“I did a bad thing,” she repeats.
She looks grave. But I’m never sure these days whether to put any value in her ramblings — or how connected her ideas are. Under the circumstances, this one bears further investigation.
“Are you saying that you did something bad that is catching up to you?”
“Well, I’m sure that’s true, Nathaniel.”
It’s a platitude. One of dementia’s symptoms is that its sufferers tend to respond with stock answers, relying on automated, practiced responses to supplant more sophisticated processing.
I reach for her hand and take it in mine. She resists for an instant, and then relents. Beneath skin withered by time and pocked with age spots, I feel strength coming from her fingers, the flexor digitorum and her other forearm muscles. Grandma’s still in there and kicking.
“Grandma Lane, please. Are you keeping a secret from me? Do you want to talk about it?”
“Don’t pester me!” An outburst.
I fall silent, hoping stillness will bring calm, lucidity. I can’t tell if there’s substance to her muttering — or continuity to it.
She looks up at the home.
“They have a fitness room and soft pillows on the couches,” she says. “But it’s strange there.”
The Manor is a castle-like structure that not only is anomalous for San Francisco’s inner Sunset District, it is indeed eerie. It looks beamed from mythical Transylvania, a cryptically imposing edifice with a spire cloaked in fog.
Its ancient facade makes its innards all the more contrary. Magnolia Manor provides retirees with the highest-tech amenities. Residents have wireless access, dozens of new computers and printers, handheld game devices. In the activities room, dozens of withered octogenarians often sit nose-to-screen playing virtual golf or talking in videoconferences with their grandchildren.
Of late, many of the residents, including Grandma Lane, are using the technology to share their life stories. They sit in cubicles and talk into microphones to record tales of the 20th century. Low-cost cameras attached to the computers capture grainy digital images of the storytellers. This project is called the Human Memory Crusade. It’s ambitious, this transferring of our grandparents’ fading memories into a database.
I drive in through the gates.
“I give up trying to get into that head of yours, Grandma. For now.”
At the Manor’s front desk, we get our first break of the evening.
“You’re lucky Vince isn’t here,” the nurse says. “You’re way past curfew.”
Vince Alito is the home’s director and autocrat. He hates me, or acts like it. He browbeats me for being an insufficiently dedicated grandson and for our family’s failure to make timely payments for Grandma’s bills, including for “extra” services, like car rides and cable television access in her room, and, of late, a bigger monthly bill reflecting her graduation into assisted-living care. She gets to stay in the same room but requires more frequent attention.
With my dad living in Denver, I’ve taken primary duty for Grandma’s care, becoming the face of the family. I’m also responsible for transferring money each month from Grandma’s meager trust to the assisted-living facility, and timely bill paying has never been my strong suit. Still, the chip on Vince’s shoulder is hard for me to understand. Once I said to him: “Usually, I don’t irritate someone that much until they’ve known me for a while.” He responded: “I’m a quick study.”
I am relieved but also a little surprised by Vince’s absence; he’s a retirement-home fixture, synonymous with this quirky, sometimes sad, place.
I take Grandma to her room. I sit by her bed and read to her from Mark Twain’s
“Get married and have a family,” she says. “You’re not getting any younger.”
Grandma Lane never used to give me advice — certainly not to conform. One time, she asked me to take her to a Tracy Chapman concert so she could see what all the hype was about. Just before the encore, she leaned into me and whispered that she and I were birds of a feather—“iconoclastic romantics,” she said.
Nearly a decade ago, she was the first person I told I was quitting medicine to be a journalist. I was well more than $100,000 in debt when I exchanged stethoscope for reporter’s notebook. The medical life felt too rote, black-and-white, like I was a glorified auto mechanic, performing Jiffy Lube diagnoses of the corpus. Journalism let me roll around in life’s gray areas and emotional muck.
“Question your government and your spouse. Trust your hairstylist and your gut,” she told me at the time.
But she’s right; I’m not getting younger.
At thirty-four, I’m a standard bearer for what pundits call The Odyssey. I’m exploring still, enjoying it some, not like I used to. Critics who like to see life packaged up neatly would say I’m thrilled by the chaos, using an endless search for a perfect landing spot as an excuse to not settle down. Some of those critics are close friends and family.
Physically, I’m aging more traditionally. I’m having more trouble getting up and down a basketball court. My five-foot, eleven-inch frame isn’t metabolizing snack foods the way it used to. My haircuts come less frequently. But when I have a good one — haircut — I can pass myself for my late twenties. I have a strong nose, like Grandma. Pauline, who runs Medblog, says women find me attractive because I listen. With a little carpentry, she says, I could make someone a good husband.
My phone rings.
It’s Pauline. The phone clock reads 8:52.
“I was just thinking about you,” I answer. “Your phone must be reading my mind.”
“You didn’t respond to my text. Under company rules, you can only do that if you’re dead.”
“What if I was busy avoiding death?”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you later. What’s up, boss?”
“You’ve received a mystery package.”
I don’t know what she means and I’m feeling impatient and desperately uninterested in work. I shouldn’t have answered the phone.
“It’s a manila envelope,” she continues. “On the front, it says: ‘Nathaniel Idle. For your eyes only.’ It’s written in thick blue ink and rotten cursive, the kind of penmanship you’d find on the prescription pad of a drunken doctor. Or a sober one, actually.”
She intends a joke. I don’t laugh.
“Nat, do I detect you’ve lost your sense of humor?”
She sounds hurt.
“Long day.”
“Everything okay?”
I look at Grandma. “Fine, now.”
“I’m insatiably curious about the package. There could be some incredible scoop on the thumb drive,” she says.
“Thumb drive?”
Pauline laughs. “Did I forget to mention that I opened the package? Inside is a two-gig memory stick. I hope you’re not going to nail me for mail tampering. I did it in the interest of journalism. And I was bored.”
I finally laugh. “Pauline, you are one seriously impatient quasi-journalist.”
“Birds of a feather.”
“So put the drive in the computer. See what’s on it.”
“Thanks, Hercule Poirot. I did that. It’s encrypted.”
I sigh. “What do you want me to do about that?”
“I assume you know the password.”
“Why’s that?”
She explains that when she puts the mysterious memory stick into the computer, a screen pops up with a
