The Good Night
21 Mar 2023
The doctor was late, Collins knew. She usually visited the ward before sunset, in this particular season, before the shadow could touch the second cabinet on the left-hand side. There were much to do in the hospital, but Collins would prefer to watch time flowing by. He enjoyed observing the signs of time—the leaves, the shadow, and in which angle sun found him in the morning. Those signs often reminded him of certain moments, which would then lead him into the vortex of memory. His memory was already way longer than his remaining life.
His son would have blamed him for wasting time, Collins knew. Do not go gentle into that good night, Aaron would have said. It was one of the last words that he texted. Technically it wasn’t him that texted the message—Collins remembered having this conversation five days before he and Lauren eventually arrived Aaron’s place. It was awkward to dive into such a serious issue during journey, only later did Collins realise. But he had no time to doubt anything then. They were eager to see their child, alone in a foreign land, working for earning life. They noticed him sending message at 4 a.m. from time to time; in fact he seemed to be online 24/7. Working, he would mostly reply, whenever being asked of what he was doing at the moment.
It wasn’t a healthy habit, but since Aaron never brought forward a complaint, Collins didn’t comment a word. By that time he was already aware of his ageing and had no time to interfere a younger man’s life. It took almost a month for a wound on his knee to completely heal, and he got that wound because of sudden weakness on leg. It was but an ordinary day, and he on his way from the market back home. Without any sign, he crumbled while getting off the tram. He didn’t break his legs or arms, luckily, fortunately, but only the eggs in the large tote bag.
And yet he knew he lost way more than a carton of eggs. He was losing time. Time for traveling freely to wherever he wanted, time for witnessing his son becoming a better man, time for living. At dusk he started to sigh to the glow, for he failed to save another day. With every day passing he grew less hopeful for the upcoming one because getting older meant, in his knowledge, the gradual loss of control over his own life and, by extension, the remaining days awaiting him to experience.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Aaron quoted for the first time on the next day, in one of his messages.
Collins never knew Aaron read Dylan Thomas. He didn’t even know he read poems. But their conversation moved on anyway, as they later had a thorough debate on whether seeking medical advice was a good idea. Aaron strongly advocated a health examination to clearly identify the issues ringing an alarm to Collin’s aged body, apparently ignoring that remaining ignorant would comfort his father’s mind, which would also contribute to the so-called health.
Collins obeyed in the end because he couldn’t defeat Aaron on arguments. In fact he hadn’t triumphed once since he entered college, not to mention the years when he studied a Master’s programme in computational linguistics and later on stayed in the foreign land to work. By then it was already his sixth year abroad. At first Collins suffered from his absence, refusing to admit that raising a child essentially meant a long farewell. “It’s ironic—” he complained to Lauren— “we’ve lived in the same city for decades. Why would young people leave it so desperately?”
“There’s no more room for them. It’s a biological instinct.”
“As if being a nomad would earn them an open ground.”
“It’s not a matter of space. It’s about boundary—it becomes vague in a foreign land and gives you the illusion of a world with countless possibilities.”
Boundary. Collins couldn’t tell if he understood what she meant by then, but at the moment he certainly had a higher level of understanding the concept as his world shrank into the 18-square-metre-wide ward. The four walls became the boundary of his physical trap. Whatever happened outside the window was but a fantasy, as if an everlasting video on a gigantic screen. Sunrise. Sunset. Then sunrise. The cycle marked every progress he made on the timeline. At first he counted how many days he had stayed in this hospital, until someday he started to confuse himself with the exact number. One week later he gave up, suspecting the mistake to have taken place before he was even able to notice anything wrong.
Was Aaron sent to a ward like this in his last moment? Did he wait for his time to come as well? Collins would sometimes imagine, particularly in those nights when he could hardly fall asleep like the remaining world. Darkness enlightened imagination. And imagination filled the gaps between the segments of the story in his narrative—Aaron’s story, in his narrative. About how he lived as a student and later an engineer, how he suffered from colorectal cancer that eventually took his life, and how he created a fraud that convinced him of his survival, or existence.
Collins knew that he could never understand the mechanism behind the so-called consciousness extension—which the doctor was about to discuss with him later again tonight—even if his son tricked on him with the basis of this technology. How could consciousness be extended? How could someone be conscious in the electronic container? In spite of seemingly understanding that the consciousness didn’t refer to the abstract thing that he would usually mean by the word, he refrained from looking further into details because of such deviation between terminology and mechanism.
“Names are important.” He argued when the doctor explained the methodology to Lauren. She nodded from time to time, which Collins couldn’t tell out of acceptance or disagreement. After letting the doctor finish, she told her, “I’ve heard of this before. I don’t think I’m prepared for such new thing though.”
The doctor looked a bit surprised to know she had heard of the new technology—it was less common back then—but she respected her choice of not to accept the treatment and never mentioned the topic to her again.
Of course she had heard of it, Collins thought. They together experienced this.
Four months later Lauren left. It was by then did Collins realise he was the sole survivor on earth in this household. It had already been almost two years since they made the journey, and yet he never considered himself recovered from its aftermath, namely, the total corruption of his understanding of physical body, soul, and by extension, even the entire civilisation itself. He sat in the living room alone, perceiving its wideness and coldness resulting from the absence of those who was supposed to appear in the space. Home was too big for him. So was the world. The world was too wide to contain all of his sadness, as if a desolate plain without stars.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right because their words had forked no lightning, they do not go gentle into that good night.
Only in such emptiness did he once again think of the old poem, the one that had been read for so many times that ended up becoming a cliché. But he started to appreciate it because it contained the only lines that Aaron ever mentioned to him. In fact, although his reason agreed that those lines were quoted by the computer, he would rather consider this question unanswered and could never be answered, for uncertainty allowed him to believe in whatever his mind favoured but not whatever the objective facts referred.
What would he favour then, to accept or not to accept consciousness extension in his own case? He agreed when the doctor asked him for the first time, and yet the affirmative reply didn’t bring him any joy in the following nights. Instead, he started to question himself on whether the decision was wise. Wise men at their end know dark is right. Was consciousness extension right in this regard? As his thoughts wandered the dusk had gone deep. The shadows on the wall vanished. Usually he would have turned on the lights already, but on this particular day he would like to witness the night falling towards its end, to experience the moments when the room and outside went equally dark and thereby merged together.
The sunset glow resembled that of the day before their arrival at Aaron’s place. The hotel compensated them with an upgraded room owing to an accidental repair work. Neither of them was used to such height at twenty-sixth floor—in particular with giant floor-to-ceiling windows. When the night fell, they sat on the sofa and watched the colour shifting. Marigold. Ruby. Violet. Then everything faded into indigo. And finally black. “We should’ve asked him to come,” Lauren broke the long silence.
“Too late. We got this quad room by chance anyway.”
Lauren didn’t reply. “He’s lived well without us for so many years,” Collins added. “One more day wouldn’t be a long wait.”
She didn’t sleep well later. Collins was disturbed by her rolling over throughout the night. He ended up getting up one hour earlier than sunrise, only to find her staring at him.
“Did you fall asleep?”
“Several times.”
“I dreamed of him,” she continued after a brief silence. “We were taking a train and somehow didn’t get off at where we were supposed to. Then we were stuck on coach, not knowing what to do. The train didn’t make any further stops, and we didn’t even know its destination.”
“At least we’re together,” Collins commented. Lauren smiled.
“We’ll soon be together.”
The trip took place eight months after Collins fell on the road. Aaron insisted that he could depart only after finishing the health examination and every additional item deriving from it. Deal. By replying so Collins regarded the entire process as a deal. Those monthly-lasting queue turned out to become notations that marked Collins’s health status not as good as other men at his age. He wasn’t much disturbed though. It was Aaron that had him finishing all those tests, and simply by finishing them he was permitted, finally, to visit him.
The whole journey was full with anxious excitement. Collins and Lauren arranged an extra week visiting a couple of cities before going to his son’s place, only to find themselves not in the tourism mood. They paid little attention to the attractions, food, and coffee, eager to fulfil the ultimate purpose of why they came so far. In the very morning they finally arrived at the location to which Aaron directed them, they nevertheless failed to find him anywhere around.
Are you at the bus stop? Collins saw a new message from Aaron. He called back in response, but he didn’t pick up.
Instead there came another line. Would you come to my place directly? Then an address was given.
Only until then did Collins start to doubt if they were really welcomed at Aaron’s place. It seemed that he made several attempts to avoid them but ran out of excuses in the end. “That’s rude,” Lauren complained. Collins answered with a grunt.
You may find the spare key under the second pot on the right-hand-side to the entrance.
That very line that triggered their impulsive anger, which eventually blinded them from seeing the ongoing real story. They collected the rusty key and opened the door that was in fact unlocked, welcoming themselves into the unlit corridor. As the front door closed, they found the house extremely quiet; the air introduced a hint of wooden furniture and yet no further signs of something organic, as if the house had been vacant for weeks or even months.
“We’re here,” Collins called. Dead silence.
They had no choice but to look around. The more they saw, the less vivid the place appeared. At some moment Collins even wondered whether they broke into the house of some stranger by accident, but this was soon proved to be a stupid guess by a family photo on the cabinet. Nonetheless, there seemed to be very little airflow; the window frame was covered by a layer of dust. Even the mug on the desk was completely dry. Next to the mug, Aaron’s laptop was still on, running some kind of program that looked too complicated to understand for Collins and Lauren. Their message, however, showed up in a separate window.
In spite of the uncertainty regarding Aaron’s mysterious whereabouts, Collins texted him again with hope that he at least carried his phone elsewhere. He watched his message turning into a bubble that pushed up the other ones that contained earlier conversation. And then it took only a few seconds for the next one to emerge.
I’m at home.
Where? Collins texted again.
Have you arrived? I’ll come soon.
Collins further looked into the texts popping up in his laptop. We don’t see anyone at your place. He sent. Then he saw in the other window—the one with black background colour—his message showing up simultaneously, followed by a flashing cursor. By the cursor, word by word, he witnessed a line being generated.
Hold on, I’m working. Maybe serve yourself a drink?
Then the line appeared in the messenger window as well, being sent to Collins. He received a notification on his phone immediately.
At first Collins was mostly confused, but he soon realised that the message was sent by Aaron’s computer, and they had always been having conversation with a program. Then, knowing this fact, he suffered the longest day in his lifetime as he experienced to what extent the measurement of time can be defined by the storm within one’s mind. They further visited several places, including a police office, a hospital, Aaron’s university, and two of his friends’ places. Sunset came so late that they forgot to dine. Or perhaps even if it had been winter, they would have eaten nothing for dinner, since they were already overwhelmed by the weariness and the overloaded information scattered around this vast foreign city.
The rest was history: how they exhausted themselves from investigating Aaron’s vanishment, how Collins accompanied Lauren as she fell ill right after their quest, and how he became the kind of old men who possessed nothing but memory. Memory was a vortex that swept away one’s soul, leaving nevertheless body behind. Collins’s body aged along with the flow of time, but his thoughts froze at those weeks. He couldn’t help reviewing every detail of how everything happened, of how his world crumbled, until he became even uncertain about the accuracy of what he remembered from time to time.
“He passed away a year before we were there,” Collins explained to the doctors, first the one taking care of Lauren, later the one taking care of him. “He had cancer. When it was diagnosed, he didn’t have much time left.
“He trained a model on his own corpus—everything he typed, messages, posts, school essays—so that his computer could still send messages as if he himself was texting.”
“Even if he was no longer there.”
“Even if he was no longer there,” Collins nodded. “His body, his soul, all gone. His words do not constitute the so-called consciousness; they were but traces of his mind.”
“Traces can be important, maybe not for yourself, but for others,” Collins’s doctor suggested. “But I’ll respect your decision on whether accepting consciousness extension. You still have a couple of days to make a final decision.”
Final. The word brought him a sense of ending and therefore made him nervous about whatever was about to come. Or perhaps he was simply not yet well-prepared for embracing the decision together with its consequences. Why did his son choose the path, and why did Lauren choose the other? Though he knew, at his age, choices could no longer simply categorised into right or wrong, he would prefer to make judgements which he wouldn’t spend more time regretting. Time shouldn’t be wasted on such thing.
Perhaps time was what his son tried to give them—those extra months when he was as if accessible online. But what did those months eventually save? Collins questioned himself. The technology could never reverse death, and it was death that wounded the survivors, no matter how much extra time was given. Every time he recalled visiting Aaron’s place, he doubted his motivation even more, as if guessing would allow him to approach the real answer step by step. He ended up remembering dozens of versions of Aaron’s story. Some appear more reasonable in terms of plot, though every of them was but an attempt to fulfil the void that he had always failed to reconcile.
So when the doctor comes, what would his answer be? Collins asked himself again. Aaron would have asked him to accept consciousness extension, he knew, and he therefore followed this presumed suggestion. But what would he himself say?
The thing was that he was not Aaron, he wasn’t Lauren either, he was himself. And by being himself it meant to accept, acknowledge, and sometimes reconcile with his own choices, which happened to prove, whether appreciated or not, a unique identity of his own. That was why he never regretted departing to Aaron’s city, even if the journey brought him but pain. He would rather survive the cruel reality than live in the illusion of concord. This was, by definition, being conscious.
This would stand as a good reason to reject his prior words on accepting the treatment. And it was this very choice that distinguished him from many of others. In this regard Lauren seemed to share more common with him in comparison to Aaron, but neither of them should accelerate or refrain him from deciding his own path, for he was the only one eligible to do so. It was this choice that completed him, as a wife, as a father, and as an individual.
“Why wouldn’t you turn on the light? It’s already dark outside.” A nurse came in, followed by the doctor.
They lit up the room. The light made him squint, dragging him out from the night to which the ward once belonged. All of a sudden the poem returned to Collins’ mind, and he found himself understanding it slightly better now.
The doctor made her routine diagnoses first, but they appear trivial in front of the question. Collins knew clearly which topic the doctor would bring forward. No, he was going to say—though still confused, though still uncertain, but brave enough to speak—I would prefer not to accept consciousness extension. He would tell the doctor, he knew. He had made up his mind. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.