Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [193]
“Excuse me,” said Solange, fleeing into the waiting room.
“Now I’d like you to take this paper in your right hand, fold it in half, and put it on the floor.”
“No. I’ve had enough. Now you tell me something. How did I do in your childish little test?”
“Your mother would be proud.”
“So you’re not going to put me in a strait-jacket?”
“No. But I want you to see a neurologist. There are some tests that should be run.”
“Brain tests?”
“We’ve got to eliminate certain possibilities. You could be suffering from no more than fatigue. Or benign forgetfulness, not uncommon in a man your age.”
“Or a brain tumour?”
“Let’s please not jump to unpleasant conclusions. Do you live alone, Mr. Panofsky?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Just asking.”
Early the next afternoon I bluffed my way into the McGill library and looked it up in a reference book:
When Alzheimer (1907) described the disease which now bears his name, he considered it an atypical form of dementia … Family histories illustrating either dominant or recessive inheritance have been reported … Alzheimer’s disease is indistinguishable histiopathologically from senile dementia, and Sjogren et al. (1952) found a higher than expected incidence of senile dementia in Alzheimer families …
Oh, my God. Kate. Saul. Michael. What have I done, Miriam?
Pathology
The brain shows extreme atrophy. Coronal sectioning confirms the uniform gyral atrophy, widening sulci, reduction in white matter and ventricular dilatation …
Yeah yeah yeah.
Clinical features
The first sign is mild memory loss. A housewife mislays her sewing, burns the toast, and forgets one or two items while shopping. A professional man or woman forgets appointments or disconcertingly hesitates in the middle of a lecture, unable to find the appropriate word. No more serious failure may be observed for a year or longer because of the slow progress of the disease.…
“Morty, it’s me. Sorry to call you at home. Have you got a minute?”
“Yeah, sure. Just let me turn down the TV.”
“It’s Alzheimer’s, isn’t it?”
“We’re not sure.”
“Morty, we’ve known each other for a hundred years. Don’t fuck with me.”
“Okay. It’s a possibility. The thing is, your mother died of —”
“Never mind my mother. She had hardly any marbles to begin with. What about my children?”
“The odds are long. Honestly.”
“But shorter than for those with no family history. Shit. Shit. Shit. Saul reads about any disease in the Times and he’s sure he’s got it.”
“We’ve scheduled the CAT scan and MRI for tomorrow morning. I’m going to come and pick you up at eight.”
“I’ve got to arrange my affairs, Morty. How long have I got?”
“If it’s Alzheimer’s, and that’s still a big if, the memory lapses will come and go, but I’d say you’ve got a year before …”
“I’m totally gaga?”
“Let’s not assume anything before we know for sure. Hey, I’m not doing anything tonight. Would you like me to come over?”
“No. But thanks anyway.”
14
I’ve already mentioned “Margolis,” but there is an even more chilling story of Boogie’s that I read while I was in prison. “Seligman,” written in Paris in the early fifties, wasn’t published in The New American Review until months after Boogie’s disappearance. Like all his stories it went through endless drafts before it was distilled to less than three thousand words. It’s a story about a bunch of affluent New York lawyers, Harold Seligman among them, who have taken to relieving the tedium of their lives by playing practical jokes on one another, constantly upping the ante. But there is a rule to the game. In order for a jest to pass muster, it has to pinpoint and attack a flaw in the dupe’s character — in Seligman’s case, say his uxorious relationship with his libidinous wife. One morning, Boris Frankel, the criminal lawyer who is a member of the group, entices Seligman, just for a gag, to join a police-station line-up in a case of alleged burglary and attempted rape. To the astonishment of the bunch, watching behind a one-way mirror, the victim, a still traumatized woman, identifies Seligman as the true culprit. The lawyers instantly fear that