[ WP ] After a long life , an elderly patient is lying on their deathbed , when their father walks in , looking as young as the last time they saw him as a child .

The patient's father came in, around 2 pm that afternoon. His face was fair and unlined, his hands long fingered and still on the handle of his cane, like great white spiders. He did n't say a word, just breezed past security, who did n't give him a second look but just stared down into their computer screens. His shoes clicked on the linoleum floor of the Intensive Care ward as he walked past the beds filled with dying old men and women. 
 
 He carried his cane in his hand as he walked, and none of the patients paid him any mind, except one old Hatian woman near the end of the row who met his husky-blue eyes with her own and began to yell and scream and press the button for the nurse. She'd seen him before, back in Hati during the reign of Duvalier. She had seen the pale eyed white man stalking the streets with Duvalier's bogeymen. 
 
 She had seen him stoop and greet the dying and soon to be dead with a kiss on the brow, before Duvalier's thugs put lead inside their skulls. She had seen him again too, in 2004, in Gonaives, walking down the street with the flood waters up to his chest, stopping at the occasional body floating past. The old woman, whose name was Michtell-Sandra beat on the `` call nurse'' button like a drum, but the attendants at the other side of the ward spared her only a moments glance before deciding that the old Hatian woman, who was a crank and a misery at the best of times, was only having another one of her episodes again. Usually she called out for someone named pierre. Other times she just cried. They let her be, and the man walked past her. 
 
 He reached the end of the ward and turned to face a bed on the left. In the bed was a young man who looked old. His eyes, husky-blue like his fathers, were the only part of him not aged prematurely. He did n't know where he had gotten his sickness: from a needle maybe, or an unscrupulous partner, but it did n't matter much now. The young mans name was Carlos, named by his mother, who had come from mexico, and worked cleaning the homes of the rich every day on the Upper East Side of New york, from the time she arrived in this new and terrible country to the day that she came home to where Carlos had been playing in front of the TV, sat down heavily in the beat up old leather chair that she favored, and passed out of this life. 
 
 Carlos, who had been only six years old then, had looked up to see the strange pale man standing over his mother. He had n't been scared, just curious, as he watched the man, whose age was hard to tell, lay a soft kiss on his mothers forehead, and then carefully smooth her ruffled sleek black hair. 
 
 Then the police had come, and an ambulance, and a seemingly endless succession of concerned neighbors and devastated relatives and Carlos had never seen the strange white man again, except for one other night when, sitting outside the Columbia dorms on 125th at 2 in the morning waiting for the boy who would eventually break his heart, Carlos had seen a black cadillac skid through an intersection and barrel through a tiny asian girl who was crossing the street. The strange white man had walked out into the middle of the street where the girl lay, as the cadillac careened off drunkenly into the night, and crouched down to to close her eyes, and stayed with her till the ambulance came. 
 
 Now the pale man stood at the foot of Carlos's bed, and their eyes met. 
 
 Will it hurt, asked Carlos 
 
 Less than it hurts now, said the man. 
 
 Carlos nodded. Good. 
 
 I've seen you before, Carlos told the old man. I know who you are. 
 
 The old man nodded slightly, like a chessmaster whose pawn has been taken. 
 
 What comes next? Carlos asked. 
 
 Nothing, said the old man.
