He recognizes the doctor but can’t remember his name. The doctor is a good ten years older than him with teeth so perfect Jerry suspects he may actually be a dentist, then realizes it’d make more sense that the doctor trades medical services with a dentist, swapping the painkillers and the occasional backyard surgery for fillings and root canals. The doctor asks how he’s doing, and Jerry isn’t sure what the doctor is really expecting to hear, so he tells him he’s doing fine.

“Do you remember who I am?”

“My doctor,” Jerry says.

“Can you remember my name?”

“No.”

“It’s Doctor Goodstory.”

“Why couldn’t it be Doctor Goodnews?” Jerry asks.

Doctor Goodstory smiles, then goes about taking Jerry’s blood pressure before running some memory tests with him, some things Jerry can answer and some things he can’t, then Goodstory asks him some logic questions, and again he can answer some and not others.

Finally Goodstory packs his things, sits back down and crosses his legs. “I hear you had quite the adventure yesterday,” he says.

“I can remember bits and pieces,” Jerry says. “I remember Eva took me to the beach.”

“We’ve been charting the progression of the disease, Jerry,” Goodstory says. “It can vary from day to day, some days you are extremely lucid, other days you’re never fully aware of where you are, or even who you are. Like I say, things vary, but there are consistent themes to your overall state. One of those themes is that often, when you wake up, you wake up believing you’re back in your old life. The sense that everything is as it used to be stays with you sometimes only for a few minutes, sometimes for a few hours. It’s as though you regress to a certain time in your life. This morning, for example, I’m told you woke up believing you were on tour. Mostly you revert back to a time over the last few years, though on occasion back to when you were much younger. There are days where you have absolutely no idea what is going on, where you can’t even feed yourself. These days are rare, but they do happen and, sadly, will begin to happen even more.”

Jerry looks at his hands as Goodstory talks to him. He feels so silly.

“Even at your best now there are still so many things you’ve forgotten,” Goodstory says. “There are memories you’ve repressed.”

“What kind of memories?”

“Just memories. We’ll ask you something that you’ll have no idea about. Some things will come back to you, but there are things that refuse to. Mornings are the hardest. Once you become aware, then often you become very lucid, very aware, just like now. I’ve had conversations where I’m talking to you and I can see the words just falling off you, and I’ve had conversations where you’re almost like the man you used to be. The theme of struggling in the morning after waking up also extends to naps. Often you’ll take an afternoon nap, and when you wake up you’ll be confused, yet that tends to only last a few minutes. Sometimes much less than that, fifteen minutes at the most, then you become alert again.”

“Am I able to function in these other states?”

“Sometimes quite well. You just don’t seem to develop the memories. You don’t remember any of this morning, do you, about believing you were on tour.”

“Little bits and pieces, but not really,” Jerry says.

“But you can remember being on tour years ago?”

“Yes,” Jerry says. “Sometimes quite clearly. Other times hardly at all.”

“Well, you’re definitely functioning when you’re making your way into town. It’s almost twenty miles between here and the library, and that’s a lot of ground to cover. You could have walked, or you could have hitchhiked, but the mere fact you were able to means on some level you’re very much aware of what’s going on.”

“But I don’t keep the memories. It’s almost as though I’m sleepwalking.”

“That’s as good an analogy as any,” Goodstory says. “It’s what Alzheimer’s does, Jerry. It erases things, it creates, it rewrites.”

“Will I remember this conversation?”

“I imagine you will, right up until the moment you won’t. That could be twenty-four hours. It could be a week. You might not think about it for twenty years, then it will just seem like yesterday.”

“Is there a crueler disease, Doctor?”

“Sometimes I’m not so sure there is. They really should be keeping a better eye on you here,” Goodstory adds. “It’s one of the conditions.”

When he’s gone Jerry heads out into the sun with A Christmas Murder. For the next few hours all he does is read, caught up in the momentum of a killer and a cop. The book has a theme running through it that he recalls being in some of the others—a theme about balance. The world in his books is out of balance, it’s out of whack, and sometimes his characters—the good guys at least—try to fix that. He has the feeling that theme carries over into his life as well. He must have done something terrible for the Universe to treat him this way.

He is a third of the way through when he starts to have a very uncomfortable feeling that whatever that something is, it’s to do with Suzan, the woman in this book. She is somebody he used to know. An actual person. He can’t remember her real name, but she was a neighbor when he was a teenager, until she was no longer his neighbor because her ex-boyfriend killed her. He used to have a huge crush on her—she was ten years older than him, but he fell in love with her that summer—fell in love from the opposite side of the street, too young and too nervous to ever talk to her. He based this book on what happened to her. He used her story to write one of his own, a story he then went on to sell, a story that helped pay his mortgage, that helped give Eva a good education, a story that gave them the chance to travel the world—all things that couldn’t have been any further from Suzan’s mind when her ex-boyfriend’s hands were around her throat. Jerry remembers coming home from university that day, the police cars on his street, his parents telling him what had happened. Suzan was gone and it didn’t make sense how life could end so easily.

That’s the balance, he realizes. He took advantage of the bad thing that happened to her. This is why he is being punished.

He decides he doesn’t want to finish reading the book.

He decides he doesn’t ever want to read any of his books ever again, because there’s something more than just the memory of coming home and finding the police cars. There’s something else hidden in the darkness—best he stops looking. Best he heads back inside and lets the dementia carry on doing its work.

DAY FIFTEEN

A lot has been happening, and there’s a lot to catch up on, the most pressing of which is another fight with Sandra. You always feel sick to your stomach when you and Sandra have fought, and today is no different. Strike that—today you actually feel worse. It was a real doozy. Things are a little more stressful now that the wedding has been bumped up—that was something decided a few days ago, but first you need to be updated on today. This is, remember, a journal—it maps the journey. It’s not a diary—you’re not going to add something every day just because it’s another day. Otherwise it’d be Day fourteen, ate breakfast, went for a walk, and read the newspaper at the kitchen table. The long gap (would that make a good book title? The Long Gap? No, probably not) happened because you’ve been so busy, and because—now this is supposedly so, because Sandra read the journal. She asked for it, and you said sure, honey, knock yourself out. Or something along those lines. Here’s your memory of it. . . .

That’s right—that blank page and a half represent exactly what you remember, which is to say none of it. But Sandra says you had the conversation, and how can a man losing his mind and his memory argue with that? It turns out quite easily, because you’re adamant that the discussion just never happened. If somebody tells you two plus two equals five, you’re going to argue it’s not true because you know, you absolutely know the truth. That’s how this feels. If Sandra had asked to read the journal, you’d have said no. Absolutely. However, she says you said yes, and you love her and trust her, and the truth is, buddy, you’re going to have to start trusting her more than you can trust yourself. You can no doubt imagine what happened after you found out she was reading it, and don’t need it explained to you—but here to explain it to you is Henry Cutter, author of novels such as Dead Man Stalking and Dying Made Easy. But before Henry takes over the reins, here’s a little history on who exactly Henry is.