And Go Like This

by John Crowley

  The problem was that there was nothing you could do with them. It used to be that they could be taken to specially designated spots miles away on designated Toxic Waste Days, when they would be received and bound up in fifty-gallon drums and done somehow away with; now that no longer happened. At the town dump—now the Recycling Center—certain Toxic Wastes could be brought in and taken off the possessors’ hands on the first Saturday of alternate months, and oil paint was one of these. Harry tried to remember when these alternate first Saturdays were, and on one he did bring in a certain number of very old and rusting cans, but he was ashamed to bring in all he had at once, and then the months went by, and so on. Even more intractable as a problem was the latex paint. The aged guardian of the Recycling Center told him that latex paint could not be recycled, thrown away, dumped, drummed, landfilled, or disposed of in any way; and he tugged the bill of his cap with finality.

  What then was Harry to do with it?

  Well, he could open the cans, the old fellow averred, and let the remaining paint just dry out; wholly and completely dried-out paint cans could be tossed into the compactor. But Harry’s cans were almost all nearly full, or half full anyway; they would take months, years, to dry out, their tops off, in the damp basement. He could take one or two up to the attic, and let them sit there and dry out, and each year on some given day throw those two out, and open a couple more. Mila grew impatient, then caustic: the problem was unsolved, and Harry’s brain had ground to a halt over it, and he could see in his wife’s expression whenever he considered it aloud in her presence that she had had it with him and with it, and with his inability to make a move regarding it. He gave it more thought. And on the hot night of the thirtieth of August it did what the pamphlets and the PSAs said it would. It most likely began, the fire inspectors later said, with a leaky can of thinner, which rested on a pile of old newspaper; and then the gallon jug of shellac next to it, which went off like a Molotov cocktail—Harry would come to learn that shellac was actually not toxic at all and could have just been thrown away; and then the ten or fifteen years of paint, can after can, all the Sidewalk Café, Fringed Gentian, Mocha Frappé, Periwinkle, Chinese Jade, Leather Leaf, Aquarium, Comet, White Asparagus, Desert Rose, Creme Fraiche, Raspberry Sundae, Italian Straw, Cotton Field, Cape Sunset, heated and popping and finally exploding all at once in a blast that blew out the upstairs windows and brought all the neighbors out.

  Among the vast inventory of what was destroyed—months later Harry continued to remember things that he no longer possessed—was Mila’s home office and all its Rolodexes and bulletin boards and files, which Harry had intended to look into that very night to see if he could find the name of the hotel where Mila was staying, which she had mentioned to him but which he couldn’t remember. (His recent brain researches suggested that in a brain like Harry’s, terms for similar things might be gathered in clusters rather than each being firmly and purposefully attached to Harry’s reason for needing to recall it, so that a call of “Mila’s hotel in Ottawa” brought forth Holiday Inn and Ramada and Hilton and Travelodge and Best Western and Marriott all in a slurry. It was chemical, apparently.) Harry looking at the vastation of his house from the window of his car (for a long time he was unable to get out) had no idea how to reach her and tell her. Not that anything was going to get any better or worse by the time she got back, or until she figured out how to reach him after learning their phone was dead (it was quite dead); but Harry had a premonition that those couple of days of ignorance on her part and inanition on his were going to matter, and the fact that Harry had forgotten it was the York Ramada outside Ottawa that she had been staying in, and that he hadn’t been able figure out how to find this out, was going to be unforgivable. He ascribed her decision to divorce him (made, or at least voiced, the very night she returned) to this. You asshole, she screamed. It was way past midnight. Her scream was like a nail in the head. He had always wondered how loud it could get, whether it would really keep on rising limitlessly with the gravity of the offense; it couldn’t really, but it was penetrating. Oh you stupid stupid fuck. This is it, this is it, this is really really it.

  “It wasn’t that,” Hope said, her eyes still on the table, watching her finger draw spirals in the fine breadcrumbs scattered there. “She told me she just couldn’t go on making all your decisions as well as all her own. She’s done it all your life together and she just wasn’t going to anymore. She said the risk was just too great. She said she’d have done this even without the fire.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Harry. But he remembered, just then, that he had, under pressure of her rage, suggested that after all they both knew the paint was there and she too could have tried to solve the problem; and it was then that her voice started to rise to unearthly volume. “You know, your mother sometimes suffers from Chanticleer syndrome.”

  “She suffers from what?”

  “Chanticleer syndrome. Chanticleer is a rooster, the rooster in Chaucer. He’s convinced that his crowing is what causes the sun to rise every morning. And of course he’s got good evidence, because every morning after he does his crowing the sun does come up.”

  “And?”

  Your mother, Harry thought. Ascription used by a parent in speaking with gravitas to a child about the other parent. He ought to make a note, for his book. His burned book. “People with the syndrome believe they have to keep prodding and reminding everybody and pressing decisions on them. And when people do do the things, then they, I mean the sufferers from the syndrome, they think it wouldn’t have happened without their prompting. But they might be wrong.”

  “Aha.”

  “Yes. Chanticleer syndrome sufferers can exaggerate their own importance. Or they can experience anxiety. Or anger at all the responsibility they have to bear.”

  “Where did you learn about this?”

  “I made it up,” Harry said. “Or better, I named it. It’s real.”

  Hope knew; he knew she knew. She rested her chin on her hand and regarded him as though he needed study. “Well, actually, I don’t understand what kept you together anyway so long,” she said with some bitterness. “I really don’t.”

  “Love,” Harry said.

  “Oh yeah right,” said Hope.

  “Pheromones,” said Harry.

  “Dad,” said Hope, a warning. “So what are you going to do? Like split the insurance?”

  “It seems so. And sell the land. It’s almost as valuable as the house. It got to be, over time.” He lowered his eyes. It was like talking about someone who had died: it was evident Hope felt so, though it might be someone she had ceased to have a lot of contact with in recent years.

  “So you’ll get money for the stuff.”

  “Well. Yes. The things that can be replaced.” Harry wouldn’t name those that couldn’t be; they included the family archive of photographs and letters, his side’s at least, going back a hundred years and more. Who’s this? Hope used to ask him, poring over dim sepia snapshots of a man in uniform, a woman in a fox fur-piece. Sometimes Harry could remember. And of course in the blackened and floorless second floor there was, or rather was not, the only manuscript of his book, almost done, a revision and expansion of his modest best-seller, A Rhetoric for Everybody. For nobody now.

  “Listen, I’ve got to go to work,” Hope said.

  “Right, sure.” Hope was a medical technician in a tall and ramifying medical center in the city. “You can stay. Of course. I’ve got the extra bedroom.”

  “Where we stayed before. Mila and I.”

  “No, that’s Muriel’s room now. The little one.”

  “Okay. Fine, that’s fine.”

  “It’s small.”

  “It’s fine. Small is beautiful. I’m small.”

  “Okay.”

  Harry had to pull his car out of the driveway beside the house so she could remove hers, which he had driven up behind (thei
r cars would go on being in each other’s way for the length of time he lived there), and then when she had left he sat on the steps of her house amid a scatter of yellow ginkgo leaves remembering many things.

  When he and Mila had met she was eighteen and he was twenty-five. She was on the run from immurement in middle-class family ambitions and duties, or thought she was; a lot of people were then. He picked her up on St. Mark’s Place, took her to his old-law apartment; they danced together in that tiny space to “Down Along the Cove,” and got together into his bed. Pheromones he actually knew nothing about then, but—whatever destiny each of them was out to avoid—they opted without a question for the one that had suddenly appeared before them, and for months, for a year, they hardly left that bed; it was possible in those days to live with minimum of hustle, and they needed nothing much. When they seemed momentarily to cool she decided to go on, get back to the path away that she’d first chosen. Went West. Harry stayed. He was still there when she circled back a half-dozen years later. Like an extinguished candlewick relighting by mere proximity to a lit one, their present selves caught fire from their past ones. But they didn’t understand how differently they had each unfolded meantime.

  How she had, anyway. Whatever it had been that had driven her from the standard life choices, she was ready for them now; she turned out to be endlessly resourceful and quick in the making of them; maybe she always had been, and maybe Harry had always been as forgetful and indecisive as in their shared life he would prove to be, only there had never been much to be decisive about earlier, so it wasn’t apparent. It was true that Mila had made the decisions in their life together, but he considered himself actually the more thoughtful of the two, and even sometimes believed the decisions he would eventually have come to would have been better, all things considered, than her sudden ones, if she’d only given them time to evolve.

  He should have married someone else, he thought, immobile on Hope’s stoop. Someone as incapable as himself, or maybe more so. How tender he would have been to such faults, exasperated, sure, and blowing up in harmless gales sometimes, marveling at her incompetencies, she laughing at herself as though she had every right to. How many times, a thousand times, he’d forgive her, let go by her witless, her what, her fertile no flaccid no fecal no flocked feckle feckless her feckless fecklessness, because he loved her, because she was at heart not responsible really, no worse than anybody, because at bottom it didn’t really matter at all. Rarely mattered that much. Very rarely mattered a whole whole lot.

  Harry moved in that week. Hope took him and his stuff up to the room under the eaves that looked out onto the garden and the backyards beyond. Harry stood gazing at the bed she’d made up for him, a single bed narrow as a boy’s and clothed with blankets and coverlets she had probably brought with her from the house when she went away to school—a cotton Indian blanket with faint images of rodeo cowboys and sheriff’s stars; an old quilt made of strips taken from even older men’s suits, herringbone and pinstripe. The white sheet folded down. Muriel had put a brown bear on the pillow; it bore a grave and yet welcoming expression. The longing Harry felt to lie down there, to wrap himself in those covers, the long-lost delight in safety and solitude he knew he’d find there, was almost painful.

  He did a lot around the house to earn his keep. He and Mila had both been self-employed for years, and Harry found it impossible to imagine how a single mom with an eight-hour workday ever found time for any household business at all. He cleaned the house after she’d rushed out, ran the errands with the list that he would always conscientiously make lying on the passenger’s seat where he could check it often (and even then speaking out loud to himself to keep his duties straight—“first to the store, and then to there to get that, and then there and there,” he would say as pictures of the various destinations rose in his mind). And he walked Muriel to school and home again.

  “Here we are home,” Muriel echoed. She had the most amazing facility for mimicking the words and attitudes of grownups, shrugging elaborately to express ignorance or indifference, groaning and smacking her brow to show exasperation. It was a little spooky. Harry found graham crackers and milk for her.

  “We had a sad day,” she said.

  “Oh yes.”

  “Noemi’s nanny died.”

  “She died?”

  “Yes. Noemi said. She told everybody.”

  “That is sad.”

  Muriel sighed deeply, and tenderly bent her head to one side, eyebrows lifted. Then she returned to her snack. “I hope I never die.”

  “I hope that too,” Harry said.

  “It would be terrible.”

  “Yes,” Harry said. “Terrible.”

  “Grampa,” she said. “Are you still sad because your house burned down?”

  “I’m less sad,” Harry said, and she gave him a toothy grin in payment.

  “Is it cause you go to the doctor?”

  “No,” said Harry. “It’s just time.”

  Muriel nodded solemnly, ah how well we all know.

  It was Hope who got Harry together with Dr. Macilhenny. She came home one day when Harry had been living with her for a month and told him about a Lunch Hour Lecture she’d gone to at the medical center. A neuropsychologist talked about missed signs of early onset dementia like Alzheimer’s, or head injuries that show no physical trauma but are still effectively TBI. The doc had said that very often the signs that nurses or PCPs are looking for have to do with memory loss. But there can be earlier or subtler signs than that. Harry listened and nodded, wondering if he ought to know what TBI was, or PCPs, and how much further he could follow the conversation without knowing. The signs were often a new hesitation about decision-making, a loss of incentive, a willingness or need to be cued continuously about what ought to be done next. Executive Function, Hope said. That’s the thing that goes. And during the question period she’d asked if it was possible that a person’s executive function could deteriorate even if there wasn’t TBI or dementia.

  TBI, Harry thought: Traumatic Brain Injury.

  The lecturer said that he thought that was possible. Many learning disabilities, including ADD, were now seen as executive function disorders, diagnosable through neuropsychological assessment. A PCP might be able to refer if he perceived problems in this area, even without other symptoms.

  PCP: Primary Care Physician. Harry now understood what Hope was going to say next, but he was not going to let on that he knew. If she couldn’t bring herself to make a suggestion, a cue, then Harry was going to let the whole conversation slide on past. Hope said she thought Harry ought to go see this guy, if he could get a referral, and just. Well, just go see. And Harry said maybe he would. It was four in the afternoon of that day, she’d been on the early shift, and the day was November gray. Now it was December, and the weather had turned clear and cold, the sun bright.

  “The doctor is curing you though,” Muriel said.

  “Well, I’m not really sick.”

  Muriel eyed him sidelong. “Very mistuvious,” she said.

  Dr. Macilhenny had turned out to be younger than Harry, though he was getting used to that, most of his doctors and lawyers and the last two presidents as well, younger than himself by years. A lean sleek man with a button-down shirt and tie but Calvin Klein black jeans and sneakers. They chatted for a while, went over the insurance situation. Then Dr. Macilhenny, after carefully describing what he was going to do, administered a series of tests that would, he said, give him a baseline as well as possibly identify any problem areas. It took a long time. Harry took the Category test, the Tactual Performance test, the Seashore Rhythm test, the Finger Tapping test, and Trail Making. Only after the doctor decided that there was nothing to indicate dementia was Harry told the names of these tests, which he would remember ever after. He took the Stroop test: in this one, he was shown words on a computer; they were all color names, and the letters were
colored too, but not colored the color of the name: “blue” was colored red, “green” was colored yellow. Harry had to say what color the word was, rather than reading the color name. It was hard. He took the Wisconsin Card Sorting test, in which he sorted cards that showed a trio of simple items, a blue star, a black square, a black circle, without being told what criteria he should use, only if he was right or wrong.

  A card with a blue star. A card with a black star. Harry sorted the stars together. Right. He went on sorting the cards that had similar shapes. Then Dr. Macilhenny said Wrong.

  “Why?”

  Dr. Macilhenny said nothing. Harry tried again. Two squares and a circle. He sorted it into the similar-shapes pile. Wrong again. Harry tried again, guessing that something had changed. He sorted a card of three blue things with another card of three different blue things. Right.

  “You’re changing the rules.”

  Dr. Macilhenny said nothing. Harry went on sorting. He tried to count how many cards he went through before Dr. Macilhenny changed the rules, but he couldn’t do that and sort too. Sometimes he forgot what criteria he had been using, or which new one he had chosen. Dr. Macilhenny started chatting with him about nothing, making it all the harder, and Harry tried to shut out his sweet and pleasant voice. He got bored and irritated. Dr. Macilhenny kept score with a pencil in his left hand. When Harry was all done, he was cagey about what it had all meant; next meeting they could go over the results. Harry went back to Hope’s house rattled and weary.

  There was no discernible pathology in Harry’s brain, no organicity that Dr. Macilhenny had been able to discover. Harry went back to the doctor’s office, which was in the same medical complex where Hope worked at other times of day, to listen to him say so. And yet taken all together it was easy to see, he said, that Harry Watroba’s Executive Function was compromised in measurable ways.