Brightness

Room 25, fourth floor south

Tuesday, October 16, six in the morning.

My father died twelve hours later.

My mother and I fight against his fever which is branching out and blooming like iridescent serpentine wetness on the thin skin of his forehead, his arms, his chest, his legs. We undress him; time is ticking away.

The hospital room is an ecosystem of fibrillated vein pain hope and frozen paracetamol. With its vague and rechargeable insulin pump slowing his blood down, reminding us of its dense network of incandescent arteries.

The intravenous tubes drilling in, those oxygen loads with their systematic misting interrupting our caresses. The generated random air particles assassinate our sanity and the confused rhythm of his improbable breath. We refresh his eyes with saline solution, and its drops slip from them on a trail of insufficient sadness, following the lines of his feline eyelids which are torn into oval shapes.

Silence quiets down amidst the bursts produced by the soft bubbles of his oxygen supply unit. The catheter approaches his heart, trembling at every small noise blow; and would reach it if it wasn't for those ten degrees of separation that we all hold in our lives precariously and fiercely to separate us from the omens of our memento mori.

Our green dyed cotton robes are seen from far as static coloured flashes when we set off in an embodied circular movement, as we are suddenly one, my mother and me. We transit the squares of his hospital bed with whole, rhythmical movements, each of our steps chiming in lengths that reach the improvised boxing ring on which he lies. We transit around the bed and our feet strokes keep on punching deaf thumps on the floor underneath him which then expands in the telluric wholeness of this isolated room. We comfort the impact of those traitor blows on my father's body as the bed trembles; we want him to rest in his feverish night. We apostatize from the plastic gloves given by the nurses, and we reject their impersonal blueness, their forced separation. We want to touch him, memorize his body, his aligned shapes, those brightened muscles surrendered to love.

Feeding bleached bags of thick liquid food hang in their vacuum packs, ignoring him. We conjured against their impenetrable sodium attacks, we know that they prevent the launching of his vessel of hope, the clarity of ours.

We cover his naked body with tiny frosted white towels while fever ravages the thick enchanted forests of his unconsciousness. We wring the soft cotton floating in droves in a basin of lucid ice cubes. Our job is to delay the unforgettable denouement, that imminent sounding bell with our renewed tenderness, always renewed in this farewell without surrender. A glowing, enlightened Ecce Homo, his legs too long for the length of the bed; those bed wheels twisted and equidistant.

Tears are no liquefied lights, the heat of his fever seizes an unknown silence, dawn revives our hope for a fragile recovery. We manage to reach shore before sunrise, gather our safe ground.

My mother and me still standing.

The brightness.