April - The Flood 16 страница

"Do you want me to be with you?" I asked him. I touched his arms and held his hand. He squeezed, and I took that as a yes. I crawled into his bed with him and put my head on his chest. We were both fully clothed this time around, and we didn't touch one another with such an insistency as the night before. Instead, we both shut our eyes and just replayed the day before us.

I still didn't know what to think, and it took awhile before I realized it wasn't even my place. It was Gerard's body and it was Gerard's mind. He should be able to have the last word on what was going on with him. Who was I, or anyone else, to get in the way of that? He kissed the top of my forehead suddenly, and I turned over to look at him. Our lips met and I crawled on top of him and we continued to kiss. He touched my hair and pulled away for a bit, just looking at my face.

"Oh, Frank," he told me, his voice aching. "How did I get so lucky? How did all of this happen?"

I tried to look into his eyes, look past the pupils and the corneas, and try to see inside of him. I saw my own reflection back. It took me a second to realize that his questions may not have been rhetoric. He could have been actually been asking me how all of this had happened. Was he here with me now, but thinking of the apartment? He knew who I was, though, I told myself. That was all that mattered.

I kissed him again, and then I rested my head on his chest. I fell asleep without even trying.

When I woke up, Gerard was still in the room. He was at his bookshelf, sitting on a stool. He had a book open and was reading from random pages, as if jogging his memory of the contents. He noticed me stirring and smiled at me. The sun was just setting in the window and he had turned the lamp on. Its orange glow filtered around the room and made me feel like I really was back in his old apartment.

"How are you doing?" he asked me. He was in good spirits and nothing like he had been earlier the day. As I woke up more and brought myself over to sit with him, I began to wonder if it had all been a dream. The Alzheimer's, the doctors, everything, even moving in and starting the life in the new place. What if we really were back at the old apartment, and none of this had happened? Or even better, what if we were in Paris and could stay there the rest of our lives? Gerard told me to sit with him, and that he wanted to tell me about the book in his hand. He wanted to teach me something, like before, I realized, and sat down quickly.

"It's called Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. It's one of the most beautiful books I have ever read."

"What is it about?"

"I'm glad you asked, because this is what I wanted to point out to you, my dear Frank. The contents are what's peculiar about this book. What it's about is absolutely horrible. Humbert Humbert

is a pedophile, and the entire narrative documents his love affair with the daughter of the woman he married. She's his adoptive daughter, so there are no blood relations, but it is the kinship bond that should be respected. It's a disturbing plot, but the way that this is written just oozes beauty. Here. Listen to the first page," he said, and then began to read me the first part about Lolita, the narrator's love of his life. Sitting there and listening to Gerard's lucid voice run over the brilliantly crafted and poetic phrases, I would have suspected this to be about someone normal, average - not this twelve year old girl that he raped. I was uncomfortable, but captivated, which was the goal of the lesson. I wanted to know and read more.

"That's the affect the book has on people. It's disgusting when you know, but when you read, you change your mind - at least on the surface." He flipped through and read me another part. Just as enchanting. He handed the book over to me, and told me I should read it.

"The book is known for its beauty, and for the fact that you can never trust the narrator that just told you all those beautiful things. This type of beauty is deceptive like that. Well," he looked at me and smiled. He kissed me briefly and then concluded, "Some beauty, anyway, is deceptive. Some I like to believe is honest. Like us."

In spite of how entranced I was, my chest had felt tight each time there was talk of pedophiles. I was so conscious about the fine line that our relationship held. Anytime I forgot about the age difference between us, I was reminded again by other people or circumstances. Though I could consent now and there were no issues, there was still that gray area where we had formed our bond and that the bulk of our relationship was built on. His bringing up Lolita made me shake because the foundation of us had been shaking. Humbert Humbert was a pedophile, even some parts of the book alluded to that. Gerard read me another passage in the book where Dolorous - Lolita - had blamed him for breaking her life. Gerard had not done that with me; he had made my life, he had saved it. I was relieved that the bringing up of Lolita and the unreliable narrator had nothing to do with our foundation. But it was still important, Gerard had insisted, and was important enough for me to read it now.

"If only to appreciate temporary beauty," he told me, and then kissed me again. "Keep that copy. It has notes inside the pages and the margins from when I read it in Paris. I think you will enjoy it."

I thanked him again and gave his arm a squeeze. I held the book in my hand like a heavy weight. In spite of the way we were getting along and had moved past from what had happened before, I needed to know. I needed to know whether or not he thought he was sick, if he needed more tests, or if I should be worried about our future. He was looking in the bookshelf again, taking down books and flipping through the pages, remembering small and far off places he had used to escape into before his life had become what it was around him. I waited, urging him with my pleas that stayed silent in my head, to look at me and just tell me if he was all right or not. But he never turned around, and I could not bring myself to ask him. I could not bring myself to know.

Even if I did know, it wouldn't be the way I wanted to know. The medical scans, the doctors, the waiting rooms with bad magazines. We had wasted nearly our entire day there. We had not been spending time with one another like we should have been. I had a full time job to contend with now and I would have even less time with him and with Jasmine. What was the point in knowing about this disease, if it really was there, medically? It would take us away from the lives that we had worked so hard on making. I was glad that I had thrown away the pamphlets, the referrals, the lab work form. These texts would change our lives too much, and not in the way we wanted them to be. They would create sickness, instead of beauty.

I held the book in my hand, and I thought of Lydia's words. You can't dismantle the house using the same tools. I couldn't know if Gerard was really sick unless he told me, or I did my own tests, I found my own way. I sat there for a few moments thinking it over before I decided what I would do.

"Hey," I said, nudging his shoulder. "Do you think we could paint? You know, like we used to?"

Gerard smile and nodded. We both put down the books we held and began to make our way over to the table where he kept his supplies. I found a piece of card paper that was fairly large. I took the black paint and began to do the first topcoat. Gerard watched me carefully, trying to decipher my actions and putting them within his own frame of reference.

"What color next?" I asked him. I hoped he realized that this was a test; that my framing of the phrase with "like we used to" meant that I needed him to dip into the abyss we had created for ourselves a long time ago. I needed him to get to the foundation that our love was built on. He looked at me and seemed to sense a definite gravity to the situation and he began to focus hard as he looked through his colors. His fingers lingered a long time before he finally picked up blue.

My heart sunk, but I refused to let it happen. It wasn't what I had been looking for, but blue did mean something. "Okay, good. Good. That color could definitely work for us, although I think you were doing most of the painting that day."

I nudged him in the side and he smiled. He went to look for more paint and pulled out more blue. I wanted him to say something - sacré bleu - or anything. But he hesitated. He pulled out another blue instead. I grabbed his hand and made him face me for a second. "I like blue, but what if we put it on our hands." I rubbed my hands over his, mimicking paint. "What if I put it on my hand and then I put this on the black paint? What color?"

I rubbed my hands over his again and it seemed to trigger something. He grabbed my hands and we reversed the position. He traced the outline of my skin and went from my palms to my fingertips and back again. Then he looked through the paint, and after only some hesitation, he gave me the yellow.

"Yes! Yes!" I said, getting really excited. We both began to put yellow paint on my hands and then I told Gerard to direct me. I told him to help me put it where it needed to go. He took my arm and made it move so my handprint went on the black. When we both backed away, his smile was so large it almost made me want to cry. I shoved all of my emotions back and focused on him. He picked up the painting and held it like it were gold, as if it were the most valuable thing in the world. He was so happy, but then he began to look around for something else.

"Pencil? Pen? Something to write with," he said.

"For the words? What words Gerard?"

"You can stop testing me, Frank, I know what I'm doing," he said, getting somewhat frustrated. I nodded and backed off a bit, rubbing his back. I still watched him closely, however, but I kept my mouth shut.

Once he had a small paint brush in his hand, he began to struggle to try and remember what the words were exactly. He got the first one, but kept pausing on the middle and then the last. I whispered to him, and though he brushed me aside each time, he began to remember and write things correctly. When we were done, after some limited struggling, he was so full of life. I had not seen him that excited. He placed our small card on his desk to dry and kissed my forehead.

"See? It's fine, Frank. We'll hang this up in my room and it will be just like last time," he told me.

After it was dry, we did just that. We tacked it up right above his bed, so that when he would wake up in the morning it would be the first thing he saw. I had to stand and awkwardly get it right, but it was worth it by the end. He had done it, I told myself. We both looked up at it as we laid down in the bed together. He still remembered.

I turned to face him, kissing him long and deeply. I told him that I loved him, but that I was going to sleep in my bed tonight since I had to work. "It's been a long day," I said, getting to my feet again. He called after me, telling me I had left Lolita behind.

"Don't forget," he told me with a sly smile. He did know what had happened earlier that day, I knew he did. And as he lay back in his bed and looked at what we had hung up, I knew that things were okay.

But as soon as I shut the door and went to my own room, I burst into tears. I laid down Lolita on my nightstand and I knew. I knew that just because he had remembered, that didn't mean he wasn't forgetting. He should have known that handprint, that piece of art, like the back of his own hand but he hadn't. I had to work with him until he got it. The roles had changed, something had switched. Things were changing, and I knew, I knew it so deep inside of me that things were going wrong. He could remember now, he could still create beauty, but I didn't know how much longer it would last. I knew - using my tools, in my own language - what Gerard also knew. I looked at Lolita on my nightstand s and burst into tears even more. He was Humbert Humbert, the unreliable narrator. Only he wasn't taking about the paedophilia, the foundation of our relationship. He was talking about the words that were used, the daily experiences that created a temporary beauty. He was unreliable now. He had Alzheimer's, and soon, he would be gone.

Chapter Three

I couldn't face my bed by myself. I tiptoed down the stairs, trying to not show how much I had been crying, and knocked on Jasmine's door. I had seen her car in our driveway from my window, so I knew that she was back from work. She hadn't stayed long, at least, not as long as I was used to her working when something was bothering her. I remembered in undergrad, during a really bad time, she didn't come out of her apartment for nearly a week. She claimed that she had been busy with term papers every time I had called, but I also knew her family had been giving her issues and producing extensive research papers with appendices was her only way to cope. Now in our house, so many years later, not much had changed. I could see a small light emitting from the bottom of her bedroom door, so I knew she was still awake. She probably was still working, I told myself, but it was in our house rather than her office.

When I knocked, she came to greet me right away, her eyes wide and attentive. It was almost eleven and she was usually in bed by this time; I should have been in bed by this time. I had to get up early in the morning and go to work, especially since I had just taken all this time off. I swallowed hard, dreading it. I would be away from Gerard again and who knew what else he would forget. What if one day I came home and he didn't know who I was? I replayed all the bad images from those Lifetime movies in my mind and then just as quickly pushed them all away. No, this was not our reality. We had distinctly tried so hard to create something different than what was bastardized on television. But now instead of a soap opera, we were merely conforming to one of those Shakespearean tragedies that he had read out loud to Jasmine and myself, when we were alone in his room at night, before we had known any better, before we had realized he was reading to us so he didn't have to remember anything to say, so he didn't have to form conversation.

Jasmine saw my expression change before I opened my mouth, and mutely, she threw her arms around me. She knew she had to be the one to comfort me. I had tried to clear away my tears, but she saw how visibly upset I was. She always knew when I was upset. She used to tell me all the time in undergrad when I would hassle her for not letting me inside, she would always counter with her own observations: "You're so quiet, Frank. People think you don't talk a lot but you do. It's just in your head. And I know when your head is telling you something bad. I see it everywhere all over you." We had been at lunch the first time she had told me that, just after her week in hideaway. She wanted to let me know that it wasn't just me with the great observational tools; that she could see past my own skin and outer shell as well. She had known, before I even told her that I had had a bad meeting with my father. It was one of the first times I had been home after I told them about Gerard, and Jasmine was comforting me at the old cafe where she used to work. The memory flashed before my eyes as she opened the door and wore the same expression of concern on her face. I wrapped my arms around her and let myself go. Jasmine always knew when I was faking strength. Dean and I could talk about how we did it, about how hard it was under this crushing weight of masculine resistance, but Jasmine was the only person who could penetrate and know the act from reality. Maybe it was because she was good at hiding, too. I saw the same concern on her face then that I had seen years ago in the cafe, but I also saw her own emotions poking through a thin veil of confidence. We held one another tighter, knowing the other was weak. I realized Gerard wouldn't be able to have the same type of moment that Jasmine and I had just shared. In a few years, maybe even a few months, he would no longer be able to register a faint recollection and then the catapult back to the original memory. What did losing your memory feel like? I wondered. Did it hurt? It hurt so badly for me right then.

"Oh god," Jasmine said into my neck. She clung to me tighter, but I didn't pull back as hard. Her stomach was in the way between us, and I never knew how much that belly could endure. "Oh god, it's true, then."

I nodded into her shoulder and tried to form my mess of feelings into words that could explain. "The doctor.... he was full of shit. We have to get a million tests done to even be sure that this disease exists. And even then, it's not that conclusive. But I'm sure. I know. I did a test. He's different now... he's..."

I didn't want to finish that sentence. Gerard wasn't different. I didn't want him to be different. He was the only stable point in my life for so long. Whenever something changed, I always went back to him. Even when he wasn't around, he was in my thoughts. He was always there. He couldn't change; he couldn't become this unreliable narrator that I couldn't trust anymore because he had been the first person I had learned to trust. He was not different. His body and his mind were still there, he was still living in this house. He was still here, he was not dead. And yet I was sobbing like he was dead, and Jasmine was too. We had gone to the bed and though she tried to shush me and tell me it would be all right, it just made her cry more.

"I don't want to believe it," she said, but then started to cry again because she did believe it. I knew she did, too. She told me that the work she ended up doing at her office was to research the disease. She had been reading about it all day now and all the signs were adding up. It was like that Where's Waldo? Image when as soon as you found him hiding in the background once, he stared back at you menacingly.

"He labeled things and made to do lists for ordinary tasks. He mixed up words. He got art facts wrong that even I knew. He called me Frank once and didn't notice, and always forgot Hilda's name, who she was, why she was here. He asked me the date all the time. I thought it was because I was organized. But... fuck," Jasmine sobbed, covering her mouth. I wanted to comfort her. I wanted to be there for her when she cried. I had just been there for her; I had already seen her spill these oceans and rivers of emotion. We had already been flooded; I thought we were saved now.

I looked around her room and tried to focus. I glanced back down at the book and I felt my gut reach into my mouth again. I was punched. I was out cold.

"What do we even do?" I asked. "We can't afford those medical tests. He's not covered. On paper, he's nothing to anyone. But he's fucking everything to us. We can't lose him."

"We won't, Frank, we won't. You can live a long time, even if this is what he has, afterwards...."

"And do what? Forget who we are? Who..." I looked at her stomach and then looked at my palms. There were still traces of yellow paint on them. I had made him remember the art we had created together. But that was logged back there, that was seven years old. After some prompting, it came back. It took a while, but it did. I had to help him, but I didn't mind helping him if I knew it would be okay. Seeing his face when he finally got it, it made sense and he was elated. I wondered how long he had bluffed his way through memories, through conversations, wanting more hints about some things but being unable to ask. I wondered how many times he wanted to tell me something, but couldn't find the words, wanted to reminisce with me, but it only came in pieces. He was now not afraid to ask and he knew himself what was going on. He was handling it well, in spite of some shots to his pride; he was definitely doing better than the two of us. But even if there was still the fact that the old him was buried and could be resurrected with a few prompting questions, the new him, the present one, would forget.

Jasmine's voice began to straighten out as she gave me a few details about the disorder. She told me that daily things went first, the small things. Like missing keys or wallets, dates and appointments like the lectures, misplacing the pot in the fridge; these little innocuous little details that didn't really matter. They weren't real memories, they weren't precious. It was new material, like Hilda's name, that seemed to go in one ear and out the other. Here one day, gone the next. Gerard would remember us and would remember things about us if we prompted him. We could keep a mixture of signs and symbols around the house, more than Gerard had already been doing for himself. I was prepared to do that, and so was Jasmine. But we both sat on her bed, clutching her stomach, and began to panic for the future.

"I read that personality changes happen later on. People become aggressive, especially if they don't know who's in the house with them."

I closed my eyes. I could never see Gerard being aggressive. Even when my father beat him up, he never hit back. Even if he didn't know who was in the house with him, so long as we weren't hurting him or making noise, I was sure it would be okay. I told Jasmine I would wear a fucking name tag. I would walk around with that portrait he had painted of me near me so I could show him who I was and what he was capable of doing. I didn't care. I needed him to be the same and I was willing to do anything - everything - to have that happen.

Jasmine said that since he was doing art, that was a good sign. It showed that he remembered and could recall that part of his identity, but that it was also dangerous because it could mean he's regressing to his old habits.

"So we should make him stop and try to remember or something? We should stop him from doing art just in case it makes him regress faster?" I asked, angrier than I needed to be.

"No," Jasmine said quietly. "I'm just telling you what I know. That's all I have right now. We don't even know if he has this, or how far along he is if he does have it. I'm just guessing now. That's all."

Her voice hurt me; it was so small and quiet. I turned to her on the bed and I placed my hands on her shoulders, touched her hair, and then kissed her. She kissed back with more force than I expected. We both wanted to escape the reality, to go into our bodies and be with one another. In times of crisis, if she was not locking herself away and working until her mind was too tired to continue, Jasmine always wanted to have sex. During exam period, we were always together, our clothing always scattered all over her apartment floor. She would write one exam, come back to me, and I would stay naked and wait for her. She'd take her clothing off in the front hallway and I'd push her up against her apartment wall.

And then I was remembering this again, for the sake of escape, as my hands went over her body, and I began to undo her shirt. She groaned at the back of her throat as I rubbed her sensitive chest. I weaved in and out of my own memories, undergrad and now, her five months pregnant on the bed in our house that we owned with Gerard...

I flung my eyes open, and pulled away from her slightly. We were both breathing heavily, and leaned our heads against one another, the passion now vanquished between us. No longer touching, or wanting to fuck, we were sad again. I did up her shirt, up to the collar, and then touched her chin. "Jasmine, you have me. We still have Gerard. He's just..."

"Different."

We were quiet. Different still didn't suffice to describe him. I had already fractured him several times over in my mind. I kept thinking of old Gerard and new Gerard, past Gerard, present Gerard, and future Gerard and it was exhausting. I was losing myself in his image. And then there were the images he had drawn in the waiting room, the shells of men, and I worried that this was the image of Gerard by the artist himself. I sighed, and looked down at the book I had tossed on the bed. I gazed at the unreliable narrator he had told me he had now become. What did that mean for our story, for our lives, for the images he drew of us?

"Have you read this?" I asked Jasmine. She nodded. "It was one of the best and the worst books I have ever read," she said angrily and then touched its corner with affection. Given her history, I could understand. The book made something beautiful out of something horrific, something that had kept her up at night. I could understand why she had wanted to believe in books and beauty so strongly, to escape what had happened to her.

"Gerard knows," I told Jasmine, and she turned her attention towards me. "It's not just that we think he has Alzheimer's, he actually knows."

"What did he say?"

"He gave me the book. He told me Humbert Humbert was unreliable, but he still told a beautiful story."

Her face twisted. As someone who had read the story and was able to block out the pedophilia, she understood what he meant right away. She placed her face over her hands and heaved a giant sob.

"He wants us to decide what is better," she elucidated. "Reliability or beauty. Oh god I had this same discussion in my English class. I can't do this, I just can't. "

She began to sob again, much worse than before. I went to her side, pushed the book out of the way. It fell off the edge of the bed with a thump. I was glad. It had already caused so much pain that I doubted its capacity for beauty. I put my hands on Jasmine's back and I rubbed it, trying to calm her down. While she cried, I had run out of tears. I was thinking of the proposition that Jasmine said he had put forward. What was more important? Was the fact that he was forgetting and was going to lose everything eventually, the fact that he had a degenerative disease and would eventually die from it, the fact that he had fucking Alzheimer's and the medical facts that haunted us; was that truth better or did we want the unreliable narrator? Were the paintings and the time spent alone at home with him helping him remember, the time spent quietly with him, the painting prompts and word prompts and the telling and retelling of stories for him, the creation of beauty again and again even as he got worse - was that more important of the two?

Did he want us to treat him, or let him be?

"He's scared," Jasmine finally said. "He doesn't even want to make the decision for himself."

"He's testing us. He tested me all this time. He wants us to pick." I choked. "Even if we wanted to get him medical attention, we couldn't do that. We don't have that kind of money, we don't have insurance-"

"I'll worry about that. If it ever comes to that. But do we want that?" Jasmine wiped her eyes.

I took a deep breath. We were working through our acceptance, bit by bit. We understood what this meant now, that he had it and it wasn't going away. "It's only going to get worse," I said remembering all the facts from the doctors. "There is no cure, and we'd just spend all this time that he has left in waiting rooms."

"In un-beautiful places," she elaborated, and then looked at me. "What kind of a life is that? Even if we did do that and try our best to get treatment for him, he'd still be scared. At least, maybe, he won't be scared here. With us."

We both looked at one another, our eyes scanning the other face for recognition, for approval, for anything. I sighed. I grabbed Jasmine's hands and I kissed each one of her fingers. I felt my throat choking up as I thought of how much emotion there was between the two of us, between the three of us. It hurt knowing that some part of it would ever melt away. She moved her hands away, touched my forehead and kissed me there. We both held one another, and we seemed to have made our decision. He was not going to get treatment, unless absolutely necessary.

"At one point, when he gets really bad, maybe in as much as five years, he may need a home or a health-care worker," Jasmine began, trying to be that reliable source. She stopped halfway through her explanation. "But that's not the time, yet, and we won't worry about it. We just have to not think for a little while. Just not expand that far into the future."

I nodded. We both knew that it was unreasonable. We both knew that eventually, he would need more care. I thought of what the doctor had told us that afternoon. It wasn't an illness that killed you, but heart disease, stroke, and cancers sometimes came in conjunction with it. We would have had to have prepared for that eventually. Right then we had to not let the disease become terminal in the way that Gerard meant it. We couldn't let it destroy everything it touched and made it un-beautiful. Even if we managed to evade the physical ailments, Jasmine knew that we couldn't do this by ourselves. We were all bringing a baby into the world. A daughter. I had barely enough time to think about the fact that by child was going to be a girl-child I had been so busy with worrying about Gerard. I felt guilty for wanting to forget him for a little while and just focus on Jasmine and her stomach. For just focusing on others. It was unreasonable, it was, and we knew it, but we began to kiss. We had made a decision - and in spite of it being a poor one in terms of future plans, we knew it was the best one we could give him. We were giving him freedom. No medical bills to pay, no waiting rooms, no invasive doctors. I thought of him, pale and skinny, in the hospital gown from earlier today. That had been a new type of intimacy that neither of us was ready for, neither one of us had wanted. I thought we had done okay, though, I mean, I had rubbed his back when he was cold and I had gotten the knot undone for him. I could do this for him later on. I could take care of him and take care of Jasmine and my daughter. I could do this, I told myself. More importantly, I had promised I would do that for him. I thought of the party, of us in the far off corner, drinking our wine from our paper cups. I'll take care of you, my dove, and you take care of me, I repeated his words in my head. I would, I had promised him I would. It just wasn't time for that yet.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14