Free Willnot by James Sallis

many scenes I read as a kid where some guy ruptures his spacesuit or his ship and gets sucked out, horribly but at considerable length and with excellent description, into the vacuum. It’s like that—your mother’s TV, sounds, possessions, the press of others.”
    The cat sat at yard’s edge watching us. Maybe we were prospective buyers and soon there’d be companionship, comforting sounds above. Food.
    “No one saw the shooter. The round had some distance to it. That and the caliber rule out an amateur. Yet except for blood loss, Sergeant Lowndes is all right. And who around here has any reason to shoot him?”
    “Why does the shooter have to be from around here? Though, mind you, pretty much everybody who is, knows guns.”
    She stood. “None of it makes any sense.”
    “Does it have to?”
    “Things usually do.”
    “Only if you’re an accountant.” Or paranoid—in which case everything connects. “How are you doing with those splinters?”
    “I think I can manage.”
    “Then I should be getting back to the office.”
    Clouds were gathering as I drove—gathering surreptitiously.Sky would be clear above a stand of trees, I’d look back and clouds had claimed squatter’s rights.
    Her mother’s TV, the visitor who never leaves, and loneliness …
    Later in life my hardcore-SF father turned to fantasy. His last novel was Dying with Grace , Grace being a two-foot-tall giraffe who wandered up to the protagonist’s side one day on the streets of Brooklyn and never left. From that day he was never alone, even in his final moments. The last thing he saw was Grace’s face bending over him. She had to stand in a chair to do so.

12
    I lost a patient that afternoon. I’d barely got back to the office and was looking over the first chart when Maryanne came into the examining room to tell me they needed me at the hospital. I arrived to find Gordie, two nurses and his teenage surgeon bent over a gurney like birds at a watering hole. When one straightened and stepped away for a moment, I saw who the patient was. Burt Feldman.
    Fifty-three years old, at least forty of those years given over to fighting or, more correctly, surrendering to diabetes. He’d gone blind long ago, had such severe neuropathy that he hadn’t walked more than a dozen steps at a time in a decade, his legs were half-and-half sores and necrotic tissue.
    And now, from all appearances, he was in DIC, covered with bruises and hemorrhaging from mouth, nose, ears, eyes.
    “Sepsis, we figure,” Gordie said without looking up. He had Burt on a vent, had his jaw pulled down peering into his mouth. “Clots everywhere. Lucky I was able to get the tube in. Looks like black granola in here.”
    “Kidneys are gone,” the surgeon said.
    Janet, one of the new nurses, looked up from the chart. “There’s no DNR.”
    “He’s Doctor Hale’s patient,” Gordie said.
    “Sorry. Didn’t know.”
    “How long?”
    Janet glanced at the clock. “Forty-six minutes. A deliveryman saw him lying in his front yard, called it in. Unconscious and unresponsive to pain but still breathing when he got there, Andrew says.”
    I looked up at the skittery, slowing EKG.
    “Mostly just the drugs,” Gordie said.
    “Is there anyone we should notify?” Janet asked.
    “He doesn’t have family.” I looked down at the bruised chest, taped lines, distended stomach. “If it’s okay with everyone, I’m going to ask that we leave Burt in peace now. I’ll sit here with him.”
    They filed out, pulling the curtain around us for privacy.
    It didn’t take long. Twelve minutes maybe. Holding his hand, purposefully not watching the monitors whose alarms I had shut off, I could feel when the moment came. I remembered how much Burt loved Gunsmoke , and I was talking to him about that, trying to recall bits and pieces I’d seen of the show over the years, when he died.
    Upstairs, Bobby was adamantly stable, his room museum-quiet, though anesthesia and sedation had to have