Warren Murphy - The Ultimate Death

The old Chinese had been left at the hospital many years before by his grandson, a Remo Nichols. This young man had dropped twenty-five thousand dollars in cash to pay for the life-support systems, and quickly vanished. Before the money had run out more began coming in, to cover the spiraling cost of sustaining the old Chinese gentleman, but the grandson never returned to visit his comatose grandfather.

Mary Melissa thought that was disgraceful. The old man had been left there to waste away by a relative who had no intention of ever returning.

She took on that patient as a personal cause.

At first, Mary Melissa told herself she gave the man special attention only because of his personal situation. That was all. But in fact, as with everything else in her life, she had become obsessive about him.

She had been obsessive in her quest to become a nurse, obsessive in her strict adherence to vegetarian dogma, and now she was obsessive in her care of the terminally ill Chinese gentleman.

And the trigger for that obsessiveness was the fingernail. It couldn't have been anything else.

What is its purpose? Mary Melissa often wondered, as she trimmed the old man's hair and sponged his flaking, purplish skin.

She had tried at one point to trim the sharpened guillotine tip of the index fingernail, but it just would not cut. She even jutted the tip of her pink tongue through her pearl-perfect teeth and scrunched up her freckled forehead in determination as she bore down on the nail with all her might, but all she succeeded in doing was snapping her clippers. The nail remained smooth and shiny.

Mary Melissa would sit for hours, eating salads from the cafeteria and holding one-sided conversations with the old man, because she had read that even the comatose were sometimes cognizant of their surroundings. And who knew? Maybe she could talk him back to health.

Mary Melissa Mercy believed in miracles.

The nursing staff at Houston General thought she was as loopy as mating squid, but no one complained, because Mary Melissa Mercy was the only nurse who undertook the distasteful job of veggie-grooming without complaint.

One day, a miracle seemed to occur.

Over the rhythmic sounds of the ventilator that assisted the man's breathing, she heard a sound issue from parted purplish lips.

"Missy . . ."

"My name! You spoke my name! You can hear!"

"Missy . . ."

"I've gotten through to you!"

Later, Mary Melissa Mercy tried to explain her progress to the attending physician. He was a cynic.

"Nurse Mercy," he had said. "I know you're excited. But try to listen carefully. The patient is brain-damaged. He will never regain consciousness. He will never leave that bed, except for the county morgue."

"But he said my name! He called me Missy! Missy was my childhood nickname!"

"Missy," the doctor patiently explained, "is a very Chinese form of address when speaking to a young woman. I would not take any such vocalization seriously."

But Mary Melissa Mercy did take the patient's words seriously. In the weeks that followed, she devoted herself to the old Chinese.

She knew on an instinctual level that he realized she was in the room with him. She spoke to him for hours on end. About the weather. About current events. About her life-which consisted mainly of the same twelve-by-fifteen foot room the old man lived in.

Her ministrations were rewarded one late afternoon, with the flicker of a translucent eyelid.

Many in her profession would have disregarded such an event. They would have called it an example of "unfocused neural impulses," or something equally random, and gone on ignoring the old man.

But Mary Melissa Mercy had seen it. Seen it with her own two eyes.

Over the next few weeks there were more such twitches. Mostly around the eyes, but some were located in the hand. The one with the strange super-hard nail.

Mary Melissa was changing the old man's linen one day when his eyes snapped open completely. They were hideous. Like twin fungi. She did not back away in fear as some might have but moved closer to him, peering down into his dark, drawn face.

Mary Melissa Mercy had thought those eyes hadn't seen the light of day in more than six years, but the sight of them told her it had been much longer than that. They were so white, it was difficult for her to discern any pupil at all. She finally gave up trying. It didn't matter, however. He could see. Perhaps more clearly than a sighted man. Those blind, milky eyes bored into her very soul.

He forced two words from between thin lips.

"Reject . . . meat."

"Yes, yes!" Mary Melissa cried, thinking the patient had absorbed her lectures on proper Vegan diet.

As quickly as they had opened, the milky eyes closed again. The old man seemed tired from his effort. His eyes rolled and locked beneath their parchment lids. The twitching stopped for several days afterward, as he regained what little strength he had.

Mary Melissa Mercy told no one of the miracle she had wrought.

Over the course of the next year, the old man's strength increased. He seemed to possess a boundless determination to recover. It appeared to Mary Melissa that, even in his obviously advanced years, the old man had some overriding reason to cling to life. A drive. Something that compelled him to beat almost insurmountable odds to recover.

In the second month after that first time his eyes had opened, the old man began to speak in complete sentences. The words seemed to be Chinese. The voice struggled laboriously over the pronunciation, as the vocal chords vibrated for the first time in over a decade. A few English syllables seemed to pepper the subvocal murmurings.

The head would sway from side to side-that started shortly after he had begun opening his eyes-and he would wheeze out a stream of unintelligible nonsense.

The words he said most often sounded like "sin and chew." They seemed to trouble the old man greatly. Often the phrase would seem a curse; at times it was said almost reverentially, and at others, as a plea.

Mary Melissa was so interested in the old man that she went to the public library to try to find out what had caused him so much mental anguish. It took some doing, but finally she found it.

It was Sinanju-just some tiny little fishing village in Communist North Korea, nestled in the heavily industrialized western coastline. It didn't even appear on most maps, it was so small. Mr. Nichols had probably spent some time there as a boy, she decided.

Like most Americans, Mary Melissa Mercy lumped the entire Asian continent into one big neighborhood.

The old man became more animated as time wore on. He also became consciously aware of Mary Melissa's presence. Eventually, he told her in his halting English that he had learned the language thanks to her and her hours of disconnected ramblings. He told her that, despite appearances, they were much alike.

"Really?" she asked.

"We do not soil our stomachs with the flesh of animals."

"How did you know I was a vegetarian?"

"We are one Creed, you and I, Missy," rasped the Chinese named Nichols. "Soul mates. Connected in mind and spirit."

A one-sided relationship, akin to idol worship, began to develop between the old man in Room 334 and Mary Melissa Mercy.

Then the bottom fell out. Orders were passed into the terminal ward saying that the old man was to be moved out of the hospitial at the end of the month. When Mary Melissa Mercy tried to find out where, she was told the new location was not known.

In tears, she ran to tell the poor old man of his fate.

He was sitting up in bed, propped against a half-dozen pillows. The blinds were opened wide and he was basking in the midday sun, which made his scaly skin appear livid and strange.

"Sir," Mary Melissa had said, sobbing. "They are taking you from me."