He prods the faces of a room once familiar, but now haunted in misty corners by the unexplained. His cane darts at forms that fade into walls, wisp-like. Maybe, he says, it is those once here, but now crossing the intersection of this moment.
His eyes, a blue-gray fog need no thick lenses, such as his son bought, to see what matters. He sees and hears and knows well enough for the business at hand, for the pursuit of truth at the tip of a cane.
“Touch me,” we say. “I am real.”
Imagine a reel of film or bits of data with electric charge, vibrating, stretching the bounds of their containers, threatening to spill order into gibberish. This chaos holds together only by the thought of existence.
His nights fill with wails of white light, sharp noises that stop short, and voices that mutter uncertainly. Whatever order there was is breaking.
This is a story of dissolution. Of a clockwork inside us spinning another minute, wearing another tooth, shaft or spline in time failing. In time, all is failing. The spinning center of the thought of existence teeters to a stop, gloriously revealing what remains.