Time ceased to be a line and became a murky liquid, a broth where days, weeks, and months dissolved without leaving flavor or mark. Evandro didn't know how long he had been there. He only knew of the here and the now in a precarious, intermittent way.
The here was a white room. The now was a constellation of sensations: the cold of the air conditioning, the weight of a thin blanket on legs that no longer felt weight, the dull discomfort of a tube in his nose and another in his urethra, and the low, constant hum of machines. Lights blinked on monitors beside the bed, translating his vital processes into green graphs he could no longer decipher. His mind, once a tool of surgical precision, was now a poorly tuned radio, picking up only static and fragments of past transmissions.
He was awake. His clouded eyes scanned the ceiling. Hospital, he thought, or something resembling a thought. But why? No answer came. Only a deeper impulse, a base programming beneath the rubble of consciousness: Silence. Secret. Guard. It was an echo, the last vestige of the instinct that had governed his life. Something important was hidden. He needed to protect it. What it was, he didn't know. But the imperative was clear and cold, like the action of a scalpel.
The door slid open with a soft rubber sound.
Four people entered, filling the white room with a dense, silent presence. The one in front was Carla, his daughter-in-law. Her hair, once merely sprinkled with silver, was now mostly gray, pulled back into a severe bun that accentuated the weariness carved into her face. Her movements were practical, almost ritualistic: adjusting the blanket, checking the IV.
"Everything okay, Evandro?" she said, her voice containing a professional kindness, the kind offered to sick strangers. The word father-in-law didn't echo in any recognizable corner of his mind.
Behind her, Márcio, his son, seemed like a man shrunk within his own clothes and his own life. The protruding belly, shoulders hunched forward, eyes that fled from the hospital bed to land on any other point—on the monitor, the window, his own shoes. "Dad," he greeted, the syllable coming out like a loaded sigh, more a burden than a greeting.
But it was the third figure that paralyzed—for an infinitesimal second—something in the stagnant depths of Evandro's consciousness. A young adult, thin, with dark hair and serious eyes. Lucas. His grandson. He didn't come every day anymore. Life, work, distance—or perhaps the unbearable pain of witnessing the erasure—kept him away. On that day, however, he was there. Standing behind his father, his hands in his coat pockets, he observed his grandfather with an expression that was no longer one of childish tenderness, but of an adult, resolute sadness. It was the look of someone coming to say goodbye to a ghost.
And then, a small movement. Next to Lucas, peeking between his father's suit-clad legs, a boy. Small, with the grandfather's wide eyes, but without the fog—only with the clear, frightened shine of childhood. Miguel. The great-grandson.
Lucas placed a gentle hand on the boy's shoulder. "Go on, Miguel. This is your great-grandfather."
The boy took one step, two. Stopped a meter from the bed. His eyes, so similar to those Evandro saw in the young man at the door, studied the bony face, the tubes, the glassy eyes.
"Grandpa Ben?" the boy whispered, confusing the name or perhaps inventing one.
It was then, upon seeing that boy—the echo of an echo—standing before the young man who was the echo of a lost memory, that an imperceptible tremor, a final spasm of connection, passed through Evandro. Not for love, never for that. But for a final logic. He saw the line: the tense man (the son), the sad young man (the grandson), the frightened child (the great-grandson). And he, in the bed, was the point of origin. The silent architect of that lineage of discomfort and distance. The facade had worked so well that now its final fruit was a family visiting a dying stranger, out of obligation and a remnant of pain.
Lucas, at the door, swallowed hard. His eyes met his grandfather's for an instant. There was no recognition there, only a moist void. He gave a slight nod of the head, a gesture not for Evandro, but for himself. A period.
Carla resumed the ritual, wiping the father-in-law's forehead with a towel. Márcio muttered something about getting coffee. Lucas took Miguel's hand and began to turn to leave, carrying with him the last vestige of a bond that, deep down, had never truly existed—only its skillfully projected shadow.
The facade, until the last breath, remained perfect.
He slept. And in sleep, the radio of his mind, by a whim of the disease, sometimes picked up stronger transmissions. They were memories, not as narratives, but as brutal, disconnected sensory flashes, without chronological order.
(The 1970s)
He is in a dirty bar, the smell of rancid cachaça and urine. A large man with green tattoos pushes a thin woman against the wall. She has wide brown eyes, not of panic yet, but of a deep weariness, as if expecting it. Evandro, then in his early twenties, lean and wiry like a street cat, feels not indignation, but a tingling in his muscles, a yearning for movement and pressure. He approaches. Doesn't speak. The large man turns, smiles scornfully. Evandro's first punch is precise, to the throat. The second, with a broken bottle that appeared in his hand, goes to the eye. The sound is wet, satisfying. The violence is not rage. It is language. It is the only thing that makes sense. The woman, that Célia, looks at him afterward, and her fear has a different shine. It's no longer the fear of the obvious predator. It's the fear of the abyss. He likes that shine. He takes her home.
(The 1980s)
Blinding surgical lights. The rhythmic sound of the heart monitor. His gloved hands are inside an open abdomen. It's a simple appendectomy. The patient, a robust man, is under general anesthesia. The appendix is there, inflamed, but not catastrophic. Evandro's hands, however, move to a nearby blood vessel. A small cut. Precise. Contained. He watches, for a few precious seconds, as blood begins to accumulate in the peritoneal cavity silently, insidiously. He then closes, washes, sutures. The procedure is "successful." The patient dies in the ICU hours later from an "unexpected hemorrhagic complication." In the report, Evandro writes with his impeccable cursive handwriting: "suspected pulmonary embolism." At home, he drinks a whiskey. The taste is good, but the real taste, what stays on the tongue of his soul, is power. The sensation of having pressed, by his own will, the shutdown button of a human machine. It's more intimate than sex, more definitive than any word. It's the true signature.
(The 1990s)
Célia is pregnant. Her belly is round under her dress. He watches her from afar, from his armchair. She sings softly as she folds clothes. He doesn't feel what the books say a man should feel. He feels... possession. An extension of his facade that is becoming more complex. The baby, Márcio, is born. He holds the small red, screaming being. Analyzes the closed eyes, the pulsating fontanelle. It's fragile. It's a blind spot in his system. But it's also the perfect disguise. He stops coming home with his knuckles cracked from hitting other people's faces. The raw violence moves inward, professionalizes, finds a more lucrative and less risky channel. The beast was not tamed. It learned to use a collar and leash to get closer to the sheep.
(Decade of the 20xx)
He is in his clandestine "consulting room" for the last time, before burning everything. The diagnostic letter is in his apron pocket: "Mild Cognitive Decline. Suspected Lewy Body Dementia." He looks at his hands. A barely perceptible tremor, but to him, a flare of alarm. Precision is fleeing. The risk of error (an error that would give him away) increases exponentially. It's not morality. It's logistics. He performs the last "service" with a coldness heightened by urgency. When he finishes, he cleans everything with obsessive care. It's the end of a production line. He retires. The letter he would write years later to himself already begins to form in some still-healthy corner of his brain: a safety net for the monster, built by the monster himself.
The flashes came and went, without mercy. The perverse joy of a surgical "accident." The profound boredom of a family dinner where he chewed and smiled at the right moments. The smell of blood mixed with cigarette smoke. The smell of Célia's potato stew. The sensation of the scalpel meeting resistance. The sensation of Lucas's small, warm hand in his. It was all the same now. A great soup of sensations where good and evil, the real and the staged, had dissolved. Pleasure, power, the facade... everything had become static.
In the early hours of March 17th, 20xx, Evandro's heart, a tired muscle beating in vain for almost eighty years, simply found a rhythm it could no longer sustain. The green lights on the monitors danced in a chaotic line and then flattened, emitting a continuous, monotone beep.
There was no drama. There was no last coherent thought. Just the shutdown of a system.
A nurse on duty entered, checked the signs, turned off the alarm. Made a precise note in the chart. Activated the protocol.
And just like that, it ended.