What the Runaway did after his return was completely unexpected. After dinner I heard him telling the others how in the city outside everyone was being subjected to an experiment. They were playing out the future, if you can believe it, guys . . . Some people are walking around with wires in their ears and little TV sets in their hands and they never look up, their eyes are glued to the screens. Either they’re filming some crazy expensive sci-fi movie, or they’re testing out what life will be like fifty years from now. That was the Runaway’s conclusion, publicly proclaimed. He had recently read some prognoses in Time and now surely they were conducting experiments. But everything looks so fake that there’s no way people will believe it. Good thing they’ve been strictly fenced off from us, he finished.
Don’t worry, he told me later, I didn’t tell anyone out there what year it is, so I wouldn’t spoil their experiment.
Then he apologized for making trouble, then asked me if I believed they would really take action to protect John.
I thought for a bit and said—yes. I had a whole year until the papers would prove me wrong.
29.
Numbers
You can see where the world is heading, Gaustine said one morning . . . A complete failure, everything we had previously expected for the coming twenty-thirty years has not happened. You yourself know that part of the failure of the future is also the failure of medicine. The world is getting older and every three seconds someone loses their memory.
Statistics were his new obsession. He tracked them, constantly comparing and analyzing the growing curve of various memory disorders, data from the World Health Organization, from the European headquarters and several of the larger national centers. The numbers for the U.S., for example, were truly terrifying—around five million with dementia, another five and a half million with Alzheimer’s. Globally there are now more than fifty million, Gaustine would say, and those are only the registered cases, that’s a country bigger than Spain, in seven or eight years it’ll be seventy-five million, and again that’s only the diagnosed cases. In India, for example, ninety percent of those suffering from dementia are never diagnosed, while in Europe almost half aren’t. Almost half, can you imagine, that means just double the numbers we have. We are surrounded by people for whom the trigger has already been pulled, they just don’t know it yet. You and I could even be among them . . . have you gotten yourself tested?
No.
Me, neither. Some kind of global dementia is coming.
Gaustine knew how to tap into all my hidden fears. Recently I’d had the feeling that every day, names and stories were abandoning me, quietly slipping away like weasels.
That’s not all, he went on with his numbers, it’s one of the three most expensive illnesses at the moment. The Americans have calculated it, two hundred fifteen million dollars a year, and that was five years ago. That includes medicines, social workers, doctors, home health aides, can you imagine how many aides are needed? Some politicians there will soon think to ride this wave, they’ll stir up unrest, nobody wants to pay huge amounts of money for people with mental disabilities, who are just a burden on society, terminally ill, in need of a merciful death, they will demand radical health policies, some kind of realpolitik in medicine . . . you’ve seen this before, that rhetoric was developed and applied back in the 1930s.
Good thing we don’t need to re-create the ’30s, I thought, even though I’d taken a peek into them. I remembered the cover of Neues Volk from 1938, the National Socialists’ flagship magazine, with a photo of an “incurably ill” person along with the caption: 60,000 Reichsmarks is how much this person with a genetic disease costs society per year. Dear countrymen, that is your money, too.
Our patients would be the first on the blacklist. That’s how it had begun back in the ’30s—with psychiatric wards and geriatric clinics.
30.
Once they brought an elderly woman to the clinic, Mrs. Sh., who refused to go into the bathroom and became hysterical every time she caught sight of a shower. This happened sometimes, in the severe phases of the disease people became aggressive, obstinate, like children refusing to do things that previously had been habitual. In such cases we would find soap and shampoo from the right era, which still held their scents, toiletries, shower caps from back then, thick robes with monograms, mirrors with ivory handles, wooden combs . . . Everything that would make a bathroom seem cozy and familiar. But in this case nothing helped. Mrs. Sh. kept trying to pull away, crying and pleading with the nurses to spare her. So Gaustine and I dug through the archives. We searched out the woman’s surviving relatives and documents, and discovered, actually I must admit that Gaustine guessed it first, that Mrs. Sh. had survived Auschwitz. She herself clearly had tried to forget and not talk about it. But now, in the late phase of her illness, that which she had tried to erase for her entire life rushed back at her like an oncoming train and she could not escape into other memories. Somewhere Primo Levi wrote that the concentration camp is that inescapable reality which you know that you will sooner or later awaken into amid the dream of life. And that feeling does not fade with the years.
Suddenly it all made sense—her eternal morning questions of whether they had found her mother or whether her brothers were alive. We also understood why she squirreled away crusts of bread and other leftovers from the cafeteria, hiding them in her cupboard. Everything that awakened that memory had to be avoided—showers, the clicking of the nurses’ high heels in the hallway. (We switched them out with soft slippers.) The daytime lighting was softened. Part of the cafeteria was divided into smaller, cozy booths, so as to avoid large common areas and the rattling of silverware. Unwittingly you realize how many things in a clinic are potentially charged with hidden violence, as Foucault would say. Nothing would ever be innocent again—bathrooms, cafeterias, the gas stove, a doctor in a white coat who wants to give you a shot, the lighting, the barking of dogs outside, the sharp voice, certain German words . . .
This was one of the rare instances in which Gaustine refrained from tapping into a patient’s memory.
31.
New and Imminent Diagnoses
Family Collapse Disorder
Somewhere in a Swiss village a father came back home to find strangers inside his house, a woman and two young men who were making themselves comfortable. He locked them inside and called the police. The police came and surrounded the house.
Dad, what’s wrong with you? his sons cried from inside.
They say that the coming mass loss of memory could be something like a virus that reaches the hippocampus, destroys brain cells, blocks neurotransmitters. And the brain, that supreme creation of nature, is transformed into a pulpy mass in the span of a year or so. Several world-renown scientists offered bees as an example and warned that what is happening with their mysterious disappearance, so-called colony collapse disorder, is actually the same as what the Alzheimer’s mechanism does to the human family.
The Skipping Record Syndrome
One morning they wake up after a night of restless dreams and find, while still in bed, that they have undergone a metamorphosis . . .
Time has skipped, like records used to.
A young man and woman, university students, go to bed in the evening and wake up twenty years later. They sense that something is off with their bodies, stiff, painful, they are not exactly arthropods, but it’s not much better. Some unfamiliar kids barge into the room, screaming at them.