Word Count: 642
The man who thought outside the box was dying. I was sent to collect his last words.
His skin was the color of the hospital sheets, his hair sparse and needle-straight on the pillow. His lips were parched blue and opened in a tight little “O.” His arms were sticks of bone attached to tubes that led to so many monitors and machines that I wondered if the right combination of buttons and dials would make him spring up and dance like a marionette.
For a long time I sat close to his bed, ready to record anything at all he might say. The long-whistling breaths that he took were paced with such space in between that it kept me on edge, not knowing if each one was his last. So far he’d said little; something about being kind to each other, using one’s talents to better the world. Turning one’s cheek, yet an eye for an eye, all terribly conflicting and senseless.
“It won’t be much longer now,” a kind nurse told me. She stroked his hair gently, using her fingers as comb. She rubbed a sweet-smelling lotion into the dry fragile skin, as if one can bring back summer’s green glory to a dry autumn leaf. She brought me some coffee and offered to sit listening if I needed to walk for a bit.
“No, I can’t leave him,” I said. “They’ll want me to catch every word.”
I was getting weary, having slept little in the last two days, afraid to drift into sleep as the old man took his odd way of thinking into the darkness unheard. Strange that all his life no one would listen but now they were rethinking positions, testing theories and strategies, so determined (they said), so desperate (thought I), to set society back into some place more stable. Someplace in time before, where as a whole, we fell victim to someone’s supposedly wise words and followed like the Pied Piper’s rats.
I caught myself nearly nodding off when a sharp gasp of breath and a low rattling exhalation poked me back to an alertness heavy and swollen to bursting. I pushed myself up from the chair, leaned over the skeleton form on the bed. In the low light I could see his eyes were now open, his breathing so shallow his chest wouldn’t have tipped over a wineglass filled to its brim.
His “O” of a mouth started moving and it struck me that he was trying to form words. I grabbed my laptop, set it down on the bed where I could type with my ear to his lips. Yes, yes; this was what they had wanted, what I’d been patiently waiting to hear. It sounded vaguely familiar but I didn’t have time to reflect. For a dying old man, he started spouting them off in a bubbling whisper and I typed as fast as I could, trying to get everything exactly in the words he was using.
I typed on and on, for near fifteen minutes before he breathed out a last long low breath and did not draw another one in. I felt bad, this poor man ostracized in his youth, sneered at in his manhood, ignored in old age until now. I touched his hand lightly, closed his eyes and noticed his lips were left shut on his words, as if that would indeed be the last time he’d try to tell anyone his basic thoughts and ideas for a better society.
I called in the nurse and bid her goodbye. I read the last thing he’d said, the last thing I’d gotten down from this man who had his last say outside of the box. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods,” I read. “Could work,” I thought as I closed the laptop and left.
