The Persistence

They dressed him in one of his eight pairs of pants, one of his twenty-one shirts, and two of his thirty-four socks. He was prepared by the same two individuals - his mother and his brother - and their routine took only 18 seconds longer than usual. A few breaths more than the average count.

The usual time to dress him was 26 minutes and 9 seconds. The rest of the day was 15 hours. He was put to bed for 8 hours and 44 minutes, near 10:00 each night. He was only removed for the occasional event (a meteor shower, a tornado warning) but even those flashes and flickers were familiar. As the days passed, he became hollower, lighter, until there was no difference between the weeks or the routines, and the individuals’ hands passed over him as faintly as a dove’s wings in the wind.

Good morning, his mother said. On Tuesday, on Wednesday, and on Friday.

Good night, his brother said. On Saturday, on Sunday, and on Thursday.

The sayings varied, the tone shifted, but the meaning was the same. It was a habit they’d grown used to. Then again, what wasn’t? Each day passed to the same beat, a constant tick so deeply embedded that to stop was no longer an option. Couldn’t be.

The doctors had come in the beginning. After the accident, they’d swarmed him in the hospital and scoured his every data point, painstakingly searching for proof that the injuries were temporary. His mother, father, and brother had not understood the medical jargon, but the unmoving body of their loved one spoke for itself.

The condition was described as a vegetative state. The eyes blink and move, Dr. Morrison explained, but only out of reflex. They persist where the mind does not.

Whatever this persistence was, the family could not reach it. They simply continued along with it, transporting its owner to their newly-cleaned guest room and placing him on an adjustable gatch bed from which he could not rise. His mother wept, her prayers and hopes long unanswered. She screamed at his father when he suggested giving up.

The father left after the first year, packing away the doubts and the questions.

Then came the second year. The third. Sweet stories murmured by the son’s ear grew melancholic, diminished to infrequent and resigned talk. His brother tended a vase of peonies whenever business wasn’t good, but aside from those periods, little in the room changed. The sun lifted and set its shimmering compass, and his existence followed the needle.

On the one thousand one hundred and twenty-first day, he was dressed at six forty-five a.m., only 18 seconds longer than usual. He was left to sit by the bedside window, as always, and it was there that he wondered when they would realize that his mind was truly there. That he had always been there. That he was screaming inside - a man in the coffin of his own body, buried alive.