We Are Not Ourselves(114)

“I feel like one of my rats,” he told her as they sat in the attached orange chairs in the waiting room. She gave him a quizzical look. “In the lab,” he said.

“It’s not the same.”

“It is,” he said. “It’s okay, though. I can be the rat after all these years.”

“Stop that, Edmund.”

“Maybe it will help someone,” he said.

“Maybe it will help you.”

“I’m not the point of this. This is a trial. Other people are the point of this.”

“That’s not true,” she said.

“It’s fine. It’s science. I’m here for science.”

She was silent for a while.

“I’m the rat,” he said, more definitely now.

“Fine,” she said. “You’re the rat.”

“They all died eventually,” he said. “I never liked finding them stiff. It never got easier.”

She imagined the stench from the cages, the dead eyes, the reduced bodies looking like cat toys. “It must have been unpleasant,” she said.

“It was sad. It was a thankless job they had.”

? ? ?

They weighed him and took his vital signs, drew his blood and collected his urine, gave him an electrocardiogram and performed memory tests. They monitored his ability to do certain tasks. They had him play with blocks. They had him cut meat. They had him write things. Writing was the hardest thing to get him to do. He hated his own handwriting. It was more proof than he was willing to look at.

At the end, they handed her enough drugs to last Ed the thirteen weeks until his next scheduled visit. There was a jolt of promise in the bag of medications. She wondered for a moment whether, if she gave him the whole bag at once, he would be his old self for a few days, an afternoon, a couple of hours. It would be worth it, even if the rest of the time he was a mess. She knew it didn’t work like that, though. His real self wasn’t hiding in there waiting to be sprung for a day of freedom. This was his real self now.





48


It was a Tuesday in early July. They were lying in bed with the windows open. She tried reading a novel but felt jittery and distracted until she gave up and retrieved one of her Alzheimer’s books from the pile she kept hidden under the bed. Ed was supposed to be reading, but he had his hands folded across his chest and was looking at the ceiling.

Four months had passed since the diagnosis. She had gotten swept up in the strange logic of that moment—Don’t tell a soul—but it was clear that Ed couldn’t be counted on to know when enough was enough.

She couldn’t just tell people herself, because she knew Ed wouldn’t forgive her for betraying his trust.

She closed her book and propped herself on her elbow to face him. “How about if we have a dinner? Invite our closest friends over. We can tell them all at once.”

“I’d prefer if we didn’t.”

“It would be easier than telling everyone individually.”

“Who says we have to tell them individually?”

“A nice dinner party,” she said. “It would make it feel like a team effort to tackle this thing. I’ll see if I can get it together for Saturday.”

He gritted his teeth. “You sound determined.”

“We’ll have to tell Connell.”

“That’s where I draw the line,” he said, almost growling. “I’m not telling him yet. I don’t want him to see me that way, reduced like that. I still want to be his father.”

“You’ll always be his father,” she said, but instead of soothing him she only disturbed herself with thoughts of what that “always” implied—the time when the disease would have tangled his synapses and hobbled him, when he would no longer be all there.

“In any event,” Ed said, “I want to wait.”

Connell was often playing baseball or in the city or at a friend’s house. When he was home, he stayed in his room. If she was extremely careful, she could keep it from him a little longer.

“Fine,” she said. “We’ll hold it back a bit. But you’d better prepare for it. We can’t keep it from him forever.”

“I could.”

“Honey, no offense—you couldn’t.”

“If I’m not alive,” Ed said darkly, “then he doesn’t have to see me like that. He can remember me as I was.”

“That’s nice. That’s just lovely. You get that goddamned thought out of your head this instant. You’re not going anywhere.”

“If it could just stay like this,” he said, his tone changing, “I could live with it.” He pulled the sheet up under his chin.

“Maybe the drugs will start working,” she said. “Or if these drugs don’t work, there’ll be others that work better. The science will catch up to this disease. And we’re going to do everything we can in the meantime. We’re going to be very busy. You’re going to stay alert. You’re going to read a lot.” She looked at his book on the nightstand, which he hadn’t picked up in days. “We’ll do the crossword together, we’ll go to plays and operas. We’ll go on trips. We’ll keep this thing at bay.” She took his hand; it felt stiff, a little cold. She put her other hand on his chest to feel his heart beat.