Memory Card

Memory Card

By James Oliver Smith Jr

Mark Jacobson was rather proud of himself. He was pleased with his life as he reflected on it. Although he did not plan to live for 93 years, he surprised himself by actually enjoying his time on planet Earth. All of it.

“It’s a good day,” he would typically say to the attending nurse each morning. The nurse would usually smile and busily mumble some canned affirmation while checking monitors clicking, beeping and whirring around Mark, attesting to his status on the medical charts draped over the foot of his bed.

“Yes, it is a good day,” the nurse might say absent mindedly. The nurses never disagreed with him. He knew it wasn’t their job to assess his evaluation of the day. Their job was to keep him alive.

Mark thought about the irony of that purpose: to keep him alive. He knew that was the task they were focused on, even though they all knew this was the last phase. He also knew they were quite reticent to become too connected to him personally. This was, after all, one of those rooms where people left as bodies to be processed, handed over to relatives or made available to the medical school for study by new generations of physicians. That’s why he never asked what their names are and never committed their names to memory when they offered it.

Mark was ready for all those machines to register that final status, the time of death. The nurses were ready clean up after him. The hospital was ready to reassign the room. The process of keeping him alive was simply a stream of data insinuating itself into databases, spreadsheets and quarterly finance reports. All of those years of designing software and generating reports for various hungry managerial eyes had given Mark the ability to look at the process of life as a data set to be manipulated and analyzed.

He had treated his own life in the same way: a data stream. A warm, comforting rush worked its way across his body when he imagined the order he had instilled into that data stream. It was one of the few physical sensations he could still experience. He didn’t care, at this point, if his body could actually still feel the sensation physically. He fully understood the possibility that he was simply stimulating his tactile cognition with the thought. He felt the order of his life’s data stream, whether it was physical or cognitive.

The nurses were only concerned about data emanating from the monitors. That was their connection to reality.

Mark turned his head to the side and stared in the direction of the night stand. He took note of the phone headset resting in its cradle and the controller for the television set that stared down at him from the corner of the room, next to the window. He could also see a box of tissues with a tuft of white fiber rising from the opening in the top of the box. Moving his hand to the edge of the bed his fingers moved the objects on the table to the side a bit. Then he moved them again.

“Where is it?” he hissed to himself, “Where is my memory card?” Mark was now agitated. That sense of order he had just felt in his life’s data stream was now disrupted and he was not happy. He had spent most of his final years scanning documents, books and images. He spent countless hours organizing and documenting the digital files on on tablets and desktop computers. He even made sure that everything was backed up in multiple locations, both on the web and local back disk drives.

He had digitized everything he could. He was frustrated with stories of relatives spending weeks, months, even years, cleaning up, organizing and disseminating the belongings of relatives who had died.

He was determined to make the job of those tasked with cleaning up after him easy. All of his jobs, marriages, business relationships, children and were documented and organized digitally. There was nothing left to clean up. It was all digital, redundantly backed up and fully documented. Every network location, service password and file system structure was detailed in a memory card that he planned to give to one of his children if they showed up. That memory card was sitting on that night stand, ready to be handed over.

... was on the table! That is the problem. ... was on the table. Mark could not see it! The key to his life’s data stream could not be seen! His fingers searched the bed sheets for the emergency switch. Once found, he pressed it, setting off the alarm.

In short order, Mark’s room was filled with nameless nurses checking monitors carefully. Seeing nothing threatening, they turned towards him in unison. One of them asked, “What is wrong?”

“My memory card! Where is my memory card!”

One of the nurses moved to the night stand and moved a couple of items. The nurse’s hand lifted a small blue box containing Mark’s memory card.

“It’s right here,” said the nurse impatiently, “It just got moved over to the other side of the night stand. It’s alright.”

The nurse placed the blue box at the edge of the night stand, arranging the phone, controller and box of tissue so Mark could see the memory card container.

“Now you should be able to see it,” said the nurse, “Is there anything else you need?”

“Yes, I was wondering if my son or daughter had called,” answered Mark, hopefully.

“No one has called”, said the nurse, adjusting his sheets, “now get some rest.”

“Damn kids,” Mark whispered to himself.

As the final nurse was about to leave the room, Mark’s machines came alive with a concert of alarms in different keys, a cacophony of technological awareness. The nurse rushed to Mark’s bed, grabbed his wrist, then pressed the emergency alarm switch. The other nurses and a physician entered. The physician began issuing orders, starting the process of trying to revive Mark’s body.

Ultimately, the physician terminated the revival process, jotted down the time of death on the chart, then he left the room to answer another call.

Nurses set about to prepare Mark’s body for transfer to the university for research. Those were the instructions in Mark’s files on the event of death.

A man walks into the room and asks if this is Mark Jacobson’s room.

“Yes,” said one of the nurses, “may I help you?”

“Well, I got a message from my dad, telling me to come here. My dad said my grandfather had something he wanted to give to my dad. Mark Jacobson is my grandfather.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said the nurse sympathetically, “your grandfather just died. That is him lying there. Would you like to be alone?”

“Oh, no. Go on with your business,” said the man, “is there anything I need to do?”

The nurse looked at Mark’s chart, then returned her gaze to the man, “Actually, your grandfather has taken care of everything. He is donating his body for research at the university.”

“OK,” the man said puzzled, “but my dad said my grandfather wanted to give him something.”

The nurse thought for a second, then said, “Well, he kept talking about the memory card in this blue container.” The nurse lifted the container. “He kept it on his night stand. He was pretty obsessed with it. Could this be what he wanted to give your father?”

“I really don’t know,” said the man, “I never have seen my grandfather. My dad never had much to do with him when he left home after my grandmother divorced him. Quite frankly, I didn’t even know he was alive until my dad called me and asked me to come here and see what my granddad was calling about.”

“Well,” said the nurse, “here’s the memory card.” She hands the blue container to the man, who held in his palm, inspecting it closely.

The man extended his hand to the small trash basket underneath the night stand and released the blue container into the black plastic liner of the trash can.

“It seems like this trip was a waste,” said the man plainly, devoid of feeling. He turned, left the room and stepped out of sight.

The nurse looked at Mark’s body ... then the trash can ... then the chart ... then she joined the other nurses shutting down machines and preparing the body. The room needed to be ready for another patient shortly.

Josjr (2013)