What was he doing in here? He was in the bedroom, he was sure. He thought he had had a reason, just moments ago. He had been… Meyer tried to think back to what he had been doing. What had he been doing? He had been in the kitchen, hadn’t he? Yes, the kitchen, that felt right. He turned around and left the bedroom, stopping in the hall just outside the door. The kitchen, was that were he had been going? The hall led in two directions. Which one led to the kitchen? He smiled. The blankness, the uncertainty. He turned left without being sure, and walked slowly down the hall. he noticed a little difficulty walking; his left hip seemed stiff and he felt a twinge of pain in his right foot, just along the top when he put weight on it. He was limping, that’s what it was called. He supposed perhaps he was old.
He thought about oldness for a moment. It felt like an unwelcome thing. Still, it felt like oldness came after something. Had he been different some other time? Was there a different time? He had the feeling there had been other times.
There was a familiarity about this hall, for instance. There was a painting on the wall to his right. He stopped to look at it. It was a picture of a landscape, with orange and red colors on hills. Trees with leaves — autumn leaves. A red barn just to right of center.
It occurred to him to wonder how did he knew these things. What autumn was, what leaves were, what a barn was. Where had he learned those things? What was he doing in here? In this hallway? He had been walking along the hall, maybe going somewhere? Maybe just exploring? The hallway seemed familiar somehow.
He resumed his slow walk. There was another painting, on his left this time, but he didn’t look directly at it. He had the feeling something was expected; he was supposed to be doing something. But what?
There was a kitchen at the end of the hall and in the kitchen there was a woman. She was stirring something in a saucepan on the front burner of a stove. “Meyer, did you get your sweater?”
Meyer, unsure of what to do, smiled at her. Her question was odd, out of context. Then he suddenly had it. He had gone to the bedroom to get his sweater. He could visualize the sweater; it was a mixture black, gray, and a subtle copper arranged in a small checked pattern. He could feel the comfortable, loose fit, the softness and warmth.
“Ah, that’s what I was doing,” he said to the woman. She was his wife, and her name was Ev. He turned around and returned to the bedroom. Moments later he reappeared, donning the sweater as he walked. It was his favorite sweater.
He was pleased to have a favorite sweater. No perhaps “pleased” wasn’t quite right. It was a comfortable thing to have a favorite sweater. It was a pleasant feeling. Yet…he wondered why he bothered about such a small thing; why couldn’t he ever just appreciate comfort or pleasure without analyzing it? Wasn’t all that thought, after all, another crutch, a shortcut substituting for real experience? The same question as usual, he thought ruefully. Most of his musings came down to this question, or one like it.
He sat in his reading chair in the living room and picked up the book topmost on the small stack on the side table. Half an hour later Evelyn found him there after calling him to dinner and receiving no response. it wasn’t unusual for him to get so lost in a book or paper that he didn’t hear calls to lunch or dinner. He had sometimes explained, about missed telephone calls, that he simply hadn’t heard the ringing. “Your ears heard it just fine,” Ev had said more than once. “You just disconnect them.”
He had smiled at the time. “I only use these ears on Sundays,” he had said. “Very low mileage. These ears are real creampuffs!”
Ev’s irritation had dissipated, a little when he said that. He was funny, disarming. Still, she thought, it would sometimes be nice to have a husband who was more present. Like Rachel’s Harry for example; always bustling around in the here and now.
Anna looked closely at her father. he had always been likely to get lost in his thoughts, but she was used to rousing him with a word or even, when she was younger, with a gentle poke on the shoulder. This time she had spoken to him three times and still he stared vacantly into the distance. She noticed the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and on his forehead. They were deeper now. He had less hair on the crown of his head, and what there was had grayed. She wondered how that worked. Did a hair turn gray after it had grown? Or was the color set once the hair grew in? Did balding people ever grow new hairs? Flamingos, she had read, were pink because of the shrimp they ate. Did people eat more gray food as they grew older?
She smiled at the thought, and in that moment her father came to himself and made eye contact. “What were we talking about, Anna?” he asked.
“Oh nothing,” she said. “Want some tea?”
“That would be grand,” said Meyer.
Anna went to the kitchen to put the kettle on the burner and take out the mugs, tea, and honey. Meyer picked up the topmost book from the stack on the side table. Essays of Roger Bacon. It was an old book, but he couldn’t recall having read it before. Well, that must be why it was on top of the stack. He smiled.
“Do you think Dad’s okay?” asked Anna.
“What do you mean?”
“He seems kind of forgetful lately. More than usual, I mean.”
“Like what”?
“Like just yesterday. We were talking and he zoned out like he does, but he didn’t snap back for a while.”
“Oh come on, he’s always done that. Sometimes he doesn’t snap right back to where he was. He’s been that way for as long as I can remember.”
“No, this felt different, like he couldn’t get all the way back or something. I don’t know. I just think something’s wrong.”
“Have you talked to him about it? He’d be the first to know, I’d guess.”
“No. I didn’t want to…well, I mean, I didn’t know how to bring it up.”
“You’ve always been able to talk to dad about anything. You’re way closer to him than I am.”
“No, not anything. There are some things I can’t talk to him about.”
“Like what?”
“Like this, peabrain. How do you tell somebody you think there’s something wrong with them?”
“How about like this: ‘Dad, I think there’s something wrong with you’? I’ve been saying that about you since we were six.”
“But this is serious.”
“If you think it’s serious that’s all the more reason to mention it. What can happen? He’ll either say ‘you’re right’ or ‘you’re wrong’. He’s not going to get insulted; Dad’s not like that with you.”
“I know, I know. you make it sound so easy, but it’s not.”
“And what’s so hard about it?”
“What if there’s something really wrong with him?”
“You mean like getting older? Guess what, he is. So are we.”
“I mean like something wrong with his brain.”
“If you thought there was something wrong with his car, what would you do? Would you tell him?”
“I guess so.”
“And why would you do that?”
“So he could get it fixed.”
“Well there’s your answer. Now stop bothering me and go. Bring it up.”
“A car is not the same as a body, as a brain.”
“Sure it is. If something goes wrong, you get it fixed. Have you noticed what century we live in? No, never mind, you probably haven’t.”
“Some things can’t be fixed.”
“Okay, and I suppose you know which things those are, doctor?”
“No, but…I’m just scared.”
“So now the truth comes out. This isn’t about Dad, it’s about you.”
“But what if dad has alzheimers?”
“What if he does? Are you going to make it go away just because you hide under your covers again? Remember your list?”
“Yes, as if you would ever let me forget the list you made me write.”
“Hey, it cured you of hiding under your blanket, didn’t it?”
“I only learned that blankets are flimsy. That whole idea, ‘things that can still get me under the covers’ on one side and ‘things that can’t’ on the other; that was so stupid. I still have PTSD from that. Not to mention everything else you did to torment me.”
The grapes hung on the vine behind the house, dark and full. Some had been harvested and sat in the sun, slowly wrinkling and drying. Ann hefted a bunch still on the vine; they were heavy and cool. Dew still clung to the underside of the vine and her hand came away freshly damp. It felt cool as the water wafted away into the warming air. The air covered every bit of her, she thought. It was the same air it had been yesterday and the day and month and year before…and yet it was never the same air, really. The air freshened and reshaped itself. It was the same. It was not the same.
Someone who sometimes calls himself Meyer sits in the midmorning sunlight in a glassy atrium, next to a large leafy plant in a vast urn. He seems to be aware, moment by moment, of the warmth of the sunlight, the fragrance of the nearby flowers, the subdued murmur of conversations elsewhere in the room. He is still, though his eyes follow motion occasionally; a passerby, a cloud far above the skylights, a contrail. Can he speak? He can surely walk, and eat, and sleep. Even swim, and dance, and sing. The way one does things changes, but the core of those things remains. Physical traces are memories of a sort, inward and outward, of memories and experiences; an accident on skis, a bad burn. The mind is an undisturbed pool; smooth and undisturbed as a misplaced mirror. The tiny lightning flashes rarely now. What lay within, and beneath, prior to the lightning and also its result…has it gone elsewhere or elsewhen or else…? Everything is memory, and nothing.
Meyer smiles in the brightening light.
