I know my mother doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. My mother also knows that. And maybe the doctor does too. But I pay the care-home bills regularly, including those for the Alzheimer’s treatment. Not so that my mother will stay in the care home, but to try to make sure she goes on believing in the biscuit story. I visit my mother every Wednesday as well as at the weekend. I stay with her for an hour or an hour and a half. My mother doesn’t say anything when I tell her that the old man that I showed her is still on the motorway. ‘He has his white gloves on and he’s touching the cars. Some of the drivers have tried to crash into him, including a soldier in an army jeep. All of them have ended up as biscuits. So far no one’s been able to get him off the motorway. And the old man is just as you saw him the first time, Mum. He darts between the cars. He hops around on one leg. He spares one car. He dodges and weaves. He spins around. They tried using tranquillizer darts on him, but he dodged them all. Warning shots weren’t any use either. The sight of the old man is now so commonplace that people no longer stop on the side of the road to watch – except for tourists, who take pictures or videos of the old man on their phones. There were three big fire engines on the side of the motorway today. Whenever the old man turns a car into a biscuit, the firemen immediately spray the biscuit with their hoses to soak it and free the people inside.’ Then my mother asked, ‘Don’t you think that the old man who turns cars into biscuits looks like your father?’ My mother is talking about my father, though there has been no trace of him for more than twenty years, ever since he packed his bags at the end of the war, claiming he was going off for some sporting event. My mother still goes to the window every day and curses him out loud, so much so that it’s annoying for the neighbours and embarrassing for me.
Every weekend my wife and I go past the old man on the motorway. My mother sits in the back of the car. There comes a moment when I watch my mother in the rear-view mirror, whispering, ‘The old man’s coming closer now, to touch our car.’ At that point my wife automatically exclaims, ‘Hey, old man, now are you satisfied?’ My mother is now convinced that whenever the old man hears this, he freezes, which gives us a chance to escape. Sometimes a police patrol car draws alongside us and one of the policemen asks us why we’ve stopped in the middle of the motorway, and my wife and I have an argument. I don’t approve of revealing any details of this story to anyone except my mother, and whenever it’s her day out I do everything I can to make her think we’re going to bake a cake in the kitchen.
A Joke
I’M TRYING TO MAKE UP A JOKE, A COMPLETELY new joke. I don’t have ready-made jokes in my head and I don’t remember any details of the few jokes I’ve heard. So I’m trying to sketch out the scenario for a joke in my head. I look around me. There’s nothing I can use in my joke except for my parents. They’re not my real parents. They’re my adoptive parents, and their son has gone out to beg. He might not be their real son – he too might be adopted. Some people say he’s my brother, but I don’t believe it, although there is a resemblance. Sometimes I feel sorry for him, because he has only one arm. But with it he can beg, whereas I can’t.
He’s the only breadwinner in the household, because my adoptive parents are old. I’m still young, they say. None the less, my health problem prevents me from begging or working. I’m too embarrassed to tell anyone about it. It might be simple for you. It might not be worth mentioning. What kind of work can a young man like me do when he has to urinate every quarter of an hour? How does that happen? I don’t know. Although I don’t drink much water, I always need to urinate, even when I’m asleep. For a time, I would wet my bed – the whole bed. Or, if I happened to be sleeping in the courtyard, where there were piles of rubbish, I would soak the paper I was sleeping on. My parents didn’t mind me sleeping there, and I don’t see anything wrong with someone sleeping in their own rubbish; what’s wrong is to sleep in the middle of other people’s rubbish. But I no longer do that, because I’m a year or two older. When you grow up, you think more and you find ways to avoid a particular problem. So now I wear nappies and I can sleep wherever I like.
Sometimes I sleep on the sofa and imagine that the television is on and that I’m watching all the channels at once. I don’t know how to do that, but there must be a way to see all the channels at the same time. Then my brother comes back from work, takes the bar of soap out of my hand and says, ‘This is not a remote control,’ slowly and in a loud voice, like this: ‘THIS … IS … NOT … A … REMOTE … CONTROL.’ Then he carries me to the bedroom. When I’m asleep, I can only walk with someone else’s legs.
We share the bedroom, him and me. During the day, we use it as a kitchen, while the old people are asleep in the next room. In the winter I used to sleep in the courtyard, between the piles of rubbish. It was warmer like that. With his one arm my brother makes me a mat out of newspapers. He collects the newspapers during the day from the nearby shops, the hairdressing salons, the coffee shops and the supermarkets. Every day my brother begs in a different street – for the novelty value. A new beggar attracts attention. And every day I try to think of a joke to tell him, because I don’t have any other way to thank him. I say, ‘One day I’m going to make up a long, beautiful joke for you that will make you laugh for two days straight – you won’t stop laughing, even for a minute.’ He shakes his head. I don’t remember seeing my brother laugh. Not since he caught sight of himself in the glass door of a large building and he saw that he had an arm and a half instead of two arms. My parents say he came out of my mother’s belly like that.
I know my new joke won’t turn my brother into a happy beggar. But I want it to be powerful enough to be included in my CV and to stand the test of time. I want my brother to laugh non-stop for two whole days so that he can’t go to work – like any beggar, he wouldn’t collect a single penny if he stood on the pavement with his one arm stretched out, chuckling with laughter. The food in the house will run out, because we won’t have money to last two days, and, besides, when you laugh a lot you get hungry.
My mother hides the nappies that are left and throws the mop at me, and I have to clean up my urine, which has soaked my clothes, the toilet seat, the floor, the bed, and the courtyard. Sometimes I slip, and sometimes I wet myself while cleaning up the previous round, while my brother laughs, slapping his forehead with the muscles of his one arm and saying with difficulty, ‘It’s no use, man, no use.’
The Angel of Death
I DON’T HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOUR, TO BE HONEST, and I don’t understand why people smile. You’ll usually find me scowling. I don’t look at faces when I’m walking along and I don’t say hello to anyone. That’s because people don’t let me say hello to them when I’m scowling. You’re supposed to smile whenever you raise your hand or nod your head to greet someone, whether in the morning or the afternoon, even if you meet someone in a dark alley. This is exhausting in itself. But if you greet someone without smiling, they’ll be hostile and, I assure you, they’ll look in the other direction the next time. I’ve thought about this subject at length, and because every time I greet someone, it costs me a smile that I’m not really able to produce, I prefer not to greet them in the first place. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to greet people. Not at all. I just can’t smile. Find me a solution. If I said hello to someone with my head bowed, they’d think I wasn’t paying enough attention or there was something wrong with me, that I had something to be ashamed of, or that I’d suffered some setback or was the victim of some serious mishap. And so, in order to avoid all the confusion I might cause to others, I’ve decided not to look at anyone when I’m walking along. Not to look up at all.