The story is about a doctors research to an illness he experiences
It seemed as the man looked out to the horizon that the sun burned out. The darkness filled life with despair, filling people's dreams with nightmares. He looked at the horizon with glazed eyes; at a casual glance, you would think him dead. His chest rose and fell in short, deep breaths, his chest barely moving. Just another victim to fall to the lack. His thoughts were gone. It was as if he became a living shell without a soul and brain, and yet somehow his body still functioned. I would call it death, even though they still lived.
The doctor filled his journal with notes, yet nothing anyone did could cure the lack, as most called it. All doctors around the world—all medical geniuses—wrote and studied, yet there was no cure, only moving forward and hoping the "living dead," as the doctors called them, died happily. As the sun rose, or you could say rose, yet it didn’t bring day; it just rose without light. He sat there with his glasses pulled down to the bottom of his nose, hunched over his notes. The room he sat in was lit by candles, plainly dressed with just a desk at one wall and a door to his right. The walls were white, and a window looked out to the meadows. Sweat glistened on his forehead; he had studied all night.
Mumbling under his breath, he read his notes. "Patterns, there must be patterns," he said to himself. Yet the further he pried into the mystery, the further it tangled; it was like trying to untie a knot by tying it further. The doctor’s shirt was rumpled from the position he sat in all night, creased along the chest and back. The sleeves were folded to cool off his body, and the top three buttons were opened. Pressing a pen to his notes, he wrote further:
… as I may think this incurable disease—as I will call it from now on—may be curable, just not found on the basis of the study we’ve been using as a foundation to try and understand what makes our "patients," as we can call them, stop responding to stimuli. Our research has been held in the dark, and that is good, because it is all wrong. We are studying things we have no idea about. We have to find what they all have in common before they became, as it is known in the medical world, the living dead* (7).
As I recall, most of my patients have had a traumatic experience before they became "living dead"*(8). I think that it’s related to the hypothalamic/pituitary/adrenal axis, instead of the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.
With this last line, the doctor breathed a sigh of relief.
Footnotes:
7 – That paragraph of study seems to get me further than I have, which means it's more right than our other assumptions, but yet still not right. (I really hate this).
8 – Whoever came up with this very uncreative name should not have a medical degree.