Hope the Eternal

Image by Midjourney, copyright N. B. Hankes

I've counted every second in a 24 hour period more times than I can recall. That's 86,400 seconds. By that account, I've been trapped inside my body for nearly a quarter billion seconds. Divided by 86,400 seconds in a day, that's around 2,890 days. Or just under eight years. That’s 20% of my life.

It's been just under eight years since I've moved a muscle on my own volition. It's been just under eight years since I've heard my own voice. And it's been just under eight years since I've become a ward of the state.

As far as I can tell, my mind works the same. To the orderlies, I'm basically a piece of furniture that requires sponging and emptying from time to time. Maintaining my mind through this is something worse than torture, I can assure you. Up until recently, my intellectual curiosities have had to subsist on the paltry gossip I might pick up if there happened to be two orderlies in my room at the same time.

But frankly, I always found people disappointing. Most seemed to me either too stingy with their inner world or lacking altogether. In my good years, I'd had occasion to fall in love with the most beautiful light and to despair at her absence. I'd tasted the highest heights of ecstasy from a yogic practice and dipping my toes in psychedelia. And I'd tasted the depths of despair coming off a tour of combat that left my nervous system in ruin. But now my world is small, the highs and lows too similar to bear. And I can only live life by looking backwards.

There's several machines that beep. I can't see them, but I hear them fine. One machine beeps in a key of B Sharp once every three seconds. The other beeps in G Major every fifteen seconds. The timing of neither is precise. By this I mean one counts time faster than the other. I know this because they fall in and out of sync. For a period of roughly twelve hours the machine beeps form a dyad, just one note shy of a proper chord. I've worked it out in my mind, with the assumption that the beep is 1/10th of one second, and this suggests one machine's internal timer is either 2/10ths of a second fast or slow. Of course one could be slow and one fast, but I can only measure them relative to one another considering my rather limited circumstances.

The night clerk will sometimes listen to the radio. This is my only glimpse of the world beyond what I can immediately hear around me. It seems to me that the people of the world aren't grateful for what they have. I know I wasn't when I had it all. Working legs. Working eyes. Working arms and spine. I really did have it all.

But recently my life has taken a positive turn. I am madly in love. Although infatuation is probably the appropriate term for a one-sided connection such as this.

The first time we met, she told me her name was Sandra. From the accent, I'd say she's from somewhere in the Caribbean. She asked me if I'd read any Dostoevsky. Had I been able to speak or blink, I would have told her, yes (or blinked twice, I suppose). There was a time in my mid-twenties where I'd strongly identified with Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky's idiot. And perhaps it was Dostoevsky's work that encouraged me to walk through the world with a little more goodness and open-hearted simplicity–regardless of how I might be received.

I would have loved to have told Sandra as much. And for the past several weeks I've spent the better part of my days fantasizing about how that conversation would have gone. As it was, she played a recording of a Dostoyevsky novel I had not come across back when I was able to come across things.

As Sandra sponged me off and moved me about, I got to listen to the story of some people writing letters back and forth, and of their poverty and the resulting lack of self-worth. Sandra told me she could listen to the story on headphones while she worked, but that she thought I might like to hear too. If I could move, I would have hugged her or wept or both.

I don't have access to a clock, which might explain the obsession with counting seconds. There's a bell over Doctor Harrison's office door that jingles each time he opens the door. I keep my time by marking it relative to the first ring of Doctor Harrison's office door bell. I've made the assumption that Doctor Harrison works a standard shift, starting at 9:00 am five days a week. To me, that first jingle represents 8:50 am.

Sandra starts her shift approximately 28,800 seconds after Doctor Harrison does. And she works on the two days the doctor's bell remains silent. So, working second shift and weekends as she does, I would guess that she is a student. Perhaps of literature. If I'm lucky she’ll share more details of her life with me. I would love to know.

My field of vision has been entirely black since the accident. But my mind still generates flashes of imagery. These images are a patchwork quilt of things I've seen and experienced before the accident. I've painted Sandra's likeness from the Caribbean references I'd passively absorbed growing up in lower middle class America.

If I had to guess, she has a complexion like that singer Rihanna. Although her voice sounds like she might be bigger than Rihanna. I'm not worried about that honestly. It's her mind that attracts me. And the fact that she talks to me. That’s the main thing, honestly, that she talked to me. All the other orderlies treat me like a vegetable. It makes me mourn for all the carrots and celery stoically going flaccid in fridges across America.

Doctor Harrison's bell has rung five days in a row but not this morning. So I know for sure that Sandra is on shift today. Without the Doctor's first bell ring to mark the time, it's hard for me to predict exactly when her shift starts. So I wait and think about our conversation about Dostoyevsky and his idiot Prince Myshkin.

I hear footsteps in the hallway and the click of a cart foot brake. The door is already open, but I can clearly hear that someone has entered the room. It's not Tubbs. Tubbs is one of the weekend orderlies. Tubbs drags their feet and has never once introduced themselves or talked to me. I assume Tubbs is a man by how roughly he handles my body. These footsteps are sure and purposeful. A chair rolls over to my bedframe and I wait for Sandra to speak. There's a long sigh. It's definitely a female, but I can't be sure.

Suddenly I feel a hand on my forehead and a sound as if she's crying but trying to be quiet about it. "Sometimes I think life would be easier if you and I switched places," she said. This is definitely Sandra. She rubs my forehead like my mom used to when I was a kid and then sets about emptying, sponging, and changing me.

If I could speak, I would tell her she has so much to be grateful for. Her legs, and arms, and spine, and eyes. She's rich beyond measure!

"Oh Lord," I hear her moan. I want her to open up to me. I want to hear about her day. Every single detail. I want to know how she feels about every little thing.

"Sometimes I feel trapped," she says. Yes, I think. This is good. "There's just enough money for rent and food. I feel like that Varvara character in Dostoyevsky's Poor Folks novel.” She sighs heavy. “I want to live simply and care for the downtrodden, but I feel like that's just sentencing me to a lifetime of poverty."

This made my heart break, but I was also ecstatic she'd open up to me this way. I’m under no illusion that it has anything to do with me. I’m basically a corpse. But I feel like I’ve struck gold in Sandra. Her words give my mind so much new material to explore. For starters, she must not be a student. Students have hope. They assume their poverty is temporary. But Sandra doesn't feel this way, no.

She continued to sniffle throughout the rest of our time together. I thought that might be all I'd hear from her. But as she walked back to her cart, she turned and said, "You know what I heard today? I heard that some company released a software program that thinks just like a human mind. It's passed the bar exam and you can ask it to write your papers for you. Kids are already getting in trouble with it. They call it artificial intelligence." She paused for a few seconds, as if she were in deep thought, And then she turned and left.

A computer that passed the bar exam! A computer that writes papers? That's the juiciest information I may have encountered since I got stuck in this room to rot. My mind could play with this shiny new idea for years, extrapolating and exploring hypotheticals indefinitely.

But Sandra's mental health alarmed me more than this revelation excited me. She seemed to have worked it out, whatever it was that got her down to start. Maybe it was the first of the month and she just drained her savings on rent. I hadn't thought about that in some years, making a living. I'd say I was just getting started at it before the accident brought me here.

I thought I'd draft a letter to Sandra. It's something I do in my mind sometimes. Writing things. I write novels and essays, mostly. I've got three completed novels inside of me and I can recall them word for word. I see the words as if they’re printed on paper and flip through pages in my mind’s eye. I still go back to them and rewrite sections here and there. Books are never really done, anyway. They're only ever abandoned. But since these are the only readings available to me, I don't plan to abandon them anytime soon.

"Sandra," I'd start, "I hope you'll forgive me for eavesdropping. But at the same time, I'd like to thank you for speaking to me. No one else does, and I can assure you my hearing and mind are quite…" No, no.

"I heard you say that some days you think that switching places with me would be easier than living your own life. Do you believe this because at least with my life the illusion of choice has been removed?"

If I were to write this, I would do it by hand. Handwritten notes were rare eight years ago and I assume are still rare today. I'd find a thick stock paper, maybe hemp, and write it down for her with a fountain pen. I always liked unbleached envelopes. They always struck me as rustic. So I’d put the letter inside an unbleached envelope and write her name on it.

"No matter the circumstance, I have found that we always have a choice. I have a choice here on this bed even. It might not look like it. But I do. Everyday I get to make a choice on how to react to this disability. I get to make the choice to use my time here productively. In this way, you and I are the same. We both have the choice to frame our circumstances however we want. And today, I choose to be grateful that you came into my life. I choose to take pride in myself because I can share this insight with you. And I choose love even though guarding my heart is safer.”

I’m not sure about that last part. It’s a little too dramatic for my tastes. But I’ll leave it for now, if only as a placeholder.