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ear. By her expression—eyes closed, mouth a wide slot of darkness, forehead painfully taut, as if someone is pulling her hair— Alex doesn’t need to ask who it is.
    She covers the mouthpiece. “Dorothy can’t feel pain any longer. They don’t think the steroids are going to work. She needs the surgery. They have to perform a test first to see where to operate. The dye can cause seizures. The test could kill her. She’ll have it around seven; if she’s operable she’ll go right to surgery. They need to speak to you. We put it on your credit card.” She hands him the cell phone.
    Even under the best of circumstances—the satellite is overhead, the TV is mute—he can barely make out what anyone says to him on the cell phone. A woman’s voicecrackles
three hundred
or
three thousand
, he can’t tell. He turns to Ruth, but she’s risen off the sofa, her back to him. Her glasses remain on the armrest, the lenses catching the kitchen’s fluorescent glow, concentrating it into two tiny suns.
    “We’ll authorize the test,” Alex tells the woman, “but please have Dr. Rush call us on our land line with the test results. We want to talk to him
before
the surgery.” He closes the phone, puts it back in her purse.
    “He talked about a wheelchair of some sort,” Ruth says. “He said the dogs adjust better than their owners.”
    “Did you believe him?”
    “No.”
    She sits down again, pulls a tissue from her purse, wipes her eyes, and then crushes the sodden wad in her fist, as if she were trying to compress it into a diamond. In a voice as calm as he can manage, he says, “She’s one tough old dame, Ruth. She might surprise us.”
    He takes her hand, and they sit side by side in the television’s volatile, liquid light. The newscaster is now interviewing a robotics expert who explains, in a droning monotone, how an aqua-bomb robot can enter a ten-thousand-gallon gasoline tank and maneuver through highly flammable liquid without destabilizing the environment. “She’s called a Robo-eel. She uses the undulating motions of an eel to keep friction to a minimum.”
    Ruth is right, there’s nothing new.
    Without even knowing that he’s doing it, Alex nods off, catches himself, and sits upright. He doesn’t want to leave Ruth alone right now, but sleep tugs him under again. Only when something loud—a laugh, a gunshot—shatters the oblivion, and alerts him to the world he’s abandoned, does he resurface and open his eyes. In those brief clicks of consciousness, he sees Ruth—now wearing her glasses, pushing the channel button on the remote control as it were a morphine pump. Sometimes he sees the television screen—dancing M&M’s, the ravaged face of a middle-aged rock star, a bloody dagger, BBQ sauce being painted on ribs, an SUV climbing a staircase, a map of Bonanza burning, a cat dancing the cha-cha, the basset-eyed newscaster, green shapes rolling over a weather map, a comely woman eating worms, their empty co-op lobby, commemorative president portrait plates, a man’s face going through a window, a planet exploding. And sometimes, just as sleep gets hold of him again, just as he sinks back into tranquil nothingness, he sees Dorothy in the examining room, crouched on the linoleum floor, waiting for him to call her.

RUTH PAUSES AT THE NEWS STATION ON HER third go around. In the time it’s taken Alex to fall asleep, a graphic for tonight’s top story has already been designed— a long shot of the tunnel as seen by the night-vision bomb robot, and a bold red-and-black sans-serif typeface emblazoned diagonally across it,
Danger in the Tunnel
. She switches back to the BBQ sauce being painted on ribs, to the gold-edged dinner plate bearing Ronald Reagan’s face, to their lobby as seen by the security camera near the vestibule door—a skinny boy of twenty, their upstairs neighbor who always forgets to take off his wooden clogs, strides through the lobby on his way out.
    When Ruth had cast her vote