Vegetables

The 41st floor.

I have always hated the 41st floor. 

Even all those years ago, on that first trip up there, even then I hated it. It was all I could do back then to not let my anxiety get the best of me. Several times I thought of just turning around, of going back to my superiors and telling them I’d done it without ever having to set foot on the actual floor. I never got the time to work up the nerve. 

In the midst of my moment of doubt, there was a groan in the cables and a ding as the elevator arrived at my destination. A shiver ran up my spine while the elevator doors crept open to reveal the seemingly deserted floor. It was cloaked in darkness in all places except those parts that were lightly illuminated by the yellowing glow of the emergency lights. The higher-ups didn't see any point in paying to keep the floor well lit seeing as there was no one there that would thank them for it. Looking into that dark tomb, something kept me suspended in time for just a moment longer, as if some part of me was silently begging not to go. In the end, I was forced to take the first step out and into the darkness. The doors slid closed behind me and as if the elevator itself was running from the contents of floor 41, it shot off in another direction to carry some other professional to some other engagement. 

Now I had gone to medical school in hopes that I would be able to help those when they were really in danger. I had fantasies of being the good doctor to swoop in at the last second and save a dying man with nothing but my own wit and expertise, but that's not where I ended up. No, I ended up in places like floor 41. 

I had only worked at the hospital a few weeks when they sent me there, but it was long enough to have heard the stories. Young nurses talked of the place feeling cursed, that it was haunted, but I have a different interpretation. When I walked through the halls that first time to the patient wing I was scared, sure, but since then, having had to spend a lot of time between its walls I have come to understand it on a different level. It is worse than if it was cursed, worse than if it was haunted, worse than any graveyard or cemetery I have ever been to because on floor 41 the people are still alive, in a technical sense at least. 

The patient wing there consisted of one large room. The only light came from the single row of pendant lights that hung from the towering ceiling and made a perfect line down the center of the room. Many of the lights were now blocked by a few deteriorating green banners from some old event or another that had sagged over the years and no one ever bothered to take down. This caused large sections of the room to be basked in a light yellowish-green light. In the shadows that gathered at the edges of the room, there sat rows of beds. Each one was the nearly eternal home of a vegetable, someone who was brain dead, unconscious, nothing but a sack of blood and organs that would only live on as that for the rest of its life. 

They all had their own story for being there, some were forgotten relatives of young people who didn't want the guilt of pulling the plug, a few were John Does who had never been identified and there were even a few that had been brought in by the government with some mumblings of a secret experiment that they needed results for. No matter the reason that they were there, they were all abandoned, that's how they ended up on the 41st floor. 

It was my job to check their vitals and make sure they were still alive. That first time I brought a flashlight with me but I learned quickly that it wasn't much help and I didn't really need it to do my job anyway. The only thing having the thing on me really did was allow me the temptation of checking the patient's records and really it was all easier if I didn't know anything about them. 

Unfortunately, that first time I didn't think of it that way yet. 

His name was Philip Oscrate, my first one, a billionaire who had made the mistake of telling his children that they were in charge of his assets in the event he was in any way unable to control them on his own. They had abandoned him at the hospital back in 2146. That was almost 8 years before I found his charts in that dark room and checked to make sure that his pitiful heart was still convulsing to the beat of the life support machine. I have never been able to prove it but it has always been my personal belief that his children put him in that coma. His chart contradicts me, with a statement from his brats about how he fell down the stairs, he has gotten clumsy in his old age doctor, but I never believed them. The only reason he is still alive as far as I could tell was to keep anyone from getting suspicious. I see them on the news sometimes and I wonder if they ever think of the man that they left locked up in here.

Another one was Juliet Pharaoh. She was young, that was what always struck me about her, what kept her suspended in my memory. She had long brown hair and still a bit of youth in her features. The day before her wedding she had an allergic reaction to something on the hotel menu and went into anaphylactic shock. Her husband-to-be found her too late and she never woke up from the coma. I checked her breathing as I thought of her fiance. Originally he didn't want to give up on her, insisted that she would wake up even when the doctors told him she wouldn't, but as time passed he moved on and stopped visiting her. Eventually, he went so long without seeing her that she was moved to the 41st floor. The rumor mill tells me that he is married to someone new now, a dental assistant I believe, but I never did find out if that was true. I never left her without noticing that shiny purple nail polish that still clung to her fingernails from a long-forgotten wedding that never was. I wonder if she would still love him if she knew? Would she be grateful that he wouldn't let her die or upset that he never gave her a release?

Sam Carter was the first one that I found dead. This wasn't until somewhere around my third year, after all, our tech had gotten fairly advanced, it was very unlikely that the patients ever died when on the machine. By that point, I had learned that it wasn't a good idea to read their stories but when I found that he wasn't breathing and that I would have to, for the first time, report a death, I needed to know who’s death I was reporting. 

His file read like an old crime novel, it told of an uncaught and forgotten killer who spiked the punch at a company Christmas party with cyanide. It seemed that Sam was the only one that survived the party, if you could call it surviving. The cyanide had destroyed his brain before he got to the hospital but the machine would keep his organs chugging for another 20 years. In that instance, the family had wanted to give him the mercy of death but the police insisted that they were on the verge of something that would make his wreck of a brain usable to them. They never did find whatever that was. As I covered his limp body with a white sheet I wondered how many other people in that room would die with no more worth to their lives than they already had. 

I worked the shift on the 41st floor for almost 40 years. Every day I went into work and checked pulses and avoided the light and ignored the stories and flew so far from the fantastic doctor I set out to be. Day- in and Day- out it was just me and the vegetables. Like the stone cliffs that are berated by the ocean, I was worn down. It took me 40 years to break. I’m not sure what it was exactly, the dead or the undead or something different entirely, but one day I just broke. I couldn't see it all again, the purple nail polish, the yellow-green light, the empty husks of human bodies devoid of the souls that once kept them alive, really alive. There was no inciting incident, no call to adventure, just a feeling, a thought, and a rash action. 

It had never occurred to me how appropriate it was that the red glow of the exit sign always fell on the power breaker until the day I decided to flip the switch. The last thing I remember hearing as the lights died out around me was the beautiful silence that came when the machines shut off. It was the first time in history that the 41st floor was silent enough for anyone to rest.