A Short Story: The death was most unexpected*

By James Brodell

Roger Proctor felt relief at the end of a challenging shift in which he consulted in the matter of two very sick patients. He liked volunteering once a week, yet the grim realities of this hospice affected his mood. Basically, he concluded, his job as a cardiologist was to confirm that a patient was dying. They all were, or they wouldn’t be here, he concluded.

“I sure hope I don’t end up in a place like this,” the physician said to himself. There was little chance of that in the near future. At 38 Proctor was well entrenched in his profession. He had a staff job at the area’s major hospital and his own private practice. The money was good. The family was better: a loving wife and three kids. He supposed he could spend his time in other ways instead of providing medical support for a hospice. Yet he recognized that dying was the inevitable end of a life and frequently scary. So he tried to console as many residents as he could in the few hours he spent there each week. By the time they got to him, there was not much a cardiologist could do but just confirm they were in the correct place.

A nurse he knew as Carol interrupted his path to the door. “There’s a new resident here that you should see before you go. He just showed up at the front desk. No family. No family physician. Could you give him a quick look. He seems pretty sick and pretty old.”

Having someone walk in off the street was unusual. Usually patients were referred by their own physicians after extensive testing and the professional conclusion that they were short-timers. This was no nursing home. “This is a place to die in comfort, if you could call it that,” Proctor said to himself.

The cardiologist knew that the walk-in put the hospice administration in a bind. They couldn’t just throw the person out, particularly if he was very sick. What they needed from him was an assessment as to whether the man was really ill or just looking for a warm bed. He could do that in just a few minutes, he concluded.

Proctor needed only a few seconds to reach his conclusions. As he walked into the hallway where the man had been placed temporarily, his eyes saw a very frail and very, very old man.

“This guy must be in his 90s,” he told Nurse Carol.

“I’m actually a bit older,” the wrinkled man said quietly and with a slight smile. “Thank you for coming, Doctor.”

A very quick examination told Proctor what he needed to know. The man’s breathing was shallow. There appeared to be water in the lungs. His temperature was below normal. So was the blood pressure. The pulse was irregular. And the perspiration seemed excessive.

“I wonder how he had the energy to get here,” Proctor wondered.

“Well, I like to be direct, Mr.…Mr. err,” he said.

“Just call me Luke,” said the man.

“Did the receptionist get all your personal details,” replied Proctor.

“Well, what details there are happen to be scanty,” replied the man. “I have no next of kin, and there will not be any fuss at my passing.”

“How did you happen to come here,” asked Proctor. “Who is your physician?”

“The truth is, I have no physician, but you know no being wants to die alone. We all would like someone with us as we take that final step into nothingness.”

“I take it, then, that you are not a religious man and you are not expecting a new life after death,” said the doctor.

The man seemed to smile, and then he paused a bit. “I do have a very good theoretical understanding of religions. I’m just not sure any of them are on the right track. Could you sit with me awhile if your duties permit.”

Proctor replied: “First I have to be frank. You have to understand that you are in the final stages of dying. There will be no recovery. The ravages of aging are not reversible. If you were expecting medical treatment to make you better, you came to the wrong place. This is where people come to die in relative comfort and in peace.”

“I have no illusions,” the man said. “There are no perpetual motion machines, and all things eventually wind down. That’s how I set things up.”

“I’m sorry,” said the cardiologist, “ I did not understand that last part. You set something up?”

“I might as well be frank with you,” the man replied. “I set up this whole system, the world, the solar system, galaxies, plants, animals and even humans. But I fear as I come to the end of existence so will my hobby.”

“Your hobby,” asked the doctor.

“Yes, this all was a hobby with me to set up a dynamic system that would amuse me through the ages. You would be surprised at how old I am.”

“You mean you are like God?” said the doctor.

“That would be one way of putting it. For now just consider me as some very old entity who had a very interesting existence that is now coming to an end,” replied the man.

Proctor smiled and decided to continue to humor the man. “You are in pretty bad physical shape to be the creator of all things, and generally we consider people who think they are God to be a bit off their rocker.” The man replied:

“Thank you for being frank, Doctor, but what I said is true, and this physical manifestation you see before you simply is a representation of my actual condition on a plane beyond your view. As I said, no being likes to die alone. I just am sad that my creation will be in jeopardy when I do.”

“So let me get this straight,” said Proctor. “You are telling me that you are God, and that you created the world, and you are afraid that when you die the world will too?”

“I never called myself God, although you could make that inference from what I told you. The truth is that I created all that you see over a very long time because I liked to sit back and be amused by what takes place.”

Proctor could not hide his broad smile. “So maybe you should tell me how you did all this. Did you start a long time ago?”

“Actually I was pretty old when I started my little hobby. It was more a mental game. I wanted to set up a system that basically ran itself so I could take pleasure from time to time in watching what transpired. So I conceived what you would call the basic laws of physics. That took a long time because the system had to be sturdy to last a long time. I tried several approaches, but this is the one that seemed to endure.

“Then I worked out the concept of electrons and atoms. You have to build a system, even a hypothetical, from something. That gave me a lot of problems because the early efforts decayed rapidly, and there were so many moving parts. I left a lot of holes in that effort because my results seemed to be solid and, as they say, if its not broken, don’t fix it. Your scientists continue to be surprised by the holes in that periodic chart of the elements.”

“So how did you create things,” asked Proctor.

“Well, once I had the atoms figured out, I struggled for a long time with the construction of matter and the application of the physical laws I had created. It sure gave me a lot of pleasure to see my new atoms being formed into molecules and then into substances. That made it necessary to create methods to meld the electrons and atoms into solids. I loved to watch what happened as the atoms changed fundamentally.”

“After awhile, the system seemed to take on a life of its own. Centers of great force stirred up the mix. Black holes came to be. Unexpectedly, I might add.”

Dr. Proctor smiled. “So you were like a guy setting up a train set in his basement, right?”

Luke considered this comment and then replied: “You could put it that way, but a train set is a collection of actual physical objects. In our case, and I include you as part of the discussion, everything was done within my consciousness. I willed these things to happen in the way I wanted. I really am very proud of chromosomes. I never realized that a couple of little strings of molecules would grow and mutate into a much more complex system. I just let it happen and took pleasure in watching. Sort of like the guy in the basement with the big train set. Except my train set developed the capacity to change, and grow and even die repeatedly.”

Luke began to cough and blood spurted from his lips. Proctor grabbed some tissues and cleaned Luke’s chin.

“So how long have you been having this fantasy about the world being your own plaything,” he asked.

Luke smiled. “Thanks for the cleanup. So how old do your scientists think the universe is?”

“That’s not my area,” the doctor responded, “but the stuff I see on television says they think the big bang happened about 14 billion years ago.”

“Well it was much longer ago than that,” Luke said. “First I played around with constructing a silicon-based system before I got to hydrogen, carbon and oxygen. Just think. You would have been a rock!” Luke laughed. And then began coughing again.

“So what you are telling me is that I live in a virtual world somehow created by your mind, although you just let things happen without much interference,” said the doctor.

“Well, early on I had to make some radical changes, but I mainly just watched things develop. You know, some of your scientists and certainly in popular culture the idea that you live in a virtual world is considered. Even some of the classical civilizations touched on the idea. How about the Roman politician Cicero? He said ‘Corpora non sumus.’ If you forgot your Latin, that means ‘We are not bodies.’ Considering the state of science education at the time, he was not far off, although he might have been speaking spiritually.”

The doctor smiled again, and said, “If what you say is true, a whole bunch of people wasted a lot of time in prayer, thinking that you or God would intervene personally in their lives.”

“You hit on a good point there, Doctor. The whole of the mammal kingdom expects some kind of life after death. You would be surprised how deep that goes. Of course, lizards developed their own culture and had similar beliefs. That was an interesting time, but the randomness of events led to their extinction.”

“You mean the big meteor impact 65 million years or so ago?”

“That’s what you heard on the History Channel, Doctor. Actually they all nuked themselves, as I was expecting mammals to do. I guess you now won’t have the chance.”

The doctor laughed. “You have been reading some pseudoscience, I see. The idea of lizards developing civilization and then destroying themselves was something out of those 1930s pulp sci-fi magazines, probably enhanced when the public became aware of nuclear weapons at the end of World War II.”

Luke smiled again. “What do they say about monkeys at a keyboard. Eventually, given enough time, the random strokes create a novel? Humans always have considered themselves unique instead of the logical outcome of a procession of biological development. Too bad I am in such a state. I really was hoping to see what came next after humans gave way to something else. I actually found the lizards to be at least as interesting. I like some of the other mammal species, too. You people do, too. Did I not see all kinds of animal shows on your television. Little creatures living a communal life in holes in Africa, for example? You see you have the same tendencies as me, spending time observing the life of other creatures. That’s probably expected because you have my tendencies.”

“So, Luke, from what you said I conclude that the meaning of life is simply to amuse you?”

“That’s as good as anything else, Doctor. I mean some people, and even some lizards, felt that their goal was to please the entities they thought of as gods. Why not just me?”

“And that’s a great answer to the old theological question of why God lets bad things happen to good people,” replied the physician.

“Of course, Doctor, the whole thing was basically random. Even though the natural inclination of humans is to expect some kind of intercession from a god. Those Sumerians, those folks that lived in ancient Iraq, even thought the gods lived among them, and they would take their statues out on big holidays and march them around the city. And when they won a war, they would take their enemy’s god home with them. The Greeks and Romans thought the gods were a little further away. On Mt. Olympus for the Greeks. Yet they still figured the gods controlled their lives, which is why many of them made daily sacrifices, sometimes their own children.

“I got big kicks out of the Crusades, all that fighting over brands of religion, which really was cloaking territorial ambitions with a moral cover. The Inquisition and the Cultural Revolution were pretty interesting in a bloody sort of way. Of course, you folks really got my attention with atomic weapons, just like the lizards did.”

“So, Luke, we are living in a fantasy land?”

“Oh, don’t put it that way, Doctor. Your life has been very real to you. I was surprised when my little creations began developing consciousness. That was a long time ago. You have consciousness now because of a little quirk in the brain of a fish. So to that extent you are far above the inanimate objects in the train set. And far more interesting. I just love war. Great conflicts generated by all kinds of emotions, be it greed, fear ambition. Actually the lizards were far more warlike. I guess it is their nature. So I was pretty surprised when you humans began banding together into tribes and started waging war on what was nearby. And then there were the massive armed conflicts when humans learned how to build real armies. That started about 120,000 of your years ago, I think. And it still is continuing.”

Dr. Proctor realized he enjoyed talking with this man. The alternative would be another round of golf with colleagues who always beat him. And then going home half drunk to his family. He decided to stay a little longer.

“So what happens when you die,” he asked Luke.

“That’s fast approaching,” Luke replied. “As my consciousness fades and I lose the ability to hold my hobby together, I suppose things start to collapse. I’ve never seen my own death before, obviously, so there is a lot of guesswork. I do not think that my creation will be able to continue on its own, although that’s a possibility. We’ll soon find out.”

The man coughed again and loudly. More blood appeared around his mouth.

Nurse Carol walked into the partitioned area. “Is there anything I can do,” she asked.

Proctor glanced at her and then at Luke. He saw a glaze forming over Luke’s eyes and the man’s jaw relaxed. And then he just vanished.

Both Proctor and the nurse were stunned.

“Jesus! What happened,” she asked as she slammed her hand over her mouth.

Proctor didn’t know what to say, and then he noticed that the nurse’s hand was beginning to lose its form. It began to look like a collection of disconnected dots.

“Look at your legs,” she shouted in panic.

And then there was just blackness.

*This short story is from the new book “Brother Amos Gambles His Soul and Other Quirky Stories,” available in ebook format as of Aug. 1 here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1153910. And also available Sept. 1, 2022, here: https://books2read.com/u/mv1lnV.