At seventy-eight he had stopped choosing things, and the tablet did not require him to. Between nine at night and whenever sleep took him, it went from a man restoring a rusted wrench, to a plane landing sideways in Madeira, to a woman in Ohio explaining what her mother said at the end. He picked none of them. It picked forty, and then forty more.

His son called Sundays. He would pause the screen, say the knee was fine, say Florida was fine, and unpause before the call had fully dropped. The charging cable stayed taped along the arm of the recliner so the thing never went dark. At 4:17 a.m. it was still playing to a room where no one was awake. He could not have named one video, or what else there would have been.