Fritz can’t sleep, because someone is watching him — not staring down at his face or peering around the curtain that separates his room from the nurses’ station, but spying on him at the station itself, where everyone’s heart is on display: three televisions broadcasting nothing but the story of many hearts, sharp white peaks that form and dissolve, marching endlessly across a gray background. The nurses explain that his heart muscle is sending out some type of electric signal, but he thinks they are not telling the whole truth. He is disappointed, too, to find out that his heart is like a battery. He had supposed it was more mysterious than that.