“Do you want me to take this?” I asked. He continued smiling and there was something unnerving about his fixed expression. Perhaps all of us, normal and afflicted, old and young, associate this rigidity of emotion, the absence of gestures with death. I repeated my question just to dispel my uneasiness.
I left his room a few minutes later with the same unease and by the time I got to the bottom stair, I was determined to end my visits. But I turned up the next night. And the night after. Each night I observed his deterioration, the blue discolouration and puffiness on his body, the scratches on his wrists one night, the bruises on his cheek the next. But I continued going up the stairs; I suppose I wanted to see how it would end. (Maybe, as an infant learning of the ebb of life by observin
