The Wilderness

8

The fox-haired woman runs her finger over a diagram of the brain.

“Many things are happening here,” she says. “Do you see these tangles? These are fibres that twist together and choke the neurons.”

“And what is a neuron?” he asks, adjusting his glasses lower on the nose.

“A cell. It transmits messages to the next neuron, and the next. There are billions of them. Without neurons we can't think, Jake.”

“Very well. Go on.”

“These shadows here are called plaques, they're another common sign of Alzheimer's. They are a kind of rash that develops between the neurons. Between them, the tangles and the plaques, it becomes very hard for the neurons to transmit any messages at all. It's like trying to kick a ball through a bramble hedge.”

“I see.” He folds his hands together, thankful that somebody is taking the trouble to explain. “And is this my brain?”

“No, this is a diagram. From a textbook.” She shows the cover of the book to demonstrate. “We don't know what your brain looks like, we can't know, but we can predict that it will be beginning to look like this.”

“I see. Well then.”

She stands and pours him a glass of water from a jug on the shelf behind her. He watches carefully.

“My mother used only ever to rely on the things she could count,” he tells her. “She always said we were made up of cells, just so many of them, we are just a lot of them. But we look like so much more. But we in fact aren't.”

He smiles and the fox-haired woman nods.

“But you could count the cells, if you really needed to, and you would see then that they were — that they were—”

He loses the thought, pinches his fingers in frustration.

“Your mother had a point.” The woman hands him the glass of water. “On the other hand, cells don't explain everything.”

She pulls the chair out and sits. “So, Jake, how are you feeling?”

“Neuron,” he says. “What did you say a neuron was?”

She rubs her eye then folds her arms across her chest. “Jake, much as I think your curiosity is wonderful, I do find it's better not to talk about these things. It's confusing, and a little frightening. It's better to address the practical issues.”

“I'm not frightened.”

“Well, that's good. That's good.”

“Is this a different room?” he asks.

She pushes the water closer to him (as if this, this water, will solve everything) and he nods his gratitude.

“You mean, to the one we're usually in?”

“Yes.”

“It's the same room. Exactly the same. We'll always be in this room, Jake. If we move — and I don't expect we will — but if we do, I promise to tell you, okay?”

He smiles. “That's good of you.” He goes back to the picture. On the adjacent page is a different brain, larger and whiter. “This is a normal one I take it.”

Sitting again, she makes brief eye contact with him and pauses before she speaks. “That's right. You can see how it has no plaques or tangles, and it's bigger. The Alzheimer's brain is atrophied.” She looks at him and raises her brows a little as if to see if he has understood. He wants to understand, so he nods. “Shrunk,” she says. “See how it's shrunk?”

He leans on his elbows, running his hands through his hair and feeling himself become agitated, desperately wishing to stay afloat, to say something intelligent. “Why has it shrunk?” he asks.

“Because the tissue begins to wear away.”

“And what was it you said before? About brambles?”

She touches his arm. “I think we should stop there, don't you?”

She has a look about her that he has seen a million times recently: pity, and then relief that this problem is not hers.

“Do we have to do that test today, with the words and the dates?”

“We did it when you first came in.”

She puts the flat of her hand on a pile of papers and he sees some awkward writing, some childish drawings. Sweat dusts his forehead, a bead of anger, a ball of frustration at the forgetting. He leans over the picture of the brain, and something dawns on him.

“These shadows,” he points at the dark, shrunken diagram, “remind me of the markings put on trees before they're cut down.”

Quail Woods, he thinks, was cut down. Leaving an emptiness. Branches gone, patterns gone.

She looks up to observe, then goes back to her writing. “Yes, I suppose they do.”

“It makes me think the brain is marked up when it is old and no longer any use. I'm no more than a tree. I've been marked up. I've been selected.” Resting back against the chair he draws his palms together, firmly now, as if, for once, he means it. “The brain is finite, this is what you mean to say. I understand exactly what you mean to say.”

For the first time in his life he feels the hand of God on him, a surge of religion which abates again like a chill wind. She gathers her fox hair into a band and casts him a concerned look.

“That's the bottom line I suppose, yes.”

Any moment now, he supposes, she will write something about his wayward digression into logic. The patient is not supposed to be logical; it is much easier for everybody if the patient behaves and tries not to understand. He feels like letting himself loose in the room, having an adolescent outburst, turning the shelves of books on end. Then going to the next room, and doing it again. Fucking books! And again. He tries to make out what she is writing, but he cannot. Odd, the way words sometimes make no sense anymore. Odd the way he wants to gather them up like sheep and stop them escaping him. He goes to drink his water, but the glass is already empty.

They come into the kitchen and the woman, Ellie, Eleanor, walks straight to the kettle, lifts the lid, takes tea bags out, and throws them in the bin.

“Tea bags in the pot, not the kettle,” she says kindly.

She goes to the door, bends to take the post from the floor, and hands him a letter. “Another one from America.”

“From Joy.”

Her hand goes to her lower back. “From Joy.”

She puts a coffee in front of him and leaves the room. Inside the envelope is a picture of Joy as requested, though he can't recall requesting it. He reads the date on the letter, July 1994. Strange date, implausible, looks too heavy at the back end. The picture shows her sitting somewhere, in front of a large window, looking through the things, the magnifying glasses that make distant birds close, or that one uses to spy. In fact not much of her is visible at all, what with the magnifiers and the shadows and the glare of the window behind.

He understands why she hides from the camera; she doesn't want to age in front of him. They must always be young for each other. Where the handwriting loses curves and gains angles, where the dates creep up, where the black ink becomes blue biro and the photographs go from black-and-white to colour, they are both silently embarrassed and apologetic at having let time invade.

Her letter is long. It has a plot, something about a trip to Phoenix and the lack of grass there, and the question she poses: How can people live without grass? He doesn't know the answer. Maybe he doesn't know about people anymore. But he could live without grass, he thinks in a minute of panic, he could live without anything if he could have his thoughts back.

A swarm of cells, a mass of dying strangled cells. Bramble hedges, unwholesome growth that chokes. His mind sees a garden being strangled by weeds which climb up and over the walls, suffocate the flowers, split the paving, cover the house, reach their wayward tendrils through windows and find the people sleeping and pick at the locks of their heart, unpick them until they are just dismantled machines. He could live without grass. Without growth and green. Having never been to Phoenix he knows what it is like, a huge orange desert stabilised by the sun, it never ages or changes, its dryness is trustworthy, its earth is as hard as stone, nothing unexpected comes. He suddenly yearns for this place he has never seen. His thumb traces to the end of the letter and rests on the signature: All my love, Joy.

When he takes the letter to the study, rummaging to find the secret place he has always stored Joy's letters, he finds a box file that contains all the literature he made for his group: LIPAC: Lincolnshire Israel Public Affairs Committee. Yes, he remembers the name now he reads it — it seems grand and over-important, and he smiles.

There are leaflets with a logo of a rising sun on the front and a schedule of meetings inside, and notebooks of minutes from meetings, and a list of names and signatures with his own at the top, and letters to the government lobbying for pressure to be put on Palestine to fulfil Israel's demands, which he reads now with a faltering understanding and a disbelief that these words could have been typed by his own hands.

What was the point of it all again? If he had a map he would not even know where to begin to look for these countries. The inspiration these leaflets and letters had once provoked in him is felt so dimly now, and with immense shame he cannot quantify but which suggests to him inspiration cannot be worth its consequences — it is better overall to keep one's head down and say and think nothing.

He misses Joy, suddenly. Then he simply misses everything. He puts the literature and the letter back into the box file, puts his coat on, calls the dog, and leaves the house.

After an hour of walking he realises he has no idea where he is going, except that with all the talk of Phoenix he wants to travel. Yes, travel! But where to? The dog trots silently at his side, and every now and again he bends to look at her collar and rediscover her name. Lucky. Of course. Stupid of him to forget. So then, if he wants to travel he will go to one of those travel offices and tell them, and they will find somewhere for him to go, so long as dogs are allowed.

He finds himself now on a main road with the rushing cars tipping his balance. It doesn't feel safe; he wraps his hand around the letters to Helen in his pocket and finds his mind tripping from one thing to another. Henry, the felt strawberry stitched into Alice's blue dress when she was a child, Helen's feet smashing a bottle, the royal-blue nylon trousers he used to wear, the smell of Makassar oil. As a child, sitting in the back garden of The Sun Rises with Sara, his father, Eleanor, Rook, some others now faceless, singing while Sara played a little old violin and Rook a harmonica. There were always money spiders, he suddenly remembers, in the long grass, up and down their arms, in their hair. What a strange warm memory to come from nowhere!

The main road comes to a roundabout and he recognises where he is. From here he may as well go on to Lincoln since there will be travel offices there, he is sure he has seen them in the past. But where to travel to, he wonders. Maybe he doesn't want somebody to decide for him, maybe he will choose a place now and tell them that's what he wants, and take the cash from his wallet and seal the deal in a moment. And then go, tonight. If dogs are allowed.

What about Rome? It sounds closer than Phoenix; by all accounts he doesn't recall any grass there, but then maybe he hasn't been. He imagines Luigi Lucheni setting out with his sharpened shoe file on his search for somebody to murder. Hot streets and high walls. Amphora pots and crucibles built into the walls; water running through tufa stone. Architecture he has studied and used to know in depth, because one had to, because they were told everything derived from it. Architrave, pediment, pole thing, porch.

The light seems to be failing and he ought to press on, so he walks faster. The dog begins to lag behind. On the horizon the sunset is long and red; he loves this, these elongated sunsets, he loves how flat they make the land. He sees the cathedral perched on its hill in the distance, a sight he hasn't seen for months or years. He used to come here sometimes with Helen to the pictures to see Quatermass and the Pit, and The Hustler, and that film, that film whose name he doesn't remember but which had no beginning or end. You could walk in at any time and begin the story and it would make sense — and they did this, they watched it several times from different starting points.

The idea of the eternal story delighted Helen and perturbed him. If a thing went on forever, how could one ever know its centre point, where its weight settled? It seemed to him to not be a story at all. It seems to him now far too resonant of the way he is beginning to think, the motifs that repeat in his mind like subliminal messages, someone hypnotising or doping him. Birds flying, the missing e. That little key chain; Star of David. Suddenly, now, the word plutonium from nowhere: plutonium; what a funny word to spring to mind, and an image (that surely doesn't go with it?) of a blue peg with an elastic band wrapped around it. And now Joy's yellow dress. Cherry blossom adrift and homeless across the air, almost invisible against grey sky.

He turns to see a bus approaching from behind and waves it down. He lays some coins in front of the driver, takes the ticket, and finds a seat. The driver calls him back to say he has forgotten his change. (Forgotten more than my change, he wants to say, but takes the money and sits again.) As the bus makes its way through the town he struggles to recognise the streets he is in. Somewhere around here was some office space he built in the mid-1960s, since knocked down. Somewhere a community centre, since replaced.

He belongs to a period of architectural amnesia, he thinks, holding the dog's head to his knee to steady her. Most of what he built has disappeared as if it never existed. The prison building is the exception, he still counts that as a success and spares a thought for Henry cooped inside there, until the thought becomes envious: to be inside there too, to be safe, to be with his son. To be there playing chess with his son, to know which side you are on. His breath forms on the window.

Out of the bus, he and the dog begin searching the quiet streets. No travel offices to be seen, and his legs are beginning to ache now that they have had a chance to rest. Finally, as he is beginning to fret that he is lost, he finds one of the travel places. The front is all window with pictures of beaches and mountains. He tries the door but it won't open. With his head to the glass he sees that there is nobody inside, and when he looks around him, up and down the street, the story is the same, everything closed. It is quite dark.

I want to go to Rome, he thinks sulkily. He and the dog scour each street hoping to find something open. He starts to feel hungry and the hunger addles his thoughts. What was it his mother wanted him to do with that money? It always felt like a test: Did she want him to spend it and rid the family once and for all of its European past, or did she want him to spend it on something that would prolong that past?

And then there is the letter from Eleanor which he realises now he had quite forgotten about — just as he forgets about Eleanor he supposes. And he shouldn't do this; Eleanor is all he has. Did he drop it at his mother's house? It got somewhat lost in all the drama of the money. It had seemed so heavy with portent there in his pocket while he tried to play Debussy, and then it slipped from the picture. And then there are the letters he clutches now from Helen's lover, which he knows (and is happy for the absolute certainty of the knowledge) must not be opened. And Joy's letters, strange, intoxicating Joy, a surge of yellow in his mind. He is hungry and thirsty and can't think anymore.

The streets become a jail; he is lost. One street just looks like another, and he finds himself climbing a hill steeper than his legs can manage, so that he sits halfway up catching his breath, stroking the poor dog's head and wondering at what point he became an old man.

Hours must be passing. At the top he buys an ice cream just before the man packs up for the day and drives off. The cathedral is at his feet, the square empty but for a couple treading their way across with a packet of crisps, and darkness is falling fast. There is nothing he can do to get home, or get to Rome, there is nothing he can do for himself or for his dog to make this better. Once he would have been able to solve any problem or navigate through any city, and now he doesn't know which way is home, or how far it might be — only that he is exhausted.

Another hour of walking around and he finds a bus; he came on a bus, so he must be able to go on a bus. Another half an hour and he is somewhere unfamiliar. A few questions to passersby to find out where he is, a blast of panic in the middle of a narrow street in a narrow town on what feels like the edge of nowhere, or worse still the edge of everywhere, as though another step will scatter him far and wide beyond himself. A slow, aching trail through the small town, past the fish-and-chip shop, blinded by a memory of Helen by the fire: monkey goes into space, Egypt, Israel. Freckles on her eyelids that she could never see. The static crackle of her petticoat as she took it off, little green flashes in the dark that made her gasp — my petticoat's flashing! Maybe he could get some chips, but he has lost the confidence even to do this, wondering what he would say to the person behind the counter. Maybe he will cry. Here. Sit here and cry?

Another few minutes of moving forward, because moving forward is the instinct, and now there is a police place. He goes inside.

“I'm lost,” he says. “I need to get home.”

Some activity and showing driving licences and identity, establishing addresses, raised brows — he must have walked some fifteen miles before he got on the first bus, is he okay? Yes, but hungry, and the dog is thirsty. Both are given water, and then put into a car and driven across a now deeply dark flat landscape. Shame descends. He has done a bad thing. The police are involved.

Gradually the motion of the car relaxes him, his legs relax, his head is heavy on the back of the seat, his hand a hot weight on the dog's head. So grateful for the police car that is taking him home, so very thankful. Though the dog sleeps soundly next to him on the seat, he is awake for the journey. The police drop them off outside the house, coming to the door to make sure this is where he lives, and to explain to the woman what has happened. She nods at the door in her dressing gown while he shuffles past to sit at the kitchen table; from here he has a view of her back. Wide back, short hair coerced into a band. He fidgets. Already the last few hours are hazy. If she asks, what will he say?

When the police go she sits heavily opposite him with her head propped on her hand, just looking at him — in anger? In dismay?

“You wrote me a love letter once,” he says.

“I did.”

“I don't know what I did with it.”

“You burnt it. I found a corner of it in your grate.”

She stands and wraps her dressing gown around her. “If you want to escape from me save yourself the effort. Any time you ask, I'll go.”

As she leaves the kitchen he sees bottles floating on the sea. Hundreds of bottles with messages inside. Today, or sometime this week, he went to see the fox-haired woman and talked about cells. In his brain are countless cells — countless, but not infinite. To say infinite would be reckless. Inside each cell a little piece of him is packed, and every time a cell dies a piece of him dies. His past is just an electric impulse. Static flashes on a petticoat. Gradually he is being scattered and lost — hundreds of unread messages floating out across the sea.