Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

He smiles and the fox-haired woman nods.

“But you could count the cells, if you really needed to, and you would see then that they were — that they were—”

He loses the thought, pinches his fingers in frustration.

“Your mother had a point.” The woman hands him the glass of water. “On the other hand, cells don't explain everything.”

She pulls the chair out and sits. “So, Jake, how are you feeling?”

“Neuron,” he says. “What did you say a neuron was?”

She rubs her eye then folds her arms across her chest. “Jake, much as I think your curiosity is wonderful, I do find it's better not to talk about these things. It's confusing, and a little frightening. It's better to address the practical issues.”

“I'm not frightened.”

“Well, that's good. That's good.”

“Is this a different room?” he asks.

She pushes the water closer to him (as if this, this water, will solve everything) and he nods his gratitude.

“You mean, to the one we're usually in?”

“Yes.”

“It's the same room. Exactly the same. We'll always be in this room, Jake. If we move — and I don't expect we will — but if we do, I promise to tell you, okay?”

He smiles. “That's good of you.” He goes back to the picture. On the adjacent page is a different brain, larger and whiter. “This is a normal one I take it.”

Sitting again, she makes brief eye contact with him and pauses before she speaks. “That's right. You can see how it has no plaques or tangles, and it's bigger. The Alzheimer's brain is atrophied.” She looks at him and raises her brows a little as if to see if he has understood. He wants to understand, so he nods. “Shrunk,” she says. “See how it's shrunk?”

He leans on his elbows, running his hands through his hair and feeling himself become agitated, desperately wishing to stay afloat, to say something intelligent. “Why has it shrunk?” he asks.

“Because the tissue begins to wear away.”

“And what was it you said before? About brambles?”

She touches his arm. “I think we should stop there, don't you?”

She has a look about her that he has seen a million times recently: pity, and then relief that this problem is not hers.

“Do we have to do that test today, with the words and the dates?”

“We did it when you first came in.”

She puts the flat of her hand on a pile of papers and he sees some awkward writing, some childish drawings. Sweat dusts his forehead, a bead of anger, a ball of frustration at the forgetting. He leans over the picture of the brain, and something dawns on him.

“These shadows,” he points at the dark, shrunken diagram, “remind me of the markings put on trees before they're cut down.”

Quail Woods, he thinks, was cut down. Leaving an emptiness. Branches gone, patterns gone.

She looks up to observe, then goes back to her writing. “Yes, I suppose they do.”

“It makes me think the brain is marked up when it is old and no longer any use. I'm no more than a tree. I've been marked up. I've been selected.” Resting back against the chair he draws his palms together, firmly now, as if, for once, he means it. “The brain is finite, this is what you mean to say. I understand exactly what you mean to say.”

For the first time in his life he feels the hand of God on him, a surge of religion which abates again like a chill wind. She gathers her fox hair into a band and casts him a concerned look.

“That's the bottom line I suppose, yes.”

Any moment now, he supposes, she will write something about his wayward digression into logic. The patient is not supposed to be logical; it is much easier for everybody if the patient behaves and tries not to understand. He feels like letting himself loose in the room, having an adolescent outburst, turning the shelves of books on end. Then going to the next room, and doing it again. Fucking books! And again. He tries to make out what she is writing, but he cannot. Odd, the way words sometimes make no sense anymore. Odd the way he wants to gather them up like sheep and stop them escaping him. He goes to drink his water, but the glass is already empty.

They come into the kitchen and the woman, Ellie, Eleanor, walks straight to the kettle, lifts the lid, takes tea bags out, and throws them in the bin.

“Tea bags in the pot, not the kettle,” she says kindly.

She goes to the door, bends to take the post from the floor, and hands him a letter. “Another one from America.”

“From Joy.”

Her hand goes to her lower back. “From Joy.”

She puts a coffee in front of him and leaves the room. Inside the envelope is a picture of Joy as requested, though he can't recall requesting it. He reads the date on the letter, July 1994. Strange date, implausible, looks too heavy at the back end. The picture shows her sitting somewhere, in front of a large window, looking through the things, the magnifying glasses that make distant birds close, or that one uses to spy. In fact not much of her is visible at all, what with the magnifiers and the shadows and the glare of the window behind.

He understands why she hides from the camera; she doesn't want to age in front of him. They must always be young for each other. Where the handwriting loses curves and gains angles, where the dates creep up, where the black ink becomes blue biro and the photographs go from black-and-white to colour, they are both silently embarrassed and apologetic at having let time invade.

Her letter is long. It has a plot, something about a trip to Phoenix and the lack of grass there, and the question she poses: How can people live without grass? He doesn't know the answer. Maybe he doesn't know about people anymore. But he could live without grass, he thinks in a minute of panic, he could live without anything if he could have his thoughts back.

A swarm of cells, a mass of dying strangled cells. Bramble hedges, unwholesome growth that chokes. His mind sees a garden being strangled by weeds which climb up and over the walls, suffocate the flowers, split the paving, cover the house, reach their wayward tendrils through windows and find the people sleeping and pick at the locks of their heart, unpick them until they are just dismantled machines. He could live without grass. Without growth and green. Having never been to Phoenix he knows what it is like, a huge orange desert stabilised by the sun, it never ages or changes, its dryness is trustworthy, its earth is as hard as stone, nothing unexpected comes. He suddenly yearns for this place he has never seen. His thumb traces to the end of the letter and rests on the signature: All my love, Joy.

When he takes the letter to the study, rummaging to find the secret place he has always stored Joy's letters, he finds a box file that contains all the literature he made for his group: LIPAC: Lincolnshire Israel Public Affairs Committee. Yes, he remembers the name now he reads it — it seems grand and over-important, and he smiles.

There are leaflets with a logo of a rising sun on the front and a schedule of meetings inside, and notebooks of minutes from meetings, and a list of names and signatures with his own at the top, and letters to the government lobbying for pressure to be put on Palestine to fulfil Israel's demands, which he reads now with a faltering understanding and a disbelief that these words could have been typed by his own hands.

What was the point of it all again? If he had a map he would not even know where to begin to look for these countries. The inspiration these leaflets and letters had once provoked in him is felt so dimly now, and with immense shame he cannot quantify but which suggests to him inspiration cannot be worth its consequences — it is better overall to keep one's head down and say and think nothing.