Summary

"Nirvana" – The narrator’s wife, Charlotte, is temporarily paralyzed from the shoulders down and is bedridden following a simple flu. Charlotte tries to keep her mind off the pain and her situation by listening to Nirvana through headphones. The narrator worries about his wife killing herself since she is unhappy with the paralysis, and because she doesn’t believe it is temporary. Reading Joseph Heller’s autobiography doesn’t help much, since Joseph Heller recovers from illness to leave his wife and marry his nurse. Charlotte dislikes how the narrator has iProjector computer-generated talks with a hologram of the recently-assassinated President each night. The narrator has constructed the president from lines of code out of the feeling of needing to save someone.

The narrator asks the holographic President about his life with the First Lady, if they ever talked about the future...