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against the camera, she did it with galling righteousness, warning her neighbors, too young to remember, about giving up their privacy for false security. But once the system was up and running and their lobby played twenty-four hours a day on channel seventy-one, she had found herself tuning in from time to time, absorbed by the activity, oddly soothed by the steady bustle of life entering and exiting their building. When Alex had asked her what could be so engrossing about watching their neighbors come and go, she said, “RememberMrs. Birukov sitting on the stoop all day long? We were so sure she was spying on us, that she was the FBI’s informant in the building. Maybe she was just an old woman who found solace in the hubbub.”
    When the front door closes behind the skinny boy, the long, narrow black-and-white lobby looks, to Ruth, no more or less foreboding than the long, narrow phosphorous green tunnel playing on all the other channels. Compared to the fate of one little dog, nothing else matters.
    How can he sleep at a time like this?
    How could she not? Fatigue pervades her every cell. The whirligig of imagery exhausts her. Whatever they might face tomorrow, rest will only help. She mutes the sound and goes to the medicine cabinet. All three shelves are overflowing. Alex’s prescriptions dominate the top one, hers the middle, Dorothy’s the bottom. She scours her shelf for her over-the-counter sleeping pills, a foil-backed, plastic sheet of eight perforated squares, each square holding a little blue diamond of sleep in its own air bubble. She finds the sheet, but the diamonds are gone. She must have swallowed the last one yesterday evening. She fingers through the rest of her shelf—expired penicillin, Lipitor, hemorrhoid cream, Advil, Aleve, Excedrin Migraine, an ancient jar of skin lotion, ear plugs—for some alternative (any label that warns of sleepiness). She checks Alex’s shelf—-Gas-X, Zantac, Nexium, Cystex, Sudafed, Proscar, Viagra, Avapro, Toprol, hydrocortisone, and one disintegrating roll of antacid chalk. She even searches Dorothy’s—Zubrin, Soloxine, heartworm pills, Advantage, chicken-flavored toothpaste, Atopica, Clomicalm, and a vial of sedatives for travel.
    She can’t be up all night, not tonight. She’ll descendinto a vortex of panic and worries far more disturbing than anything she saw on television. She and Alex have to be up, showered, and dressed before Lily arrives. The young couple she’s bringing over might overlook the five flights of stairs, the water stain on the ceiling, but they’ll certainly take notice of a septuagenarian couple greeting them in their bathrobes.
    She reaches for Dorothy’s vial of travel sedatives and reads the label:
one quarter tablet for dogs up to eleven pounds one half hour before traveling, or when needed
. She tries to do the arithmetic. How many times does Dorothy’s weight go into hers? Her mind goes blank. She struggles with the childproof cap and pours two pills onto her palm. Placing them on her tongue (they taste like chicken), she turns on the faucet and drinks from the stream, like an animal. She half expects the very act of swallowing them to calm her, but she feels anything but quieted. She returns to the living room, covers Alex with a blanket, and shuts the lights. She mutes, but doesn’t turn off, the television. It will act as a night lamp should he awaken in the dark.
    She goes to their bedroom, changes into her nightgown, sets the alarm for seven, and puts it on her side of the bed. But she’s hardly ready to lie down and close her eyes. The sedative’s label instructed the dog’s owner to allow the pills a full half hour to work. It’s only been ten minutes.
    She wakes up their computer, asleep on a tiny desk next to the bed. She opens the icon for their dial-up server, a connection so slow that it alone sometimes puts her to sleep. When the search engine comes up, she types into its thin window,
dog dachshund herniated