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A certain disney I once began, one nite long ago in another age.

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish

“Mr. Cavendish? Are we awake?” A licorice snake on a field of cream wriggles into focus. The number five. November 5. Why does my old John Thomas hurt so? A prank? My God, I have a tube stuck up my willy! I fight to free myself, but my muscles ignore me. A bottle up there feeds a tube. The tube feeds a needle in my arm. The needle feeds me. A woman’s stiff face framed with a pageboy haircut. “Tut tut. Lucky you were here when you fell over, Mr. Cavendish. Very lucky indeed. If we had let you go wandering over heaths, you’d be dead in a ditch by now!”

Cavendish, a familiar name, Cavendish, who is this “Cavendish”? Where am I? I try to ask her, but I can only squeal, like Peter Rabbit tossed off Salisbury Cathedral’s spire. Blackness embraces me. Thank God.

A number six. November 6. I’ve woken here before. A picture of a thatched cottage. Text in Cornish or Druidic. The willy tube is gone. Something stinks. Of what? My calves are raised and my arse is wiped with a brisk, cold, wet cloth. Excrement, feces, cloying, clogging, smearing .?.?. poo. Did I sit on a tube of the stuff? Oh. No. How did I come to this? I try to fight the cloth away, but my body only trembles. A sullen automaton looks into my eyes. A discarded lover? I’m afraid she is going to kiss me. She suffers from vitamin deficiencies. She should eat more fruit and veg, her breath stinks. But at least she controls her motor functions. At least she can use a lavatory. Sleep, sleep, sleep, come free me.

Speak, Memory. No, not a word. My neck moves. Hallelujah. Timothy Langland Cavendish can command his neck and his name has come home. November 7. I recall a yesterday and see a tomorrow. Time, no arrow, no boomerang, but a concertina. Bedsores. How many days have I lain here? Pass. How old is Tim Cavendish? Fifty? Seventy? A hundred? How can you forget your age?

“Mr. Cavendish?” A face rises to the muddy surface.

“Ursula?”

The woman peers in. “Was Ursula your lady wife, Mr. Cavendish?” Don’t trust her. “No, I’m Mrs. Judd. You’ve had a stroke, Mr. Cavendish. Do you understand? A teeny-weeny stroke.”

When did it happen? I tried to say. “Airn-dit-hpn” came out.

She crooned. “That’s why everything’s so topsy-turvy. But don’t worry, Dr. Upward says we’re making super progress. No horrid hospital for us!” A stroke? Two-stroker? Stroke me? Margo Roker had a stroke. Margo Roker?

Who are all you people? Memory, you old sod.

I offer that trio of vignettes for the benefit of lucky readers whose psyches have never been razed to rubble by capillaries rupturing in their brains. Putting Timothy Cavendish together again was a Tolstoyan editing job, even for the man who once condensed the nine-volume Story of Oral Hygiene on the Isle of Wight to a mere seven hundred pages. Memories refused to fit, or fitted but came unglued. Even months later, how would I know if some major tranche of myself remained lost?

My stroke was relatively light, true, but the month that followed was the most mortifying of my life. I spoke like a spastic. My arms were dead. I couldn’t wipe my own arse. My mind shambled in fog yet was aware of my witlessness, and ashamed. I couldn’t bring myself to ask the doctor or Sister Noakes or Mrs. Judd, “Who are you?” “Have we met before?” “Where do I go when I leave here?” I kept asking for Mrs. Latham.

Basta! A Cavendish is down but never out. When The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is turned into a film, I advise thee, Director dearest, whom I picture as an intense, turtlenecked Swede named Lars, to render that November as a boxer-in-training-for-the-big-fight montage. True Grit Cavendish takes his injections without a quiver. Curious Cavendish rediscovers language. Feral Cavendish redomesticated by Dr. Upward and Nurse Noakes. John Wayne Cavendish on a walker (I graduated to a stick, which I still use. Veronica said it lends me a Lloyd George air). Cavendish a la Carl Sagan, caged in a Dandelion Clock. As long as Cavendish was anesthetized by amnesia, you could say he was content enough.

Then, Lars, strike a chord sinister.

The Six O’Clock News on the first day of December (Advent calendars were on show) had just begun. I had fed myself mashed banana with evaporated milk without tipping it down my bib. Nurse Noakes passed by, and my fellow inmates fell silent, like songbirds under the shadow of a hawk.

All at once, my memory’s chastity belt was unlocked and removed.

I rather wished it hadn’t been. My “friends” at Aurora House were senile boors who cheated at Scrabble with stunning ineptitude and who were nice to me solely because in the Kingdom of the Dying the most Enfeebled is the common Maginot Line against the Unconquerable Fuhrer. I had been imprisoned a whole month by my vengeful brother, so plainly no nationwide manhunt was under way. I would have to effect my own escape, but how to outrun that mutant groundsman, Withers, when a fifty-yard dash took a quarter of an hour? How to outwit the Noakes from the Black Lagoon when I couldn’t even remember my post code?

Oh, the horror, the horror. My mashed banana clagged my throat.

My senses rethroned, I observed the Decembral rituals of man, nature, and beast. The pond iced over in the first week of December, and disgusted ducks skated. Aurora House froze in the mornings and boiled in the evenings. The asexual care worker, whose name was Deirdre, unsurprisingly, strung tinsel from the light fittings and failed to electrocute herself. A plastic tree appeared in a bucket wrapped in crepe paper. Gwendolin Bendincks organized paper-chain drives to which the Undead flocked, both parties oblivious to the irony of the image. The Undead clamored to be the Advent calendar’s window opener, a privilege bestowed by Bendincks like the Queen awarding Maundy money: “Mrs. Birkin has found a cheeky snowman, everyone, isn’t that fabulous?” Being Nurse Noakes’s sheepdog was her and Warlock-Williams’s survival niche. I thought of Primo Levi’s Drowned and the Saved.

Dr. Upward was one of those Academy Award-winning Asses of Arrogance you find in educational administration, law, or medicine. He visited Aurora House twice a week, and if, at age fifty-five or so, his career was not living up to the destiny his name foretold, it was down to us damnable obstacles in the way of all Emissars of Healing, sick people. I dismissed him as a possible ally the moment I clapped eyes on him. Nor were the part-time botty wipers, bath scrubbers, and gunk cookers about to jeopardize their lofty positions in society by springing one of their charges.

No, I was stuck in Aurora House all right. A clock with no hands. “Freedom!” is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

A few days before our Savior’s Birthday, a minibusload of private-school brats came to sing carols. The Undead sang along with wrong verses and death rattles, and the racket drove me out, it wasn’t even funny. I limped around Aurora House in search of my lost vigor, needing the lavvy every thirty minutes. (The Organs of Venus are well known to all but, Brothers, the Organ of Saturn is the Bladder.) Hooded doubts dogged my heels. Why was Denholme paying my captors his last precious kopecks to infantilize me? Had Georgette, incontinent with senility, told my brother about our brief diversion from the highway of fidelity, so many years ago? Was this trap a cuckold’s revenge?

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book. Well, Mumsy, no, not really. Your beloved large-print sagas of rags, riches, and heartbreak were no camouflage against the miseries trained on you by the