Flowers for Algernon

The only bad thing about having Alice here with me is that now I feel I should fight this thing. I want to stop time, freeze myself at this level and never let go of her.

October 17

Why can't I remember? I've got to try to re­sist this slackness. Alice tells me I lie in bed for days and don't seem to know who or where I am. Then it all comes back and I recognize her and remember what's happening. Fugues of amnesia. Symptoms of second childhood— what do they call it?—senility? I can watch it coming on. All so cruelly logical, the result of speeding up all the processes of the mind. I learned so much so fast, and now my mind is deteriorating rapidly. What if I won't let it hap­pen? What if I fight it? Think of those people at Warren, the empty smiles, the blank expressions, everyone laughing at them.

Little Charlie Gordon staring at me through the win­dow—waiting. Please, not that again.

October 18

I'm forgetting things I learned recently. It seems to be following the classic pattern, the last things learned are first things forgotten. Or is that the pattern? Better look it up again.

Reread my paper on the Algernon-Gordon Effect and even though I know I wrote it, I keep feeling it was writ­ten by someone else. Most of it I don't even understand.

But why am I so irritable? Especially when Alice is so good to me? She keeps the place neat and clean, always putting my things away and washing dishes and scrubbing floors. I shouldn't have shouted at her the way I did this morning because it made her cry, and I didn't want that to happen. But she shouldn't have picked up the broken records and the music and the book and put them all neatly into a box. That made me furious. I don't want any­one to touch any of those things. I want to see them pile up. I want them to remind me of what I'm leaving behind. I kicked the box and scattered the stuff all over the floor and told her to leave them just where they were.

Foolish. No reason for it. I guess I got sore because I knew she thought it was silly to keep those things, and she didn't tell me she thought it was silly. She just pretended it was perfectly normal. She's humoring me. And when I saw that box I remembered the boy at Warren and the lousy lamp he made and the way we were all humoring him, pre­tending he had done something wonderful when he hadn't.

That was what she was doing to me, and I couldn't stand it.

When she went to the bedroom and cried I felt bad about it and I told her it was all my fault. I don't deserve someone as good as her. Why can't I control myself just enough to keep on loving her? Just enough.

October 19

Motor activity impaired. I keep tripping and dropping things. At first I didn't think it was me. I thought she was changing things around. The wastebasket was in my way, and so were the chairs, and I thought she had moved them.

Now I realize my coordination is bad. I have to move slowly to get things right. And it's increasingly difficult to type. Why do I keep blaming Alice? And why doesn't she argue? That irritates me even more because I see the pity in her face.

My only pleasure now is the TV set. I spend most of the day watching the quiz programs, the old movies, the soap operas, and even the kiddie shows and cartoons. And then I can't bring myself to turn it off. Late at night there are the old movies, the horror pictures, the late show, and the late-late show, and even the little sermon before the channel signs off for the night, and the 'Star-Spangled Banner' with the flag waving in the background, and fi­nally the channel test pattern that stares back at me through the little square window with its unclosing eye….

Why am I always looking at life through a window?

And after it's all over I'm sick with myself because there is so little time left for me to read and write and think, and because I should know better than to drug my mind with this dishonest stuff that's aimed at the child in me. Especially me, because the child in me is reclaiming my mind.

I know all this, but when Alice tells me I shouldn't waste my time, I get angry and tell her to leave me alone.

I have a feeling I'm watching because it's important for me not to think, not to remember about the bakery, and my mother and father, and Norma. I don't want to re­member any more of the past.

I had a terrible shock today. Picked up a copy of an ar­ticle I had used in my research, Krueger's Uber Psychische Ganzheit, to see if it would help me understand the paper I wrote and what I had done in it. First I thought there was something wrong with my eyes. Then I realized I could no longer read German. Tested myself in other languages. All gone.

October 21

Alice is gone. Let's see if I can remember. It started when she said we couldn't live like this with the torn books and papers and records all over the floor and the place in such a mess.

'Leave everything the way it is,' I warned her.

'Why do you want to live this way?'

'I want everything where I put it. I want to see it all out here. You don't know what it's like to have something happening inside you, that you can't see and can't control, and know it's all slipping through your fingers.'

'You're right. I never said I could understand the things that were happening to you. Not when you became too intelligent for me, and not now. But I'll tell you one thing. Before you had the operation, you weren't like this. You didn't wallow in your own filth and self-pity, you didn't pollute your own mind by sitting in front of the TV set all day and night, you didn't snarl and snap at people. There was something about you that made us respect you—yes, even as you were. You had something I had never seen in a retarded person before.'

'I don't regret the experiment.'

'Neither do I, but you've lost something you had be­fore. You had a smile…'

'An empty, stupid smile.'

'No, a warm, real smile, because you wanted people to like you.'

'And they played tricks on me, and laughed at me.'

'Yes, but even though you didn't understand why they were laughing, you sensed that if they could laugh at you they would like you. And you wanted them to like you. You acted like a child and you even laughed at yourself along with them.'

'I don't feel like laughing at myself right now, if you don't mind.'

She was trying to keep from crying. I think I wanted to make her cry. 'Maybe that's why it was so important for me to learn. I thought it would make people like me. I thought I would have friends. That's something to laugh at, isn't it?'

'There's more to it than just having a high I.Q.'

That made me angry. Probably because I didn't really understand what she was driving at. More and more these days she didn't come right out and say what she meant. She hinted at things. She talked around them and expected me to know what she was thinking. And I listened, pre­tending I understood but inside I was afraid she would see that I missed the point completely.

'I think it's time for you to leave.'

Her face turned red. 'Not yet, Charlie. It's not time yet. Don't send me away.'

'You're making it harder for me. You keep pretending I can do things and understand things that are far beyond me now. You're pushing me. Just like my mother…'

'That's not true!'

'Everything you do says it. The way you pick up and clean up after me, the way you leave books around that you think will get me interested in reading again, the way you talk to me about the news to get me thinking. You say it doesn't matter, but everything you do shows how much it matters. Always the schoolteacher. I don't want to go to concerts or museums or foreign films or do anything that's going to make me struggle to think about life or about myself.'

'Charlie—'

'Just leave me alone. I'm not myself. I'm falling apart, and I don't want you here.'

That made her cry. This afternoon she packed her bags and left. The apartment feels quiet and empty now.

October 25