He wore a respirator to bed that night. She asked him why, and he with replied with some muffled and delayed response. She gave up trying and turned over to go to sleep. He thought about how she assumed he was wearing a gas mask. He wished he had a gas mask, not out of fear of some biological attack or sudden mustard gas explosion; he wanted to take pictures of all his friends wearing a gas mask and then send in the pictures to an anarchist website with words of encouragement, so that the anarchists would think they had a lot of supporters and would then stage some huge uprising and then no one would show up and it might be on the news because a Honda Civic would be lit on fire for a brief moment before being extinguished.
He thought about this as he breathed deep the mask, deep and controlled breathing, conserving oxygen as if only a small part of usable air was actually making it through the mask to his mouth. The filters were positioned like stubby antlers on each side of his jawbone, and she slept soundly next to him, or at least pretended to. Was she wondering about the mask? Did she worry that she smelled of something foul, and this was his not-so-subtle way of notifying her? He didn't know, didn't try to know, just questions about other questions, piling onto each other in no logical way, like a stack of green sea turtles precariously balanced, scared of each other and scared to be apart from each other.
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