It is again one of those tinny gray spans of time lost to the mist that inhabits the middle of the week, burnished to an obnoxious gleam by the steadfast whirring of the staff within their benevolent routines. His eyelashes clash like cymbals as his gaze leaves furrows across the stale unfamiliarity of the room. Everything feels new and yet nondescript. What is most obvious is the foreignness of his own presence against everything else, like a pebble in some god’s great shoe. The morning is a crisp sheet of paper on which pointless ugly creases exponentiate with his every passing moment, spoiling the potential that the day holds, and before it has properly begun, he feels the urge to crumple it up and toss it away. However, there are precious few of them left, and regardless of their sorry state he must hoard what remains.

A yawn tugs at the idle horrors that slumber just beyond the limits of human perception. The persistent blank gaze of something cosmogonic grows slightly keener with a passing glint that just barely scratches the surface of its apathy. At the depths of himself, he is similarly unknowable and agonizingly present, a teeming mass of memories in the form of homuncular representations of bygone, idealized, maybe even imaginary personas, having accumulated now in such absurd numbers that there isn’t enough room between their tiny bodies for their lungs to expand. He recognizes miniature versions of himself as a schoolboy, a middle-aged field engineer, the physicist that he once dreamed of being, pressed against many countless others, all desperate for air, each begging to be lifted from the crush of obscurity. As they gradually cease to stir, their defining features melt into a uniformly impenetrable murk, leaving behind only the immeasurable sense of something lost, never making room for new musings. Always at the back of his mind, and during quiet moments at the forefront, he is accompanied by the faint sound of ringing, a harmony of the dying gasps of every familiar characteristic of the self.

He rubs his eyes, dazed by the visage reflected in every generic facet of this detached instance of time. The flesh that has accrued there feels foreign. When he presses his fingertips to the jowls abutting the grizzled point of his chin, the sensation that seeps through after a few moments of delay is dull and synthetic, as though his skin were covered in a layer of molded plastic putty. He hasn’t gone so far off the bend yet that he doesn’t recognize the absurdity in the idea, but he just can’t shake the feeling that somewhere beneath the uncanny contours of his cheeks is his real face. Almost involuntarily, his nails find their place along the ridges of the fifth or sixth occurrence of a scab over a long-suffering patch of skin to the side of his nose. With barely any pressure at all, the yellowish crust disintegrates into the ether, a flash of golden motes in a streak of predawn light, and the wound opens once again. He presses a daub of blood into his hand, rubs it until it becomes tacky, and the color equalizes with his flesh. The warmth pulled to the surface of his palm brings the smell of iron rushing to his nostrils. That sense, at least, is still reasonably keen.

The hollow rap of knuckles at the door shakes him from his passivity. The turning of the doorknob preempts the fourth and final impact of a sequence of knocks, and he has barely enough time to jerk himself onto his side, pressing the marred portion of his face into the emaciated pillow. The woman closes the door behind her. He is stiff and silent, swallowing the wrack of pain caused by the sudden adjustment in posture, but he cannot stifle the air rushing to fill the cavity left by his body in the nominally soft material of the mattress. She lets out a soft sharp sigh that deflates the expanding tension.

“Good morning, Mr. Manoury.”

Without turning around, Mr. Manoury rolls his eyes towards the woman with hair the color of cinnamon. Her face is foolish and molten with his myopia, but it crystallizes within three succinct strides as she comes to occupy nearly the entirety of his vision, ominous in his periphery when he attempts to scatter his awareness against the daylight oozing through the window. When she places a hand on his shoulder, it locks into place like something made of stone, ground down by patience to fit perfectly over the slopes of him. Guided by her touch, he sits up with unexpected force and, in swinging his legs over the side of the bed, kicks the quilt across the floor. Mr. Manoury lurches over his feet, stopping short of springing to them by the steadying influence of his caretaker and the chill of the laminate tiling traveling up his body in a wave of goosebumps, proliferating with increasing percussive momentum until his teeth clatter together. When his vision steadies, it lands squarely on the oversized letters of her nametag, and Darla, as well as the name, solidifies in his consciousness with the same natural ease as her stability bolstering his own.

She remains expressionless as she turns to collect his slippers and the discarded blanket, not seeming to realize that all his vulnerabilities have gathered beneath her calluses. As soon as she removes her hand, he prickles over in rime like a heliotrope in February. The cold burrows deep into his bones when she notices the newly raw splotch of granulation tissue beside his nose. Darla pauses. Though the features of her face betray no hint of a swell of frustration, they appear to settle even further into the rigid definition of clinical compassion. Expression hardening imperceptibly, her cheekbones loom like scythes above the crumpled folds of flab draped from Mr. Manoury’s head. Part of him aches for her to quash his blatant weakness, but she continues to operate with devoted gentleness beneath the flinty surface of her resolute commitment. He feels completely and terribly embraced.

As a swab covered in ointment glides like an affectionate murmur in weightless spirals over the reopened lesion, he returns to that thoughtspace choked with the calcified remnants of what he has forgotten. In spite of his determination to gather something of value to prove to her that he is, or at least once was, something more than what he seems to be now, he is even feebler in mind than in body. Reaching clumsily within himself, he wields hands that have devolved into something like the ends of straw dangling from the gingham sleeves of a scarecrow. Memories either slip through his grasp or are crushed because of his lacking the necessary joints and subtlety to handle something like an idiosyncrasy with care. All the same, aspects of himself that were once immediate and distinctive continue to regress to the stuff of stars, distant and cold in the vastness of the indefinite.

Darla chides him in harsh whispers that resonate to the core of him, shaking loose the densely packed sediment of inexpressible ego and sending an avalanche cascading down his ribcage in a powdery heap to the diaphragm. The humiliation of it tickles the back of his throat, prompting him to cough up excuses for how scattered he feels among concepts akin to molecular clusters, a divine sneeze, reality as particleboard. He may have better come to terms with this inevitable entropy if he could only meaningfully convey the profound impersonal hollowness traded in equal measure for the mundane intimacy of an individual life, but just as he is beginning to lose the little things like an acquired preference for vegetable shortening over butter in shortbread, he equally cannot find the words to adequately describe the nebulous astronomy that his predilections have displaced into. His tongue has been coated in a flurry of ash kicked up by a grumble of his belly, dehydrated words forming speleothem behind his lips.

Upon attempting to articulate the feeling of staring into space, not knowing what has been devoured, Mr. Manoury only manages to make a few witless observations about the state of the morning. The void continues to hunger, but he’s losing the capacity to assuage this emptiness with nostalgia or resentment. No, others would have to feel such things for him now. To this end, he wishes he could offer Darla a keepsake, something inconsequential but inherent to him. All he can muster is an apology. The words emerging from the pit of his stomach roll limply from his mouth in a single knotted clump and splatter onto the mounds of Darla’s assenting palm. She pockets it without a hint of disgust, and sympathy beams through the frigid glaze of her eyes.

Smoothing over the injury but compounding his shame, she places a bandage with meticulous precision over his face and warns him not to pick at his skin again until he heals properly. Repeating the words exactly as she has commanded, he pledges his utmost, but his voice is airy, causing the promise to ring hollow. Darla, expecting and endlessly forgiving of the worst of him, takes no offense. She bends over to help him put on his slippers, and when a momentary lapse in fine motor dexterity causes his toes to splay out awkwardly, she cradles the balls of his feet to hold him still. Mr. Manoury blushes at being unable to avoid complicating even this simple task but stops himself before inflicting further sheepish inanities upon her. He wonders if she will keep the fatuous gnarl of language tucked safely in her side pocket, perhaps in a cabinet cluttered with similar curios, the ever-growing collection equally derelict as treasured. He imagines a sliver of his soul remaining in that meek little pith of his frailties, writhing in the inability to make proper amends. As much as he longs for some truth of him to be deduced from the impassiveness of the universal, in this case, it may be better to be forgotten.

Ushered out into public grounds, he briefly enjoys the relief of being dissipated. Hallways are always lively around breakfast. There are long stretches of the day when the neutral span of the wing adjoining his room is entirely desolate except for an aide at the nurse’s station, such as when he makes an afternoon sojourn to the vending machine and the successive shuffling of his slippers echo like a cloudburst rolling in over the horizon, but practically everyone must make the commute for the inaugural meal of the day. The first thing he notices is the smell. There’s nothing quite like a night of stirring and snoring to steep a closed room with the aromatic essence of a being. Now that all of the doors have been flung open, everyone’s most genuine intimate odors have been exposed to the boisterous currents of the morning and the scrutiny of the nosy. His new next-door neighbor primarily expresses a faint ammonia, like the redolence of pool water on a swimsuit after a hot summer’s day. Meanwhile, petrichor tends to be most distinguishable of the atmosphere wafting from the room directly across the hall where a bedbound waif stares unblinkingly into the intergalactic space nestled between two cherished nodules in the popcorn ceiling. He occasionally picks up elusive notes of something zesty and herbaceous that he has yet to attribute to a particular source, which vacillates between moldy oranges and looseleaf pekoe, likely depending on the mood of the originator.

However, individual smells quickly lose definition beyond thresholds. Towards the center of the corridor, the bouquet of fragrances commingles in a heady primordial brew from which emerges a persistent scent that seems to belong to an entity entirely distinct from any of the residents of the facility. Again, he senses the specter of it, not only in the balmy quality of the air, but in the subtle tugging of the hairs at the nape of his neck associated with the overwhelming suspicion of being watched, even when nobody else is around. He imagines a silent and pervasive onlooker whose perception is honed by the swarf of his own faculties abraded by time. Reflected somewhere in its all-encompassing gaze, a scintilla of a scintilla, is the perfectly preserved entirety of the person he once was. There, in his insignificance, he is still himself. Untethered by the trivial ambivalence of the subjective, the workings of the world that once engrossed him in the study of machine theory, fluid dynamics, even dark matter, have been made vacuous and explicit. However, he expects that it may still be possible to reconcile the gnawing measureless expanse within the confines of himself and the discreteness of these confines against the truly infinite, when he is at last able to look this panoptic witness in the eye.

“Oh pardon, Hal, my dear boy!”

A woman with a decidedly motherly disposition throws her arm out in an abundance of caution before he can run into her and ruffles the fullest portion of his hair just behind the forelock. He blinks out of his reverie, hunching over to accommodate her modest reach. Though she is probably a dozen years his junior and equally shorter in inches, he is dwarfed in her inexorable presence. With her effortless vigor and the roundness of her cheeks still untouched by the deep crow’s feet cascading into the smile lines that echo her jaw, Miss Clare is practically cherubic, but by comparison, he is puerile. She asserts with daunting affection that he perfectly calls to mind her estranged son, and Hal can’t help but smile in a strange reflex that pulls awkwardly at his face. The smirk kindles a warm glow of recognition from Miss Clare. Suddenly, with the great haze of selfhood smeared over by a resolute force of will, the world seems to become a little bit simpler. Colors shake off their nuance. Textures curdle over with forthright abstraction. Miss Clare begins to chat excitedly about various habits of her son that Hal is clearly expected to feel tickled to realize that they have in common, or at least to allow these quirks to nestle into his being and then adopt them as having always been his own. Compelled between the lines of a narrative scrawled in a child’s earnest penmanship, he wears the fairytale like a second skin, and the brittleness of it against his joints constricts his movement in a way that he doesn’t find to be entirely unpleasant.

Hal’s own mother never lived past middle age. Strangely enough, his memories of her have largely been spared by the degradation of recollection. What threatens them most imminently now is not the usual existential black hole, but the proximity of Miss Clare and her natural insistence upon being a surrogate. As the topic of food grows increasingly relevant with the encroaching aromas of the cafeteria, Hal is reminded of one of his last fond memories of his mother shortly before she would run herself off the road after another elegant day drinking function with the other wives of the unincorporated county’s rummy club. Though she was never much for cooking, she would surprise him on occasion with a meal consisting of nothing more complicated than boxed pasta and canned tomato sauce. However, as he recalls this sight of her in the kitchen, his mother bears the prize of an impeccable quiche Provençale, which Miss Clare gloats could always spring her son bleary-eyed from the deepest of slumbers. In a vivid falsehood, steam curls from the cast iron pan poised between his mother’s mitted hands, fogging glasses that she never wore, and his mouth waters in spite of the truth. There’s a hitch in her step as she turns toward him. Hummocks and gullies complicate the simple topography of her face as age shifts the tectonics of her skull. There’s a sharp cracking of bones as her broad angular shoulders collapse into soft curves that more closely conform to the doughy physique of Miss Clare.

It would be easy to deceive himself that this matriarchal archetype might approximate what his mother would look like had she lived into her dotage, but as he struggles to revive the finer details of the woman who died all those decades ago, more and more of the immediately available Miss Clare filters through. Chalky blue is superimposed over his mother’s shrewd brown eyes, creating a tepid hazel. The sharp incline of her nose rounds off suddenly in the jovial bulge of Miss Clare’s nostrils. He tries to summon what he knows to be the taut melodic timbre of his mother’s voice, but it is barely audible beneath a guttural matronly lilt. A faithful but tenuous rendition of his mother is quickly and irrevocably overwhelmed by the living specifics of Miss Clare. Hal begs a silent pardon for sullying his mother’s memory before giving in to the ready comfort of Miss Clare’s grip as she leads him by the hand towards breakfast.

Claiming a seat at the round banquet table towards the northwest corner of the dining hall just out of the direct glare of the louvred windows, Hal dissolves further within the cocoon of assumption as he is engulfed by the collective spirit of mealtimes. His sternum disperses like a startled school of fish when he touches his hand to his chest. Spoonfuls of oatmeal diffuse evenly in an instant throughout his body. He traces these bite-sized compositions of food and soul to nonsensical predigested provenance. A cursory notion of a blue-collar chip on his shoulder has been conflated with the distant twinkle of a blue giant in a celestial abyss. A brief flash of an idyllic first experience of a romantic relationship with an older camp counselor at a youth retreat sponsored by wealthy Jesuits is lost amidst the seminal heat radiated by neutron capture. The smear of a fingerprint left by a woman he loved replacing his glasses over his eyes after they had gone missing atop his head for the nth time recedes into a Magellanic Cloud. Definite qualities, instrumental experiences, salient perspectives have been scraped hollow, chiffonaded, denatured into the static of the cosmos.

Though he is squeezed on either side by the gathering of diners and their sprawl of foodstuffs, he feels unraveled, almost out of his own body, by the accumulation of many willful points of gaze. Unlike the dispassionate all-seeing watcher with which he is often captivated, the observer effect of his fellows makes him pervious and volatile. Between bouts of chatter and stirrings of imaginary cubes of sugar into her lukewarm mug of tea, Miss Clare keeps glancing over at him with a vigilant edge to her eyes, monitoring him as if he had all the stability of a radioactive isotope, or a child. He wrings his hands together, fearing that he may be seized at any moment by the urge to do something accordingly debasing, such as sticking his thumb into the communal slab of butter.

Once the table has been fully populated by residents with breakfast trays, a server approaches with a pitcher of water swirling with a gloomy blend of melting ice and free-floating citrus pulp. Maintaining as much distance from him as possible, they fill everyone’s glasses in somewhat counterintuitive sequence before finally reaching awkwardly across the entire table to slosh some water into his. A lemon seed bounces off his powdered eggs. He’s unsure of what he has done to warrant such poorly disguised prejudice. Perhaps he had been short with this server during a previous luncheon or spilled some soup on their shoes. Maybe he bears a passing resemblance to someone they find distasteful for one reason or another. In any case, personal shortcomings mitigated by the passing of a lifetime shake free from their scars and begin to chafe anew. His face mottles over as the innate human potential for vileness becomes obvious just beneath the skin. He is momentarily crippled by insecurity, and a spasm causes a piece of bread to miss his mouth, crumble into his wattle, and scatter over his legs. The server wrinkles their nose in disgust before proceeding to the next group of diners.

Before he can ease his discomfort by cleaning up the mess, his companions erupt in a peal of laughter that arcs through his body and shakes the crumbs from his lap, guffaws pulverizing toast into infinitesimal granules that remain suspended in the air. Silence congeals around him. He sways at the center of magnetic pathways of anticipation, and from the random collision of cognitive detritus, he gleans a nonsensical phrase that, once uttered, sets off another explosive chain of mirth. It’s some kind of inside joke that was ostensibly initiated by a markedly more overt individual whose place in the cafeteria social circle he has inherited by extemporaneous necessity after the poor man was transferred to hospital for acute care. He’s acquired enough of the context via osmosis to be able to fill in the comedic beat when prompted, but he lacks the connection to form, function, and sentiment to access the reservoir of genuine affection that appears to sustain the others upon the delivery of the punchline. The performative joy rolls off him like water from a duck’s back, and the superficial camaraderie only serves to make him feel more alienated today. The fulsome legacy of the gentleman for whom he has become a poor substitute is palpable as a vacuum, causing his body to groan like an old house as it expands into a barrel-chested imprint. His fundamental lack of stature is painfully apparent. However, no one seems to mind, and the nonchalance makes him ache all the more for the deficit he so hopelessly fails to redress.

When he, too, is nothing more than an interstice for someone else to flit through, he wonders what measure of his identity, some unadulterated crux of him, will endure. Perhaps some unexplainable impulse will tickle at the brows of his successor, inducing them to be raised in shocked fashion to mirror the way he tries to dislodge the hooded lids over his eyes whenever he wants to get a good look at something. Whoever sits next in this seat may also inherit the repulsion that he elicits from the particular server and, through no fault of their own, continue to receive unwanted helpings of lemon seeds in their denture-friendly meal items. He expects that an even more soulless iteration of the inside joke will survive his departure. So long as some of the dining table coterie remain and their senses do not fail them, a few will probably continue to wait with bated breath for someone, anyone really, to fill these recurring gaps in conversation for which the exacting silence has been sculpted to fit the occasionalism. Then again, maybe a firebrand will cycle into the community and shake up the status quo with new and more relevant social paradigms, like fatalistic references to current events or a younger generation.

These lengthy exchanges with others have been leaving him in more and more of a reductive state, and he is very nearly embryotic after having been slashed across too many lines drawn between degrees of separation. Stewing in the solitude of his room, he allows cells to divide in a philosophical womb, flesh to contextualize the axial tract digesting breakfast and mortal expectations, but this elaboration does not culminate with the promise of birth. Just as he’s about to be fully formed again, he overleaps fruition. Makeshift rounds wizen. Curiosity wastes away. All of time compressed to a span of a breath, he degenerates as if never having lived at all. He sighs. Even his body is no longer immune to the bewilderment induced by the clashing of fruitless whims. A childhood scar still attached to the memory of an uncle’s fishhook lodging into the base of his thumb after an overly enthusiastic cast of the rod has shifted a couple inches towards the butt of his palm. A notable liver spot just before the crease of his elbow has vanished entirely, and a bulbous and incensed rheumatoid nodule has mysteriously appeared on a finger that he could have sworn was not yet a source of arthritic discomfort. He continues to resist coherence, and as he pokes at the fleshy sac still more or less holding his shape, the jumbled odds and ends of his organs fail to warrant the appropriate concern.

“Gray-Gray!”

An instantaneous great-grandchild bursts through the door like a crisis of faith. The existence of the boy had slipped from his mind, but the demands of the child’s optimism are broadcast with such plain intent in radio waves buzzing through the air that he will not have to suffer the shame of admitting such a lapse. He does, however, shudder a little at the horror of having lived long enough to witness the tender erosion of innocence in the child of a grandchild and at the thought of age coming full circle to allow him to reclaim such virtue. In a manic burst of energy, the kid breezes straight through him as though he were made of cobwebs. Bouncing across the room like an extradimensional entity briefly tangent with this reality, the pure spark of a callous and brilliant deity, his great-grandchild flickers across spacetime. Shockwaves of the boy’s incidence leave little kernels of singularities that promise to make new worlds out of the vestiges of his.

After much of the momentum of the initial chaos has been shed, the boy finally becomes material enough to handle. The title of great-grandfather is still too much of a mouthful, and so Gray-Gray opens his arms to allow the kid to climb onto his knees. The child, still molten, brazes to him in a congruence of resurrection and annihilation. Tendrils of youth burrow into wilting sinew and pooling muscles, attempting to bring him back to life. Their embrace forces the mangled thoughtform of a man at middle-aged prime into agonizing semi-existence, torn to the limits between the polarities of young and old. Gray cradles the bridge of suffering between their bodies. The boy begs him for a story from when he was young, the idea of which is effectively as fantastical as asking Santa Claus for a unicorn.

Instead, he draws deeply from the blankness pervading him, and perhaps because there is little hope for the boy to grasp any of it, the language to convey the enormity of the cosmic as eclipsed by the absence of the self comes easily for once. The truths of him can no longer be accessed by all but the most immovable of witnesses, and there is some relief in accepting that futility. The kid’s eyes glisten with a naivety that defies the opacity of what he has to offer, and so old Gray speaks, in the gradual pursuit of apocalypse, or perhaps nirvana, following the centrifugal trails that those who died fearing death enough to become psychopomps, tour guides of inorganic space, have carved like tattoos into the arms of the galaxy. He brings the child before the crowning spires of late-stage civilizations, but they bobble like blades of grass, tickling the boy’s shins while he joyfully tramples the innumerable possibilities of isopsephic verse as if frolicking in a sunny meadow.

Scoured by stardust, his body readily disintegrates, and eager to be acquainted to novel toxins, the boy flehmens to take in the residual vapors of him. When his great-grandchild’s dimples briefly darken to reflect the depth of the disillusionment he has been propagating into the universe, a sensation vaguely akin to a carefree joy bleeds into him from the mucilaginous mesh of neural systems where they are moored together, but the shadow passes. Like a vulture of his decaying biology, the boy is all the more ebullient for having tasted the rot of him. The Gray resigns himself to desperation. He yearns for the casual self-destruction of his younger years, when he was sure that the dearth of him would be felt like the oblivion at the center of a quasar.

At least, he is satisfied with this representation of the paradoxes of his nonbeing, carefully folded into an irreconcilable figure, something like a tribar, hopelessly entrusted to the child to actualize into future possibilities. The implausible promise it holds transfixes the boy for scarcely a moment before it is reduced to a plaything, handled with gruesome ease, once again as though by an artful but indifferent god. If nothing else, it is out of his own gnarled hands. When the kid is torn from his side and he sloughs this last gray shroud of great-grandfatherhood from his person, there is hardly anything left of him. He moves like a wisp, liminal and elusive, becoming less and less distinct from what surrounds him. The powdery green of the walls becomes soulful when the hue leaks onto his fingertips, spreads in feathery ripples like ink spilled onto wet gauze, the color sodden with poignant mystery like the final traces of a hitherto unnoticed bruise. He brings his palms to his face, imbibes, becomes one with the substance dripping like sweat from the pores of everything, or welcomes all that is into the fertile void of him.