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one, he knew. And
not much help from MaryJo, either, for instead of being strong as she usually was in an emergency, this time she would be, as she said, afraid.
    â€œWell, so am I,” Mark said to himself. He reached over and stroked his wife’s shadowy cheek, realized that there were some creases near the eye, understood that what made her afraid was not his specific ailment, odd as it was, but the fact that it was a hint of aging, of senility, of imminent separation. He remembered the box downstairs, like death appointed to watch for him until at last he consented to go. He briefly resented them for bringing death to his home, for so indecently imposing on them; and then he ceased to care at all. Not about the box, not about his strange lapses of memory, not about anything.
    I am at peace, he realized as he drifted off to sleep. I am at peace, and it’s not all that pleasant.
    Â 
    â€œMark,” said MaryJo, shaking him awake. “Mark, you overslept.”
    Mark opened his eyes, mumbled something so the shaking would stop, then rolled over to go back to sleep.
    â€œMark,” MaryJo insisted.
    â€œI’m tired,” he said in protest.
    â€œI know you are,” she said. “So I didn’t wake you any sooner. But they just called. There’s something of an emergency or something—”
    â€œThey can’t flush the toilet without someone holding their hands.”
    â€œI wish you wouldn’t be crude, Mark,” MaryJo said. “I sent the children off to school without letting them wake you by kissing you good-bye. They were very upset.”
    â€œGood children.”
    â€œMark, they’re expecting you at the office.”
    Mark closed his eyes and spoke in measured tones.
“You can tell them and tell them I’ll come in when I damn well feel like it and if they can’t cope with the problem themselves I’ll fire them all as incompetents.”
    MaryJo was silent for a moment. “Mark, I can’t say that.”
    â€œWord for word. I’m tired. I need a rest. My mind is doing funny things to me.” And with that Mark remembered all the illusions of the day before, including the illusion of having children.
    â€œThere aren’t any children,” he said.
    Her eyes grew wide. “What do you mean?”
    He almost shouted at her, demanded to know what was going on, why she didn’t just tell him the truth for a moment. But the lethargy and disinterest clamped down and he said nothing, just rolled back over and looked at the curtains as they drifted in and out with the air conditioning. Soon MaryJo left him, and he heard the sound of machinery starting up downstairs. The washer, the dryer, the dishwasher, the garbage disposer: it seemed that all the machines were going at once. He had never heard the sounds before—MaryJo never ran them in the evenings or on weekends, when he was home.
    At noon he finally got up, but he didn’t feel like showering and shaving, though any other day he would have felt dirty and uncomfortable until those rituals were done with. He just put on his robe and went downstairs. He planned to go in to breakfast, but instead he went into his study and opened the lid of the coffin.
    It took him a bit of preparation, of course. There was some pacing back and forth before the coffin, and much stroking of the wood, but finally he put his thumbs under the lid and lifted.
    The corpse looked stiff and awkward. A man, not particularly old, not particularly young. Hair of a determinedly average color. Except for the grayness of the
skin color the body looked completely natural and so utterly average that Mark felt sure he might have seen the man a million times without remembering he had seen him at all. Yet he was unmistakably dead, not because of the cheap satin lining the coffin rather slackly, but because of the hunch of the shoulders, the jut of the chin. The man was not comfortable.
    He smelled of