The House of the Spirits

On the paper, there’s more and more ink. More and more nurses are filling reports. These are for everyday things he needs. Oxygen tanks. Malto-dextrose. Pain killers. For real, every day they replace the tanks eight times. Whenever it’s time for him to eat, a tube through the respirator.

Not that he notices.

The crowds build gradually. It starts one person at a time, an aunt, an uncle, a cousin or two, even only old friends, and the room is full in a way that would warrant another room. Everyone wants to pay their respect, visiting when really they mean condolences.

He can’t talk. The respirator is nine inches into the mouth he can’t close, and oxygen is being pumped into lungs he can’t use.

The question is always: Can he hear us?

The doctors say he can’t. That he’s all groggy from the dopamine. They do this so he doesn’t feel the respirator, he’ll choke otherwise. The moment he wakes up, if he wakes up, he’ll gag himself to death.

So we leave him to sleep, not that he could be awoken. The room is silent with incessant chanting. The rosary being read, recited, and rewound and he doesn’t hear a word.

He is asleep.

Neruda asked, How long does a man live, after all? Does he live a thousand days, or one only? For a week, or for several centuries? How long does a man spend dying? What does it mean to say “for ever”?

He doesn’t know they’re there. He can’t hear them, or see them, barely even feel them. The people inside the room are dead to him. They are ghosts that waft by, he feels only the lightest of sensations.

They spend every free moment in there, unable to go on with their lives. Some of them before work or school, some of them after. They go there and they sit, staring at the man laying in front of them and ask: Can he hear us?

The hospital has become a house of the spirits.

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Decided not to add any of the additional notes I took. I’m happy with the little that I have and how it turned out.

Incase you don’t know, “The House of the Spirits” is a novel written by Isabel Allende, under the genre of magical realism. Magical Realism, a genre that was made popular by the Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is a style that attempts to make the familiar extravagant and vice versa.