Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [83]
Time passes. Now the lilacs are in bloom outside the window, and he can see them, or parts of them. Despite this, he thinks it’s October. Yet the core of him is still there. He sits in his armchair, trying to figure things out. One sofa cushion looks much like another unless you have something to go by. He watches the sunlight gleaming on the hardwood floor; his best guess is it’s a river. In extreme situations you have to use your wits.
“I’m here,” I say, kissing his dry cheek. He hasn’t gone bald, not in the least. He has silvery-white hair, like an egret frozen.
He peers at me, out of the left sides of his eyes, which are the ones that work.
“You seem to have become very old all of a sudden,” he says.
As far as we can tell he’s missing the last four or five years, and several blocks of time before that as well. He’s disappointed in me: not because of anything I’ve done, but because of what I’ve failed to do. I’ve failed to remain young. If I could have managed that I could have saved him; then he too could have remained as he was.
I wish I could think of something to amuse him. I’ve tried recordings of bird songs, but he doesn’t like them: they remind him that there’s something he once knew, but can’t remember. Stories are no good, not even short ones, because by the time you get to the second page he’s forgotten the beginning. Where are we without our plots?
Music is better; it takes place drop by drop.
My mother doesn’t know what to do, and so she rearranges: cups and plates, documents, bureau drawers. Right now she’s outside, yanking weeds out of the garden in a bewildered frenzy. Dirt and couch grass fly through the air: that at least will get done! There’s a wind; her hair is wild, blown up around her head like feathers.
I’ve told her I can’t stay long. “You can’t?” she said. “But we could have tea, I could light a fire …”
“Not today,” I said firmly.
He can see her out there, more or less, and he wants her to come back in. He doesn’t like it that she’s on the other side of the glass. If he lets her slip away, out of his sight, who knows where she might go? She might vanish forever.
I hold his good hand. “She’ll come in soon,” I say; but soon could be a year.
“I want to go home,” he says. I know there’s no point telling him that home is where he now is, because he means something else. He means the way he was before.
“Where are we now?” I say.
He gives me a crafty look: am I trying to trip him up? “In a forest,” he says. “We need to get back.”
“We’re all right here,” I say.
He considers. “Not much to eat.”
“We brought the right supplies,” I say.
He is reassured. “But there’s not enough wood.” He’s anxious about this; he says it every day. His feet are cold, he says.
“We can get more wood,” I say. “We can cut it.”
He’s not so sure. “I never thought this would happen,” he says. He doesn’t mean the stroke, because he doesn’t know he’s had one. He means getting lost.
“We know what to do,” I say. “Anyway, we’ll be fine.”
“We’ll be fine,” he says, but he sounds dubious. He doesn’t trust me, and he is right.
The Boys at the Lab
The boys at the Lab were not boys. They were young men, but not extremely young: a couple of them were already thinning at the temples. They must have been in their twenties. If you were speaking of one of them – one at a time – you would never have called him a boy. Yet, in a group, they were boys. They were “The Boys,” with quotation marks around them, standing all together on the dock, some with their shirts off. They had tans: the sunlight was thinner then, the ozone layer was thicker, but still they had tans.
The boys had muscles, and also grins, of a sort that you don’t see any more on men’s faces. Faces like theirs date from the wartime; they went with pipes, and with moustaches.