The Weightless Silence of Transit
The morning shift had no urgency to it. That was the strangeness of hospitals—how a place so intimately acquainted with crisis could, in one hour, feel like a museum of breathing. Dr. Malik walked with no clipboard, no phone to his ear, no nurse shadowing him. Just himself and the old building that had come to know his gait as if it were a recurrent pulse.
He passed through the double doors near the cardiology wing. The motion sensor clicked with the same slow deference it always did for him, as though it, too, had come to respect his silence.
The hallway expanded before him—a stretch of muted light and industrial polish. The floor tiles bore the dull shine of overnight cleaning, and overhead, the flickering fluorescence pulsed like a distant, dying star. Nurses moved like phantoms, charting numbers with tired grace. He saw a young man sitting near the vending machine, back hunched, whispering a prayer into his palms.
No cries echoed today. No footsteps rushed. Just the quiet hum of machines and the patient sighs of old walls holding breath with their inhabitants.
Malik adjusted his coat, the fabric slightly wrinkled at the sleeves. His steps were neither heavy nor light, but they belonged entirely to someone who had lived too many hours under ceilings where mortality slept and woke.
He took a turn toward the east wing. Pediatrics behind him. Psych ahead. Somewhere between the two, a single patient waited—not urgently, not critically—but in the way one might wait for a late train: without hope, but also without panic.
In this segment of the hospital, the architecture changed subtly. The white became off-white. The windowless walls made each breath feel closer to thought than to air. Framed posters hung like ghosts of optimism—smiling models in perfect health, messages in sans-serif about nutrition, heart rates, resilience.
Malik glanced at one, then kept walking.
Outside Room 42-B, a nurse passed by and gave him a nod as a greeting exchanged. Just the nod.
He paused at the door and inhaled. A faint scent of antiseptic lingered, overpowered only slightly by old coffee from a nurse's cart stationed nearby.
Then he knocked, three soft taps. The kind of knock that asks for permission from time itself.
From inside, a voice: raspy, low, unmistakably female.
"Come in."
He turned the knob and entered.
The room was dim. Not from lack of light, but from a kind of deliberate restraint—as if brightness had been tried and found unconvincing. A single lamp sat on the windowsill, haloing a potted aloe in gold. The woman in the bed was older, perhaps in her early seventies, her skin the dark brass of someone who'd long since stopped counting years under the sun. Her hair, cropped short, framed a face more expressive in stillness than movement.
She looked at him with eyes that had outlived wars of both blood and meaning.
"Doctor Malik," she said, as if greeting a familiar ache. "You walk too softly for someone alive."
He almost smiled. Almost.
"Is that a complaint or a diagnosis?" he replied, pulling a chair closer to the bedside without waiting for permission.
She shifted only slightly, just enough to let her bones feel the presence of company.
"A complaint would mean I expect change. A diagnosis would mean I still care about labels. So, neither."
Her voice held that peculiar lucidity some patients developed—the kind earned not from healing, but from surviving too long without it.
He opened the folder in his hand, though he already knew her file. Routine check-ins. No change in vitals. No urgent symptoms. A survivor of an old lymphoma that had receded into dormancy. No terminal clock ticking down. No fresh wounds.
And yet she looked at him like someone readying for a last conversation.
He set the folder down.
"You requested me," he said. "But the nurses didn't mention anything specific."
She leaned back. Her breath was not labored, but it had the inflection of someone who had trained it to be calm.
"I did request you. Not for illness. For presence."
Malik tilted his head slightly. "Presence?"
"Yes," she said, "That thing doctors often forget they carry between the lines of their charts. You wear yours like a weather pattern. I thought I'd borrow it for a while."
The silence that followed was unaccounted for as the dreadful whispers of nothingness remained in between the corridors of professional duty and a petty selfish excuse for abandoning hope for a possible recovery.
"Tell me something," she asked after a long pause. "When you leave a room like this, do you ever feel like parts of you don't follow?"
He didn't answer immediately.
"Yes," he finally said. "And sometimes I don't notice until much later—when I'm home, or alone, or staring at something trivial. I find a silence in me that doesn't belong to my own life."
The woman smiled with a kind of forgiveness.
"I thought so."
He studied her face then, the fine lines around her mouth, the slight tremor in her left hand, the way her eyes held the memory of people long gone.
"You're not dying," he said.
"Not medically," she replied.
Another silence.
"But aren't we all?" she added, not as a question, but as a soft note on an old piano.
At that moment, the door cracked open again. A younger voice called softly from behind.
"Malik. You have a moment?"
He turned. A man in a white coat stood in the hallway—Dr. Setumo, the new neurologist from Transvaal, early thirties, eyes too bright for this floor.
Malik rose from the chair, eyes still fixed on the woman. "We'll speak again?"
"If you come gently," she said. "Not like death. But like a shadow returning to check the room."
He gave a single nod, and stepped out.
---
The hallway seemed longer than usual. Maybe because neither of them rushed. Or maybe because silence—shared and intentional—stretches time like fog. Malik walked alongside Dr. Setumo, their footsteps the soft percussion against sterile tile. Every few meters, a door whispered shut. A light flickered overhead with the polite indifference of overuse. The hospital was not a place that aged—it only accumulated.
Setumo finally broke the quiet.
"She asked for you, didn't she?"
Malik didn't glance sideways. "She asked for presence. That's not quite the same as asking for me."
Setumo gave a soft, curious hum.
"I've been here four months," he said. "Still feels like I'm renting the skin I wear."
Malik's eyes flicked toward him then, sharp but not unkind. "You think that feeling goes away?"
"No," Setumo admitted, after a moment. "I was hoping you'd lie."
That pulled a sliver of dry laughter from Malik. They reached a turn in the corridor where one wing broke into two—geriatric long-stay to the left, psych-medical hybrids to the right. Malik leaned briefly against the wall.
"I used to think medicine was about interruption," he said. "That we step in—halt decline, buy time, reverse outcomes. Intervene."
Setumo folded his arms. "And now?"
"Now I think it's about translation. People bring us poems written in blood, in pain, in breath. We read them. Misread them. Interpret. Prescribe."
He looked at the ceiling for a breath.
"And sometimes, we are the ones misinterpreted. Because no one teaches us how to be read."
Setumo looked down at his own hands, the hands that had once wanted to be anything but tools.
"You ever think about quitting?"
"I think about disappearing," Malik answered. "But the body keeps waking up. And duty's a slow leash."
An almost dry chuckle escaped Dr Setumo's lips ,"Tell me about it."
They stood there in quiet agreement. A nurse passed them, nodded. Behind the walls, machines beeped—mechanical affirmations of life, and of its terms.
Setumo finally turned to Malik again.
"There's a patient in B34. Old musician. Keeps hallucinating symphonies. Said the flutes keep crying out for someone to understand them."
Malik raised a brow.
"Sounds like a diagnosis waiting for poetry."
Setumo smiled faintly. "I thought you might want to visit him. You seem fluent in flute."
"And what made you think that?", a languid smile crawled down Dr. Setumo's face as he chuckled.
And looking like he'd long planned it he swiped his hand to the left and right ,"No one focuses more on one point than you, just like now, you didn't even look at my fingers probably because you were looking for a possible remedy to what I had to say, and unfortunately all i have is that I trust in my judgement, so if you look like you can do flute then you'd be fine in it as well."
Malik pushed off the wall. "Lead the way."
They walked in rhythm again, two physicians moving toward another breathing silence. In the echoing hall, it no longer mattered whether healing arrived through scalpel, pill, or presence.
Sometimes, the cure was a chair beside a bed.
Sometimes, it was just listening to the sound of someone's world breaking—quietly, like a hymn no one else could hear.
---
B34 was at the far end of the older wing, where the air held a different density. Something thicker. Not quite nostalgia—more like the residue of breath long exhaled. The kind of place where voices lowered instinctively, not from reverence but a sense that time had softened into something less linear.
Setumo knocked once out of habit, then again, because habits die louder in quiet places.
The voice inside was gravel and brass.
"If you're Death, come back when I've finished the finale."
Malik entered first. The man on the bed sat upright with an elegance unbroken by age. Skin the shade of worn bark, eyes rimmed with yellow but lit from within, like the slow-burning tip of a cigarette in darkness.
A silver halo of frizzed hair crowned him. Around his wrists, hospital tags. At his bedside, scattered pages—sheet music, drawn in pencil, some in crayon. Most incomplete.
"I'm not Death," Malik said. "Just another man with a stethoscope and insufficient sleep."
The patient's mouth curled into a grin. "Then sit, maestro. There's still time to learn the first movement."
Setumo smiled at the corner, gave Malik a slight nod, and stepped out. He knew when to leave the stage.
Malik pulled up the chair.
The man studied him for a long beat. Then: "You're the one they call the soft surgeon."
"I'm no surgeon."
"Softness can cut deeper than steel," the man muttered. "And don't insult me—I don't mean weak. I mean the kind that listens. The kind that doesn't flinch when someone says they hear music no one else hears."
Malik looked at the scattered pages.
"You write them down?"
"I transcribe what the walls give me." The old man gestured toward the corners of the room. "Each pipe here has a voice. Each flicker of light, a tremble of string. But the flutes—oh, the flutes won't shut up."
Malik waited.
"They cry," the man said simply. "Not in sadness. In need. In...in yearning. Like they remember someone who used to answer them."
Malik leaned back. "Maybe they're waiting for that someone to return."
"Or," the man whispered, "they're asking if I'm the echo or the source."
That silenced both of them for a moment.
Then Malik said: "What did you play? Before the flutes came."
"Trumpet. Jazz, mostly. Some orchestra. Played in Jo'burg, London, Dakar, once even in Harlem before it all collapsed."
Malik nodded. "And the music stopped?"
"No," the man said, his eyes far off. "The audience did."
Another pause. The IV machine blinked in ambient rhythm.
"You believe in madness, doctor?" the man asked suddenly.
"I believe in language that doesn't find a home."
The patient laughed, hoarse and bright. "Then maybe I'm just untranslated."
Malik smiled faintly. "You're in good company."
For the next thirty minutes, neither man spoke much. Malik listened as the old musician hummed fragments—some real, some imagined, all deeply alive. Malik sketched in the margins of a leftover music page: spirals, waveform loops, a few notes of his own.
Then the old man reached for one crumpled sheet and offered it.
"Take this," he said. "It's the beginning of something I'll never finish. Maybe you will. Maybe someone will."
Malik took it. The staff had tried to throw it away earlier in the week. He recognized the scrawled clefs, notes uneven and urgent.
"It's in the wrong key," he murmured, almost to himself.
"They all are," the old man said. "That's how you know it's still alive."
Malik stood, tucked the sheet into his coat pocket. He looked once more at the man who saw symphonies in silence.
Then: "You ever afraid the music will stop?"
The man shook his head. "No. I'm afraid it'll keep playing...and no one will be left to understand it."
Malik nodded. That kind of fear he understood.
He walked out quietly, the page a fragile weight against his chest.
Outside, Setumo leaned against the wall, hands in his coat pockets.
"Well?" he asked.
Malik smiled, thin and real. "You were right. He speaks flute."