The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(75)

I believe I kicked and screamed and begged and fought, but in truth I was probably too tired and too dosed to make more than grunting noises punctuated by the occasional child-like shriek of indignation. They had to use masking tape to attach the electrodes to my skull; getting me to keep the final electrode in my mouth proved more of a challenge until the same doctor who had demonstrated such a sensible attitude to voltage reached the equally sensible decision to administer a paralytic. Sedation, it was judged, would probably not help what they were aiming to achieve, but I was grateful when one of the orderlies leaned over and taped my frozen bone-dry eyes shut. All I was left with was sound. It took them three false starts to get it right, the first charge misfiring as a fuse blew; the second failing to trigger because one of the leads had become detached in the attempt to change the fuse. When they finally got round to the business of sending a few thousand volts through my brain in an attempt to wipe every aspect of who and what I was from my still-thinking mind, it had a slight air of comedic afterthought.

I heard the doctor say, “Can we please get it right this time? Is everyone standing clear? All right, and—”

And that was that.





Chapter 57


I’ve only once attended a Forgetting.

It was 1989, in a private room of St Nicolas’ Hospital, Chicago. I was seventy years old and doing all right for myself, I felt. I had only received the diagnosis of multiple myeloma a few months ago, which was surprisingly late in my life cycle, and my enthusiasm in my mid-sixties for how little I appeared to be dying a slow and inconvenient death had led to me taking better care of my body than I usually did. I was even a member of a tennis club, something I’d never been in all my lives gone before, and I taught mathematics at a school in the mountains of Morocco for three months of every year, perhaps in an attempt to enjoy the company of the children that I could never call my own.

My visit to this eminently polite room in this eminently polite hospital on the edge of a more polite Chicago suburb, where the American flag flew proud and fresh flowers were put at the end of every patient’s bed, every day, without fail, was not on my own account. I had been summoned, and the woman who had summoned me was dying.

Akinleye.

I hadn’t seen her since that night in Hong Kong when her maid danced out across the water and she had fled before the sun rose.

They had me put on a sterile robe, and wash my hands in alcohol before going into her room, but the measure was rather half-hearted. The damage had already been done. How a woman with so few white blood cells left in her body was still alive bewildered me, and stepping through the door into the room where she would soon be deceased, I could see how obviously, how clearly, death approached.

Her hair had fallen out, leaving a pocked skull of crude bones protruding up like mismatched tectonic plates. I hadn’t ever seen her without any hair before, but now I realised how egg-shaped her skull truly was. To say her eyes had sunk into her sockets would be a lie, rather it was that every ounce of flesh, every line of softness in her features had been eroded away, leaving no more than a skull thinly coated in muscle and protruding remnants of nose, ear, lip, eye dangling off it like baubles off a withered Christmas tree. She was physically younger than I, but in that place, at that time, I was the sprightly infant, she the ancient one, dying alone.

“Harry,” she wheezed, and it didn’t take a doctor’s training to notice the crackle in her voice, the holes in her breath. “Took your time.” I pulled up the empty chair by her bed, sat down carefully, bones creaking a little despite my exercises. “You look good,” she added. “Old age suits you.”

I grunted in reply, the only sound I felt was really apt. “How are you, Akinleye? They wouldn’t tell me much outside.”

“Oh,” she sighed, “they don’t know what to say. It’s a race as to what will kill me off first. My immune system, you know. And before you tell me that AIDS is a lifestyle disease, I think you should know that you’re an idiot.”

“I wasn’t going to say—”

“The others look at me, you know, as if I was evil. As if having this–” she may have wanted to gesture, but the movement was little more than a twitch at the end of her fingertips “–is somehow a result of being morally bankrupt. Instead of the f*cking cheap condom splitting.”

“You’re putting words into my mouth.”

“Am I? Maybe I am. You’re all right, Harry, always have been. Stodgy old fart but all right.”

“How long have you got?” I asked.

“My money’s on the pneumonia getting me–couple of days, maybe? A week if I’m unlucky.”

“I’ll stay. I’m booked into a hotel down the road…”

“Fuck’s sake, Harry, I don’t want your pity. It’s just dying!”

“Then why did you call me?”

She spoke fast and flatly, words that she had already prepared. “I want to forget.”

“Forget? Forget what?”

“All of it. Everything.”

“I don’t—”

“Harry, don’t be obtuse. You do it sometimes to put people at ease, but I find it patronising and annoying. You know exactly what I mean. You try so hard to blend in, I find it frankly intrusive. Why do you do that?”