I used to remember things, like people’s birthdays or what time my favorite television shows came on. I was a big fan of The Virginian, used to watch it with my brothers or…were they my neighborhood friends? Hard to discern at this point.
I have trouble keeping up with what day it is or how long into the day we are and when the sun’s well hidden behind the clouds…it’s all just a big blur. Twice this week I’ve forgotten to put on clothes before one of the nurses came to get me for breakfast and just this morning I walked out of my room in nothing but my underwear. I remember those moments because they’re so embarrassing even this sickness can’t wash them away. I’m seventy four years old, that hasn’t left me yet, in fact each year that ticks by is a reminder of how far from the life I can remember I really am.
There are seven stages to dementia and they tell me I’m somewhere between three and four, with my brain creeping towards a total wipeout. A clean slate. Like a computer cache constantly clearing itself over and over, passwords and logins lost in a fog. I keep a calendar and a journal but those aren’t any help if I forget to write in them and the nurses, as kind as they are, well sometimes they just can’t be bothered to fill in the gaps. Working in a place like this you have to be numb to old people and the way their brains go bad, if you get too attached I think it could really mess with you.
I’ve just now returned to my room after dinner, I don’t remember what it was I ate, probably spaghetti and meatballs or at least that’s what they like to call it down there in the dining hall. Somebody, I don’t know who, was playing old songs on the lobby piano, some of them rang a bell but most of them all sounded brand new. For about an hour I just sat there trying to figure out what the songs were or where I’d heard them previously. I guess tonight I’m feeling the same I feel every night — alone. It’s hard to make friends in a place like this. Where everyone up and down the halls has lost a piece of the puzzle. Our minds are scrambled, we’ve got that in common, but you can never really connect to anybody, not once you stop remembering faces. I’m getting to the point where I have to remind myself where I am and, thanks to my family, I’ve got a tool to keep me on par. I wake up early, before anybody else, and I look at my wall…
A stenciled tree, black and neatly painted on, each limb holds a photograph; a memory of the major steps of my life. It’s something my family did when I was first sent here after they sold my house and car and all of the other things I’ve been deemed unable to operate or own. I didn’t have a hand in any of it, don’t suppose I would’ve been much help. But I have my tree, and each morning I go to its branches, one by one, and put myself as deep into the memory as I can.
There’s Margaret and I on our wedding day, and Lucia’s fifth birthday, and so on and so on. My wife took so many pictures and some of them, when I really dig in, when I can put names to the faces, they make me feel young again. Just now I’m looking at myself and Margaret vacationing in Europe, Lucia must be about six years old. All smiles. We were all so happy then and if I try hard enough, I can’t help but feel some of that happiness now. Happiness is the key, you know, without it you’re vulnerable to all sorts of treacherous agony both from this world…and others. Those others that exist alongside of what we know as reality, and believe me they do exist whether people want to believe it or not. We’ve grown farther from them, sure, but it’s all a distraction and…they…they know that, too. I look at a picture of Lucia when she eight years old, that was about the time she moved in with us fully. We’d taken care of her most days before then but occasionally her mother would step in and take her away for a week or two. Her father, my son Derek, he was smart enough to let us raise Lucia and truth be told he wasn’t really there much at all. I think he saw his daughter as an inconvenience. Something that just always got in the way.
Derek had the mind of a genius but he chose to apply it to things that cause harm to others and eventually himself. Drug users can’t be pushers, monkeys can’t sell bananas. Lucia is basically our daughter, well, my daughter now and she gave Margaret and I a chance to make things right. Sure, I’ve gotten older and any number of doctors will tell you that every day I get farther and farther away from understanding the road left ahead of me let alone remember the road behind me, but I remember enough to know that I was never a good dad to Derek. I never listened and many times when he’d come to our house and ask us for money or gas or food, I wouldn’t even tell him I loved him before he left. Maybe it’s my fault he went so far off the deep end.
Anyway, I couldn’t save Derek…couldn’t save Margaret either but Lucia, I always kept her under my protection.
Derek passed away when he was young, too young, and Lucia was just a child. Hard to tell a child that their daddy has died. I spared her the tangibles — that he was found unconscious in some trailer park out by the freeway entrance. That he had recently demanded I pay his rent, rent that he was months behind on. I refused then, and I’d probably refuse now but before he left, after he realized his anger wasn’t working and whatever high he was on started to fade he looked at me and I saw my son.
“I love you, dad,” he said to me and even though I hated him for the man he became and the trauma he put the rest of us through I still found it within my gut to respond “I love you too.” That was the last thing I ever said to him.
Margaret had gone to the store and spoken to him earlier that day, they spoke most days and most days she felt like maybe he’d come back to us whole. That the pieces missing would find each other and fix our son. They never did and the biggest piece he left behind is Lucia, who asked more and more questions and who I learned to always be honest with.
Another picture — the front entrance of this place, a reminder of where I am. I guess I’ve been here a long time, but time doesn’t matter much to me anymore. I read somewhere that the problem we have as a society is we think to often on time. The past, the things we cannot change or the future, the things we are afraid of. We’re never really thinking about right now and as I’ve lost more and more of my memory, I’ve been forced to face the present moment. Again I look at the picture, at this place, not my final resting place, no I’ve already picked that out, but the buildings, rooms…the walls I will remember last.
Lucia checked me in after she got a call that I was wandering around the lake where Margaret and I had our first date. It was two in the morning and I slipped out through a back door when the nurse on duty went to the bathroom. Still don’t remember how I got there, but the way the wind felt on my face — it was the same way it felt so many years before, and I could just about feel Margaret’s hand in mine, gripping me tightly, holding me like she and I were the only two people in this universe. That was the kind of thing we did in those days before cell phones and the internet, we’d take walks and sometimes we’d talk about the mysteries of this world and sometimes we’d say nothing at all. Margaret’s hands were soft then, they never calloused as mine did framing houses and working concrete most of my life, and she never got so old that her face wrinkled the way mine does now. No, she left us before she started to age and in my mind’s eye, when it’s not blinded by disease, I still see her smile, her eyes…her youth. It’s funny how I can remember the way she looked in the moonlight, but not what I had for dinner this evening.
Bad thunderstorm outside tonight and now that I really look at it through my window I see that it’s the same sort of storm that was raging the night Margaret went missing. Never really seen a storm like that around here since then, though, I guess you could say I might not remember one if I had. Maybe that night is when my mind began to fail me, hard to tell, but now as I sit in my recliner in this tiny cell of a room that strange evening has come back to me in vivid detail. Even as I turn on my television, the images move through my mind, every beating moment, right there, I can grasp them. The way fear took hold of me, the way my heart clenched up with anxiety like you wouldn’t believe…the way it felt when I couldn’t save Margaret.
I never told the police the truth because I never thought they’d really believe me, and sure they thought maybe I’d done something to her, that I knew more than I was letting on, but the real truth is that Margaret disappeared days before I reported her missing. Not because I couldn’t handle it or I had hidden myself in some sort of depression, no…she was seen around town, our neighbors interacted with her but it wasn’t her. The woman who was masquerading around my home in the days leading up to that call. That woman who tucked Lucia in to bed when I had to work late. That wasn’t my wife. That was an imposter — a poltergeist. The kind of haunting you see in a movie or like that thing Lucia’s husband Chris is always talking about where cartoons look too human? Uncanny valley I think is what he calls it…that’s what it felt like when I looked into the eyes of that clone. Like it was something that shouldn’t be.
Lighting stalls overhead now the way it did before and with each flash I’m back in a moment. Margaret standing center of the hallway in our home. Slouched over in a sickly way…she didn’t look human. I could feel that whatever was standing out in front of me was here to hurt me and I feared for Margaret.
I wondered where she must be if this thing had taken her place.
I turn the volume up on my television to drown out some of the rain, some memories are better locked behind this dementia, whatever it is. I don’t like thinking about what happened to Margaret because it’s one of those unsolved mystery sort of things that keeps you up at night and even me with what little brain I have left, I still have to fight that memory off. You see, there’s sadness, and then there’s such a thing as the kind of sadness that brings with it a weight. Adds years to your face. You know when a president leaves office, they got grey hairs and shit — this is that sort of weight. It’s the heaviness of a parent having to bury their child and the knowledge of something…else…out there, beyond what most people call this dimension.
I got a glimpse of it once, I got a taste of what hell exists for humanity should we stay on this course. I had them block all of the news channels on my television, I advocated for the entire facility to remove them, but they wouldn’t. God damn fools. Every time you turn on the news, you hear a story that wakes you up to just how awful people can be. Rarely do you get news about some new discovery that will change mankind in a positive way; it’s always doom and gloom. There’s always an agenda, somebody is writing the prompts and with so many shootings and climate change and hate, you’d be smart of think the devil himself were the hands writing it.
The world is under a dome of sadness, it has been forced onto us but we have the option to turn it off. We can create our own reality and, to the best of my limited ability, that’s what I did the years leading up to my residence here. I found a lighthouse in the storm of modern society in the eyes of Lucia. I should have folded, I should have collapsed into despair, but I didn’t, because I knew that I had to be there for my Lucia. Sadness is the really bitch, because sadness is the method by which they travel. It’s what attracts them, those little bastards that come crawling through the air vents and cracks in the walls when you’ve gotten so sad you can’t get out of bed. They can smell it, they can smell it from that hellish world they come from and they don’t stop until they’ve taken something back there with them. I’m an old man now but when I first saw them I was much younger, stronger and I still lost my sweet Margaret to them. That’s what really happened — they took her away.
In a flash I can see THEM, hundreds of them connected to make the Margaret Muppet Woman standing out before me. You know how those puppets always stack one on the other to make what appears to be a person? A disguise? That’s what they did…and I can see them now, falling apart, stacked bodies disbanding, leaping out onto the walls and ceiling like spiders…but they’re little monsters, beady orange eyes behind those sharp beaks. Fur ruffling like feathers, hands with thumbs, but definitely not human. Able to camouflage as someone they’ve taken, that’s how I see it, once they’ve got you, they can become you.
Maybe it’s their world, that once they pull you into it, cover you in that dark soot of anguish, they can mirror you here in our world. I don’t know for sure, but those little bastards go after the most important, the backbone of the family, and then they fool you into thinking they are them and before you know it…they’re coming for you, too. I don’t know where they come from, I’ve seen it, but I don’t understand it. I don’t know why they choose the people they do — but I know that the sadder we got, the harder life became, the more broken our family bonds, the more of them that appeared.
Like those little Gremlins in that old cartoon, fooling around with the motors and warplanes, these bastards were familiar. I knew them, instinctually, like my ancestors were pricking at the hairs on the back of my neck, whispering whatever name they had for them. I tried to draw them, but I’m no artist, and Lucia, well, she was young enough to forget them. Therapists convinced her that Margaret died in some accident, that whatever she thought she saw was made up. Part of her big imagination and for a long time, I played along with them to protect her, because I knew if I let on that we were both sharing some weird hallucination they might take her from me and I couldn’t have that. Ever.