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"An accountant," she said. "We'd have a big condo downtown."

"And two cars," I said. "New ones."

"And a cottage on a lake somewhere," she said.

"And we'd vacation in the Caribbean every winter," I said.

She pointed out a baby that wouldn't stop crying. "What about that one?"

"With lungs like that," I said, "I'd have to be some sort of musician. Maybe even a rock star."

"I'd be your manager," she said. "We started out working together, and then we fell in love."

"On a tour of Europe," I said.

"We live in an estate outside the city," she said.

"I have gold albums and everything."

"We have maids and people who do our lawns."

"And more money than we can ever spend."

Rachel pointed to a baby at the back of the room. This one was tiny, half the size of the others, and it was in a different kind of incubator, one that was all enclosed in glass and had tubes running into it from machines. The nurses checked on this baby every few minutes, and they stopped smiling whenever they did.

"What about that one?" Rachel asked. "Who would we be if we were that baby's parents?"

"I'd be worried," I said.

I WAS ACTING OUT so many deadly diseases and conditions that I couldn't even tell when I was acting and when I was really sick. Once, I woke with what I thought was a real pain in my stomach. I'd been researching stomach cancer that week, and I knew all about the low survival rate, so I mentioned it to the doctor in charge of the training exercises when I went in that afternoon.

"I don't know," she said, "I was planning to test them on head injuries today."

"But I think this is a real pain," I said.

"Are you sure it isn't in your head?" she asked me.

When she brought the interns in, the first one shone a light in my eyes. "Are you feeling any pain or nausea?" he asked. The question was directed at me, but he was looking at the doctor.

"I have a pain in my stomach," I said.

"You mean your head," he said.

"No," I said, "it's in my stomach."

He looked at the doctor. "I thought we were doing head injuries today."

"But I'm not acting," I said. "I'm really in pain."

"I didn't study for abdominal pains," he went on. "This isn't fair." One of the other interns laughed.

The doctor checked her watch. "Let's move on," she suggested.

"But I think there's something really wrong with me," I said.

THE NEXT TIME we went back to the room with all the babies, the sick baby was still in its incubator with all the tubes hooked up to machines. It didn't look any bigger, and it didn't cry or wave its arms and legs like the other babies. It just lay there, looking up at the fluorescent lights overhead.

"Do you think it's going to live?" Rachel asked.

"I don't know," I said.

"Where are its parents?" Rachel asked, looking around. "What it needs are parents."

"Maybe they're sick too," I said. "Maybe they're in their own special incubators somewhere."

Rachel looked at me, then back at the baby.

"It'll grow if it thinks it has parents," she said. "It just needs to feel loved."

"Well, what can you do," I said.

"We'll be its parents," she said. She tapped on the glass. "Hello, baby," she said.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Wave to baby," she told me. She kept on tapping the glass, and the baby looked in our direction, as did one of the nurses.

"That's not our baby," I said.

"It doesn't know that," Rachel said. "It's still young enough that maybe it'll imprint on us."

"It's not a chicken," I said.

"Wave to baby," she said, "or it'll think you don't care."

I looked at the baby. It stared back at me, unmoving except for its shallow breaths. I lifted a hand and waved.

A FEW MONTHS after I started working as a victim, a pharmaceutical company hired Rachel and me for some drug trials. It took place in an old wing of the hospital that wasn't used any more. The hospital had sealed off the wing because it had been scheduled for demolition and rebuilding, but then the funds for the project had been cut off, and the wing had been left to collect dust, until they moved us in there.

There were maybe a dozen of us in total, all in one big room so the doctors could keep an eye on us. We lay in beds along the walls and watched a television they'd put in the middle of the room. All it played was commercials. Some of the others were normal people like me and Rachel, but some were actually sick. The guy in the bed beside me told me he was dying of cancer.

"Shouldn't you be in another ward then?" I asked him.

"They can't do anything about it," he said. "It's in my head. They'd have to cut out most of my brain to get at it. Then where would I be?"

"Is that a rhetorical question?" I asked.

"I'm hoping maybe these new drugs might do something," he said, but then he sighed and shook his head.

The trial ran for the weekend, and they gave us pills every four hours. They even woke us up if we were sleeping to make sure we took them. The pills all looked the same, tiny and blue, but the doctor in charge said that some of them were placebos.

"Please don't give me any of those," the man beside me said. "That's the last thing I need."

"I'll take his placebos if he doesn't want them," I said.

"That's not the way it works," the doctor said. "It's all random."

"Don't I know that," the man beside me said.

The water had been turned off in this part of the hospital, so we had to go back to one of the other wings if we wanted to use the washroom. One of the women in our group needed help walking there because the drugs she took made her fall down, and another guy lost control of his bowels in his bed, but I figured they were giving me placebos because there was nothing wrong with me.

But when I went to the washroom, I couldn't find my way back. I wandered the halls of the closed-down wing for what seemed like hours before I finally gave up. I lay down on the floor of one of the empty rooms and tried to go to sleep.

As soon as I closed my eyes, though, all the commercials that I'd watched on that television in the ward room started playing in my head. Only now Rachel and I were in them. We drove down a coastal highway in a gleaming new car, we met each other's eyes across a crowded bar and I slid a drink down the counter to her, we played one-on-one basketball against each other in a dark alleyway. I still don't know if it was all caused by the drugs or just a dream.

One of the security guards found me around dawn. He shone a flashlight in my eyes and kept it there even after I'd stood up. "We've been looking all over for you," he said. "We even checked the morgue downstairs."

"What would I be doing in the morgue?" I asked him.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, looking around the empty room.

When he took me back to the room where I was supposed to be, Rachel was just waking up.

"Where were you?" she asked me.

"I went to the washroom," I told her, climbing back into bed.

"I had this dream," she said, shaking her head. "We were living together."

"I want your drugs," I said.

RACHEL AND I STARTED checking on our baby whenever we were in the hospital. We'd stand on the other side of the glass and wave and smile and make faces. Once, Rachel even bought a silver helium balloon from the hospital's gift shop. It said Get Well Soon on one side, and the nurses tied it to one of the incubator's hoses. The baby waved its arms.

"Look," Rachel said. "It's like baby's trying to reach it."

"It's getting better," I said. I put my arm around her.

She didn't take her eyes off the baby. "It really is," she said.

Our baby grew stronger with each passing day. Soon it was waving its arms and legs together, and once I thought it even smiled at us, although Rachel thought it was just gas.

"I think it's going to live," I told her one day.

"But what kind of life is it going to have?" she asked. "That's the question."

"It's going to be an athlete," I said. "It's going to overcome all the odds and go on to become one of those success stories you see on television."

"I'll be happy as long as it's not in a wheelchair or anything like that for the rest of its life," she said. "I couldn't stand it if it was crippled."

"Even then, it'd still be a hero," I said. "Like that guy who rode his wheelchair all around the world."

"Imagine that," Rachel said, tapping her fingers on the glass. "Our baby, a hero."

BUT ONE DAY we showed up and our baby was gone. The special incubator was empty, and now the nurses didn't even look at it. The helium balloon was still attached to the hose, but it hung half-deflated in the air.

"Oh no," Rachel said, putting her hands over her mouth. "What's happened?"

"Hey," I said, pounding on the glass to get the nurses' attention. "What have you done?"

All the other babies started to cry at the noise, and one of the nurses waved at me to stop.

"Oh oh oh," Rachel said, staring at the empty incubator.

"It's okay," I said. "Don't worry, it's all right." I didn't know what else to do, so I pounded on the glass some more.

One of the nurses came through the door that led into the room. "Who do you think you are," she said, "upsetting the babies like that?"

"What happened to it?" Rachel asked. She put her arms around me, and I held her. "Is it all right?"

"What happened to what?" the nurse asked.

"What happened to our baby?" I said.

THE LAST TIME I worked as a victim was when the hospital staged a disaster simulation. It took place in the parking lot of a mall, on a Sunday morning. There were twenty of us, all made up with different injuries by professional makeup crews. We sat on the asphalt while they painted wounds on us. I asked for a bullet in the chest, but the woman who worked on me said it wasn't that kind of disaster. "It's an explosion of some sort," she said. "With toxic gas and all that." She did something to my head that made it look all burned and black, then ripped the top of my shirt open.

"Am I getting reimbursed for that?" I asked.

"Do you think you can vomit?" she asked, rubbing fake blood into my chest. Her hands were warm and strong, like a masseuse's. "We don't have any of the simulated vomit left, and they wanted everyone throwing up from the gas."

"What kind of gas is this anyway?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said. "All they said was gas."

"I don't think I can vomit," I said. "Maybe I should just take off my shirt and you can put blood all over me instead."

"I think we're about done here," she said. She turned to Rachel and worked on her for a while, giving her a slashed throat and covering one of her eyes with melted skin.

"How do I look?" Rachel asked me when the makeup woman was done.

"Perfect," I told her.

The hospital had hired a professional film director, a man by the name of Eden, to stage the event. He listed off all the films he'd worked on, but I'd never heard of any of them. He arranged us around a burned-out tanker truck they'd parked in one corner of the lot.

"This was in a real accident," he told us. "Two or three people got killed. So try to play off that, uh, realistic feeling."

Rachel put up her hand. "What do you mean, 'two or three'?" she asked.

"The fire department guys told me two bystanders died when it blew," Eden said, "but they never found the driver, so they're not sure what happened to him."

I looked at the cab of the truck. It was all melted, the metal fused together so tightly you couldn't see inside it. I wondered if the driver was still in there.

Eden spread us out around the truck and told us to lie down until the ambulances arrived. He walked among us, adjusting people's limbs and telling us to show more pain, that sort of thing. A couple of times he stopped and looked at the scene through a little lens hanging from his neck.

"All right," he said, when he was done, "I'm going to call the ambulances now. Try to stay in character when they get here."

Beside me, Rachel lay back and looked up at the sky, practised her moaning.

Eden walked over to the snacks table and grabbed a gasoline container from underneath it. He took it over to the burned-out truck and poured gas all over the hood and the cab. Then he tossed the can aside and took a lighter from his pocket, lit the truck on fire.

Rachel stopped her moaning and looked up. "There's no gas left in the truck, is there?" she asked.

"Are there going to be fire trucks too?" I called out, but Eden shook his head.

"No, this is just for, uh, effect," he said. "I thought it would make things look more real."

"He thought?" Rachel said, watching the smoke from the fire rise up into the sky. "Does the hospital know about this?"

"So no one's going to put out the fire?" I asked.

Eden didn't answer, though, because he was talking into his cell phone now. "Everybody's in places here," he said. "We're ready for the take."

I looked around the parking lot. People were pulling into parking spots around our taped-in area and getting out of their cars, wandering into the mall. Some of them looked our way, but no one actually stopped.

Eden frowned as he put away his phone. "Attention, people," he shouted. "There's been a delay. It seems there's been a real disaster in a chemical plant on the other side of the city, and our ambulances got sent there by mistake. They thought it was the exercise." People around Rachel and me groaned, but Eden held up his hands. "I want you all to stay in position," he said. "They're going to come for us as soon as they realize the mistake."

We lay there for a while longer, until the sun was almost directly overhead. I began to sweat, but I stayed in place. The smoke from the fire drifted down over us, and everyone began to cough.

"What if they don't realize it's a mistake?" Rachel wondered after maybe half an hour of this. "What if they think that other disaster is really the exercise all along?"

"Well, they'd better figure it out soon," I said, "because my makeup is starting to melt."