The Forgetting Time(7)

Is there life after work?

But he wasn’t finished.

“Perhaps you’d like to talk to someone—there’s a social worker—or, if you prefer, a psychiatrist—”

“I am a psychiatrist.”

“Dr. Anderson. Listen to me.” He noted, but could not feel, the concern in her eyes. “Many people with primary progressive aphasia continue to take care of themselves for six or seven years. More, in some cases. And yours is in the very early stages.”

“So I’ll be able to feed myself and—wipe myself and all of that? For years to come?”

“Most likely.”

“Just not be able to talk. Or read. Or communicate in any way with the rest of mankind.”

“The disease is progressive, as I’ve indicated. Eventually, yes, verbal and written communication will become extremely difficult. But cases vary widely. In many instances, the impairments progress quite gradually.”

“Until?”

“Parkinson’s-like symptoms can develop, along with decline in memory, judgment, mobility, et cetera.” She paused. “This can often impact life expectancy.”

“Time frame?” The two words were all he could manage.

“The conventional wisdom is seven to ten years from diagnosis to death. But there are some recent studies that—”

“And the treatment?”

She paused again.

“There is no treatment for PPA at this point in time.”

“Ah. I understand. Well, thank God it isn’t a death sentence.”

So this is what it felt like. He’d always wondered; he knew what it was like to be on the other side of the desk. So many years ago now, those months they made the psych residents give out the most severe diagnoses, said it was “practice,” though sadism was more like it. He remembered the hand-trembling anxiety of entering that room where the patient waited (hands in your pockets, that was his mantra back then: hands in your pockets, voice calm, a mask of professionalism that fooled nobody); then the wild relief when it was done. They’d kept a bottle of vodka under the sink in the psych bathroom for such occasions.

This doctor now, this cutting-edge neurologist they’d sent him to (coiffed, polished—her makeup itself a kind of bravado) must’ve delivered a good dozen of these a month (it was one of her specialties, after all) and still looked peaked around the edges. He hoped there was a bottle of something for her somewhere, when this was done.

“Dr. Anderson—”

“Jerry.”

“Is there anyone we can call for you? A child, perhaps? A sibling? Or—a wife?”

He met her gaze. “I’m alone.”

“Oh.” The sympathy in her eyes was unbearable.

He took it all in and rejected it at the same time. He wasn’t finished. He would not let himself be finished. It was still possible to get the book done. He would write quickly; that’s all he’d do. He could finish in a year or two, before simple nouns and then language itself became alien to him.

He had known he was getting tired. He had thought that was what it was. Why he couldn’t find the right words for things, sometimes, even though he knew he knew them. They wouldn’t come out of his mouth or roll off his pen, and he thought it was because of the exhaustion. He was not getting younger and had always worked long hours. Or perhaps he had picked up a strain of something on his last trip to India, so he went for a checkup, and one thing led to another, one doctor led to another, and he wasn’t afraid. He was a man who didn’t fear death and had never let pain slow him down, a man who had survived hepatitis and malaria and could work straight through lesser illnesses and barely take notice of them, so there was nothing to be afraid of—and yet somehow he had ended up here, on the edge of this cliff. But not over it, not yet.

So many words. Oh, he wasn’t ready to give up any of them. He loved them all. Shakespeare. Saltshaker. Sheila.

What would Sheila say to him if she were here? She’d always been smarter than he was, though people laughed when he’d said it—the kindergarten teacher smarter than the psychiatrist? But people were idiots, really; they saw the blond poof of her hair and his degrees, whereas anyone with even half a brain could see how shrewd she was, how much she understood, how much she let herself know.

If Sheila were here—

But was she? Could she be visiting him, in his time of need? Her scent was here. He had no particular experience with spirits, but he didn’t disbelieve in them, either; it was a subject for which insufficient data existed, despite some valiant efforts here and there, Ducasse’s Butler case, for instance, or Myers’s Cheltenham ghost, not to mention the early-nineteenth-century studies of mediums by William James and his ilk.

He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to feel her presence. He felt, or wanted, something. A stirring. Oh, Sheil.

“Jerry.” Dr. Rothenberg’s voice was low. “I really think you ought to talk to someone.”

He opened his eyes. “Please don’t call psych. I’m all right. Really.”

“Okay,” she said softly.

They sat for a moment in silence, looking across the desk at each other, as if they were on opposite sides of a raging river. What strange creatures other human beings are, he thought. It’s amazing anyone ever connects.