A change of gravity

"Yeah," Hilliard said, 'well, so whaddaya think? Myself I think I'd have to say the two of us by working hard've paved the road to Hell damned well."

TWENTY-FOUR

"I think the bastard actually liked explaining it all to me," Merrion told Hilliard after dinner in the dim dark-panelled bar at Grey Hills.

"Listening to him… I sat there and he talked and I heard what he was saying and it was like I'd stepped outside myself, and what I wanted to do more'n anything in the whole world was stand up and whack him one.

It was the same feeling that I had the day I went back with my mother to see the specialist, the "geriatricist" sounds like a circus act, guy who rides a bike naked onna high-wire, something. Her regular doctor sent us to him, see if he could figure out what was going on with her.

"Have him run a few tests." Duck when they say "a few tests"; they're warmin' up to tell you you're doomed.

"The idea was to find out why she was forgetting things, who she was or where she lived; why she mattered in the world and who she mattered to.

Naturally my dear brother Chris's nowhere to be seen; that's a family tradition. I can tell when the fat's inna fire: Chris's long-gone an' hard to find.

"She went outdoors one cold morning, late November, in her nightgown, barefoot. Went for a stroll down the street. Eight-thirty or so. Lots of people must've seen her, going off to work in their cars, coats on and the heaters going, barefoot lady in her nightgown walking down the street, but nobody stopped and tried to help her, or called the cops, their car-phone. They didn't care if something happened to her, nobody they knew; just ignored her and drove right on by. She got about a mile before someone who knew her from the bakery stopped her car and hollered at her, snapped her out of it, thank God; drove her home and called me. She'd only done it that once, but even once gets you worried. Next time she might not be that lucky, wander off and freeze to death, do something else and get hurt.

"And both of us already… it wasn't like we didn't have an inkling what was going on. We didn't know the details but we had a pretty good idea. She was gradually losing her buttons. We'd seen it happen to other people. Her mother, Rose; then they called it "hardening of the arteries." "Her brain isn't getting enough blood she's getting old, and simple, too." Before wed heard of senile dementia and Alzheimer's.

When she was lucid, which she was most of the time she had a pretty good idea that when she wasn't quite right, that was probably the explanation.

"But we didn't want to have that pretty good idea, you know? We didn't like having it. And her doctor, Paul Marsh, dead himself now: the reason that he sent us to this baby-faced specialist -looked like he was about fourteen was because he didn't want it to be what we all knew it was. He was the family doctor. He'd been treating her for years,

"taking care of all of you," was what he said. She was as much a friend of his as a patient. He didn't want her to have what she had, and for damned sure he didn't want to be the one to tell her. This new guy would do that. Wouldn't bother him; he didn't know Polly from a load of goats. We were seeing him to spare Paul. I suppose it was in a good cause.

"So they did those few tests they had in mind to do on her, and that took quite a while. "A few tests" is quite a lot, you find, when you start taking them. And then they told us to go home until they could "just get all the results back here, take a look at them so we can see what they mean." Give us a few more days or so to make-believe and hope that what we knew was going on was not. Then they had us back again and this time he sees us in his nice office, about sixteen diplomas on his wall and the kind of smooth white face you'd expect to see on your executioner. The vet we took our last dog to, have him put to sleep: he had a kinder face, I swear he at least pretended he felt sorry it hadda be done. But this assassin sits us down and quite pleasantly informs my mother and me that one by one, a few here, few there, she's begun to lose her marbles. And there's nothing he can do.

"For us this was kind of upsetting news, you know? But for him it was all in a day's work, like he's conducting an experiment. "Okay, let's see how these two take it when I hand the sentence down, tell them there's no hope." I suppose in his line of work, has to do this every day, gets to be routine. But my God, it hurts like hell when you're the people it's bein' done to then it's not routine at all.

"I got the same feeling listening to Pooler. I think he was making it sound worsen it is. I realize this isn't gonna be fun, something we'll really enjoy, fucking romp in a meadow or something, but he sure didn't go out of his way to make it sound better.