"Why are you so interested all of a sudden?" Mrs. Xin asked.

Usually they talked over tea in the cafeteria; that night, Mrs. Xin had brought a cup of tea and some sugar cookies to Tubby's bedside. They had somehow become shoddy and nauseating, there, the acridity of the cheap tea eclipsing its aromatics, the staleness of the cookies filling up the room.

"The subsidy is shitty," said Tubby, after checking the hallway to make sure no nurse was about to come in. She fingered one of the wires that sprouted from the JustBE machine to alight on her ribs. "I'm fed up with the fucking rash. I've wasted shit knows how many of the hours I have left with my granddaughter snoring like a boar hog in a sunbeam. I think it's shitty that the home can pull me from the program for no reason, so they can hold it over my head like a fucking guillotine." She did not speak about the failure of her memory in her last conversation with Daphne. She had filed that terror deeply away.

Mrs. Xin nodded and sipped her tea. "So what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to write the fucking Congressman."

Mrs. Xin frowned slightly. She took a bit of time choosing her words. "Tubby," she said at last, "the Congressman gets a lot of mail. And you can't vote."

"I wasn't planning on faxing him my passport, Qingmei." She made herself take a sip of tea, which was bitter from steeping too long; she pulled a face and dropped a cookie in it. "U.S. politicians are terrified of old people, because old Americans love to vote. Have you ever seen Mrs. Knott on Election Day? She'd have her grandchildren ground into chicken feed as long as she could vote on it first."

Mrs. Xin's eyes flickered over to the plastic cup that sat next to Tubby's tea on the end table. "You look flushed, Tubby."

"I'm impassioned."

"Have you been drinking?"

Tubby gave Mrs. Xin a sly look. "It is neither possible nor impossible that I have or have not been drinking."

"Tubby, be careful! Alcohol and painkillers don't mix."

"Spoken like a hundred-year-old nun with a dried-up cunt."

"I mean it." Mrs. Xin cast another eye at the plastic cup. "Now pour a nun a splash before she starts to tell you what her cunt is really—"

Tubby shrieked and scrambled for the bottle.

They drank spiked tea and spoke for a long time after that, both imbibing more moderately than either cared to let on. The bite of the cheap whisky somehow softened the bitterness of cut-rate tea and made the factory cookies buttery and rich. Afterward, Mrs. Xin helped Tubby down to the computer lab, one painstaking step at a time.