The projector had jammed between two slides. These images (held there all night?) had burned. One depicted the upper half of Schubert’s face, his tiny glasses seared clear through to whiteness but the wavy hair and the whole scorched forehead remained, a brown zigzag husk. Atop this, superimposed as in some Alabama image, black spiney letter, projected, big.

Charm, a noun. —based on Middle English for a magic spell, derived from the Latin word “carmen” meaning incantation. 1. The power or quality of pleasing or delighting; attractiveness: “The breezy tropical setting had great charm”. 2. A particular quality that attracts; a delightful characteristic: “A mischievous grin was among the child’s many charms”. 3. A small ornament, such as one worn on a bracelet. 4. An item worn for its supposed magical benefit, as in warding off evil; an amulet. 5. To attract or delight greatly. To bewitch.

Light in here bounced images off the wall and back down onto our patient. He, unsupervised, lay naked atop his sheets. He’d noticed me; I’d never felt so watched by him. When flourishing, he had never liked direct stares; but the more silent he grew, the more legalistic, dubious Talmudic, and resigned these long looks grew.

He had incidentally pulled the IV from his arm and the milky nutriment line was dislodged from a catheter inserted midchest. He was naked and elongated as any El Greco saint. His arms, thrown open, rested to either side; his features were set and bits of the projected image played over his bare form. Part of Schubert’s nose lit one shoulder.

Robert’s face had shaped itself into a question, one addressed, it seemed, to the projector’s light. I saw that my monologue (never able to cure him) would never again even cheer him. I sensed that he’d grown finally blind to whatever might now be offered to beguile or charm him. Nothing held him to us now. He had no interests. The continuous seduction, it’d ceased.

I saw that the surface of his body, once so pure and supple, was mottled and pocked and scored as if by some terrible recordkeeper. Robert’s tattoo of five-line musical possibility forever awaiting notes had shrunk, as he had—in the way a balloon, broken, renders any words across it illegible.

I climbed up onto the bed beside him, got both arms beneath his back. The crushed geranium smell of him rose so intense it threw a little clear-glass greenhouse all around us. His arm freely drained, the milky substance of the feeding fluid seemed to pour from the hole burrowed in the center of his chest like some nipple wasting nourishment that a suckling child might use. His genitals looked huge because they, having stayed their same size, contrasted with such wasting all around them.