Still Alice

by Lisa Genova

  “This isn’t your one shot. You’re brilliant, and you don’t have Alzheimer’s. You’re going to have plenty of shots.”

  He looked at her and said nothing.

  “This next year is my one shot, John, not yours. This next year is my last chance at living my life and knowing what it means to me. I don’t think I have much more time of really being me, and I want to spend that time with you, and I can’t believe you don’t want to spend it together.”

  “I do. We would be.”

  “That’s bullshit, and you know it. Our life is here. Tom and Anna and the babies, Mary, Cathy, and Dan, and maybe Lydia. If you take this, you’ll be working all the time, you know you will, and I’d be there all alone. This decision has nothing to do with wanting to be with me, and it takes everything I have left away. I’m not going.”

  “I won’t be working all the time, I promise. And what if Lydia’s living in New York? What if you get to stay with Anna and Charlie one week a month? There are ways we can work this out so you’re not alone.”

  “What if Lydia’s not in New York? What if she’s at Brandeis?”

  “That’s why I think we should wait, make the decision later, when we have more information.”

  “I want you to take the sabbatical year.”

  “Alice, the choice for me isn’t ‘take the position at Sloan’ or ‘take a sabbatical year.’ It’s ‘take the position at Sloan’ or ‘continue here at Harvard.’ I just can’t take the next year off.”

  He became blurry as her body trembled and her eyes burned with furious tears.

  “I can’t do this anymore! Please! I can’t keep holding on without you! You can take the year off. If you wanted to, you could. I need you to.”

  “What if I turn this down, and I take the next year off, and you don’t even know who I am?”

  “What if I do, but after next year, I don’t? How can you even consider spending the time we have left squirreled away in your fucking lab? I would never do this to you.”

  “I’d never ask you to.”

  “You wouldn’t have to.”

  “I don’t think I can do it, Alice. I’m sorry, I just don’t think I can take being home for a whole year, just sitting and watching what this disease is stealing from you. I can’t take watching you not knowing how to get dressed and not knowing how to work the television. If I’m in lab, I don’t have to watch you sticking Post-it notes on all the cabinets and doors. I can’t just stay home and watch you get worse. It kills me.”

  “No, John, it’s killing me, not you. I’m getting worse, whether you’re home looking at me or hiding in your lab. You’re losing me. I’m losing me. But if you don’t take next year off with me, well, then, we lost you first. I have Alzheimer’s. What’s your fucking excuse?”

  SHE PULLED OUT CANS AND boxes and bottles, glasses and dishes and bowls, pots and pans. She stacked everything on the kitchen table, and when she ran out of room there, she used the floor.

  She took each coat out of the hall closet, unzipped and inverted all the pockets. She found money, ticket stubs, tissues, and nothing. After each strip search, she discarded the innocent coat to the floor.

  She flipped the cushions off the couches and armchairs. She emptied her desk drawer and file cabinet. She dumped the contents of her book bag, her laptop bag, and her baby blue bag. She sifted through the piles, touching each object with her fingers to register its name in her head. Nothing.

  Her search didn’t require her to remember where she’d already looked. The heaps of unearthed stuff evidenced her previous excavation sites. From the looks of things, she’d covered the entire first floor. She was sweating, manic. She wasn’t giving up. She raced upstairs.

  She ransacked the laundry basket, the bedside tables, the dresser drawers, the bedroom closets, her jewelry box, the linen closet, the medicine cabinet. The downstairs bathroom. She ran back down the stairs, sweating, manic.

  John stood in the hallway, ankle-deep in coats.

  “What the hell happened in here?” he asked.

  “I’m looking for something.”

  “What?”

  She couldn’t name it, but she trusted that somewhere in her head, she remembered and knew.

  “I’ll know when I find it.”

  “It’s a complete disaster in here. It looks like we’ve been robbed.”

  She hadn’t thought of that. It would explain why she couldn’t find it.

  “Oh my god, maybe someone stole it.”

  “We haven’t been robbed. You’ve torn the house apart.”

  She spotted an untouched basket of magazines next to the couch in the living room. She left John and the theft theory in the hallway, lifted the heavy basket, poured the magazines onto the floor, fanned through them, and then walked away. John followed her.

  “Stop it, Alice, you don’t even know what you’re looking for.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “What then?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “What does it look like, what’s it used for?”

  “I don’t know, I told you, I’ll know when I find it. I have to find it, or I’ll die.”

  She thought about what she’d just said.

  “Where’s my medication?”

  They walked into the kitchen, kicking through boxes of cereal and cans of soup and tuna. John found her many prescription and vitamin bottles on the floor and the days-of-the-week dispenser in a bowl on the kitchen table.

  “Here they are,” he said.

  The urge, the life-and-death need, didn’t dissipate.

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “This is insane. You have to stop this. The house is trashed.”

  Trash.

  She opened the compactor, pulled out the plastic bag, and dumped it.

  “Alice!”

  She ran her fingers through avocado skins, slimy chicken fat, balled tissues and napkins, empty cartons and wrappers, and other trash thingies. She saw the Alice Howland DVD. She held the wet case in her hands and studied it. Huh, I didn’t mean to throw this out.

  “There it is, that must be it,” said John. “I’m glad you found it.”

  “No, this isn’t it.”

  “All right, please, there’s trash all over the floor. Just stop, go sit, and relax. You’re frenzied. Maybe if you stop and relax, it’ll come to you.”

  “Okay.”

  Maybe, if she sat still, she’d remember what it was and where she’d put it. Or maybe, she’d forget she was ever even looking for something.

  THE SNOW THAT HAD BEGUN falling the day before and deposited about two feet over much of New England had just stopped. She might not have noticed but for the screeching sound of the wipers swinging back and forth across the newly dry windshield. John turned them off. The streets were plowed, but theirs was the only car on the road. Alice had always liked the serene quiet and stillness that followed a walloping snowstorm, but today it unnerved her.

  John drove the car into the Mount Auburn Cemetery lot. A modest space for parking had been shoveled out, but the cemetery itself, the walking paths and gravestones, hadn’t yet been uncovered.

  “I was afraid it might still be like this. We’ll have to come back another day,” he said.

  “No, wait. Let me just look at it for a minute.”

  The ancient black trees with their knuckled, varicose branches frosted in white ruled this winter wonderland. She could see a few of what were presumably the gray tops of the very tall, elaborate headstones that belonged to the once wealthy and prominent peaking above the surface of the snow, but that was it. Everything else was buried. Decomposed bodies in coffins buried under dirt and stone, dirt and stone buried under snow. Everything was black and white and frozen and dead.

  “John?”

  “What?”

  She’d said his name too loudly, breaking the silence too suddenly, startling him.

  “Nothing. We can go. I don’t want to be here.”

  “WE CAN TRY GOI
NG BACK later in the week if you want,” said John.

  “Back where?” asked Alice.

  “To the cemetery.”

  “Oh.”

  She sat at the kitchen table. John poured red wine into two glasses and gave one to her. She swirled the goblet out of habit. She was regularly forgetting the name of her daughter, the actress one, but she could remember how to swirl her wineglass, and that she liked to. Crazy disease. She appreciated the wine’s dizzying motion in the glass, its blood red color, its intense flavors of grape, oak, and earth, and the warmth she felt as it landed in her belly.

  John stood in front of 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 a particular thing, but no matter how hard she thought about it, the details of the dream eluded her. Gone forever.

  “It’s John Somebody. You know, you ask me this every time, and I’ve never been able to remember where that guy lives.”

  “Okay, let’s take a guess. Was it John Black, John White, John Jones, or John Smith?”

  She had no idea but didn’t mind playing along.

  “Smith.”

  “Does he live on East Street, West Street, North Street, or South Street?”

  “South Street.”

  “Was the town Arlington, Cambridge, Brighton, or Brookline?”

  “Brookline.”

  “Okay, Alice, last question, where’s my twenty-dollar bill?”

  “In your wallet?”

  “No, earlier, I hid a twenty-dollar bill somewhere in the room, do you remember where I put it?”

  “You did this while I was here?”

  “Yes. Any ideas at all come to mind? I’ll let you keep it if you find it.”

  “Well, if I’d known that, I would’ve been sure to figure out a way to remember it.”

  “I’m sure you would’ve. Any idea where it is?”

  She saw the focus of his stare deviate to her right, just over her shoulder, for the briefest moment before settling back on her. She twisted around. Behind her, there was a whiteboard on the wall with three words scrawled on it in red marker: Glutamate. LTP. Apoptosis. The red marker lay on a tray at the bottom, right next to a folded twenty-dollar bill. Delighted, she stepped over to the whiteboard and claimed her prize.

  Dr. Davis chuckled. “If all my patients were as smart as you, I’d go broke.”

  “Alice, you can’t keep that, you saw him look at it,” said John.

  “I won it,” said Alice.

  “It’s okay, she found it,” said Dr. Davis.

  “Should she be like this after only a year and being on medication?” asked John.

  “Well, there are probably a few things going on here. Her illness probably started long before she was diagnosed last January. She and you and your family and her colleagues probably disregarded any number of symptoms as fluke, or normal, or chalked them up to stress, not enough sleep, too much to drink, and on and on. This could’ve gone on easily for a year or two or longer.

  “And she’s incredibly bright. If the average person has, say for simplicity, ten synapses that lead to a piece of information, Alice could easily have fifty. When the average person loses those ten synapses, that piece of information is inaccessible to them, forgotten. But Alice can lose those ten and still have forty other ways of getting to the target. So her anatomical losses aren’t as profoundly and functionally noticeable at first.”

  “But by now, she’s lost a lot more than ten,” said John.


  “Yes, I’m afraid she has. Her recent memory is now falling in the bottom three percent of those able to complete the tests, her language processing has degraded considerably, and she’s losing self-awareness, all as we’d unfortunately expect to see.

  “But she’s also incredibly resourceful. She used a number of inventive strategies today to answer questions correctly that she couldn’t actually remember correctly.”

  “But there were a lot of questions that she couldn’t answer correctly, regardless,” said John.

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “It’s just getting so much worse, so quickly. Can we up the dosage of either the Aricept or the Namenda?” asked John.

  “No, she’s at the maximum dosage already for both. Unfortunately, this is a progressive, degenerative disease with no cure. It gets worse, despite any medication we have right now.”

  “And it’s clear she’s either getting the placebo or this Amylix drug doesn’t work,” said John.

  Dr. Davis paused as if considering whether to agree or disagree with this.

  “I know you’re discouraged. But I’ve often seen unexpected periods of plateau, where it seems to stall, and this can last for some time.”

  Alice closed her eyes and pictured herself standing solidly in the middle of a plateau. A beautiful mesa. She could see it, and it was worth hoping for. Could John see it? Could he still hope for her, or had he already given up? Or worse, did he actually hope for her rapid decline, so he could take her, vacant and complaisant, to New York in the fall? Would he choose to stand with her on the plateau or push her down the hill?

  She folded her arms, unfolded her crossed legs, and planted her feet flat on the floor.

  “Alice, are you still running?” asked Dr. Davis.

  “No, I stopped a while ago. Between John’s schedule and my lack of coordination—I can’t seem to see curbs or bumps in the road, and I misjudge distances. I had some terrible falls. Even at home, I keep forgetting about the raised thingy in all the doorways, and I trip into every room I go in. I’ve got tons of bruises.”