That sums up day thirty. Sums up the first month.

It’s time for another nap. The gardening can wait.

Good news, bad news—you know what? I don’t really feel like doing that today.

His name is Jerry Cutter Henry Cutter, his name is Cutter Grey and he is an author and this is a nursing home and this is the real deal and he didn’t kill anybody even though he knows he did.

His name is Jerry Henry Cutter and he is an author and none of this is real.

His name is Jerry Jerry and he writes crime novels and none of this is real.

“Jerry?”

“My name is Jerry Cutter and I am—”

“Jerry, do you know who I am?”

He is sitting by the window looking out at the gardens. It’s sunny. There’s a rabbit out there, twenty yards away, hiding in the bushes, but he can see it, oh yes he can, hiding there watching him, watching him, stealing his thoughts, using its tiny little rabbit brain to steal Jerry’s thoughts to try and make its own brain bigger, stealing Jerry’s thoughts to write a novel of its own, a rabbit novel about rabbits.

“Jerry?”

Jerry turns towards the voice. Nurse Hamilton is standing over him. “He’s going to have to fake it,” Jerry says, because a rabbit can’t really know what he’s thinking.

“Jerry?”

“Yes I know who you are, goddamn it,” he says. “You’re the nurse who won’t shut up. Surely you have something better to do.”

She smiles at him, and why would she smile? “Jerry, there are a couple of policemen here who want to talk to you, is that okay?”

“Policemen from the books?”

“Policemen from real life,” she says.

He looks back towards the window. He’s not interested in the policemen. They can’t be as much fun as fictional ones. He can’t see the rabbit anymore, but he knows it’s still in the same bush, still watching him. It’s undercover! “Is the rabbit a policeman? Where’s Mom and Dad?”

The nurse doesn’t answer him. Instead she turns towards two men who are standing behind her who he hadn’t really noticed, and doesn’t really make much of an effort to notice them now. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” she says to them. “There are bad days and there are okay days. This is one of the bad ones,” she says, and Jerry has no idea what she means.

“It’s important,” one of the men says.

“Rabbit,” Jerry says.

“Look at him,” Nurse Hamilton says. “Anything he says can’t be trusted, not like this. He’s going to confess to a dozen crimes. Two dozen.”

“We’re only interested in one,” the man says.

“I know that, but he’s not going anywhere.”

“Isn’t he? He has before.”

“I had a rabbit when I was a kid,” Jerry says, and they all look at him and he feels the need to explain. “I owned it for two days before it escaped and ran away. It wasn’t my fault. I was seven years old and what seven-year-old is going to remember to shut the door on the rabbit hutch?” He stands up and puts his hands against the window. “That’s him!” He turns towards the nurse and the two men with her. “That’s Wally! Where’s Mom and Dad? They can help me catch him! Quick, we have to get out there!”

The nurse puts her hands on his shoulders. “Sit back down, Jerry, please, we’ll deal with the rabbit soon.”

“But—”

“Please, Jerry. Just do what I ask, okay?”

He looks out the window, then at the men behind the nurse. The way they are looking at him . . . he doesn’t like it. He sits down but keeps looking outside.

“We’ll keep a close eye on him,” Nurse Hamilton says to the men. “Perhaps you can come back tomorrow?”

“Hey, hey, Jerry, are you in there?” one of the men asks, and leans forward and taps Jerry on his forehead hard enough to hurt.

“Don’t,” Jerry says, and swipes at the man’s hand. Jerry doesn’t like him. Not at all.

“Hey, come on now, enough of that,” Nurse Hamilton says, and she reaches out and pulls the man’s hand away, then steps between him and Jerry, so all Jerry can see is the back of her cardigan.

“How do we know he’s not faking it?” that same man asks. “Faking the whole thing to get away with murdering—”

“Don’t say that around him,” Nurse Hamilton says, interrupting him.

“I didn’t murder Wally,” Jerry says, then looks back out the window. He doesn’t want to look at the men anymore. Just wants to find Wally. The rabbit is all he wants to think about.

“Now I’m going to have to ask you both to leave,” Nurse Hamilton says.

“Ring us if he gets any better today,” the first man says, and Jerry sees movement from their direction and turns to see that man handing a card to the nurse. He wonders if that man is a rabbit salesman. “If we don’t hear from you, we’ll come back tomorrow morning and try again.”

They watch the two men go, Jerry’s back to the window, and he can feel warmth from the sun as it comes through. He wants to go outside, but not while the two men are here. They may be rabbit salesmen, but that doesn’t make them good people. He decides he will wait for ten minutes. That’s a good amount of time for people to disappear. He thinks that some people can disappear off the face of the earth in less time than that, and he’s not sure why he would know something like that, let alone think it.

“Who were they?” he asks, once they’ve gone beyond the doors to the room.

“Just a couple of people who came to see how you are doing.”

“Rabbit salesmen?”

“No.”

“Friends?”

“Not exactly.”

“They don’t seem like friends,” he says. “I didn’t like them.”

“I didn’t like them either, Jerry.”

He turns back towards the window. “I want to go outside. I want to find Wally.”

“Let’s get you cleaned up first,” Nurse Hamilton says.

“Cleaned up? Why?”

“You’ve had an accident,” she says, and when he looks down he sees that he’s pissed himself, and when he looks back up he sees Wally running away, disappearing into the trees.

DAY THIRTY-ONE

Holeeee shit!

Hey Grumpy Smurf! How you doing, Grumpy Smurf?

All better? Yes. Yes, you are!

God you feel good. Gooooooood!

The last few weeks—they were stage four. STAGE FOUR! You’re really ripping through them now. Can you imagine going along to a support group with people treating it like a competition, people going No, I got depressed quicker, No, I got angrier than you did, or I accepted it first and you denied it longer.

Sandra came home yesterday with these little blue pills to make you feel better. To balance out your mood, and to be honest you didn’t want to take them, and then you thought, you know what? You should take all of them. So that’s what you decided to do, only Sandra wouldn’t give you all of them, instead she handed them out like clockwork, two every four hours, and then she made sure you were taking them too, she even made you open your mouth and go ahh so she could check you weren’t storing them up to take in one shot. By this morning you felt better, and by this afternoon betterer, and this evening even bettererer! You are on the mend! In fact, you are so on the mend that it’s looking like this Alzheimer’s thing can be kicked. People with dementia can’t feel this good, can they?

Time for a quick good news, bad news summation. Good news—you’re pretty sure the diagnosis is wrong, and that there is nothing wrong with you. So that’s not good news—that’s great news! That is the best news you could give yourself, which is exactly what is happening here. You’re no longer Grumpy Smurf. No longer Drinky Smurf.