But no, that’s not what this is about. This isn’t about writing up a memorial for your anger, this is a journal to let you know about your life before the disease dug in its claws and ripped your memories to shreds. This journal is about your life, about how blessed you’ve been. You, Future Jerry, you got to be the very thing you’d always dreamed of becoming—a writer. You got the amazing wife, a woman who can put her hand in yours and make you feel whatever it is you need to feel, whether it’s comfort or warmth or excitement or lust, the woman who you wake up to every morning knowing you get to fall asleep with her that night, the woman who can always see the other side of the argument, the woman who teaches you more about life every day. You have the daughter with an old soul, the traveler, the girl who wants people to be happy, the girl taking on the world. You have the nice house on the nice street, you sold a lot of books and you entertained a lot of people. Truthfully, F.J., you always thought there would be a trade-off, that the Universe would somehow balance things out. It turns out you were right. Most of all, this journal is a map to the person you used to be. It will help you get back to the times you can’t remember, and when there is a cure, this journal will help restore anything you have lost.
The best thing to do first is explain how we got here. Thankfully, you’ll still have all your memories tomorrow and you’ll still be you, and the next day, and the next, but those next days are running out the same way authors have a final book. We all have a last thought, a last hope, a last breath, and it’s important to get all this down for you, Jerry.
You’ve got the badly written book this year and, spoiler alert, Jerry, last year’s novel didn’t review that well. But hey—you still read the reviews, is that another effect of the dementia? You told yourself years ago not to read them, but you do anyway. You usually don’t because of the occasional blogger calling you a This is Henry Cutter’s most disappointing novel yet hack. It’s the way of the world, my friend, and just part of the job. But perhaps one you don’t have to worry about where you are now. It’s hard to pinpoint when it started. You forgot Sandra’s birthday last year. That was tough. But there’s more. However, right now . . . right now exhaustion is setting in, you’re feeling a little too all over the place, and . . . well, you’re actually drinking a gin and tonic as you’re writing this. It’s your first of the evening. Okay, that’s another joke, it’s your second, and the world is starting to lose its sharp edges. What you really want to do now is just sleep.
You’re a good news, bad news kind of guy, F.J. You like good news, and you don’t like bad news. Hah—thanks G&T number three for giving you Captain Obvious as another narrative point of view. The bad news is that you’re dying. Not dying in the traditional sense—you might still have a lot of years ahead of you—but you’re going to be a shell of a man and the Jerry you were. The Jerry I am right now, that you are as of this writing, is going to leave, sorry to tell you. The good news is—soon you’re not even going to know. There’ll be moments—of course there will be. You can already imagine Sandra sitting beside you and you won’t recognize her, and maybe you’ll have just wet yourself and maybe you’ll be telling her to leave you the hell alone, but there’ll be these moments—these patches of blue sky on a dark day where you’ll know what’s going on, and it will break your heart.
It will break your fucking heart.
The officer leads Jerry and Eva through the fourth floor of the police department. Most people stop what they’re doing to look over. Jerry wonders if he knows any of them. He seems to remember there was somebody he’d used for the books—a cop, maybe, who he could ask how does this work or how does that work, would a bullet do this, would a cop do that, talk me through the loopholes. If he’s here Jerry doesn’t recognize him, then remembers that it’s not a police officer he got help from, but a friend of his, a guy by the name of Hans. He still has the photograph Eva gave him in his hand, and he can remember when it was taken. Things are coming back to him, but not everything.
Eva has to sign something and then speaks to the officer again while Jerry stares at one of the walls where there’s a flyer for the police rugby team that has six names on it, the last one being Uncle Bad Touch. The officer walks over with Eva and wishes Jerry a nice day, and Jerry wishes for the same thing—he wishes for a lot of nice days, and then they’re riding the elevator down and heading outside.
He has no idea what day it is, let alone the date, but there are daffodils along the riverbank of the Avon, the river that runs through the heart of the city and appeared in some of his books—beautiful in reality, but in his books normally a murder weapon or a person is being thrown into it. The daffodils mean it’s spring, putting the day in early September. People on the street look happy, the way they always do when climbing out of the winter months, though in his books, if he’s remembering correctly, people were always miserable no matter what time of the year. His version of Christchurch was one where the Devil had come to town—no smiles, no pretty flowers, no sunsets, just hell in every direction. He’s wearing a sweater, which is great because it’s not really that warm, and great because it means he must have had an attack of common sense earlier that told him to dress for the conditions. Eva stops next to a car ten yards short of a guy sitting on the sidewalk sniffing glue. She unlocks it.
“New car?” he asks, which is a dumb thing to say, because the moment the words are out of his mouth he knows he’s set himself up for disappointment.
“Something like that,” she says, and she’s probably had it for a few years or more. Maybe Jerry even bought it for her.
They climb inside, and when she puts her hand on the steering wheel he notices again her wedding ring. The guy sniffing glue has approached the car and starts tapping on the side of the window. He has Uncle Bad Touch written on his T-shirt, and Jerry wonders if he’s going to play rugby for the cops, or if he was the inspiration for the comedian who wrote the name on the form upstairs. Eva starts the car and they pull away from the curb just as Uncle Bad Touch asks if they’d like to buy a used sandwich from him. They get twenty yards before having to stop at a red light. Jerry pictures the day being split into three parts; the sun is out towards the west and looks like it’ll be gone in a few hours, making him decide they’re nearing the end of the second act. He’s trying to think about Eva’s husband and is getting close to picturing him when Eva starts talking.
“You were found in the town library,” she says. “You walked in and went to sleep on the floor. When one of the staff woke you up, you started shouting. They called the police.”
“I was asleep?”
“Apparently so,” she says. “How much can you remember?”
“The library, but just a little. I don’t remember walking there. I remember last night. I remember watching TV. And I remember the police station. I kind of . . . switched on, I guess, during what I thought was an interview. I thought I was there because the police figured out what I’d done back when—”
“There is no Suzan,” she says, interrupting him.
The light turns green. He thinks about Suzan and how she doesn’t exist outside the pages of a book he can barely remember writing. He feels tired. He stares out at the buildings that look familiar, and is starting to get an idea of where they are. There is a guy arguing with a parking attendant on the sidewalk, poking his finger into the attendant’s chest. There’s a woman jogging while pushing a stroller and talking on her cell phone. There’s a guy carrying a bunch of flowers with a big smile on his face. He sees a young boy, probably fifteen or sixteen, help an old lady pick up her bag of groceries that has split open.