“Are you sure this is what you want? Not riches, nor fame? Not a loving family, nor a tranquil farm?”
“No. This is what I want. I am sure of it.”
“Then so be it.”
In the blink of an eye, the young man had moved from his austere hospital bed to a cozy, well-furnished room. He felt for the first time in months how his arm followed his elbow, how his legs listened and replied to his command. Yet there was a more pressing matter: the confused old man sitting across from him.
Recovering from his unexpected convalescence and quickly overcoming his initial nerves, the young man sat up with a serene smile and addressed the visitor.
“I am sorry to bring you here, but I promise it won’t be long. I am a dying man, you see. In fact, I am quite dead. Yet as I lay bleeding in some cold and dark trench…” he shivered. “I wished with every fiber of my body to speak—for a few minutes only—with every person on Earth.”
The old man stared for a few seconds. He seemed lost in thought, but soon returned with unexpected and ravenous laughter. He began wheezing, and had to calm himself down with painstakingly labored breathing. Once he had completed his ordeal, he set his eyes once more upon the young man, with an odd brightness lending his features a sharp and glowing edge.
Finally, he started,“what, then, would you like to know?”
“I never asked to be a doctor,” a woman sighed, “I just thought it was the easy path, you know? My dad was a doctor. My mom was a doctor. What else was I supposed to do?”
“Look at these cards my mom bought me!” a kid gushed, “they are limited edition, and I got lucky with my favorite character!”
Another old man just cried. Many sat in silence, but glanced knowingly at the young man with the golden smile. Many spoke of love, of sunsets, of homework. Yet after billions of people, and billions of stories, the young man did not relent. He remembered each and every one of them like his life depended on it. But it was a life he no longer had, and it began to dawn on him, slowly, that he might have poisoned himself with love.
“What about you?” A young woman asked.
“Huh?”
“You! Yes, you! Why did you do this to yourself in the first place?”
Do this to yourself? Why had he? And then, with little flashes here and there, he began to remember. He remembered staring at the Pacific Ocean with his platoon on a cold night. He remembered the first shot he fired, the first man he’d killed. He remembered how he’d grabbed onto a fellow man’s leg, sobbing, and been left to die.
And then the young man, for the first time, began to cry. The dam that had been holding back every secret on Earth crumbled under the weight of one more story—of one more heart. He remembered now why he’d done this, why he’d chosen to spurn death for just a little more: he needed to know if he, too, had once been alive.
The woman, dropping as well the insidious act of politeness, smiled at him through a fountain of tears.
“Am I the last?”
The man smiled, cried, burst into laughter and uncontrollable sobbing. He nodded. And as easily as she came, she, too, was gone.