5
She is sitting at the bus stop in the early morning searching for something in her bag. Then there is a piece of paper to hand and she is folding it lengthwise over and over until it reaches terminal density and she uses it to lever the cap from a bottle of beer.
All night she keeps lit an energy saving light bulb of the kind found in cheap motels. She requires the tinnitus-pitch hum it generates to sever a connection to the otherwise brutal quiet but lately the cold light has begun to disrupt REM sleep, and when she can dream at all she dreams she is in bed, staring at a lightbulb in an unfamiliar room. In these dreams there can be no noise of any kind. The silence will burst her eardrums. Wake into an unfamiliar room.
You do it for the picture because the picture has value. In her absence someone just like her would surely have been found or produced. What difference does it make? There are still a hundred million more prototypes that will fall by the wayside. Where is the history of these unfamiliar rooms if it is not written in the very walls? By the fact there are walls at all? What happens when every lightbulb grows dim and the noise does not stop? She's heard it all her life. Dreams come on at the speed of dark. It makes no difference at all.
