alert in his desperation.
He also dreaded dusk. In fact, it got so bad that when the evening news came on his heart rate increased and his mouth went dry. At about nine-thirty on the fifth night he actually felt sleep weigh heavily on his eyelids. So he slipped into the bedroom, trying not to think about how he was pretending to yield to drowsiness like most normal people. He took his medicine, resisting the temptation to down a few tabs of Xanax, turned off the lights, and got into bed.
He closed his eyes, trying to settle into his drowsiness as if he were just your average Joe—stable, relaxed, retiring after a long and exhausting day at the office. At 10:18 he was still awake and even more alert than ever. He stared at the dark ceiling, trying to pretend that he was fighting sleep, forcing his eyes to remain open until the last possible moment when he’d close them and slip into the warm well of oblivion.
But it didn’t work.
And his mind filled with the illuminated dial of the radio clock, the cable box, light strips framing the window shades from the street, sounds of the house settling, the fridge compressor kicking in, Logan jets … goddamn butterfly wings in Peru.
He got up and draped towels over the radio, then found some duct tape and sealed the shades against the window frame. The black was now total, but his brain was hot with frustration. He closed his eyes and tried not to think of the sounds of his heart clicking in his ears, hoping the white noise would lull him to sleep as with any other normal person. Except that he wasn’t like any other normal person but a man cursed to lie awake holding his breath for the subtlest decibel to pin his affliction on.
At 1:46 he was still awake.
By 2:11 his mind was a flywheel.
He got up and covered the cable box.
An hour later, he headed down to the kitchen for another warm glass of milk. He thought about reading a dull book or maybe catching some mindless movie on TV. But that would only stimulate his brain all the more. So he sat at the kitchen table and sipped warm milk out of a blue glass under the garish fluorescence of the circular tube on the ceiling. He closed his eyes and rested his head on his elbow, thinking about warm milk coating his stomach and magically transmitting rock-a-bye-baby signals to his brain. But that didn’t work.
Jack opened one eye. It fell on the cellar door.
The cellar.
His eye dropped to the hexagonal glass knob.
Click.
He closed his eye and sipped more milk.
His eye slitted open.
The door, and just behind it a black shaft and twelve little steps down, light switch at the top. He closed his eyes again.
He got up, scraping the chair noisily against the floor, and downed the rest of the milk and rinsed out the glass. Then he turned and leaned against the sink, staring at the door.
He crossed the kitchen and opened the door.
Well, you see, the last time I did this, there was this poltergeist thing that took me over.
He flicked on the light.
Empty stairs, no goggle-eyed zombies gaping up at him, and no ooga-booga vibes registering. Plus, a few low-sleep cobwebs aside, your head feels clear for once.
He took the steps one by one, holding on to the rail. Someplace in the front hall he had left his cane, which would have been comforting to grip at the moment. But he decided not to bother going back up.
At the bottom he turned slowly until he faced the rear wall and the armoire. Nothing.
He moved across the floor to the washing machine and put his hand on the lid, thinking that this is where the thing with the KKK hood jumps out and crushes your skull. Nothing but his clothes in a fused ring around the base of the agitator. They were still damp but they didn’t smell mildewy, so he put them into the dryer.
He limped across the old carpet and stopped in his tracks. Along the metal shelves were boxes. He didn’t know why he stopped, but as if following some radar beam his eyes fell on a single carton. He had been through all the boxes—all but this one, which still had tape across the flaps. On the side in small black letters it said “Jack’s Stuff.”
As if by remote control he went over to the shelves, his mind funneling all attention onto that parcel, that plain brown cardboard box with no commercial lettering. It was maybe eighteen inches on a side, but surprisingly light. He placed it on a table and opened the top.
Old newspapers were balled up as packing. He unfolded one double page that was discolored from long repose in the box—October 1979. He felt around under the upper layers until he hit the source of the weight. Smooth shape—soft, cloth, pliable. His fingers began to hum as they sent up crude premonitional images to his brain like a sonogram. He pulled it out.
A large tan stuffed mouse with round sausagey limbs, floppy round pink ears, a red knobbed nose, big startled cartoon eyes in white and black, a thick brown tail. Instantly every inner sensor focused on that stuffed mouse.
“Mookie.”
63
“IT’S A DAMN JOKE. KLANDER AND COMPANY gave them just what they wanted to hear:
Rene had not seen Nick so upset. His face was red, as if too full of blood. The Klander Clinical Research Group report sat in a black folder on Nick’s desk.
“They hired a bunch of fancy-sounding neuro people and threw a ton of money at them and got the validation they were looking for.”
“But we gave them reams of data and documentation of the problems.”
“Yeah, and they concluded that the events were not Memorine-related but the results of the brain’s deterioration from Alzheimer’s. And they bolstered the claim that since the flashbacks are treatable with standard antipsychotic meds, the phenomenon equals demented delusions. QED.” He pushed a copy toward her. “You can read it yourself.”
Rene took the report and thumbed through it. There were pages of data from outside literature documenting hallucinatory behavior of AD patients. “But the evidence is overwhelming.”
“Not when the conclusion is predetermined. So instead of burying the evidence, they hire so-called neutral specialists to say the problems aren’t drug-related. Pretty clever, huh?”
“But can’t the FDA see through that?”
“No, because the FDA wants this to go to market. So does the president. He sees it as a sixty-billion-dollar
