“I’m going to ask you to strip down to your shorts and sit on the examining table, Mr. Grey. Would you rather your niece wait in the garden?”
“No. She could see me right here. I don’t mind. I’m too old to be worried about bein’ naked.”
Ruben examined Ptolemy from head to toe with a rubber hammer, a stethoscope, and a pair of magnifying glasses that had double lenses and sat on the end of his nose.
“Ninety-one, eh, Mr. Grey?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re in wonderful physical condition for a man your age. You can put on your clothes and we’ll talk at the desk.”
Robyn helped her charge with his pants and shirt and then got down on her knees to tie his brown shoes.
“Those shoes is older than you, girl,” Ptolemy said, and Robyn stood and kissed his cheek.
Your uncle is in the early stages of dementia,” Ruben said to Robyn. “Maybe a little bit further along than that, but not much. He can converse with difficulty and has some trouble with immediate memory. I believe, however, that the damage is not so far along that it can’t be ameliorated.”
Ptolemy didn’t mind the doctor explaining to the child. She was his eyes and ears in a world just out of reach. She deciphered what things meant and then told him like a busboy in a restaurant that runs down to the waiter and then comes back with information for the cook.
“What does that mean, Doctor?”
“He’s losing the ability to use his mind to solve problems, remember things, and to communicate. His language skills are still pretty strong, but his cognitive abilities are weakening.”
“What’s cognitib—?” Robyn asked, frowning, trying to understand what she could do for him.
“It means thinking.”
“I wanna make it so that I could think good for just a couple mont’s, Doc,” Ptolemy said then. “I got some things to remembah, and relatives to look aftah. And, you know, if I . . . if I mess up, then it’s all lost, my whole life.”
“What will be lost?” the mustachioed man asked.
“I, I . . . well, I don’t have the words right now,” Ptolemy said. “You see? That’s the problem.” Ptolemy placed his fingertips on the edge of the doctor’s desk, as if the image of his words were there.
“There are medicines in general use today,” Ruben said, listing five or six names. “None of them are very effective. I mean, something might be able to keep you the way you are without getting worse for a while, but ...”
“Uncle wants his mind back,” Robyn said, a look of surprise and anger on her lovely face.
Ruben smiled.
“And I’m pretty sure he got medical insurance,” the girl said. “We found some insurance papers when I was cleanin’ up his apartment. He’s a veteran and the army will probably be able to pay sumpin’.”
Ruben’s smile extended into time.
“Well?” the girl asked.
“Mr. Grey,” Bryant Ruben said, like the baker that used to greet him.
“Yes sir, Doctor.”
“Do you want to live to see a hundred?”
A hundred years. Ptolemy thought back over all the time that had brought him to that patient’s chair.
“Time is like a river,” Coydog had told the boy. “It come up behind ya hard and just keep right on goin’. You couldn’t stop it no more than you could fly away.”
Ptolemy’s river had been rough and fast, rushing over stones, throwing him around like a half-dead catfish. More than once he’d opened his eyes on a day he’d wished he’d never seen.
“No, Doctor. I on’y need a few months.”
Ruben smiled again.
“Robyn?” the doctor asked.
“Uh-huh?”
“Medicine isn’t perfect. Many times, especially with new drugs, they cause as many problems as they solve. They only get better by way of trial and error.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You know what I mean by that?”
“That if I take some new pill that ain’t been tested a lot I might could get sick?”
“You might could die,” the doctor said, managing not to insult the girl.
Robyn nodded. Ptolemy nodded too.
“This is too much for a child,” the old man said.
“She brought you here, Mr. Grey.”
