Future Timers Disease

"It's written on the walls at the edge of the Universe. Everything that was, everything that is, and everything that will have been."

Lenny Hollard would say this over and over again as he lay on his La-Z-Boy recliner -- drool painting his face and the front of his shirt. The nurses knew he would do this after being 'gone' for a week at a time. Lenny was now considered a house-plant patient -- you watered and fed it and it didn't do anything.
Lenny was a visionary of his time, but now he just stares off into space. He is unable to move or even feed himself. He has been losing weight even with his daughter, Lana, coming for regular visits. All his other family is dead, or can't bear to see him this way.
His oldest and best friend, Jackov, won't come. He says, "Please don't force me, Lana, I remember him as he was. He wouldn't want me to see him this way. He would rather have me push him into traffic than have me watch him like this. He is my friend."
It was sad, indeed. But when his daughter would stay with him things sometimes changed. She sometimes noticed him staring at her... following her movement... she knew he was there! Somewhere inside him was her father and she was determined to reach him.
She had it in her mind to try one day. She turned the TV off. She brought in his chalk board with all his old notes still on it. She got him his old laptop and started it up. She painted the walls the same color as his office. If he was there, she was going to talk to him!

"Daddy, I want to talk to you. I am here, if you can hear me. Remember you used to say, 'Time touches all of us, but leaves no fingerprints on the mind that is ready?'
"Remember daddy you said you wouldn't leave me ever?
"I need you to tell me you are here, daddy. Please! Daddy! Tell me you are here!"

But even after six days of trying, there was silence. She would take him outside and to the park, and talk to him constantly. Everyone else despaired that all Lenny was now was a house plant -- his heart pumped, but no one was home.
But on the seventh night:
Lana was getting him ready for bed. She had left a clipboard in his lap. Then quite by accident, after his mumbling his same paragraph, the hem of her dress caught the edge of the night stand and jerked it. A pen on it, with which she had been keeping notes about his medication, dropped towards the floor while she had her back to her father.
It didn't hit the floor though. When she turned to steady the stand, and stop a glass from spilling, she noticed a strange mathematical formula scrawled on the clipboard. 

It read... "infinity - infinity = infinity  ...love you sweetie."

He had grabbed the pen with his mind, and instantly wrote the words, and then he had died.

edited by Roger Bourke White Jr.