Still Alice Page 0,38

bank on two unacceptably effective drugs available to treat it, and that she couldn’t trade any of this in for some other, curable disease, what did she want? Assuming the in vitro procedure worked, she wanted to live to hold Anna’s baby and know it was her grandchild. She wanted to see Lydia act in something she was proud of. She wanted to see Tom fall in love. She wanted one more sabbatical year with John. She wanted to read every book she could before she could no longer read.

She laughed a little, surprised at what she’d just revealed to herself. Nowhere in that list was there anything about linguistics, teaching, or Harvard. She ate her last bite of cone. She wanted more sunny, seventy-degree days and ice-cream cones.

And when the burden of her disease exceeded the pleasure of that ice cream, she wanted to die. But would she quite literally have the presence of mind to recognize it when those curves crossed? She worried that the future her would be incapable of remembering and executing this kind of plan. Asking John or any of her children to assist her with this in any way was not an option. She’d never put any of them in that position.

She needed a plan that committed the future her to a suicide she arranged for now. She needed to create a simple test, one that she could self-administer every day. She thought about the questions Dr. Davis and the neuropsychologist had asked her, the ones she already couldn’t answer last December. She thought about what she still wanted. Intellectual brilliance wasn’t required for any of them. She was willing to go on living with some serious holes in short-term memory.

She removed her BlackBerry from her baby blue Anna William bag, a birthday gift from Lydia. She wore it every day, slung over her left shoulder, resting on her right hip. It had become an indispensable accessory, like her platinum wedding ring and running watch. It looked great with her butterfly necklace. It contained her cell phone, her BlackBerry, and her keys. She took it off only to sleep.

She typed:

Alice, answer the following questions:

1. What month is it?

2. Where do you live?

3. Where is your office?

4. When is Anna’s birthday?

5. How many children do you have?

If you have trouble answering any of these, go to the file named “Butterfly” on your computer and follow the instructions there immediately.

She set the alarm to vibrate and to appear as a recurring reminder every morning on her appointment calendar at 8:00, no end date. She realized that there were a lot of potential problems with this design, that it was by no means foolproof. She just hoped she opened “Butterfly” before she became that fool.

SHE PRACTICALLY RAN TO CLASS, worried that she was most certainly late, but nothing had started without her when she got there. She took an aisle seat, four rows back, left of center. A few students trickled in through the doors at the back of the room, but for the most part, the class was there, ready. She looked at her watch. 10:05. The clock on the wall agreed. This was most unusual. She kept herself busy. She looked over the syllabus and skimmed her notes from last class. She made a to-do list for the rest of the day:

Lab

Seminar

Run

Study for final

Time, 10:10. She tapped her pen to the tune of “My Sharona.”

The students stirred, becoming restless. They checked notebooks and the clock on the wall, they flipped through textbooks and shut them, they booted up laptops and clicked and typed. They finished their coffees. They crinkled wrappers belonging to candy bars and chips and various other snacks and ate them. They chewed pen caps and fingernails. They twisted their torsos to search the back of the room, they leaned to consult friends in other rows, they raised eyebrows and shrugged shoulders. They whispered and giggled.

“Maybe it’s a guest lecturer,” said a girl who sat a couple of rows behind Alice.

Alice unfolded her motivation and emotion syllabus again. Tuesday, May 4: Stress, Helplessness and Control (chapters 12 and 14). Nothing about a guest lecturer. The energy in the room converted from expectant to awkward dissonance. They were like corn kernels on a hot stove. Once that first one popped, the rest would follow, but no one knew which one would be first or when. The formal rule at Harvard stated that students were required to wait twenty minutes for a tardy professor before