“You’ll need to speak to the nursing home,” the officer says, “tell them this kind of thing can’t keep happening.”
“Nursing home?” Jerry asks.
Eva looks at him. “That’s where you live now.”
“I thought we were going home?”
“That is your home,” she says.
He starts to cry, because he remembers it then—his room, the nurses, the gardens, sitting in the sun with only his sense of loss as company. He’s not aware he’s crying until his tears hit the top of the table, enough of them to make the officer look away and to make his daughter come around and put her arms around him.
“It’s going to be okay, Jerry. I promise.”
But he’s still thinking about Suzan with a z, about how it felt back when he killed her, back before he wrote about it. Back when he embraced the darkness.
DAY ONE
Some basic facts. Today is a Friday. Today you are sane, albeit somewhat in shock. Your name is Jerry Grey, and you are scared. You’re sitting in your study writing this while your wife, Sandra, is on the phone with her sister, no doubt in tears because this future of yours, well, buddy, nobody saw it coming. Sandra will look after you—that’s what she’s promised, but these are the promises of a woman who has known for only eight hours that the man you are is going to fade away, to be replaced by a stranger. She hasn’t processed it, and right now she’ll be telling Katie that it’s going to be hard, all too terribly hard, but she’ll hang in there, of course she will, because she loves you—but you don’t want that from her. At least that’s what you’re thinking now. Your wife is forty-eight years old and even though you don’t have a future, she still does. So maybe over the next few months if the disease doesn’t push her away, you should push her away. The thing to focus on is that this isn’t about me, you, us—it’s about family. Your family. We have to do what’s best for them. Of course you know that’s a gut reaction, and you may very well, and probably will, feel differently tomorrow.
At the moment you are very much in control. Yes, it’s true you lost your phone yesterday, and last week you lost your car, and recently you forgot Sandra’s name, and yes, the diagnosis means it’s true the best years are now behind you and there will not be too many good ones ahead, but at the moment you know exactly who you are. You know you have an amazing wife named Sandra and an incredible daughter called Eva.
This journal is for you, Jerry of the future, Future Jerry. At the time of this writing, you have hope there’s a cure on its way. The rate medical technology is advancing . . . well, at some point there will be a pill, won’t there? A pill to make the Alzheimer’s go away. A pill to bring the memories back, and this journal is to help you if those memories tend to have fuzzy edges. If there is no pill, you will still be able to look back through these pages and know who you were before the early onset dementia, before the Big A came along and took away the good things.
From these pages you will learn about your family, how much you love them, how sometimes Sandra can smile at you from across the room and it makes your heart race, how Eva can laugh at one of your small jokes and go Dad! before shaking her head in embarrassment. You need to know, Future Jerry, that you love and that you are loved.
So this is day one in your journal. Not day one where things started to change—that started a year or two back—but day one of the diagnosis. Your name is Jerry Grey and eight hours ago you sat in Doctor Goodstory’s office holding your wife’s hand while he gave you the news. It has, and let’s be honest since we’re among friends here—scared the absolute hell out of you. You wanted to tell Doctor Goodstory to either change his profession or change his last name, because the two couldn’t be any further apart. On the way home, you told Sandra that the diagnosis reminded you of a quote from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and when you got home you looked it up so you could tell her. Bradbury said, “It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I came along in two minutes and boom! It’s all over.” The quote, of course, is from one book-burning fireman to another, but it perfectly sums up your own future. You’ve spent your lifetime putting your thoughts down on paper, Future Jerry, and in this case it’s not the pages going up in flames, but the mind that created them. Funny how you could remember that sentiment from a book you read more than ten years ago, but can’t find your car keys.
Writing in this journal is the first time in years you’ve handwritten anything longer than a grocery list. The computer’s word processor has been your medium ever since the day you wrote the words Chapter One of your first book, but using the computer for this . . . well, it feels too impersonal, for one, and too impractical for another. The journal is more authentic, and much easier to carry around than a laptop. It’s actually a journal Eva gave you for Christmas back when she was eleven. She drew a big smiley face on the cover and glued a pair of googly eyes to it. From the face she drew a thought bubble, and inside that she wrote Dad’s coolest ideas. The pages have always remained blank, because your ideas tend to get scribbled down on Post-it notes and stuck around the sides of the computer monitor, but the notebook (now to be a journal) has always remained in the top drawer of your desk, and every now and then you’ll take it out and run your thumb over the cover and remember when she gave it to you. Hopefully your handwriting is better than when you get an idea during the night and scrawl it down only to find you can’t read your own words the following morning.
There is so much to tell you, but let me begin by being blunt. You’re heading into Batshit County. “We’re all batshit crazy in Batshit County”—that’s a line from your latest work. You’re a crime writer—now’s as good a time as any to mention that. You write under a pen name, that of Henry Cutter, and over the years have been given the nickname The Cutting Man by fans and the media, not just because of your pen name, but because many of your bad guys use knives. You’ve written twelve books, and number thirteen, The Man Goes Burning, is with your editor at the moment. She’s struggling with it. She struggled with number twelve too—and that should have been a warning flag there, right? Here’s what you should do—get this put on a T-shirt: People with Dementia Don’t Make Great Authors. When you’re losing your marbles a plot is hard to construct. There were bits that made no sense and bits that made even less sense, but you got there, and you felt embarrassed and you apologized a dozen times and put it down to stress. After all, you’d been touring a lot that year so it made sense you were going to make some mistakes. But The Man Goes Burning is a mess. Tomorrow or the next day, you’ll call your editor and tell her about the Big A. Every author eventually has a last book—you just didn’t think you were there yet, and you didn’t think it would be a journal.
Your last book, this journal, will be your descent into madness. Wait—better make that the journey into madness. Don’t mix that up. Sure, you’re going to forget your wife’s name, but let’s not forget what we’re calling this—it’s a journey, not a descent. And yes, that’s a joke. An angry joke because, let’s face it, Future Jerry, you are exceptionally angry. This is a journey into madness because you are mad. What isn’t there to be mad about? You are only forty-nine years old, my friend, and you are staring down the barrel of insanity. Madness Journal is the perfect name. . . .