“I don’t recall.”
“Did you enjoy your lunch?”
“Didn’t have any.”
“There’s a pizza box in the sink.”
Humphrey turned to consider the evidence. “Yes, some pizza. Wasn’t good, which is why I didn’t remember it.”
Tooly tried to catch his eye, to inquire with a glance, What the hell is going on?
“I didn’t offer you coffee yet,” he said.
Tooly stood to make it, but the jar of Nescafé was empty.
“Was telling Tooly,” Duncan said, “that waking can be difficult for you.”
“Feels strange,” Humphrey said. “Apprehension. But not about anything. If you fear something concrete, you can do something about it. But I don’t know what I feel frightened of.”
“His vascular system isn’t working properly,” Duncan continued. “That’s what the memory-clinic guy told us. His brain doesn’t get the blood it needs.”
“I don’t want to exaggerate the problem,” Humphrey said. “It’s uneven. It depends on what cells are attacked.”
“You must be happy to see your daughter.”
Humphrey grunted, laughed uncomfortably.
“I heard that someone robbed you,” Tooly said, looking at him hard, though he failed to meet her gaze.
“I was told I was robbed. Don’t remember any of it. Attempts were made to strangle me. This is where my problem stems from, I think.”
“The attack seems to have affected his memory,” Duncan said. “Short-term, particularly. But there are other problems. He forgets how to do stuff.”
“I don’t want to exaggerate,” Humphrey said. “It depends on what cells are attacked. Blood doesn’t flow in that direction.”
“What sorts of things are you forgetting, Humphrey?”
“I can’t remember to tell you.”
“Sometimes you come up with ancient memories,” Duncan remarked. “You told me about milking a cow when you were a boy, which must have been eighty years ago. You remember?”
Humphrey remained silent at length, sniffed irritably. “I find your questions odd, frankly.”
“I have a feeling you gave those muggers a punch or two,” Duncan said. “Didn’t you. He’s a tough one, is Humphrey.”
“If only I could get the bastards on their own for a few minutes,” Humphrey said, adding, “with someone holding them down, of course.”
Duncan laughed. “The problem is that he’s isolated here. Which doesn’t help.”
“I don’t know these people around me. Don’t know who they are. It’s a lack of community.”
“At least you have Yelena coming in,” Duncan said.
“Yes, but we’re like grandfather and granddaughter. Not friends,” he said. “I haven’t offered you coffee. I have a thing of it somewhere.”
“We’re fine,” Tooly said.
Nevertheless, Humphrey rose agonizingly to his feet again, muttering about people moving things, and tossed aside piles of clothing and books. He found the empty Nescafé jar.
Duncan whispered to Tooly, “I need to go. But you stay.”
“Let me walk you down,” she said.
For the first time, Humphrey looked directly at her. “I put on my tie because you were coming.”
“I know.”
On the street, Duncan asked how it had felt seeing her dad, and hoped that their falling-out, whatever its cause—“None of my business,” he added, not wanting to know — had been shelved.
“I found,” she said, needing to smuggle this in before he went, “I found that harrowing.”
“Yup. Well …” he responded, wanting to hand over this problem.
“But, Duncan, you shouldn’t be the one paying for Yelena,” she said. “You’ve been too generous already.”
“Hey — I’m a lawyer,” he said, unlocking the BMW.
“Being a lawyer means you pay? Doesn’t being a lawyer mean everybody else pays?”
“Means I’m richer than book persons such as yourself.” On his notepad, he wrote the door code to Humphrey’s building and tore off the sheet. “Let him recharge a few minutes, then you can go back.”
However, she kept walking, unable to return yet. All the time she’d known Humphrey, he’d scarcely spoken a correct sentence in English. Had he been tricking her for years? But what she’d seen upstairs clearly wasn’t a trick. Hard to imagine that Venn could be involved. If only she’d remained unaware of all this, never witnessed that wretched room where at this moment he probably sat, slumped forward in that dirty white armchair.
The room was messier on her return — clothes dumped, books scattered. It was evening now, but the blinds remained up. He stared at the darkened window, house lights dotting the view.
“Me,” she said, shutting the door. At the shudder of its closure, he turned, sloshing a glass of vodka in his hand.
“Don’t need to shout.” He failed to orient toward her voice.
“Why are you looking over there?”
He swiveled uncertainly.
“Humphrey? Can you see me? Point to where I am right now.”
“I don’t like tests,” he said. “I keep my chair here behind the door. When people come in, they have to stand in front of me, and the outside light makes a shadow around them. But it’s too dark now.” He spoke to her midriff. “Some people were here before.”
“Me and Duncan.”
“Was that yesterday?”
“Today.”
He harrumphed, unconvinced, and moved the vodka glass to his lips, puckering to meet the splash of liquid, which dribbled down his chin.
“You’re enjoying that,” she said.
“I intend to drink myself into oblivion.”
“Don’t say that.”
“There’s no point in staying. Nothing anybody can do.”
“I didn’t come here to help you.” She sat on his bed, watching him. “In some ways, Humph, you seem like you used to. But you talk … Maybe it was a joke or something. I’m — were you pretending before? I mean, it was years that we knew each other. But this is you talking now, right?”
He sipped his drink.
“So,” she asked, “where are you actually from?”
“Me?”
“Who else is in this room? Yes, you.”
He shook his head.
“You’re not going to say? Why not?” she asked. “How many times did you tell me how you’d been ‘cornered by history,’ that you would have been some great intellectual but your era had ruined everything? That was crap, I guess. Thanks.”
“I’d tell you,” he said. “But something blocks it out, blots it out. Things that I know very well. These blanks in my memory.”
“How am I supposed to believe this?”
His attention roamed. “Can I offer you a coffee? I have a thing of it somewhere.”
She held up a full container of Nescafé that she had bought while outside.
“Yes, that’s the one,” he said.
Tooly excused herself to the communal bathroom down the hall. A fluorescent beam flickered in there. A hole had been kicked in the wall under the hand dryer, baring dusty pipes and insulation. Residents had thrown trash in there: a used tampon, an empty bottle of white rum. She entered a toilet stall, its door hanging by one hinge, a bloated cigarette bobbing in the bowl.
When she got back, Humphrey was making instant coffee using water from the faucet.
“Wait, wait. Isn’t there a kettle?”
He shook off the question, handing her a lukewarm mug.
She stepped toward the bed, inadvertently toppling a stack of books. “Reminds me of my shop in here. But you had way more books than this. What happened to your collection?”
He shrugged.
“You still read all day long?”