, I suspect it is less difficult. There is less to hope to have accomplished. I hope to be as strong,” the doctor said.
    “But you don’t really have an alternative, do you?” Laura asked him. “When there is nothing left but this, you don’t think of yourself. It isn’t bravery. It’s some- thing else.”
    “This is the same thing I observe,” said Dr. Cam- panile. “It is something else. Perhaps emotional, per-

    haps biology being our comfort and friend. Now rest, Laura, save your strength.”
    Laura brushed her hair again and made the call to her sister Suzanne. Suzanne gave a short, sharp scream. She then insisted there must be a second opinion; she would call her best friend’s husband, a professor at UCLA, who would know what to do, perhaps the Mayo Clinic. A Medevac. Laura demurred. Suzanne was adamant. She would call back and ask to speak directly to the neurologist. Suzanne was an adminis- trator for a large credit union. She coped by