“I’m looking for something.”
“What?”
She couldn’t name it, but she trusted that somewhere in her head, she remembered and knew.
“I’ll know when I find it.”
“It’s a complete disaster in here. It looks like we’ve been robbed.”
She hadn’t thought of that. It would explain why she couldn’t find it.
“Oh my god, maybe someone stole it.”
“We haven’t been robbed. You’ve torn the house apart.”
She spotted an untouched basket of magazines next to the couch in the living room. She left John and the theft theory in the hallway, lifted the heavy basket, poured the magazines onto the floor, fanned through them, and then walked away. John followed her.
“Stop it, Alice, you don’t even know what you’re looking for.”
“Yes, I do.”
“What then?”
“I can’t say.”
“What does it look like, what’s it used for?”
“I don’t know, I told you, I’ll know when I find it. I have to find it, or I’ll die.”
She thought about what she’d just said.
“Where’s my medication?”
They walked into the kitchen, kicking through boxes of cereal and cans of soup and tuna. John found her many prescription and vitamin bottles on the floor and the days-of-the-week dispenser in a bowl on the kitchen table.
“Here they are,” he said.
The urge, the life-and-death need, didn’t dissipate.
“No, that’s not it.”
“This is insane. You have to stop this. The house is trashed.”
Trash.
She opened the compactor, pulled out the plastic bag, and dumped it.
“Alice!”
She ran her fingers through avocado skins, slimy chicken fat, balled tissues and napkins, empty cartons and wrappers, and other trash thingies. She saw the Alice Howland DVD. She held the wet case in her hands and studied it. Huh, I didn’t mean to throw this out.
“There it is, that must be it,” said John. “I’m glad you found it.”
“No, this isn’t it.”
“All right, please, there’s trash all over the floor. Just stop, go sit, and relax. You’re frenzied. Maybe if you stop and relax, it’ll come to you.”
“Okay.”
Maybe, if she sat still, she’d remember what it was and where she’d put it. Or maybe, she’d forget she was ever even looking for something.
THE SNOW THAT HAD BEGUN falling the day before and deposited about two feet over much of New England had just stopped. She might not have noticed but for the screeching sound of the wipers swinging back and forth across the newly dry windshield. John turned them off. The streets were plowed, but theirs was the only car on the road. Alice had always liked the serene quiet and stillness that followed a walloping snowstorm, but today it unnerved her.
John drove the car into the Mount Auburn Cemetery lot. A modest space for parking had been shoveled out, but the cemetery itself, the walking paths and gravestones, hadn’t yet been uncovered.
“I was afraid it might still be like this. We’ll have to come back another day,” he said.
“No, wait. Let me just look at it for a minute.”
The ancient black trees with their knuckled, varicose branches frosted in white ruled this winter wonderland. She could see a few of what were presumably the gray tops of the very tall, elaborate headstones that belonged to the once wealthy and prominent peaking above the surface of the snow, but that was it. Everything else was buried. Decomposed bodies in coffins buried under dirt and stone, dirt and stone buried under snow. Everything was black and white and frozen and dead.
“John?”
“What?”
She’d said his name too loudly, breaking the silence too suddenly, startling him.
“Nothing. We can go. I don’t want to be here.”
“WE CAN TRY GOING BACK later in the week if you want,” said John.
“Back where?” asked Alice.
“To the cemetery.”
“Oh.”
She sat at the kitchen table. John poured red wine into two glasses and gave one to her. She swirled the goblet out of habit. She was regularly forgetting the name of her daughter, the actress one, but she could remember how to swirl her wineglass, and that she liked to. Crazy disease. She appreciated the wine’s dizzying motion in the glass, its blood red color, its intense flavors of grape, oak, and earth, and the warmth she felt as it landed in her belly.
John stood in front of the opened refrigerator door and removed a block of cheese, a lemon, a spicy liquid thing, and a couple of red vegetables.
“How do chicken enchiladas sound?” he asked.
“Fine.”
He opened the freezer and rummaged inside.
“Do we have any chicken?” he asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Oh no, Alice.”
He turned to show her something in his hands. It wasn’t chicken.
“It’s your BlackBerry, it was in the freezer.”
He pressed its buttons, shook it, and rubbed it.
“It looks like it got water in it, we can see after it’s thawed, but I think it’s dead,” he said.
She burst into ready, heartbroken tears.
“It’s okay. If it’s dead, we’ll get you a new one.”
How ridiculous, why am I this upset over a dead electronic organizer? Maybe she was really crying over the deaths of her mother, sister, and father. Maybe she was feeling emotion that she’d anticipated earlier but had been unable to express properly at the cemetery. That made more sense. But that wasn’t it. Maybe the death of her organizer symbolized the death of her position at Harvard, and she was mourning the recent loss of her career. That also made sense. But what she felt was an inconsolable grief over the death of the BlackBerry itself.
FEBRUARY 2005
She slumped into the chair next to John, across from Dr. Davis, emotionally weary and intellectually tapped. She’d been taking various neuropsychological tests in that little room with that woman, the woman who administered the neuropsychological tests in the little room, for a torturously long time. The words, the information, the meaning in the woman’s questions and in Alice’s own answers were like soap bubbles, the kind children blew out of those little plastic wands, on a windy day. They drifted away from her quickly and in dizzying directions, requiring enormous strain and concentration to track. And even if she managed to actually hold a number of them in her sight for some promising duration, it was invariably too soon that pop! they were gone, burst without obvious cause into oblivion, as if they’d never existed. And now it was Dr. Davis’s turn with the wand.
“Okay, Alice, can you spell the word water backwards for me?” he asked.
She would have found this question trivial and even insulting six months ago, but today, it was a serious question to be tackled with serious effort. She felt only marginally worried and humiliated by this, not nearly as worried and humiliated as she would’ve felt six months ago. More and more, she was experiencing a growing distance from her self-awareness. Her sense of Alice—what she knew and understood, what she liked and disliked, how she felt and perceived—was also like a soap bubble, ever higher in the sky and more difficult to identify, with nothing but the thinnest lipid membrane protecting it from popping into thinner air.