He was flying! He‚d felt this way only once before — the time he had bungee jumped from that makeshift tower that had been set up on the sands near the Oak Beach Inn on Long Island, New York. But of course he‚d had more than a couple of drinks in him then, and so hadn‚t really appreciated all the little subtleties of flight he was experiencing now.
Was there anything quite as exhilarating as free fall, and at sunset?
How long would it take him to reach the water? Let‚s see, considering the height of the span, and the fact that objects — and subjects? — fall with an acceleration of 32 feet per second squared, he supposed that he would splash down — well, he supposed he would splash down sometime before he figured this little physics problem out.
Yes sir, he was really moving. One might even say he was approaching terminal velocity.
Hah! Terminal velocity! That was a good one, under the circumstances, and he laughed, a deep and cathartic laugh.
He understood that some would wonder why he had done it. How bad, they might ask, could things be? But it was, he would tell them, a mistake to think that only someone who believed that anything — including nothing — would be better than the present could make this choice. Yes, that was clearly erroneous; for he knew that in life there had been moments far darker than this, moments so filled with despair that not even the Pale Horse offered any hope of escape. Like losing, through some fault of your own, the one you loved, or being forced to endure the ebbing of your child‚s life to illness.
No, death was no answer in such cases; it would only serve to immortalize the loss of what might have been. In those moments, what was needed was sleep, deep and dreamless sleep, with the promise of forgetfulness and an awakening to a new world. Perhaps that was why so many people overdosed on sleeping pills?
Would there be pain? Or rather, would there be more pain, for there had already been plenty of pain. He supposed there would — oh God — but it was too late to worry about that now.
And then? What? Anything? Or nothing? Eternal, limitless emptiness? — unimaginable! — and for just an instant he thought he would lose control. It was like that dream that he had had since childhood, the earliest dream he could remember, of being in a colourless room that just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger until it was infinitely big, the silence echoing unbearably and relentlessly until he awoke, crying never to dream again.
Fervently hoping that he would finally see the green flash, the living light, he vaguely remembered reading once that a man who realizes he is to die cannot give supreme concern to any other event …
”Doctors,” said the nurse, ”come quickly.”
The team — attending physician, senior medical resident and three interns — interrupted morning report and bolted from the doctor‚s lounge adjacent to the nursing station in pursuit of the nurse. They followed her to a room down the hall, where they found one of their patients, face down on the floor, still tethered to an IV pole by a catheter in his left arm. He was lying in a puddle of what was either saline or very dilute urine. He was not breathing.
The senior resident knelt and felt for a pulse. There was none.
”Should I call a code blue?” the nurse asked.
”No,” one of the interns answered. ”He‚s a DNR.” He looked at the senior resident.
”He was my patient.”
The resident nodded.
”Interesting,” the attending physician remarked, glancing momentarily out the window at the sun rising over the nearby bay and the bridge that spanned it.
The jaded resident looked at him. He actually respected this particular attending — unlike some of the others, he really seemed to know his stuff — so he tried to hide the scepticism in his voice when he asked, ”What‚s so interesting?”
The physician pointed at the bed. ”How‚d he fall out with the rails up?”
The resident, annoyed with himself for missing such an obvious detail, thought for a moment, then smiled and waved his hand dismissively. ”I‚ll tell you what happened.” Then, sotto voce so that the nurse in attendance could not hear (there was no use making enemies), ”Someone forgot to put the rail up last night, and so her friend here did it for her before she called us.” Then, shrugging, ”Alas, the horse was already out of the barn.”
”Or maybe,” one of the interns offered hesitantly, ”he climbed over the rail and slipped during the night?”
”Maybe,” the resident reluctantly admitted after a pause, clearly preferring his own theory. ”Okay, let‚s get back to morning report,” he said, heading back to the doctor‚s lounge. The interns followed dutifully.
The attending physician stood there a moment, watching the sun‚s red ascent and trying to recall something. It was Martin Heidegger, wasn‚t it, who had said that man could not postpone his concern about death, but must be concerned with it always? Yet it never ceased to amaze him how these young doctors, surrounded as they were by death, could be so unconcerned about it.
Or about sunrises.