by John Harding
It was OK when he was alone but if he was walking with an associate from the office he’d notice his companion looking at him strangely. If they’d been for an alfresco coffee and it was a breezy – but not too breezy – day, then it meant yet another person he worked with would have him down as an oddball.
William liked things to be symmetrical. He could not tolerate a picture hung slightly askew. If he spotted one in someone else’s home (well, actually he didn’t usually have to spot them, they leaped alarmingly to his attention, they practically shouted at him) he would hope that his host would leave him alone so that he could adjust it. He might even ask for a glass of water or something else that would require the person to leave the room so he could do it.
If that was impossible because there were several people in the room, he made a feature of adjusting the picture. He would pretend to admire it, leaning his head to one side like a bird and squinting at it in an appreciative manner, and then, as part of this process, as a natural part of this process he hoped, he would openly reach out and make the adjustment, as though he couldn’t care less who saw him.
This was sometimes difficult and on one occasion had catastrophic consequences. The offending picture was a photograph, in the home of his then boss, of an obese middle-aged woman. This was when William was still married to his wife, Lola, before his compulsive behaviour had driven her mad and away, and indeed this incident was the last straw that broke the back of her tolerance and led to her leaving.
His boss had invited William and Lola round for dinner. There were two other couples present as well. They were all sitting around having a cocktail before it was time to eat. William spotted the photo only when he sat down on a couch and looked up to see it on the wall above the mantelpiece. It was a regular-size photo, one of three, but its frame was at least a couple of centimetres off true. He couldn’t believe his hosts hadn’t noticed it. And, assuming they had, how could they live with a thing like that! It made you wonder what sort of people you were getting in with, coming round here for dinner and all.
‘William!’ he heard Lola say and felt the sharp pain of her elbow in his ribs. He came out of his contemplation of the picture and realized he’d been hogging the salted peanuts in the silver dish on the coffee table in front of him. Everyone was staring at him, he’d been eating them so frantically. He’d been working out a strategy, trying to think of an excuse to duck back in here alone when they all went through to the dining room for dinner and put the thing right. He couldn’t stand the idea that coffee might be served in here after the meal and he’d have to sit trying not to look at the thing for another hour.
In the end, he could bear it no longer. He got up and asked for the bathroom. Inside it he ran the cold tap and splashed water over his face. He was hot and sweaty from the stress of the situation. He resolved to act rather than endure an evening of misery. Even the meal would be ruined for him, knowing he had to go back in there and look at that.
He strode purposefully out of the bathroom and into the room where everyone else was sitting, except for his host’s wife who was occupied in the kitchen for the moment. Instead of returning to his seat, William sauntered over to the fireplace and stood in front of the picture. He did the usual peering at it this way and that.
‘That’s interesting . . .’ William began, and then paused. He couldn’t think of an appropriate comment because this was not a beautiful oil painting or a delicate watercolour but a photograph of an extremely fat woman. Morbidly obese. Bigger even than Sandy Beach’s mother. A real whale. He was suddenly aware of someone standing at his shoulder and half turned his head to find his hostess there. Immediately he recognized her resemblance to the woman in the photograph. She too was plump, although not morbidly obese, not yet, anyway, but you could see she was going to get there. William guessed that the woman’s mother was the subject of the photograph, and look at her!
‘What’s so interesting about it?’ his boss’s wife asked.
William stared at the photograph searching desperately for anything worthy of comment. The picture frame was nondescript; there was no help there. The photograph had been cropped right in on the fat woman, indeed she was so gross there was no space for any background around her, no scenery could have been squeezed in that might have enabled him to say, for example, ‘Why, that looks like Lake Tahoe, we spent our honeymoon there!’
‘It’s my mother, you know,’ said his boss’s wife.
‘Yes,’ William agreed. Right away he realized it was the wrong thing to say.
‘So, what’s so interesting about her? What do you find so interesting about her?’ William remembered that this woman was also a lawyer and was said to be the most brilliant in her whole firm at cross-exam.
‘Well . . .’ William stared at the photo. Its subject was wearing a lurid pink pant suit that made her look like a barrage balloon with legs or maybe a house-size inflatable rubber pig. He could think of nothing to say.
‘I’ll tell you,’ snapped the woman at his elbow. ‘You find it interesting that my mom is fat, don’t you? And why it’s interesting is because you think I’m fat too? Is that or is that not the case?’
‘Well, no, not exactly . . .’ In truth William had nothing against fat people. He felt sorry for them if their size made them unhappy and that it was their business if it did not.
‘Well, what is interesting about this picture then? Come on, answer.’
Her voice was growing ever more strident. It had the ring of a prosecutor going for the death penalty. The hum of conversation in the room died; people picked up their glasses carefully so as to avoid making the slightest sound.
‘Answer me!’ screamed the woman.
William appealed to the room. He tried to produce a smile. ‘Hey,’ he said, with what was meant to be a nonchalant shrug, ‘can I take the fifth on that?’
He expected another onslaught but it didn’t come. The woman seemed to crumple as if her shoulders had just become too heavy for her. She burst into tears. ‘My poor mom!’ she wailed. ‘My poor mom who had a glandular problem and who never did anyone any harm in her whole life!’
The other women in the room – including, he noticed, Lola – were out of their seats and had their arms about her like a shot. Everyone huddled round her trying to comfort her. William was appalled at what he had done, but not so appalled that he couldn’t think clearly. While they were all distracted, he reached out and adjusted the picture.
The hysterical woman went on sobbing for a good half hour. Everyone was so concerned for her they all forgot about the dinner which was burned and completely ruined. When the woman finally stopped crying about the photograph she found out about the dinner and started crying all over again about that. By the time she stopped crying once more, her distress had given her a terrible migraine. The party broke up in disarray. As William and Lola left, his boss said meaningfully, ‘I’ll see you at the office.’
Outside the other two couples bade them a frosty goodnight and made off in a cab together. They were obviously going to a restaurant to eat but they didn’t invite William and Lola. In their own cab home William and Lola stared straight ahead to avoid eye contact. All William could think was, if I’d known the party was going to finish so early, I wouldn’t have been so bothered about the damn photograph.
William’s rituals cost him dear, they cost him Lola for one thing, but he couldn’t stop them. They were his security against his fears. Death was still the big one and William saw the abyss opening up at his feet at any one of a number of triggers: a clear night in the countryside when the canopy of stars reminded him of the vastness of space, the infinite number of its worlds and thus his own insignificance; a funeral cortège passing him in the street; the mention of the date of some future event – for example the submerging of various Pacific islands beneath the ocean as a result of global warming caused by Americans using their cars too much – that he would no longer be around to witness.
But death was join
ed now by another terror. Interestingly, it too concerned the annihilation of his individual personality. William didn’t regard his fear of death as illogical. After all, he was going to die some day, so it wasn’t unreasonable to be afraid of it. What was illogical was allowing the fear to so dominate his life that he could take no pleasure in it and at times might as well be dead anyway. If he wasn’t enjoying life, what was so bad about being dead?
This new fear had a less logical basis because it wasn’t inevitable. William agonized that one day he might have Alzheimer’s disease, which neatly encompassed his principal fear too, since Alzheimer’s was always fatal. The reason he was so afraid of it was that his father had died of it and this increased his own chance of contracting it. The statistics weren’t as bad as death, where the odds were 100 per cent that it was likely to happen, but William had seen enough of the illness first-hand to know that, whatever the odds, this wasn’t the way he wanted to go. About the only thing to be said in its favour was that you lost so much of your mind that you probably stopped worrying about death a long time before it happened.
William knew that although Alzheimer’s was considered a disease of the elderly, it was possible for young people to suffer from it too. You could have it in your thirties, and, at thirty-one, he found himself already in the danger zone.
He began daily to check himself for early symptoms. His father had started with aphasia, the inability to remember certain words, especially nouns.
William’s father, Joe, was, as we know, a lawyer too, specializing in civil rights cases. Many of his clients were black people who were being discriminated against at work. It didn’t worry him that he didn’t make a great deal of money, certainly not for a lawyer. He said that law had no business being about making money and he encouraged William to see it as a caring profession, like medicine or social work.
Joe Hardt had an office in his home and when he was there on vacation from law school it was William’s habit to wander in while his old man was working (he wasn’t that old, only mid-fifties), pull a law tome from a shelf and settle himself in what his dad called the customer’s chair to go through a few cases.
William never spoke first. He knew not to disturb his father when he was working. But sometimes his father would speak right away and they’d discuss the case he was on at the moment or whatever it was William had been looking up in the book.
Other times, when his father was busy he would just keep on writing. He’d continue for however long the work took and after maybe an hour, William would quietly slip the book back in its slot on the shelf and retreat from the room.
Then there were occasions on which the old man would finish at last, put down his pen, look up with a warm smile and say, ‘Now, how are things with you, my boy?’
Or he might carry on working but speak to William anyhow. He might ask him something. ‘Just pass me Billings Contract Law would you?’ Or, ‘Please could you fetch me a cup of tea?’ and William would be only too happy to oblige. He knew what his father was doing was important. He was helping other people and it was good that William was able to help him do that, even in such minor ways.
One day his father looked up and said, ‘William, would you please bring me a – a—’ and then stopped.
‘Yes?’ said William, thinking his father had been momentarily distracted by another thought about the case he was engaged on.
‘A – a – a, you know, a thing of tea?’
‘Cup?’ said William. ‘A cup of tea?’
‘No,’ said his father, ‘not a cup. A – a – you know the thing you put it into the cup from?’
‘A pot of tea,’ said William getting up and making for the door.
‘That’s it.’ His father was shaking his head. ‘Darndest thing, couldn’t think of the damned word. Guess I’m either getting old or working too hard.’
In the early stages this was the accepted explanation. And the aphasia wasn’t too much of a problem. You could usually work out what William’s dad was talking about. He could point at the object or refer to its use – ‘the things I put on my hands to keep them warm’, ‘the stuff I wash my hair with’.
The problem came when the condition moved on and there was more than one unknown in a sentence. ‘Where’s the darned thing I need to remove the other thing with?’ or ‘Did I leave that thing on the thing in the thing?’ Often nobody had a clue what he was talking about.
It could no longer be denied that there was something seriously wrong and a diagnosis swiftly followed. Once the thing that was happening to him had a name, once it was called Alzheimer’s, it was able to get on with its progress much better. Now his father forgot not only the names of things, but the names of people too. And then, not only their names, but who they were. At first he couldn’t recall William’s name, but he knew he was his . . . his . . . his . . . thing. Then he forgot everything about him. He simply didn’t recognize him any more.
Paranoia followed fast. Because he didn’t recognize you he assumed the stranger you’d become meant to do him harm. In the street he would pull away from you and scream to passers-by, ‘Help! Get the police! I’m being kidnapped!’
There was a stage at which he was ill enough to believe this but not so obviously ill that he couldn’t convince strangers – real strangers – that it was true. A trip to the park could often involve several incidents in which lengthy dialogues were needed to prove that you weren’t abducting him.
When things got so bad nobody could manage him any more, Joe went into a nursing home. The cost ate heavily into William’s parents’ small savings, but neither Ruth nor he could help out much; she had a young family and he was earning next to nothing as a rookie lawyer helping injured workers get their rightful compensation for industrial accidents.
One day William got a call from his mother, who was laid up with influenza. ‘The home just telephoned. You need to get there right away. Your dad’s been asking for you.’
It was only with difficulty that William persuaded his mother to stay in bed. The news was so exciting. Joe hadn’t recognized anybody for months. William could hardly remember the last time his father had called him by name.
He rushed to the nursing home and was met by an enthusiastic nurse. ‘Don’t get too excited, you know it won’t last, but it will give you a chance to say goodbye to him,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t happen often that they recover any lucidity, not even temporarily. Make the most of it.’
In his father’s room the old man was propped up on his pillows. William was appalled at how much weight he’d lost in the week since he’d last seen him. His head seemed to have shrunk. The flesh looked dead. You could almost smell it putrefying. Only the eyes showed any sign of life, glimmering with mad intent. They fixed on William with a desperate intensity.
‘Will! Will!’ the old man croaked.
‘You see, he knows you,’ said the nurse. ‘It’s a small miracle.’
‘No, it’s not,’ said William, biting his tongue so he didn’t snap at the woman. ‘It’s not me he’s talking about. He’s never in his life called me anything but William.’
‘But surely—’
William went and stood by the bed and the nurse took up her position on the other side of it. The old man’s frightened eyes flickered from one to the other. ‘Will,’ he muttered. ‘Will.’ His tone didn’t alter whether he said it to his son or the nurse. It was obvious he wasn’t talking to William. His father suddenly started trying to lever himself up, and William bent and lifted him. He weighed less than a ten-year-old child and it took no effort to get him sitting up against the pillows. He seemed to be struggling with something, making a supreme effort. He grasped William’s wrist with a skinny claw and pulled him closer. ‘I’ll cut them all off without a penny!’ he whispered hoarsely.
He sank back onto the pillow exhausted, still muttering, ‘Will, will,’ and William withdrew his hand. The nurse shot him a questioning look.
‘My guess would be he’s talking about h
is last will and testament,’ he told her. ‘He wanted to make some changes to it, but I suppose he’ll get over that.’
The nurse nodded. Neither of them stated the obvious. That Joe Hardt would never again be involved with a legal document, least of all his own last will and testament. There was no way this featherweight of a man was of sound mind.
Two days later Ruth called William and told him their father was dead. He’d gone peacefully in his sleep. She was at their mother’s comforting her. They had just gotten back from seeing the body at the nursing home. The undertakers weren’t coming until the afternoon, so there was time for William to stop off at the home on his way to his mother’s if he wanted to say goodbye to his dad.
On the freeway, William debated with himself what to do. He had never seen a dead human being. He didn’t know if he could carry the image of a dead person, especially the one he had loved most in all his life, around in his head for the rest of it. On the other hand he couldn’t bear never to see his father again, to miss this opportunity to tell him how he had loved him and about the size of the hole his gradual disappearance had left in his own existence.
But then again, there was the idea of a corpse and he didn’t think he could take that. He was almost past the exit for the nursing home on the freeway when on an impulse he swung the wheel right and made the last-minute turn.
He told the receptionist he wanted to see his father. She was flustered for a moment and he realized she thought he didn’t know his father was dead and didn’t want to be the one to tell him. He felt sorry to have upset her. She was only a young girl. ‘I mean his – his body,’ he stammered. It was the first time that his father was not him any more but a body.
Following a nurse down the corridor, where the only sound was the squeak of her rubber-soled shoes on the shiny floor, William comforted himself with the thought that at least his father had died peacefully in his sleep. Maybe it would help him overcome his fear, a visual image of death as something peaceful, a release from pain and confusion, some kind of blessing. The nurse stopped at the door of his father’s room and opened it for him. ‘Just take the sheet off and stay as long as you like. Put the sheet back when you leave, would you?’ She spoke softly, her face full of sympathy. William stepped inside and heard the door click shut behind him.
