The nurses came and went speaking of Michelangelo thinking he couldn’t hear them, but behind his glossy eyed, open mouthed state he was fully capable of thought and his thoughts surrounded the words the men and women said while in his room. The thoughts surrounded the feelings he felt and revisiting old ones too. His inability to be had forced him to have an incredible ability to be someplace else.
He had been in 17 North Walter Pavilion for four months “taking up a good room”. Michelangelo wasn’t always there though. He came and went between dreams and the room and had a hard time deciphering which was which but decided he enjoyed the dreams more so tried to be in the hospital room less.
He recognized faces and places and lived in constant wonder and feeling. Even the feeling of not feeling and the warmth then cold of lying in his own urine was a feeling on its own to be felt, and he could easily feel it less and fall into a dream where his wife also often went. Oh, Michelangelo dreamt.
He saw his seven sons but wasn’t sure if it was a dream or not. It wasn’t one, but all his seven sons finally came to the hospital one day to meet with the doctor to decide Michelangelo’s fate. They were timid and no one wanted to make a choice, but Michelangelo smiled a great smile only seven hours late. He slept through his sons coming in to hold his hand and debate, but he heard and recognized them all some place else.
They did not bother their mother who had problems of her own. She stayed camped in the chair next to his bed for the four months as the cobwebs began to grow. So, then this was the fate for poor Michelangelo—to decide to watch reality unfold as his undeath bore problems onto his family or fall into a deep rest and feel everything under the cover of his subconscious.
A beautiful array of auroras filled his sunken eyes as he tries to stretch his atrophied muscles to the sky as the sun set within his eyes. He saw his mother and she spoke in a whisper and he felt as close as ever, it had been nearly forty years. His father held him too while the nurses came to change his bed and turn him. They tried to protect his skin, but it slowly began to break. As the moisture from his body, his urine and his defecations broke it down. His skin lost its color and pruned and lost its ability to blanch. Four months in a bed is over one hundred twenty days. He saw his siblings visit in many forms of their age.
He grasps a hand thinking it’s his own. It’s one of the nurses while changing his gown wet with humidity. The hospital should never be one’s home but here he lies, and their faces have grown. The nurses think maybe he smiles at them that maybe that light is a recognition.
He can hear and see and think but cannot be. The nurses come and go talking of Michelangelo. Wondering if he can do the most human thing.
Joseph Shilati 