The World in Miniature: The Deafening Silence

by Matthew Rush
The Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment

The Deafening Silence

The man looked as beautiful as a pharaoh lying on the bed. His hair was long; salt and pepper black and grey. How could he have brushed it after lying there for days?

The white sheets and shining steel rails surrounding him were pure and clean and clinical; adulterating the sense of heightened emotion, of rank and stinking fear.

The image was broken by his protruding feet and ankles. Toenails yellow, fungal, crumbling into dust and mold and nothing. The nurses said they rubbed his skin with lotion but the cracked trenches in his soles spoke of sicker times and mental illness. The futility of life was a religion in that tiny room.

The machines lingered at the edges of it, watching. Their knobs and screens and cables and printed circuit boards longed for an electrical release. They did not care or consider human suffering but longed to make a difference in the efficiency of the greater machinations of the system. When they beeped and whirred and whined and whooshed they were a part of something beyond themselves. They had no consciousness with which to be aware of such desires and yet still they yearned in deafening silence.

We'd asked them to remove him from the respirator yesterday but the night had passed in vigil and still he breathed and shuddered. The rising falling of his chest and irregular twitching of his limbs and facial muscles was strange but not entirely unexpected. It was the yawning and forced blinking of the cavities around his eyes which disturbed us most. These were the signs of a man alive and made acceptance of the truth difficult.

I'd never seen a dead man yawn before and it shook me to a place that I could not comprehend. My stomach had been tight and fluttery for days but now, this night, my legs grew weak and it was hard to stand and keep from shivering.

The hours stretched on as he refused to cease to be. The staff came in from time to time to check but they were driven out by the pressurized wall of breathless air. We choked and grimaced and coughed and clenched our fists and anuses. Hope had left us long ago but there was a certain determination not to be bested by the angel.
***

It was weeks before I saw the official document but this is what it said:

He died of:

Central Respiratory Failure

due to (or as a consequence of):

Anoxic Brain Injury (10-20-2008)

due to (or as a consequence of):

Cardiac Arrest, ventricular fibrilation (10-20-2008)

due to (or as a consequence of):

Alcoholic Cardiomyopathy.

What this really meant, the attending physician had told us, was the he died of a pickled heart. Pickled by the poison in which he’d sought to drown his anguish.