The Adjustment League (22 page)

He sits there, waiting. Thinking it's not a bad idea to prolong his apprehension, I review the elements of the perception-skewing interventions recommended by the author of
More Than Memory.
An empathy-enhancing exercise, he called it, a way for caregivers and other loved ones to experience, safely and briefly, something of the totality of Alzheimer's. Max is beyond empathy, of course, but parallel experience falls within the realm of what I can arrange.

Blurred and narrowed vision—a “dimming tunnel, startled by strange sights.” Check. Loss of motor control, dimming of peripheral sensations. Check. Auditory instability—abrupt bangs and crashes, weird whisperings—making noise of normal sounds. Check.

No way to mimic the sheer number and randomness of perceptual distortions actually comprising dementia, all exacerbated by diminishing powers of focus and attention, not to mention the cognitive inability to transform the incoming chaos into an even rudimentary order—but a start.
A window, however unsatisfactory, into the other's lived experience
. Check.

I look around the condo's main room. Dining alcove, where we're sitting. Kitchen. Small square living room with a window south—the CN tower off to the right.

§

“The Ship” the nickname people gave this condo, even before it was fully built, based on the artist's renderings mounted on the construction hoardings. The company probably encouraged the identification on its website. It looked most like a ship before it was finished—a hull with many of its glass plates missing and a skeletal, scaffold-draped superstructure, dotted inside and out with tiny workers—rising out of a messy, half-invisible berth in dry dock, poised on the crest of a concrete wave set to plunge down Bayview through the ripple of the 401. Its likeness to a ship is pretty rudimentary: slim, longer than it is wide or high, with a built-up section near the “bow” descending in stages to the “stern.” Still, most times I pass it, driving up Bayview or along Sheppard in either direction, I think, obediently,
ship
. Not a cruise ship or even a freighter, but some kind of stubby glass tug. It's more imaginative and better executed, at least, than its older condo cousins clustered a little east across from the Bayview Village entrance. Those are ghastly. Bland, almost instantly shabby towers surmounted by pseudo-art-deco topknots that look like forty-foot-high hood ornaments—cold, bleak monuments to expensively senseless living. Still, they answered a question about fifteen years ago, when, for a couple of years, my roamings took me around North York. At that time, nearing the century's end, Bayview Village was a mall visibly in decline. Empty shops vacated by high-end tenants, Book Sales with remaindered paperpacks stacked on trestle tables spilling out of temporarily rented spaces, black holes like missing teeth between basic outlets like Timothy's Coffee and Shoppers. Shrinking numbers of people wandering around looking for bargains or having a donut on a bench beside an unwatered tree. The whole Village flapping like scrap plastic after the carnival's departed. And then—it happened within eighteen months—a turnaround began. Chapters moved in to peg down one end, construction started on a giant Loblaws at the other. A big new LCBO. Glittery women's fashion and shoe boutiques. A brightly-lit Asian restaurant. An Oliver and Bonaccini. And on the streets nearby—where the condos would go—bungalows dotted with Real Estate faces, and fenced off when sold, at prices that quickly encouraged their neighbours to follow suit. It was like watching a documentary film on urban development and the wages of inside knowledge. For a time, the decay and renovation happened simultaneously, proving that not everyone was seeing the same future, or at the same rate. Small retailers, made skittish by ignorance, saw a mall on its last legs making spasmodic efforts to revive itself, and continued to desert it, helpfully depressing prices for the speculators. But the sureness with which the largest bettors acted made the truth clear. Somebody—some people—knew things. Money in envelopes—or e-transfers by then—had changed hands. The fix was in.

Inside, Max's unit hews to basic condo design. A little lighter and airier thanks to more generous windows—the glass of the hull. And with a good view, since it's two floors below the penthouse. Otherwise, the standard cube of living room with kitchen and dining alcove extension. And the strange cramped sensation produced by eliminating corridors. No wasted space of halls at all—just a door in one wall to the bathroom, a door in the other to the bedroom. You realize the function of hallways when they're gone. Without them, you're always more or less stationary. Doing everything in one spot, right beside anyone else who occupies it.

At least it made it easy to check that we were alone. As did the sparse furnishings—which seem almost mandatory in a modern condo, totally unlike those richly cluttered and dusty New York apartments in old movies. Nowadays, any clutter is electronics or fashion-related. No overfilled bookcases or dishevelled stacks of magazines. No linen-draped tables crammed with tiered miscellanies of inherited antiques and knickknacks. From where I sit, I can see every object in the room, which, with its monochromes of glass (clear and frosted), polished metal, white pressed-wood and black leather, could serve as the developer's display unit or a contemporary, high-end hotel room awaiting its first guest. Even the two table accents—the jewellery, mostly silver, in a glass dish on the coffee table; and the artificial ikebana on the dining table where we sit, purple and yellow synthetic blooms spiked in a shallow black porcelain bowl—qualify as standard grace notes by a competent home stager.

The bathroom and bedroom show more signs of life. The former from the sheer number of tubes and bottles and jars of personal hygiene and beauty products, and the number of fluffy white towels hanging and stacked—small as the space is, it seems the warmest, most inviting room in the residence. The bedroom has outfits in dry-cleaning cellophane lying on the bed, and, behind a sliding door, a closet stuffed with clothing and footwear options. Multiple reflections in ceiling and wall mirrors make the space seem antic, if not as lived-in as the bathroom.

A minute's tour assures me Max is alone. There's nowhere for anyone to hide. Not unless they can fold up to gnome size and slide into the cupboards above the microwave, or curl inside the washer-dryer wombs stacked in the closet beside the entrance.

§

I push Play and thumb the volume wheel to midway. Max starts reading after twenty seconds or so, first moving his head about in that bird-like way, trying to find a crack of less-smeary goggle plastic, then, when he's got it, keeping his head at that tilt, like a robin listening for a worm under the earth, probably keeping his other eye closed to tighten the focus on the sliver of relative clarity. A smart guy. Quick on the uptake, and resourceful in a pinch.

“To Waken an Old Lady

Old ape… Old
age
… is…

a fright of small”

He waited a second before the second line, making sure he had it, then delivered it in a rush. Already realizing, after the mistake in the first line, that a quick run at the line gives him better odds against the blurs and the noise. He makes another mistake—an interesting one, like the one he caught, reading “flight” as “fright”—but I don't stop him. I thumb the volume to three-quarters. He squints against it, holding the focus-tilt he's found, but delivers the next line inaudibly, moving his lips but unable to hear himself over the din in his ears. I stop the player, and lift a headphone clear.

“What? You said one read-through. One read-through to the end.” He says this without altering his head-tilt, which is away from me, as if he's objecting to a shape near the bottom of the door I came in.

“One
correct
read-through is what I said. Mangling doesn't count.”
Disable yourself with these artificial impairments and try to perform adequately an everyday task, reading an address or telephone number, for example, or completing some simple arithmetic.
“Here's what we'll do. One tap on your arm will mean you've got a word wrong. Go back a couple of words and try again. Two taps will mean I can't hear you. Repeat it louder.”

“Whatever.”

And we get through it that way, with Max shouting to get over the screaming in his head, or when it falls away to mumbling before he can adjust. And shouting when he has to repeat something he thinks he got right the first time. And, increasingly, shouting whenever I touch his arm, for whatever reason. The effect is that of William Carlos Williams, the old man in straw hat and glasses on the cover of the book, becoming enraged as he declaims his quiet and beautiful poem at a complacent audience, screaming it finally into their stupidly nodding faces.

“To Waken an Old… TO WAKEN AN OLD LADY”

Old age is

a flight of small

cheering… chirping… CHEEPING BIRDS

skimming

bare bees… TREES

alone… ABOVE… a snow grave… A SNOW GLAZE.

Draining and flailing… GAINING AND FAILING!

they are buffets

by a park…

THEY ARE BUFF-E-
TED

BY A
DARK
WIND—

But what?… WHAT?

On hard beef… ON HARSH WEED-
STALKS

the shock… FLOCK has rested,

the snow… THE SNOW

is coored… CORED… COWERED…
COVERED! WITH! BROKEN!

SEED HUSKS

and the wind… AND! THE!
WIND!
PEPPERED! PEEPERED!
TEMPERED!

BY A SHAWL!… KRILL!… SHILL!…

BY!!! A!!! SHRILL!!!

PIP!!!!—ING!!!! OF!!!! PLEN!!!!—TY!!!!!!!
”

§

A knock at the door. I answer it, Max throwing his gear off behind me. A guy in a Nickelback shirt, braces on his teeth though he's in his thirties.

“Whoa, listen man, I know it's only nine o'clock, but…” Peeking around me. “Is everything all right?”

“Absolutely.” I lean out and down, lower my voice. “A poetry lover. Got a little carried away. Sorry about that. Won't happen again.”

“Whoa. Sure. Thanks, man.” With a couple of slow blinks he shrugs off. A new kind of screaming from his occasional neighbour.

Max fixing his hair where the headphones flattened it, his fingertips hovering, air sculpting until a uniform soft hemisphere meets them. He's balder than I realized. It takes skilful sessions with a blow dryer and light gel to train outposts of fluff into that golden halo. Rings around his eyes left by the tight-fitting goggles are slowly fading. He adjusts his round glasses, which still sit slightly askew, one wire arm bent a little. Despite his dishevelment, he looks defiant. Or perhaps just businesslike and alert. A little impatient. Anxious to get on with it.

“I hope that's brought us back to where we left it Friday night,” he says. “You keep returning us to the starting line, underlining it with heavier and heavier strokes. You can make my life inconvenient, even miserable—all right, you've made that clear repeatedly. Why do you think I agreed to your so-called ‘exercise'? There was no need to display your box cutter. I'm quite aware—very aware—of what you're capable of doing to people. I get it. Okay? And it's quite beside the point when we both know you've got something I need and that I'll have to do what you ask—if I can—to get it back. You know what I want. But we're still waiting to hear what you want. And when, and how, we make the exchange.”

His chatter like his haircut: skilful and elaborate, to cover up bald spots
. But what if the bald spot's in me, not him? What makes him most nervous—makes him fear something he'll have no idea how to deal with—is the possibility that I don't want anything rational. Nothing a normal person might want, nothing that can be reasonably accommodated. Or accommodated at all.
A friend of Judy's
.

Vivian comes in. She closes the door behind her and sets down Loblaws bags. With a brief, incurious glance at the two of us—which must take in the headphones, goggles, oven mitts, paperback, CD player, and the Shoppers bag it all came in—she goes into the kitchen and starts unpacking the bags. Max doesn't watch her and they don't exchange a word. Not for the first time, I'm struck by the aura of telepathy that cellphones give people, especially couples, who use them habitually. Appearing and disappearing at prearranged times, performing scripted actions, speaking or not speaking on cue—all from a sequence of short calls and texts, invisible to the one not in the loop. It must be one of the technology's major attractions.

“I want,” I say—and realize I have no way to finish the sentence I've started. What do I want? And how can I be asking that now, at this point, at this table? Have I forgotten what I planned, or was there no plan to forget? Either possibility is frightening.
Dangerous to begin an adjustment late in a window
. Yes, Stone, yes.

What I want. To acquaint Max with pain,
bring him the world
—which I've done only in minor ways, hassles he'd put in the category of nuisances, maybe even the “price of doing business.” And beyond that—way beyond, it should've been—
take him down
.
Them
down. Off the street, out of business. Bringing in the cops would do both, and right away: close down Christmas Music and bring them all the world they can stand. World without end, amen.

Vivian crosses the room and enters the bathroom. I half-expect her to emerge with a weapon, a gun she keeps behind her face creams. Part of me hopes she does. But there's a click as she locks the door, and almost right away, the sound of the water running in the shower.

Max is right. I'm a guy at a starting line. Stamping his feet to show he's there.

Show who?

Rapidly, with a lucidity more frightening than any nightmare, a voice inside me ticks off a checklist of mental disintegration.
Catnapping two, three hours a night. Merging of sleep and waking, neither complete. Disruptive, obsessive images. Focus slipping, forgetting. Judgement—reeling. You're a day or two, a few at most, from total collapse. From Stone.