You Lost Me There

Table of Contents

 

 

 

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

New York

2010

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2010 by Rosecrans Baldwin

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Published simultaneously in Canada

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baldwin, Rosecrans.

You lost me there / Rosecrans Baldwin.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-18927-6

1. Scientists—Fiction. 2. Widowers—Fiction. 3. Alzheimer’s disease—Research—Fiction.
4. Memory—Fiction. 5. Marriage—Fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.A595415Y
813’.6—dc22

 

 

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at
the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or
for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does
not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

New York, August 1971. I was renting a studio on West Eighth Street, back when it was dingy. Men found it avant-garde, the exposed pipes, the working bathtub in the kitchen. Victor and I caught a movie, then we drifted back to my place to listen to some Chicago blues records and drink whiskey sours (I only drank whiskey sours that year). I probably lit some incense and talked a big game. There was a point, I remember, when we discussed our favorite books. We had three in common—that seemed important. But he didn’t come on to me. I started to worry I’d read him wrong. Then he asked me, after one
of
those prolonged quiet moments (I never liked quiet moments), “So, what’s your secret?”

Sara’s handwriting covered both sides of the index card. She’d scribbled down to the last empty space. I put the card back where I’d found it on her desk, tucked into a book with dozens more.

She might have written it just after our counseling appointment, sitting in her car while I pulled out of the parking lot.

Weeks before California.

Some theories said the most accurate memory was one that’s never recalled. The more the mind retells a story, the more that story hardens into a basic shape, where by remembering one detail we push ten others below the surface and construct the memory touch by touch. A sculpture between the neurons that looks like its model, just not completely.

But I hadn’t brought this one up in thirty years. And Sara recalled that first evening perfectly: the movie, the music, the whiskey sours.

What we said. How it felt.

But I didn’t remember that we’d gone to a movie.

I barely remembered that evening at all.

The ghosts
of our research labs were old, clipped cartoons. Scientists treated them like Dead Sea Scrolls, as though nature’s mysteries were best explained by
Far Side
captions. Comic strips were the relics of investigative progress. Scientists more esteemed than myself were probably above such things (if ranked, I would have made varsity within the Alzheimer’s disease community, though not as a marquee player), but from Chicago to Cambridge, New York to Bar Harbor, I’d always carted along my favorites, particularly one that showed two scientists at a lab bench, one of them examining a fuming test tube, saying to the other, “What’s the opposite of ‘Eureka’?”

The best summary I’d seen of a researcher’s daily life.

My lab consisted of a half-dozen rooms on Maine’s Mount Desert Island at the Soborg Institute, a satellite campus for the state’s university system. My office’s eastern wall faced a faculty parking lot and featured three large windows, each of them blacked out by papers I was in the middle of editing (the better to see them with). The floor was a no-fly zone of archival boxes, FedEx envelopes, and stacks of journals. Sara used to say I worked in academia because OSHA would have banned my tidying habits from the private sector, but whatever I needed, I could find in twenty seconds.

Sherlock Holmes once said, “A man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.” Perhaps my mind, like his, meandered. Other scientists were known for their impressive recall, but I preferred to rely on my judgment.

Science in school was horrible, though, a boot camp of memorization drills, except with one teacher, Mrs. Gill. Her hero was Charles Darwin, the garden explorer. She taught us about species evolution by lugging in her own butterfly crates. Our task, she said, was to assemble the world, to develop wondering points of view, even in the grass around a baseball diamond. I remembered a moment from that year when I was standing at the end of my parents’ driveway while my friend Russell shot by on his bicycle, no hands, and I’d had an idea that seemed to make the trees shimmer: Was how I thought about things, the way things happened in my mind, the same as how Russell thought about things? If so, how could he ride no-hands when I was too scared? If not, then why not, and which one of us was the odd one out? What did it sound like inside his head? Was everyone’s consciousness different? Were all of us equally full of thoughts, or some more than others?

I probably would have ended up reading Kierkegaard if there’d been a philosophy club, but instead there was Mrs. Gill’s biology class, dissecting cow brains. And if my career since hadn’t been Keplerian in magnitude, didn’t rival Mendel’s or Crick’s, at least it reflected a life spent pursuing what had interested me for as long as I could remember.

Our lab’s subject was Alzheimer’s disease. Specifically, we were trying to develop neuroprotective strategies for sufferers, aiming to help their neurons fight back against or even prevent the disease. Unfortunately, our success was measurable among peers, not the public. Alzheimer’s disease was still an excruciating illness for millions. It lacked a cure, and the popular spin on our genes as so many on and off switches didn’t help. “Which one is the Alzheimer’s gene? Which one causes cancer?” Even for experts, understanding gene expression was a shadows game, a spelunking mission where thousands of caverns were still dark. We simply didn’t know much about genetics, and the ways both scientists and civilians behaved with uncertain information had led to straw men popping up. This misconception that humans were so many toggles was to my mind the new phrenology, and scientists themselves were responsible for bad marketing and spreading rumors, attempting to explain our mysteries with little data.

We certainly couldn’t map memory function to a switchboard. Riddles abounded. I couldn’t recall what I’d eaten for dinner the previous Sunday, but all the pretty girls from high school remained vividly in storage. Their figures, their hair color, their venomous voices.

Just that afternoon, a week before I discovered the index cards on Sara’s desk, we’d wrapped up our Friday conference call and the team had cleared out, and I was checking my e-mail when my wife appeared: Sara the innocent, stepping out of the summer light to comfort a stranger. We were near San Juan, during a vacation in the seventies. We’d wandered a couple miles past the tourist beach and I was tired, but Sara wanted to keep walking. She left me in a concrete pavilion to catch my breath. I fanned my head for a few minutes. Far away, a young man was jogging toward her. I watched while he tripped in the sand, fell forward, and didn’t get up. Imagine, I remembered thinking, if he died, just like that. Sara, in a skimpy white bikini, ran to him and stopped to help. I was shielding my eyes when he grabbed her and pulled her down to the sand, as if ripping a shirt in half. I ran out, shouting threats. He looked up and saw me just as Sara kicked him in the stomach; he fell backward, then ran over a dune toward some apartment buildings. When I got there, I turned to give chase, but she stopped me with a look: all her fury redirected at the notion that I would leave her. As if by being a man, I couldn’t be trusted. That whatever genes were expressed in that boy had produced me, too, ready to stick my neck out.