Flowers for Algernon

October 14-I wake up in the morning and don’t know where I am or what I’m doing here, and then I see her beside me and I remember. She senses when something is happening to me, and she moves quietly around the apartment, making breakfast, cleaning up the place, or going out and leaving me to myself, without any questions.

We went to a concert this evening, but I got bored and we left in the middle. Can’t seem to pay much attention any more. I went because I know I used to like Stravinsky but somehow I no longer have the patience for it.

The only bad thing about having Alice here with me is that now I feel I should fight this thing. I want to stop time, freeze myself at this level and never let go of her.

October 17 Why can’t I remember? Pve got to try to 205 resist this slackness. Alice tells me I lie in bed for days and don’t seem to know who or where I am. Then it all comes back and I recognize her and remember what’s happening. Fugues of amnesia. Symptoms of second childhood-what do they call it?-senility? I can watch it coming on. All so cruelly logical, the result of speeding up all the processes of the mind. I learned so much so fast, and now my mind is deteriorating rapidly. What if I won’t let it happen? What if I fight it? Think of those people at Warren, the empty smiles, the blank expressions, everyone laughing at them. Little Charlie Gordon staring at me through the window-waiting. Please, not that again.

October 18-I’m forgetting things I learned recently. It seems to be following the classic pattern, the last things learned are first things forgotten. Or is that the pattern? Better look it up again.

Reread my paper on the Algernon-Gordon Effect and even though I know I wrote it, I keep feeling it was written by someone else. Most of it I don’t even understand.

But why am I so irritable? Especially when Alice is so good to me? She keeps the place neat and clean, always putting my things away and washing dishes and scrubbing floors. I shouldn’t have shouted at her the way I did this morning because it made her cry, and I didn’t want that to happen. But she shouldn’t have picked up the broken records and the music and the book and put them all neatly into a box. That made me furious. I don’t want anyone to touch any of those things. I want to see them pile up. I want them to remind me of what I’m leaving. behind. I kicked the box and scattered the stuff all over the floor and told her to leave them just where they were. Foolish. No reason for it. I guess I got sore because I knew she thought it was silly to keep those things, and she didn’t tell me she thought it was silly. She just pretended it was perfectly normal. She’s humoring me. And when I saw that box I remembered the boy at Warren and the lousy lamp he made and the way we were all humoring him, pretending he had done something wonderful when he hadn’t.

That was what she was doing to me, and I couldn’t stand it.

When she went to the bedroom and cried I felt bad about it and I told her it was all my fault. I don’t deserve someone as good as her. Why can’t I control myself just enough to keep on loving her? Just enough.

October 19-Motor activity impaired. I keep tripping and dropping things. At first I didn’t think it was me. I thought she was changing things around. The wastebasket was in my way, and so were the chairs, and I thought she had moved them.

Now I realize my coordination is bad. I have to move slowly to get things right. And it’s increasingly difficult to type. Why do I keep blaming Alice? And why doesn’t she argue? That irritates me even more because I see the pity in her face.

~Iy only pleasure now is the TV set. I spend most of the day watching the quiz programs, th) old movies, the soap operas, and even the kiddie shows and cartoons. And then I can’t bring myself to turn it off. Late at night there are the old movies, the horror pictures, the late show, and the late-late show, and even the little sermon before the channel signs off for the night, and the “StarSpangled Banner” with the flag waving in the background, and finally the channel test pattern that stares back at me through the little square window with its unclosing eye.... Why am I always looking at life through a window? And after it’s all over I’m sick with myself because there is so little time left for me to read and write and think, and because I should know better than to drug my mind with this dishonest stuff that’s aimed at the child in me. Especially me, because the child in me is reclaiming my mind. I know all this, but when Alice tells me I shouldn’t waste my time, I get angry and tell her to leave me alone.