DAY THIRTY

Hey, Future Jerry. How you been? Sorry you haven’t been in touch. You’ve been busy. You know how it is. Things to do. Places to be. People to forget. It’s been ten days since you last wrote. This whole thing, this whole Alzheimer’s hoopla, has been getting to you. Of course it has. You want to be super optimistic, and make light of it when you can, and fall into line with all the Everything is going to be fine ideology everybody is preaching, but you just can’t, so rather than face the world, you’ve been sleeping in every day, hardly ever getting up before lunchtime. It’s been a Who gives a fuck kind of week, whereas it should be a Let’s do everything you can while you still can kind of week. You should be out there hang gliding and visiting Egypt and going to rock concerts and bucket-listing your way through your final days, not sleeping in. Also, you’ve been drinking more. Don’t get the wrong idea—you’re not getting hammered every night—two or three drinks, enough to take the edge of. Sometimes four. Never more than five. Enough to help you sleep. You also like to take naps during the day too. There’s a couch in the office. The Thinking Couch. You’ll lie there sometimes and come up with ideas for the books, work on solutions, lie there and listen to Springsteen cranked so loud the pens will roll off the desk. The Thinking Couch has become your Napping Couch and the desk a coaster and the stereo hasn’t been on in over a week. Sandra keeps saying you shouldn’t mope so much, but hey, if you want to mope then you’ll mope. Grant a dying man his final wish, right? Because you’re dying. Of course you are. The mind will be gone ten or twenty or even thirty years before the body—and if that isn’t death, then what is? These days you also use the couch to hide the Madness Journal. You’re sure Sandra sneaks in here at night and looks for it, but you have no proof of that.

It hasn’t been all just lying on the couch in the office, though. You got the edit notes back from your editor a week ago. She’s a real sweetheart. What you want in an editor is the ability to give you bad news in a good way. It’s always in there, hidden in praise—if there was no praise you’d have given up long ago. But this one—this one was an effort for her, no doubt there. She’s suggested some changes, and wants you to fill in more of the blanks, some character background, stuff a few years ago you would have been chomping at the bit to change because, after all, editing is your favorite phase, partner. Why wouldn’t it be? You’ve built the house, and editing is picking the color scheme.

So yeah—that’s what you’ve been up to. Napping. Drinking. Editing. You finished the last of the three bottles of gin that Hans brought around. When you rang him he told you he brought around five, but you can’t find the other two. Sandra rang Doctor Goodstory today—you don’t know what she said to him, and don’t really care, to be honest, but she’s off picking up a prescription right now. She asked if you wanted to come along, as if you were her pet, and you just shook your head and lay down on the couch in the office instead. When she gets back she’ll try to cheer you up somehow, and you’ll do your best to pretend that it’s working. You’ll fake it. That’s something you tell people when they ask for advice on writing—people ask you all the time, you know, so be prepared for that. Even in your condition people will go rattling around in that brain of yours for some last nugget of hope, something that will make the difference between their manuscript hitting the bookshops or hitting the shredder. You usually say Write what you know and fake the rest. You might want to look out for people trying to pinch your ideas too—not that you’re going to care about that, but you should. After all, you wrote all those books and it made you crazy. All those worlds—all those people—the Universe is always expanding, that’s what the physicists say, all those worlds upon worlds as new ones are born, but one day all of that is going to change. One day the Universe will be as big as it can be, and then it will shrink. It will collapse. That’s what is happening to you. Your mind—those ideas—got as big as it could get, and now it’s collapsing.

Oh yeah, and your favorite nosy neighbor—Mrs. You Know Who (but in case you don’t, it’s Mrs. Smith—I’m not kidding, that really is her name)—came over yesterday. Sandra wasn’t home. She was out with Eva going ooh and ahh at napkins, and you were lying in your office staring at the ceiling. The house has a wireless doorbell that flashes a light that sits on your desk in your office, on account of you having the stereo dialed so loud you’d never hear the bell ring. In fact, because you always write with the stereo turned up, you had to have extra insulation installed in the walls so the music wouldn’t annoy Sandra or the neighbors. The entire room is soundproofed. You could shoot yourself in here and nobody would hear. So the doorbell light went off, and you went to the door in your robe and pajama bottoms and there she was, Mrs. Smith, and really have you ever seen her wearing something not saturated in pastel? Her clothes were in fashion sixty years ago and again thirty years ago, but are currently in the out-of-fashion stage of the cycle. Her lips were painted bright red in an attempt to distract from the many wrinkles lining her face, wrinkles deep enough to swallow a penny. She smells like cheap perfume, mixed in with a little bit of earth, as if she’s always out planting flowers in the garden or toiling through her husband’s grave.

She came over and she just wanted to have a quiet word, you know, just a brief in-your-ear mention that some of the neighbors—not her, mind you, not her at all, although she would have to agree with them, but some of the neighbors—have been talking. You live in a nice house, Jerry—and hopefully you’re still there now—a nice house on a nice street, an expensive street where people have expensive tastes and expensive cars and expensive lives, most of them working less than you or not at all, their working days behind them, retirement homes on the horizon. She came over to be polite, just to let you know that some, that some people are, well, a little—not angry, no, not angry, or upset—more worried, yes, Jerry, I would say worried, worried that your garden has gotten a little out of shape. And she did have a point—the lawn hasn’t been mowed in three weeks, the garden is full of stinging nettle, the roses need trimming back, and the yard is starting to look like jungle animals could be hiding in there. Mrs. Smith hasn’t been the only one to mention it. Sandra has mentioned it too. She’s been so busy with the wedding that she’s had no time to do any weeding, and anyway, taking care of the garden is your thing. Sandra has mentioned hiring a gardener, but every time she does you tell her no, that you’ll get onto it tomorrow. You’ve been very insistent on the matter, and Sandra understood when you explained it was important because hiring a gardener felt like it was opening Pandora’s box. First the gardener, then a maid, then a nurse, then somebody to shower you, somebody to clean your teeth. Hiring a gardener is bringing that Dark Tomorrow you’ve been fighting to put off one day closer.

I know things have been . . . difficult for you lately, Mrs. Smith said, and doesn’t that really just sum up the dementia beautifully? Difficult for you. Yeah, lady, really fucking difficult. Between Sandra being obsessed with the wedding and you being obsessed with the need to mope (gotta mope while you can still remember why life is worth moping about), the gardening has taken a backseat. She suggested you get a gardener. You wanted to suggest she mind her own business. You knew your house was letting down the street, this beautiful little Stepford Wives street where everything is just so, everything except your garden and your Big A. You told her you would take care of it. She said she was sure that you would.