He thinks about that. Writing books . . . it does feel familiar. And of course his name is Jerry Grey. Not Henry Cutter. Henry Cutter is who he would become when he wrote, because that way he could be Henry for the bad times and Jerry for the good.

“So I didn’t kill anybody,” he says.

Nurse Hamilton gives him one of the saddest smiles he’s ever seen, the kind of smile that makes his chest tighten. This woman pities him. Even he pities him. “There was no Suzan,” she says. “She was just a figment of your imagination.”

“But she seems . . . seems so real.”

“I know. Come on, let’s get you inside. It’s almost dinnertime.”

She leads him inside and he tells her he wants to rest for a bit in his room. She walks him there, and tells him everything is going to be okay, then tells him not to be too long. It’s not until he’s in his room and alone and sitting by the window that he thinks back over the conversation and picks up on what he missed.

She said I know.

“So I didn’t kill anybody. That’s what I asked you,” he says, the words going into an empty room—empty except for Forgetful Jerry, and Forgetful Jerry doesn’t seem to mind him talking to himself. In fact he encourages it and, come to think of it, it actually feels familiar. When he talks again, he looks at the empty chair opposite as if Nurse Hamilton was there. “Then you said I didn’t kill Suzan. You didn’t say I didn’t kill anybody.”

He replays the conversation over again.

He didn’t kill Suzan.

You killed somebody. The words aren’t his, but he knows who they belong to. Henry Cutter, his pen name, wants to be heard. You killed somebody, and Nurse Hamilton knew.

But if it wasn’t Suzan, then just who in the hell was it?

DAY TWENTY

The days are racing past and you haven’t been able to write as much as you’d have liked. Life, just like it often does when you’re writing, gets in the way. There is still day eleven to catch up on, which is when Eva came around for dinner. Of course she’s been around a lot since then, and a lot has happened. First of all, let me tell you that Sandra has removed all the alcohol from the house. It’s a real shame because at night the G&Ts actually help. They calm you, and a guy in your condition deserves to be calm. Other people get sick, and other people die at much younger ages, but this is you me us we. You’re allowed to be upset for yourself—that’s your right, and you have to admit you’re a little angry at Sandra for getting rid of the one thing that can bring you comfort when nothing else can. She has also taken away your credit card after the whole cat food thing. You’ve lost count how many times she’s said over the last week You can’t do that, Jerry, or You should be doing that, Jerry.

The good news is that you called Hans. Hans has been a pretty big help to you over the years. He’s what you would call . . . source material. You met him in university. He was the first out of all your friends to start losing his hair, and he decided early to shave it completely off, which made him the only bald twenty-year-old on campus. He was taking a whole bunch of classes, including the same psychology class as you and Sandra, but for him it was more like he was trying to find the key to unlock not just the mind, but the world. He likes knowing how things tick. You used to go to his flat to study, and often the TV or the computer or the toaster would be in pieces, and once he figured out how all that stuff ticked, he moved on to bigger things, like the car. He’s a little like Rain Man when it comes to numbers too. He can’t look at a spilled jar of toothpicks on the floor and tell you how many there are, but he can perform all sorts of complex arithmetic in his head. He also has this trick where he can guess somebody’s age and weight, though he’d always deduct between twenty-five and thirty-five percent for women over twenty, more if he was attracted to them. Sometimes you’d take a break from studying and sit out on the back porch and he’d be smoking a joint and you’d be drinking a beer, and you’d have a Rubik’s Cube he was always fiddling with, using the layer method to solve it in a few minutes, trying to learn a way to solve it in under a minute, which he eventually did, before cutting it down to thirty seconds. He taught himself to speak three languages, and once he spent two weeks doing nothing but origami, making swans and roses and panda bears before moving on and trying to figure out how to make the perfect paper plane. When he was nineteen, he read a dozen books on how to fly a Cessna, then snuck onto an airstrip at night and stole one. He put everything he had learned to the test, flying a mile radius around the runway before returning safely. Once you were at his flat studying and he was practicing how to pick a lock, not because he needed to break into a house, but to see if he could, then he spent hours trying to teach you what he had learned, not for your benefit, but just to see if teaching was another one of his abilities.

The problem, with Hans, was the weed. He probably smoked it just to quiet his brain. Then he started growing it, just to see if he could. Then he started selling it. When he was twenty-one he did four months in jail, and when he came out he wasn’t the same Hans that went in—though by then something was changing inside him anyway, and prison just helped advance it, as it would when he served three more years for distribution when he was twenty-five. The friendship became tenuous after his first prison visit, but Christchurch being a small place meant you would always run into him every now and then, and your relationship was based on who he used to be. We all have friends like that, Future Jerry, where it’s hard to know whether you’d be friends with them now if you met for the first time (I have to be honest here and tell you I wonder this about you, about whether I’d like the person you are in the future, just as I have no idea whether you will like the person you used to be).

Hans got more heavily into drugs after that first prison stint. He started hitting the gym and he bulked up. He got tattoos. Yet whenever you ran into him, he was the warmest guy. When the first book came out, he came around to see you. He was so excited. The friendship started to grow again—though Sandra always makes herself scarce whenever he drops by, then after he leaves asks you what in the hell you’re doing spending time with a guy like that. You’ve never based any characters on him, but if you wanted to know how to smuggle a baby out of the country or buy a pound of cocaine, he’s the guy you’d ask. People often think that crime writers would know how to get away with murder, but you’ve always thought if anybody could, it’d be Hans. Some of the bad shit in your books, that’s all you, Jerry; but the way some of that bad shit unfolds, the little details, some of that is his. From how to create a stolen identity to putting the living fear of God into somebody, Hans is an all-sorts kind of guy in the sense that he can do all sorts of things. Bad things. You probably should know he scares you a little. In fact, he’s the guy you thought you bought the gun from.

On day seventeen you rang him and told him about the dementia. He said he would come over. You told him not to worry, but he did worry, and Sandra worried herself into work to catch up on some things that needed looking in on, just so she wouldn’t have to face him. You sat on the deck outside and drank one of the beers he brought over while he smoked his joint and you talked about how unfair the world was. He asked you to explain the Alzheimer’s to him, he wanted every detail, and he kept asking questions, as if it were a problem for which he could provide a solution. If he thought it would have helped, he probably would have taken you apart on that deck and tried to make right all the bits he thought were defective.