Read Online The Adjustment League by Mike Barnes - Free Book Online Page B

moment—if it is absurd—I want to move into Vivera. Right now. Drive home and get my things. Have Jade and Amrita and Meru look in on me. Remind me of mealtimes and activities. Help me dress on the worst days. I can’t see the punishment I’ve taken letting me reach that stage, but who knows? Sometimes it’s the most spindly, grub-hollowed tree that hangs on through the storm, bushy-leaved saplings blown down around it…
    Wishing Judy would come back, I get busy on the bureau to liven up the room. Jade’s advice helps. Old cards and torn-off calendar pages, balled-up single socks, the detached blades of a pair of scissors, sweets wrappers of all kinds—gums, chocolates, mints, caramels, half a rock-hard cookie, papers torn from notepads, many with cross-outs or illegible scrawls. Playing cards, some with a third ripped away, a half.
    And a scrap that stops me cold. On a square of white paper, a series of lines that look like the birth of language. Squiggles at the top, a bumpy graph from some primeval experiment. Which separates in the next line into four bumpy strands, like cells dividing. Loops protruding above and below, scrawny, crabbed—trying to become limbs. Then a couple of cross-outs, aborted words. Feel , clearly—but a heavy stroke through it. Then a small word with a tail— mud? rod? And then, after a space, the tiny, wobbling sentence, terrible and achieved:
    I am feeling sad.
    Everything I know about Alzheimer’s, which is not much, upended by this. People speaking of it with a terror almost fond, the loss of memory, of self—but peaceful, like a cloud dissolving, a slate wiping itself clean. Which is nothing like what I’m seeing here, nothing at all. Everything ripped, broken. All this evidence of a pitched battle filled with violence and pain. Chaos, yes—but not raw chaos, pure. Dirty, sorrowful chaos. A person steering through it .
    It stokes me with a cold fury, puts me on notice that there may not be any choice about an adjustment. Maybe there never is.
    Which only intensifies drawer by drawer.
    Judy come back. The bureau is a pure bitch.
    Pictures in a jumble in the third drawer. Eras mixed and overlapping, snaps taken from many albums. Many folded, torn at the corners. Pieces of photos, torn to bits. But plenty to see Jade’s lovely lady—smiling, smiling under a changing hairstyle. Pictures of friends, classmates. Husband and children through decades. Parents—sun-dark couple in a field. Others who might be siblings, nieces, nephews. So where are they? Why are you alone in the room with me?
    Some pictures with notations beside the faces, or above or below them. Names legible in a couple of cases. But usually the ink blurry, flaking off, registering poorly on the photo plastic despite repeated shaky over-pressings.
    One photo, though. A class reunion, looks like. Late-middle-aged ladies, arranged in rows. X’s through some of the faces, check marks over the rest. The living and the dead. X means dead . X means gone . Her own face—middle row, left of center—the only one without a sign.
    Cards scattered throughout the drawers. Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Birthday. The message half torn off many of them, leaving just pictures: a wagon approaching a log cabin on a frosty night, a basket of coloured eggs tied with a pink ribbon, a Beatrix Potter rabbit wiping her baby’s muzzle with a cloth—a lot of flowers. Here and there, a card left whole—from Sandor, from Max, even a couple from Judy. From others too, notes from friends, though none more recent than two years back, when Judy said she’d moved to Vivera.
    One in the bottom drawer still in its envelope. A Mother’s Day card with embossed roses, rhyming sentiments inside. Love, Max in a quick hand. But a different hand, a woman’s, entering the name and address on the envelope. In the top left corner, a tony address