the opened refrigerator door and removed a block of cheese, a lemon, a spicy liquid thing, and a couple of red vegetables.
“How do chicken enchiladas sound?” he asked.
“Fine.”
He opened the freezer and rummaged inside.
“Do we have any chicken?” he asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Oh no, Alice.”
He turned to show her something in his hands. It wasn’t chicken.
“It’s your BlackBerry, it was in the freezer.”
He pressed its buttons, shook it, and rubbed it.
“It looks like it got water in it, we can see after it’s thawed, but I think it’s dead,” he said.
She burst into ready, heartbroken tears.
“It’s okay. If it’s dead, we’ll get you a new one.”
How ridiculous, why am I this upset over a dead electronic organizer? Maybe she was really crying over the deaths of her mother, sister, and father. Maybe she was feeling emotion that she’d anticipated earlier but had been unable to express properly at the cemetery. That made more sense. But that wasn’t it. Maybe the death of her organizer symbolized the death of her position at Harvard, and she was mourning the recent loss of her career. That also made sense. But what she felt was an inconsolable grief over the death of the BlackBerry itself.
FEBRUARY 2005
She slumped into the chair next to John, across from Dr. Davis, emotionally weary and intellectually tapped. She’d been taking various neuropsychological tests in that little room with that woman, the woman who administered the neuropsychological tests in the little room, for a torturously long time. The words, the information, the meaning in the woman’s questions and in Alice’s own answers were like soap bubbles, the kind children blew out of those little plastic wands, on a windy day. They drifted away from her quickly and in dizzying directions, requiring enormous strain and concentration to track. And even if she managed to actually hold a number of them in her sight for some promising duration, it was invariably too soon that pop! they were gone, burst without obvious cause into oblivion, as if they’d never existed. And now it was Dr. Davis’s turn with the wand.
“Okay, Alice, can you spell the word water backwards for me?” he asked.
She would have found this question trivial and even insulting six months ago, but today, it was a serious question to be tackled with serious effort. She felt only marginally worried and humiliated by this, not nearly as worried and humiliated as she would’ve felt six months ago. More and more, she was experiencing a growing distance from her self-awareness. Her sense of Alice—what she knew and understood, what she liked and disliked, how she felt and perceived—was also like a soap bubble, ever higher in the sky and more difficult to identify, with nothing but the thinnest lipid membrane protecting it from popping into thinner air.
Alice spelled water forward first, to herself, extending the five fingers on her left hand, one for each letter, as she did.
“R.” She folded down her pinkie. She spelled it forward to herself again, stopping at her ring finger, which she then folded down.
“E.” She repeated the same process.
“T.” She held her thumb and pointer finger like a gun. She whispered, “A, W,” to herself.
“A, W.”
She smiled, her left hand raised in a victorious fist, and looked at John. He spun his wedding ring and gave a dispirited smile.
“Good job,” said Dr. Davis. He smiled widely and seemed impressed. Alice liked him.
“Now, I’d like you to point to the window after you touch your right cheek with your left hand.”
She lifted her left hand to her face. Pop!
“I’m sorry, can you tell me the directions again?” asked Alice, her left hand still poised in front of her face.
“Sure,” Dr. Davis obliged knowingly, like a parent who let a child get away with peeking at the top card in a game of cards or inching across the start line before yelling “go.” “Point to the window after you touch your right cheek with your left hand.”
Her left hand on her right cheek before he finished talking, she jerked her right arm at the window as fast as she could and let out a huge exhale.
“Good, Alice,” said Dr. Davis, smiling again.
John offered no praise, no hint of pleasure or pride.
“Okay, now I’d like you to tell me the name and address I asked you to remember earlier.”
The name and address. She had a loose sense of it, like the feeling of awakening from a night’s sleep and knowing she’d had a dream, maybe even knowing it was about