Chapter 11b

It is a warm summer day and nobody is busy giving two shits about the state of Mr. Erwin Packard. There aren't many left with any reason to offer their shits. His father died a few years ago. His mother lives on but, like many who knew him when he was healthy, his mother only rarely thinks about him. When she does, like many others, she thinks only poor pitiful Erwin and how terrible that something like this should happen to a mother. On the other hand, most people don't think about him at all.

He's been dead so long that nobody would be surprised if his heart stopped. Nothing would change, nobody would know anything would happen. There would be a small funeral out of obligation that a few people would show up, most would have to work or have other plans. Everybody would wake up the next day and it would be the same as any other day before or after it.

These thoughts don't bother Erwin, of course, because he's dead. He has some concept of them, though. The membranes in his ear vibrate even when he does not hear. The nerves are still there, the pathways still in tact, even when he's oblivious to them.

On that sun-shiny day a pudgy aging nurse saw him twitch and grimace. It wasn't much but there hadn't been even that much for years. When she reported about it to the doctor he nodded and warned not to ever be too attached. After more than two decades asleep the advice was sound.

What nobody noticed, not Erwin or the nurse or the doctor or even myself noticed, those connections were still there between the physical world and the mental. He was struggling to hold on, maybe the doctor had presented a legitimate estimation of events, but it wasn't the cold hospital bed he wanted to hold on to.

For the past twenty-four years, Erwin Packard had been someplace else. He spent about as long on growing and learning and socializing in one place then went someplace else to continue independently. Somewhere else, perhaps impossibly far away or impossibly close or maybe paradoxically both, Erwin Packard was living another life, had people and places and things he cared about. Where he was in that room of beds with the open windows always facing the sun and the machines constantly monitoring his condition of stasis, in that place he had none of those things.

Anybody would struggle to hang on. If that's what was happening. The sad truth of the matter is that, from all anybody could see, nothing was happening. For a moment, Erwin Packard was alive, then he was perhaps dead and now, many years later, he remains to be perhaps dead.

His is a strange case. Being kept alive in his state for so long is practically unheard of, even without considering the financial price associated. In reality, having any kind of response after so long without is relatively break-through news. The problem really is just how hard it is to be optimistic given the circumstances and history.

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