What was this whole experiment to him, why did he need to expand the field of the past? He had achieved what others had never even dreamed of. He was one of the first to introduce clinics of the past. Centers based on his experience opened up in various countries. Geriatricians were falling all over themselves to reach him, to work with him, to invite him as a consultant. He never appeared in person, he sent me most places to deliver his refusals, always polite but firm. And although he turned down all sorts of interviews and publicity, his name was mentioned with respect and reverence, just as one speaks of a genius and an eccentric whom few had seen, and this only added to his legend.
28.
The Runaway
I dubbed him the Lonely Long-Distance Runner, a nod to an angry British book from back in the day, which, I must admit, I never did get around to reading, but the title stuck in my head. Lately I remember far more books that I haven’t read than those I have. I don’t find this an anomaly, it’s the same as with the unhappened past.
Anyway, he really had been (or so they tell me) a long-distance runner—physically fit, strong, a former athlete, and it was as if his body didn’t want to forget. Once a very lively, very curious man, the disease had eaten away the past thirty-forty years of his memory, although sometimes he would surprise us with sudden returns. The medications attempted to slow down the process, and we attempted to give him back the time that he remembered . . . (Obviously, there is no cure, but a person has a right to happiness even when ill, as Gaustine would say.) It was a battle for the past, a battle for every memory.
Most probably in two or three years the Runner’s strength would leave him, his muscle memory would weaken, that sliver of remembered time would grow much narrower or even disappear completely. But he was still in good shape now, even in suspiciously good shape. He lived happily at our Alzheimer’s community in the ’70s neighborhood, we’d assigned him to the Seventy-Ninth Regiment, as Gaustine and I liked to joke.
He would go to the little library every day to read the new issues of every newspaper from 1979. We had collected issues from the whole year and released them day by day. Only the weather forecast was off sometimes. But then again, nobody expected much from the weather forecasters, so nobody really even noticed it. The Runner read a lot, he got excited over everything that happened. He was a music connoisseur and still couldn’t get over the fact that the Beatles had broken up, he was on Lennon’s side. The fall of Pol Pot’s regime, Pope John Paul II’s first visit to Mexico—he followed everything, the year started off well that January. Then he moped around downcast for a time, reading about the Chinese attack on the Vietnamese border. He was as delighted as a child to see the first photograph of Jupiter’s rings sent by Voyager. He wanted to talk for a long time about what might be found on these rings, where the colors came from. Whether some form of life might happen to be discovered there . . . I tried to share his anticipation and premonition of a miracle, as Gaustine would say, and to feel that same excitement.
Lennon got him more worked up than anything else. At that time the whole world was blasting ABBA and disco, an incontrovertible sign of decline, yet he followed John’s every step in the magazines and newspapers. They wrote that he had become a homebody, that he baked homemade bread and dandled three-year-old Sean. The Runner saw nothing wrong with this and when caustic comments from Cynthia, John’s ex, appeared in a different paper, saying that actually he just spent the whole day in front of the TV, the Runner got truly angry. Once he came to me with the new issue of Life, if I’m not mistaken, and read to me that Lennon recently had been working on his autobiography and had already made tape recordings of his earliest childhood memories from Penny Lane. I can’t wait to read that, the Runner eagerly said over and over again.
Once he came and found me in the middle of the night. He shut the door behind him but didn’t want to sit down. John Lennon will be killed, he said quickly. Very soon. He was truly worried, in any case he couldn’t explain whether he had dreamed it or not. Some crazy guy will shoot him, I’ve even seen his face. While he’s coming home, in front of the entrance to the Dakota. We need to tell the police immediately. He needs to get out of there right now.
I didn’t know how to react. Was it a sudden flash of memory (that meant the therapy was working!), or a leak of information from outside? I promised that I would call the police the very next morning. We talked for a while longer and I escorted him back to his room.
The next morning, the Runner had disappeared.
The community had a discreet but formidable security force. For no other reason than that people who have lost their memories often lose their way as well, they are easy targets for incidents when outside the protected zone. The Runner was still in good shape, the security guards said they had only seen at the last moment how he had launched himself over the fence and disappeared.
A patient running away is a rare and unpleasant event for everyone involved. Most of all due to the life-threatening danger to the patient himself. In this case, he had leapt over not only a fence, but thirty or forty years as well. We didn’t know what effect this collision with another reality would have. What’s more, the incident could eventually lead to an investigation and a closing of the community, to yet another round of arguments with the guild about the advisability of such therapy, whether we had the right to “synchronize” internal and external time, and so on.
All the police in the region were informed of the incident and asked to be very careful with a patient who “inhabited” another time. I played out all kinds of scenarios in my head as I, too, wandered around the nearby city searching for him. I imagined how he would stop the first policeman he saw and share his concerns that we needed to alert the FBI immediately, as well as the police in New York. Why? the policeman would ask. I have a secret message, John Lennon is going to be killed, the killer might already be on his way. Really, the cop would say breezily with his cop-like sense of humor, aren’t you a little late, buddy? Well . . . what do you mean, has he already been killed, I’ll never forgive myself, the Runner would moan.
I would hate for him to go through all that.
Thank goodness everything ended quickly and in the best possible way. The Runner, whom from then on we would call the Runaway, wandered for a few hours in the nearby city (I was afraid he would go straight to the airport and look for a flight to New York), then he found the police station, where they already knew about the incident. He asked to speak to the boss, who listened to him carefully, wrote everything down, and said he would immediately set the system in motion. In front of the Runner he picked up the phone to speak directly with FBI headquarters. Then he offered to escort him back to the community in the station’s nicest (unmarked) car.
I didn’t know how to deal with the Runaway. He had come back from “another” world, he had mixed times. In that case the therapy probably should have been discontinued and he should have been released. Or perhaps he would request this himself. I imagined him telling everyone that real time was passing outside, while here we were palming some secondhand past off on them. Upon entering the community, patients (at least those in an earlier phase of their disease) and their families knew that this was in fact a form of therapy. Yet nevertheless for the sake of the purity of the experiment it was better not to let particles of another reality in. The environment needed to remain antiseptic with respect to contamination from other times.