“He bought one of those pots that boils water.”
“Isn’t that what all pots do?”
“The kind that plugs in, you know. To the wall.”
“Hey, the blonde the other day,” Bonnie said, all of a sudden. “Who’s she? They looked like chums, she and your dad.”
When had she seen Joan, I wondered?
“Don’t you mean,” I said, “that she looked like chum, the chopped fish and fish oils dumped overboard to attract fish?”
“I give it six years, swear to God,” Linus said. “Teleportation. I’m willing to bet on this.”
“I better go,” Theo said.
“Don’t leave,” Bonnie said.
“I better go,” he said again, and he went.
Today Theo came to pick you up to watch the game and grab a bite and while you were fetching your things we stood at the door making very, very small talk.
You were taking your sweet time. There was an aftershock just then. It helped—it was something to talk about.
Today we planted pumpkins and squash in the garden. We ate too many figs from the tree and it made us giddy and our hearts beat fast, like we’d drunk too much coffee. All summer we’ve been trying to get a handle on the cheatgrass in the yard. Some things you try to fight and others you have to let defeat you, I guess is the thing. I gave up on birdseed. I filled the feeder with plums and let the scrub jays have at it.
I’ve been having the same dream every night this week—a dream serialized. It picks up, every night, where it left off the night before. It must have something to do with the heat.
In the dream, we are all together—you, Mom, Linus, me—living in a big house. We have pets. We have fifty-eight dogs, all types and breeds. You feed them and you care for them and you are yourself again; you can remember everything.
The first night, the first dream, a Labrador runs away, and you are so upset. In the dream we go looking for her; we post signs around the neighborhood. But she’s nowhere to be found; she’s gone for good. And we notice that you have forgotten the past year’s events. After that it’s a dachshund, and then a poodle. And the more dogs that run away, the more you forget.
Finally, we realize what’s been happening. You’ve been using the dogs as mnemonic devices to recall whole years. You were connecting eyes and ears to specific feelings or events of a given twelve months; a baseball game to a shade of pupil, a fishing trip to a puppy’s nail. After ten dogs run away you can’t remember anything from the past ten years. And then it’s fifteen. And then you forget Linus. And then you forget me.
Mom can know without counting when there are thirty dogs left. She can recognize you at age thirty, when you first met: flirting, earnest, trying so hard to impress her.
Last night I dreamt that there were six dogs left. In the dream, you sat on the floor running your hands over a retriever the color of pale hay.
Today you said, Did you know that we share fifty percent of our DNA with bananas?
Men share fifty-one, Mom said, deadpan, not looking up.
We looked at each other. A dick joke!
Today you, Linus, and I finished painting the patio cover pink to match the house.
“That wasn’t so bad, right?” I asked you.
“Well, no,” you said, surveying your work. “But it isn’t so good.”
And Linus, covered in pink, started to laugh. Then you, then me—all of us, pink and laughing, like lunatics.
September
Today I cooked you spaghetti and the sauce tasted plain and sour. Sugar and fat are bad for you. I didn’t want to include anything bad.
But today you said, Think of all the mice the scientists are studying: all those mice with Alzheimer’s. What do they forget? They forget many things, but they never forget how much they like peanut butter.
Okay, I said. Okay, okay, okay, and added more butter and a little sugar to the sauce, which made it much better.
Today we drove to the beach. We sat in the sand and ate pretzels and drank lemonade from a stand. A dog and his owner were standing nearby. The owner was holding a tube of new-looking tennis balls. He pitched one toward the surf, and said, very enthusiastically, “Thousand, go get it, boy!” and when the dog stayed put he looked truly crestfallen. “Aw, Thousand,” he said, “you fucking suck-ass bitch.”
On the way home, we stopped at the coin-operated car wash. We had a plan. I put the quarters in—two dollars for five minutes—and you scrubbed with the scrub brush while I held the hose and sprayed it down. When we vacuumed the seats we found a hundred-dollar bill, and on the way home we debated how to spend it.
Today Theo came to pick you up—the two of you were getting coffees—and mumbled hello, like a teenage boy there to pick up his date. Hello, I tried to say coolly and responsibly, like a parent.
Today you asked about my job at the hospital. I’d always thought you were uninterested—disappointed, even, at what I’d chosen. An ultrasound measures the speed of sound as it passes through different substances in the body, I told you.
I told you about what I did for a living: how I scanned people’s bodies, and took pictures of their soft tissues. How I liked breaking the news to couples who were having twins, seeing the shock and then excitement—or the horror.
There was a day, in that month before I left, I watched Grooms give an echocardiogram, and she showed me this new equipment that could isolate a heart. Any organ, you could isolate. With this program you could see whatever organ float as though in space.
Later, when I steeled a patient for her tracheotomy, and held a clubfooted baby for his tired mother, I thought about that heart, alone and spinning.
Today you were sitting in front of the computer. An actor’s face was tiled on the screen. Later, on the same computer, I saw the tabs you had open. Searches for electricity and Berlin and memory improvement.
An hour today, you spent shouting. You said we’d stolen money from you. You threw your pillows over the fence and into the Grovers’ pool. You broke the legs off of your dining table chair. You smashed almost all of our drinking glasses.
In a matter of days, Lung had said, it can go from being manageable to scary.
And after you’d frightened us all completely, you sat in the living room and quietly ate a banana you found in the piano bench. And after that, you wept.
You said you were sorry, after that. You said you wanted to help. You said you wanted to help us get ready, for when things would be worse.
We wrapped everything breakable. All of Mom’s favorite colored glasses we wrapped in newspaper and put away. We hid the knives. We picked out colorful plastic tumblers at the store.
Two sets of doorknobs was your idea. For the front and back doors, working doorknobs lower. There’s a knob in the regular position, one that doesn’t turn—you can’t actually turn the knob to get out of the house. The functional knob would be lower on the door, near our ankles.