Sometimes we are characters from a bad novel

A noise awoke her. She struggled to consciousness from a great depth. The noise came from something on the side table. She reached a heavy hand: there were objects but she had no words, no labels for them. She touched the little clock, the remote control, then sat up, confused, and the noise persisted, rapid and loud. Finally something coalesced in her brain, pulled sense from a thousand scattered bits into a mass sufficiently grave to allow for a thought put together from language: cell phone, there. The little black lozenge lay in front of her on the table. She picked it up and opened it, and at once it emitted a voice that spoke about her brother's annual review for benefits from a state agency. Her own throat and tongue delivered responses that seemed correct, in a relaxed, alert tone. There was a soft, easy-seeming exchange with the agency worker familiar to them from so many years of these reviews, and a date was chosen, and the call ended. It was 8:05 a.m. She'd gone to sleep around 5. She lay back and slipped into a light semiconsciousness and drifted, and then after another hour forced her body upright and began another day.

But it wasn't going to work this time.

For several weeks she and her brother--she, a 55-year-old woman with a bad right kidney and strangling liver and arthritis in her wrists and thumbs, and brother, a 40-year-old 95-pound retarded man with alopecia and a worrisome white count--had struggled to pack up and carry away the contents of her out-of-business bookshop. They were hindered by her increasing feebleness. Brother could go on forever, it seemed, and laugh and feel proud, but he ought not to go on, and she knew it, and she couldn't let him. She pushed herself and accomplished a lot the first week and then paid for it in days of prostration. There weren't enough boxes. She had a couple of friends who were willing to assist, they said, but she felt they were already overworked doing the chores that filled their own lives. In past moves she had hired helpers, but there was no money this time. So the deadline for vacating the premises came and went and still she and her brother kept on, as though retrieving boxes, filling them, stacking them, trucking them away to stack them again, hauling shelves up stairs or dragging them into other shops' back rooms was what their lives were all about and always had been and always would be.

The hours they devoted each day to this activity became fewer and fewer until this day, when she found herself filling boxes as though in a dream, when she walked with armfuls of books through a space gluey with minutes and stacked them, arranged them, in box after box, until all the boxes were filled and no more empty ones would be had, although books remained by hundreds stacked here and there on the shop floor. The mess that always accumulates toward the end of a move had accumulated, in the back room and around the counter, and it came suddenly into sharp focus, and she stopped abruptly, took a breath, and sent brother upstairs to their apartment after just an hour. And she turned out the lights and locked the front door of the shop and followed down the rainy street and up the steps, her brain in a reddish fog, and lay at once on the old sofa with her head on the yellow pillow, and descended into a profound black sleep.