Our effort turned from keeping Bill alive to building him an enclosure, of sorts. We didn't deny him food out of negligence, but out of futility. He couldn't swallow anymore, and his jaw hung permanently open. He was pronounced dead on at least ten separate occasions, and managed to crawl back to consciousness every time with a different look in his eye each time. It was like someone else was back there, sometimes wide-eyed, sometimes dopey, keen, short-sighted, long-sighted, cross-eyed. Most often, the eyes looked much too energetic for the decrepit body they'd found themselves in. This is what we joked about at dinner as he'd stare holes into each of us. Touch himself under the table sometimes like he'd just discovered it. Back when we could feed him, he was fussy with some food sometimes and not others. The doctors chalked it down to the Alzheimer's, but we still joked about spirits and possession. However uneasily.
It was when I saw his brain dripping out of his ears, that I started collecting old railroad sleepers. We all chipped in and plotted the timber frame and nailed wooden pallets to it that Dylan found out the back of the Grocers when he was doing his urban photography crap. Inside, we put in Bill's old chair with his scratchy blanket over it. In went an old television that the children reported was perpetually tuned to static, even minutes after we'd change it to a channel for him. We spent too much effort on the satellite dish not to have him at least stare blankly at sitcoms in crisp definition. The children reported seeing flashes of alternating channels through the static, forming sentences of single words on the programs or on the news that they thought were addressed to them. They never stayed to decipher more than a few words.
He, at that point, had no food in there. The dread had well and truly settled into our stomaches. His great grandchildren had children and still he was there, jaw hanging lopsided. Weeks at a time, unvisited. He didn't move much, but he'd always be in a different position when we'd pop in. The eyes moved though. Always side-ward from his chair toward the door when we were there checking up. The way the eyes stared was as if his head had become fixed on his shoulders.
Eventually we had the house moved down the property so the children couldn't see him looking at them through the loft window, groping himself. 171 years of age; the smell overbearing when the wind swung toward the house. We talked at dinner, as we mashed up solids for Bill's grandchildren, about what might be keeping him alive. We no longer laughed at the premise.
The next day I couldn't find Dylan anywhere. I went to the barn with my flannel shirt over my nose. Found the door ajar and his camera on the ground. Bill was gone. Couch torn to shreds, television kicked in. I don't know why it took me so long to go through his camera, but the last photo taken on the camera was this. Not sure why I kept it; maybe it the keenness of the stare. Never had I seen eyes with such determination in him.
