Stone Arabia (15 page)

I needed to get some sleep. Downward I plunged—just watch me, I won’t stop.

I could file for bankruptcy. The ruptured bank option.
Chapter 7
, I should do it. But I wasn’t behind yet, I managed it all somehow. I tried to comfort myself with options, tried to put these things into perspective. I redirected my thoughts, I focused on breathing in and out. To find my way to some rest. I gave up and took a blue oval tablet from a bottle containing a quick-acting nonbenzodiazepine hypnotic, a nonaddictive sleep aid. What we used to call sleeping pills but can’t anymore because it sounds too tragic.

Jay and I watched an early Peter Sellers movie. He had stopped with the James Mason movies just when I was trying to find a way to tell him how sick I was getting of watching the James Mason movies. Evidently James Mason made hundreds of movies, and they were not all
Lolita.
The idea of seeing each one of them might have worked as a stupid conceit in a novel, or as a bit of film-school-teacher shtick, but in realty, in praxis, such obsessions grow increasingly tedious. The experience does not increase in meaning by its devotion to thematic repetition, or mere accumulation. The stubborn concentration does not make your appreciation of James Mason deeper. Instead it increases one’s intolerance and irritation. You grow to hate all James Mason movies, even the good ones.

Jay must have sensed my growing ambivalence, and today he switched to Peter Sellers without making any mention of or reference to the change. We watched
The Ladykillers,
which Jay found uproariously funny. We ate sushi as we watched. We drank Sapporo beer and the combination made our mouths taste funny. Later, we avoided kissing.

He still brought me Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light
_™
gifts. This obsession wasn’t negotiable. They stacked up in my garage.

Also April 20

When Jay got up to use the bathroom, I checked my email. I knew from Ada’s blog posts that she was moving forward with her documentary about Nik. I had been enthused and then began ignoring and nearly discouraging it for some reason.

hey ma,

guess what? i’m thinking I would come out and film in the next month. I know that is sooner than i said, but I have some investors to get me started—i will explain when i see you. dad will get me a ticket with his miles. Of course i would stay with you if i could, but you are so far away from everything. i will stay at Mike’s house by Runyon Canyon—you know i want to film some of the movie there. I haven’t talked to nik about the details of this yet. Did you get a chance to mention it to him and see what he thinks? do you mind? I would need to interview you, too, is that okay?

I’m totally excited!

xoxoxoxo

a.

I clicked on
MARK AS UNREAD
and watched it become bold new mail again. I would answer it in the morning. I would have to talk to Nik. Nik didn’t use email. He had my old computer and printer, but he didn’t subscribe to the internet. He was stubborn this way. Last Christmas, Ada set up a MySpace page for Nik. One of Nik’s signature Fakes songs played as soon as the page opened, “Sugar Caves.” The details of the page were a continuation of the Chronicles fiction, or at least
Ada’s approximation of it. Nik seemed touched, but he quickly pointed out the inaccuracies. (He was a stickler for precision in his fictions. No continuity issues, no sloppiness. He would later hand her a typed list of errata to add as a sidebar to the page.)

“You could, you know, extend your whole project onto the internet. You know, it would be perfect for that, it would make it totally multidimensional, update it. You could even put up MP3s of all the music, reach a new audience. I could help you, you know.”

Nik stared at her laptop. He read aloud, “‘Thirty-plus solo records, with the additional recordings of the two main bands plus the side bands.’” He chuckled.

“I think it looks great,” I said. But actually it was weird seeing Nik in the real world like this—the real world of the internet. I felt anxious about it, too exposed somehow.

Ada smiled and clicked on the next song, the Demonics’ “Somersault.”

“You would have to do a separate Demonics page, a Fakes page, a Nik Worth page, even pages for some of the side projects like the Pearl Poets and Lozenge. And then link them all together,” Nik said. Lozenge was Nik’s short-lived one-man electro-boogie band.

“Exactly!” Ada said. “I could do that if you want.”

Nik smiled at her. “Naw, not for me.”

“Why?”

“Don’t look so sad. It is just that I’m a paper-and-paste guy.”

“A glitter-and-glue guy,” I said.

“Yeah, that too.”

I wasn’t sure if Nik would want to have a documentary made
about him. But who knows, maybe he would jump at it. He had made lots of films and videos over the years. (First with our mother’s Super 8 camera. Then a Betamovie camcorder I bought him for Christmas 1985. More recently a Sony MiniDV for his birthday.) He made music videos and a couple of clips where he interviewed himself. Ada could use all of that if she wanted. I didn’t even know if she knew all the stuff that Nik had made over the years. I didn’t even know it all.

Ada emailed me to tell me Nik had agreed to be interviewed. He agreed to open his archives to her. Whatever she wanted.

It was eighty-one degrees and the midday sun seared me through the thin skin of my clothing. Despite my dark glasses, the blinding shine made phantom sunspots appear whenever I blinked. I helped her into the passenger seat and the oppressively stale and baked air of my car.

“Give it a minute.” The car was on, the AC was on high, but it still only felt like the air pushed up to you and sat there, hot and thick. I knew that somewhere there were new cars that could do this air transition much better. But my mother didn’t seem to notice. She sat and looked straight ahead. I drove out of the driveway of her apartment complex and toward the highway. We were on our way to Ralphs supermarket. Leslie, the home aide assigned to my mother, went shopping for her. But sometimes I went, and I took her with me. It was something to do, an activity. Usually we went to Wal-Mart, other times we went to Ralphs.

I pushed the cart. I had a small list. It felt nice and cool as we went down the aisle, and we were in no rush. She picked out cookies. And then some Pop-Tarts.

“Ma, you know you can’t have too many sweets. You know, diabetes.” She looked at me and sighed. She put the Pop-Tarts back, shoving them on the wrong shelf.

When I was a kid, I used to do exactly the same thing when I went shopping with my mother. I would try to slip sweets into our basket. We had so much food in our cart that sometimes it would work, and she wouldn’t notice even at the checkout. She wouldn’t notice until she unpacked it at home. I liked going with her to the supermarket, I used to ride underneath the basket of the shopping cart, sitting with legs straight out in front of me on the little shelf just above the wheels. She would push it for maybe an aisle, and then the wheels would catch and the cart would resist her push. She would tell me to get off and walk, it was too heavy. I would wander off and lose track of her. I didn’t keep her in sight, because I had a system for finding her. I would walk along the end aisle and look up each lane until I found her. Once in a while I would get all the way to the end of the store and not see her. I would become slightly frantic, move quickly from aisle to aisle, and then get very frantic when I still couldn’t find her. I would run to a checkout girl and get my mother paged.

I was reminded of this childhood panic when I spent too long staring at a box of cereal. I was reading labels, trying to see what she could eat within her diabetes guidelines. I looked up and she was gone. I left the cart and went to the end of the aisle. I looked in each direction—I looked for her, in her powder-blue tracksuit and her short gray hair. I didn’t see her. I moved along, looking up each lane. Still I didn’t see her. I felt myself panicking. I knew that one of the symptoms of dementia is “wandering.” She could wander out into the street and disappear. It happened to old people all the time. They injure themselves, they get lost, they get hit by cars. I started to tear
up as I hurried past all the lanes again. She wasn’t that bad yet, she wasn’t totally disoriented yet.

I saw her.

She was at the front of the store, on the other side of the checkout lines. She was standing with a police officer. I ran over, waving my arms at them. I saw that she had handcuffs on. My mother was in handcuffs.

“What is going on?” I said, still tearful, putting my arm around my mother. She looked at me, totally confused.

“Are you her daughter?” said the police officer, who I now saw was simply a security guard.

“Yes, I am. What is going on?”

“Your mother was shoplifting. When a clerk tried to stop her, she resisted him and shouted ethnic slurs,” he said.

“My mother doesn’t use ethnic slurs. And she doesn’t shoplift. She probably just forgot to pay. She’s old, you know?”

The guard undid the handcuffs. He claimed he just wanted to scare her a little. By handcuffing her in front of the entire store? She had put containers of yogurt in her pockets. And two candy bars up her sleeves. My mother had read the manager’s identification pin and called him a dumb wop. She had no explanation for any of this behavior. They didn’t press charges. I was told I could no longer bring my mother to the store. On the ride home, she muttered.

“What were you thinking?” I said, mostly rhetorically. She waved her hand at me and scowled.

“I’ve done it many times at that store,” she said. “He always tries to bust me.” I looked at her. Lately she had been experiencing déjà vu a lot. But, as I had discovered when I
looked it up on SymptomSolve.com, what she actually was experiencing was called déjà vécu. Things are falsely familiar. You read the new experience of the moment as if it were a memory you were reliving. And you have no awareness of the falseness of the feeling. Fake memory. When I entered the term in the search engine, it was indexed to several kinds of dementia, epilepsy, and other prefrontal cortex diseases. But this behavior wasn’t merely the déjà vécu. “What do you mean, he ‘busts’ you?”

“He shouldn’t always try and shame me.”

“No, he really shouldn’t, I’m sorry about that.”

“It doesn’t work, because I don’t care what people think. Certainly not some mick cop,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say. My whole life, I never heard my mother utter a single ethnic or racial epithet or even a stereotype. Mick? Wop? Where were these words coming from? You would think my mother spent her childhood as a Bowery Boy and not as the daughter of a Reseda shopgirl.

“They have been after me for a while. I know. You don’t know what they have been up to. You don’t know because you don’t pay attention.”

Where in her brain was this coming from? The doctor wasn’t sure of the nature of her dementia, or how fast it would progress. He just called it likely Alzheimer’s. He couldn’t tell me what I could expect. Anything was typical. Anything was possible. At first I didn’t think it really mattered—they were all equally untreatable. What difference did it make if it was this or that part of the frontal lobe? But I wasn’t quite prepared for this latest sign of deterioration. It wasn’t just forgetting the
past or repeating the same thing over and over. It was actually remixing and changing the wiring. It was creating new things, it was changing her in real ways. She wasn’t just losing her social inhibitions, nothing as benign as that. She was starting to get paranoid, and it made her someone else, someone a little mean. It just didn’t seem fair.

That evening I spent hours on the internet reading about frontal temporal dementia. This led to cortical and subcortical dementias. And vascular dementias and the silent stroke events that can cause them, which also led me to TIDs, transient ischemic attacks or ministrokes. Then I read about cerebral infarctions.
Infarct
sounded like the perfect name for what I had just witnessed. And finding the perfect name seemed to mean I had accomplished something. But then I grew worried—had we missed a stroke event? Should I have taken her to the hospital? After twenty-four hours the neurological effects were irreversible. But then I read on and realized her symptoms didn’t really match a stroke or TID or cerebral infarct after all, despite the apt-sounding name. I ended up back where I started, at the symptoms for frontal temporal dementia. I was going in circles. Pages were highlighted on the search list with little numbers indicating what time I had looked at that page. 1:35. 1:58. Did my ending back where I started mean something? I clicked and printed, and none of it made me feel better or worse. It just made me feel tired.

In the coming weeks, my mother would seem almost her old self. Fatigue made her symptoms worse. But there was no doubt that things progressed in one direction. Her doctor suggested we move her to nearby (to me) assisted living (that also accepted
Medi-Cal). I would have to fill out the paperwork and get her on the waiting list.

Sometimes I printed things out to read later and then never got around to reading them. Other times I would read what I had printed the night before, or a week before. This time I read as I drank my morning coffee and ate my breakfast whole-grain toast. Frontal temporal dementia, FTD, the one she had the symptoms for, was naturally the dementia most strongly linked to hereditary causes. One form of it—yet another subcategory to explore—causes aphasia.
Aphasia,
the gentle-sounding word has a Greek etymology that means moving away from speech toward muteness. A seemingly blissful silence, almost. But aphasia actually means the forgetting of language, the loss of using and understanding language altogether, either specific words or syntax or both—and can present in the patient as early as her forties.
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