Lying half on his side in the hospital bed, Ernesto “Che” Guevara regards the machine to his right, which he has been hooked up to for the last three days. Supposedly, the curve on the screen, as long as it doesn’t go flat, means everything’s fine. Though in his treatment so far he’s been surprised by the efficiency of Vietnamese medicine, he does often wonder what it would be like if he were in Cuba or Las Vegas instead. And though it’s midday, the blinds are almost completely lowered, making for a thick semidarkness that adds an extra 98 percent relative humidity to the air. He observes the screen, which, in standby mode, goes dark to save energy; the only thing that stays on, the only sign, is a small circle of transparent plastic containing a blinking orange light. It lights up every three seconds. He’s been staring at it for several hours, but in the same way that we lose ourselves staring at a fire or the trembling of a star. The tiny bulb inside has somehow been accidentally displaced, he sees, and it means that when it lights up, rather than a circle the form it brings to mind is an egg. An egg that appears and, three seconds later, disappears. How paradoxical, it seems to him, that the machine certifying a person’s cessation does so with this oval icon, symbol par excellence of life.