She said she'd been thinking about an elderly couple she took to doctors and helped at home sometimes. They all watched daytime TV and the woman kept looking at her husband to check his reaction to whatever the people on the screen were saying or doing. But he didn't have a reaction, he never even noticed that she was looking (...). They lost things all the time and spent hours and then days trying to find them, the mystery of disappearing objects, eyeglasses, fountain pens, tax documents, keys of course, shoes, one shoe, both shoes, and Jessie liked looking, she was good at it, all three of them moving through the apartment talking, looking, trying to reconstruct. The couple used old-fashioned fountain pens fed by actual ink. They were nice people, unfilthily rich, losing, misplacing, dropping all the time. They dropped spoons, dropped books, lost toothbrushes. They lost a painting, by a famous living American, that Jessie found at the back of a closet. Then she watched the wife look at her husband to note his response and she realized that she'd become part of the ritual, one watching the other watch the other.
Don DeLillo, Point Omega
