The failure of the machines barely came as surprise to Conrad Hertz. It had been twelve days since his daughter had visited, and last time she’d only stayed for fifteen minutes or so. A vase of wilting irises, hyacinths, and orchids was the only decoration adorning his veiled chamber, having been brought against his will and its own by a vapid, chattering cadre of ex-students. And the attractive nurse was recently moved to a different ward, so for the past week he’d been attended to by a brusque, polite young man. In light of all these cruelly conspiring events, it only seemed logical that the life support would give out without much fuss, that no one would appear, phantasmal, as they usually seemed to upon his waking from anesthesia. It was mere tautology to him that death would begin to approach at an exponentially more zealous rate, that he would be cast out of senselessly serene slumber into the wakefulness of chronic discomfort. Throughout the remaining few hours of his existence, as his physical form tore recklessly, no longer confined by modern medicine, towards obsolescence, as the individual cells of his body began one by one to lurch their way towards necrosis, his mind took on an almost hermetic quality. It became sharply crystalline, and seemed to be immune to the unfamiliar vagaries of daylight--he had decided to make his way outside, feeling that, all things considered, it might be the most prudent choice. Rather than being absorbed and processed, all stimuli passed through him, were perceived for a moment and then refracted out and away. He didn’t think it strange at all that on a fine, fresh Wednesday morning there would be no people, no cars, nothing moving at all except the breeze.
It was a ten-minute walk from the hospital to Volkspark Friedrichshain. As he made his way along the street, Hertz felt an electricity running through his body, beginning at the top of his head and in his fingers as the sunlight met them. With each step, he transferred the current into the pavement as his feet struck it, and the warm air around him burned with bright radiation. The desire to break into a run was overpowering, but there was still some sensible part of him left that knew his bones would shatter, that his muscles would tear, that he would fall and be abandoned writing on the hot asphalt. So he continued walking, and each storefront he encountered was like the first he’d ever seen.
The fountain was iridescent, but not in such a way that it stood out. Indeed, nothing in the park really seemed three-dimensional or real. Hertz felt as if he were trapped in a beautiful painting, or a blurry photograph. Leaving the path, he walked onto the grass and felt his feet sink into its cool dampness, lying down in the grass he felt it all over and let out a breath, without ever taking one in again. As the days went on and the fallout began to settle on Conrad Hertz’s corpse, as the sun was hidden by thick clouds of ash, as winter began to set in, as the trees in the park were deprived of light, his process of decay and theirs continued in unison--like children skipping arm in arm under early stars on a clear fall evening.