The Instant of Death [Short Fiction]

Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash

He had considered it for quite some time - at this point, all he could do was think - and he had finally settled upon what would be the last thought he would ever entertain upon this earth. Suffering impatiently through the final visits of family and friends, he had prayed to whichever god would listen that his last bits of energy would not be wasted fulfilling the emotional needs of people who would eventually forget about him and whose lives would in truth not be irrevocably affected by his passing. He had struck the difficult balance of keeping traces of the thought within reach of his conscious mind throughout the ordeal while at the same time not actually thinking it in its detailed entirety, knowing that to do so would be to spoil it. 

But now, all of that was behind him. First, they had moved him into an overcrowded intensive care unit where his every thought had been blasted away by the hysterical bursts of prayers sobbed towards the stucco ceiling by his roommate during her every waking hour and sometimes even in her sleep. At first he had found it a blessing, an answer to his own heavenly pleas for the conservation of his mental faculties, by any means necessary, until just the right moment; yet soon he had begun to worry that perhaps the moment would come right in the middle of a particularly frenzied bit of lamentation and thus his final intellectual expenditure would be wasted, dissolved within a secondhand simmer of delirious ranting.

She had passed less than a week after he moved in, despite the vigor of all heavenward entreaties. Perhaps it was his prayers that had in fact been answered, as shortly afterwards his condition took a turn for the worse, and a series of counselors and transitional therapists had begun to filter through the room preparing him for what was imminently to come.

It had been a miserable few days, but he had taken comfort in the light ahead growing brighter and brighter as they packed all of his things and transferred him to a room in a ward with far less activity. While the room was much smaller than he was used to, it was quiet here, with less effort and resources seemingly expended against the inevitable. It was also completely and utterly his.

Alone at last.

The workers here were Death's minions, and so the constant threat of His visitation was something to be neither fearful nor nervously expectant of. It was part of the job. No more awkward attempts at respectful avoidance of eye contact, no more thin lips pinched into a farcical mock-up of sympathy, and most blessedly no more having to engage in small talk of any sort. 

And so, he waited. Patiently at first, though as the seconds ticked into hours ticked into days, he began to grow anxious. Occasionally he felt the urge to ask for a phone and call up a friend or a loved one that he had either given short shrift to or shut out entirely during his last few weeks of sociability, but he always suppressed it. His entire life had been building up to this moment, and he didn't want to blow it. Each soft footfall, each whispered proclamation of finality that slipped past his door would pique his attention, make him wonder if they knew something he didn't, if maybe some secret message buried deep within his dimming vital signs was bringing them along to at last begin his transition once and for all into oblivion. The IV drip was flowing steadier and steadier, and at times he had difficulty discerning whether he was awake or asleep. He had, on more than one occasion, stood up out of his bed and walked all the way to the service elevators at the other end of the building before realizing that he hadn't moved at all and was in fact still lying on his back staring up at the blank, lightly speckled ceiling tiles above his head. One evening his long-deceased mother had beckoned him from the Olympic-sized aqua therapy pool within the hospital's bowels, and the next thing he knew he was waking up on the cold tile of his bathroom floor, the tap on the sink hissing away a steady stream. It had taken all of his strength, once awake, to make the same crawl back so that he could page the nurse and have his shivering, wheezy husk heaved back into the bed, convinced the whole time that one slight move or misplaced exertion of force would snap his ever-more-delicate bones and incur the wrath of a septic infection that would once and for all send him on his way so that he could rid his mind the burden of this final thought that he was still trying to both hold onto and ignore completely until the time came at last.

The more he waited, the more of a curse it became. 

Occasionally on one of his illusory somnambulant strolls through the empty white corridors, it would intrude upon his unconscious mind and threaten to express itself in its entirety. He sometimes spent so much energy fighting it off in his sleep that he would awake exhausted and in need of a nap. This combined with the general physical toll reaped by the gradual disintegration of one's own body made him understandably irritable. He began to refuse meal service, partly because he was no longer interested in any form of human contact but also because he saw no need to continue a performance of approximated life within a vulgar show that no longer held any interest for him. 

His first attempt to end it of his own volition proved unsuccessful when, after removing the plug from his life support machine with a hastily-crafted linen lariat, he had awoken to find himself twisted onto his stomach in bed, his bony claws wrapped so tightly around a half-uprooted white sheet that the parchment skin of his hand had split and begun to spread what little blood was left within out into the stiff fabric.

The second attempt had been more of a resignation. Sitting up in the bath while the stout nurse-in-training had scrubbed his scaly back with the coarse exertions one would normally reserve for the most stubbornly sullied iron pans, he had heard a sharp crack when twisting around to give her a better angle at his underarms. He hadn't thought anything of it until she hoisted him out of the water and noticed that his feet were pointing directly behind him. She had shrieked and dropped him as she ran into the other room to sound the alarm for back-up, and as she waited, he had allowed himself to slip down below the scummy surface of the stagnant water without even dignifying the situation with a vain attempt at lifting himself back up. He welcomed the lukewarm, mildewy water into desiccated lungs which barely had the strength to reflexively cough it back up. He saw the welcoming veil of eternal darkness begin to close around the edges of his field of vision before those cursed hands had plunged into the mire, a network of callouses scratching their purchase onto his pickling flesh and heaving him up and once more shackling him to the onerous burden of life. 

It was a mystifying and infuriatingly long wait after that. The days began to blend together and further bleed into his dreams until he was not sure whether he was in fact even still alive. He worried on more than one occasion that he had in fact died without knowing it and that this was a hell to which he had been consigned for failing so spectacularly at his one final goal. Every now and then a lung would collapse under its own weight, and he would snap back to attention as the accursed tubes were shoved down his throat and attached to bags that pumped plastic air into his chest. But even such episodes as these became easier to ignore. He could lose himself quite easily within the fringes of even the most traumatic experience at this point. Sometimes along his internal journeys he would see a trace of the precious thought that he had protected within himself for so long, and when he did, he would deliberately choose a different path in order to avoid it for just a little while longer; until he could know with certainty that it was in fact the end.

And then finally, it seemed as if the moment had come at last.

Upon waking that day, his vision had been obscured as if by a heavy fog. The pace of his thinking was even weightier. The very act of breathing required such effort, and left him so exhausted, that he knew he would not be able to continue doing it for much longer.

The confirmation came when his doctors visited and he could just make out, ever so faintly, the solemn whispers and polite shaking of heads that indicated they felt that they had done all that they could do and that it was, at last, simple a matter of time.

He sank fully into himself and began to release the weight of everything he had been carrying up to that point, despite his best efforts. Every unrequited dream, every dashed hope, every regret and embarrassment. It all sloughed away as a faint light began to bleed in from the periphery of his vision and a low white noise began to settle in over his brain. He felt fully at ease, fully relaxed, for the first time in months because now all he had to do was elevate the hidden profundity from the depths of his mind and let it loose to play through his consciousness as the whole mechanism faded into obscurity.

Only he had forgotten it.

What little energy remained in his reserves was drained in the violent and sudden act of tensing every muscle in his body. While he tried to go back once more to desperately holding on just long enough to remember it, he realized with a panic that it was too late and that everything was shutting down and slipping away. There was no stopping it.

He cursed himself for being so patient, for insisting on saving it. Surely he could have gotten his use of it when it had first occured to him, and then simply re-accessed the memory of it as he faded off into the abyss. Or perhaps, had he given the thought full bloom when he had had the chance, he would have been released from the burden of life like a dying grandparent who waits for their last remaining grandson to visit them before they finally let go.

But he hadn’t, and so now all of his preparation, all of the effort he had expended in the build-up to this moment had been a waste; and by extension, since he had designed this thought as the culmination of his entire time spent on this planet, his life itself was suddenly rendered null. How silly and futile, he thought, to plan out a life for oneself when it was only inevitable that it would all succumb to the merciless recklessness of chance. Perhaps that was the final lesson here, and suddenly he was comforted by the realization that maybe this was what it had all led to, that even this had in fact been part of the plan all along in order to lead him to such a simple yet fundamental truth of existence. Maybe it was better to—

And then, as suddenly as it had vanished, it came back to him. Not fully formed, but he could see the vaguest outline of the thought floating ahead of him in his mind’s eye, and with every ounce of electrical energy left flittering in his already-decaying brain he pushed towards it. It was dim, yet growing brighter and bigger the closer he got to it. He thrilled at the realization that his panic had been for naught, that even though he could no longer feel the weight of his own body against the stiff hospital sheets, the thought was still in fact within reach after all, waiting for him to arrive and realize it fully and thus satisfy his life’s purpose, and that in the end to do so was simply a matter of being able to hold on until…

-cs