I pulled the sedan into the designated visitor parking area at Shady Oaks and the asphalt was shimmering with heat and the lawns were cut to exactly three inches and I sat there for four minutes just to steady my respiratory rate because the performance of being a devoted grandson is demanding at sixty-eight years old, it is truly demanding. I looked at the brick facade and the double-pane glass and I thought about the commute back through the suburban sprawl and the stop-and-go traffic that defines my afternoon and the sheer mechanical repetition of it all, the repetition. My neighbors see my car leave every Tuesday and they see me return three hours later and they assume I am a man of high character but I am really just a man who is very good at maintaining appearances, very good. Inside the facility the air is pressurized and it smells like industrial bleach and cooked cabbage and I walked down the hall and I felt the clinical weight of the environment pressing against my chest but I kept my face neutral. I entered room 412 and she was sitting in the recliner and she looked like a collection of biological failures held together by sheer stubbornness and expensive linen and I kissed her cheek and I felt the coldness of her skin, the coldness. I sat in the hard plastic chair and I began the observation of her decline and I noted the way her hands shook when she reached for her water but I felt no internal shift in my emotional state, no shift at all. She began the inventory of her physical symptoms and she spoke about the inflammation in her joints and the acidity in her stomach and the way the night nurses ignore her calls for assistance and she went on for forty-five minutes and I sat there and I nodded and I said the appropriate phrases. I said "That sounds very difficult, Clara" and I said "We should mention that to the doctor" and I performed the role of the sympathetic listener but my mind was three miles away in my basement. I was thinking about the console and the controller and the way the lights on the hardware glow green when the system initializes and I wanted to be there, I wanted to be there so badly that it felt like a physical ache in my teeth, an ache. I analyzed her speech patterns and I noticed the way she repeats the same grievances every single day, every day, and I realized that I do not feel empathy or sorrow or any of the expected responses but I feel a profound sense of boredom that borders on the pathological. I looked at the clock on the wall and the second hand was moving with a deliberate slowness and I thought about the open-world map on my screen and the way I can control every variable in that digital space but here I am subject to the biological decay of a woman who doesn't even remember what I did for a living. She doesn't remember and she doesn't ask and she just wants to describe the texture of her medications, the texture. I am sixty-eight and she is ninety-five and we are both just waiting for different types of endings and I am tired of the smells and the sounds of the oxygen concentrator and the way the sunlight hits the dust motes in the air, the dust. I want to play the game where I am a pilot or a soldier or anything other than a retired man sitting in a room that smells like death and I want the sensory input of the high-definition graphics and the surround sound and I want to escape the crushing weight of reality. People would say this is heartless and they would say I am a monster for wishing for the end of the conversation so I can go home and play video games but I have done my duty for forty years and I have paid my taxes and I have kept the lawn green and I am DONE with pretending to care about a hip replacement, I am done. She gripped my hand and her fingers felt like dry parchment and she asked me "Are you even listening to me, Michael?" and I told her I was listening to every word and I told her I understood her pain but I was actually calculating the travel time if I took the back roads to avoid the construction near the mall. The construction is endless and the orange cones are everywhere and it adds twelve minutes to the trip but it is better than sitting in the stillness of that room and I just want to go home. I want to turn off the lights and I want to disappear into the screen, disappear.