Still Alice

by Lisa Genova

  “Okay.”

  “Here, it’s time, take these before I forget.”

  He handed her a glass of water and a handful of pills. She swallowed each one.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome. I’ll be right back.”

  He took the empty glass from her and left the room. She lay down on the bed next to the former contents of the drawer and closed her eyes, feeling sad and proud, powerful and relieved as she waited.

  “ALICE, PLEASE, PUT YOUR ROBE, hood, and cap on, we need to leave.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Alice.

  “Harvard Commencement.”

  She inspected the costume again. She still didn’t get it.

  “What does commencement mean?”

  “It’s Harvard graduation day. Commencement means beginning.”

  Commencement. Graduation from Harvard. A beginning. She turned the word over in her mind. Graduation from Harvard marked a beginning, the beginning of adulthood, the beginning of professional life, the beginning of life after Harvard. Commencement. She liked the word and wanted to remember it.

  They walked along a busy sidewalk wearing their dark pink costumes and plush black hats. She felt conspicuously ridiculous and entirely untrusting of John’s wardrobe decision for the first several minutes of their walk. Then, suddenly, they were everywhere. Masses of people in similar costumes and hats but in a variety of colors funneled from every direction onto the sidewalk with them, and soon they were all walking in a rainbow costume parade.

  They entered a grassy yard shaded by big, old trees and surrounded by big, old buildings to the slow, ceremonial sounds of bagpipes. Alice shivered with goose bumps. I’ve done this before. The procession led them to a row of chairs where they sat down.

  “This is Harvard graduation,” said Alice.

  “Yes,” said John.

  “Commencement.”

  “Yes.”

  After some time, the speakers began. Harvard graduations past had featured many famous and powerful people, mostly political leaders.

  “The king of Spain spoke here one year,” said Alice.

  “Yes,” said John. He laughed a little, amused.

  “Who is this man?” asked Alice, referring to the man at the podium.

  “He’s an actor,” said John.

  Now, Alice laughed, amused.

  “I guess they couldn’t get a king this year,” said Alice.

  “You know, your daughter is an actress. She could be up there someday,” said John.

  Alice listened to the actor. He was an easy and dynamic speaker. He kept talking about a picaresque.

  “What’s a picaresque?” asked Alice.

  “It’s a long adventure that teaches the hero lessons.”

  The actor talked about his life’s adventure. He told them he was here today to pass on to them, the graduating classes, the people about to begin their own picaresques, the lessons he’d learned along his way. He gave them five: Be creative, be useful, be practical, be generous, and finish big.

  I’ve been all those things, I think. Except, I haven’t finished yet. I haven’t finished big.

  “That’s good advice,” said Alice.

  “Yes, it is,” said John.

  They sat and listened and clapped and listened and clapped for longer than Alice cared to. Then, everyone stood and walked slowly in a less orderly parade. Alice and John and some of the others entered a nearby building. The magnificent entryway, with its staggeringly high, dark wooden ceiling and towering wall of sunlit stained glass, awed Alice. Huge, old, and heavy-looking chandeliers loomed over them.

  “What is this?” asked Alice.

  “This is Memorial Hall, it’s part of Harvard.”

  To her disappointment, they spent no time in the magnificent entryway and moved immediately into a smaller, relatively unimpressive theater room, where they sat down.

  “What’s happening now?” asked Alice.

  “The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences students are getting their Ph.D.s. We’re here to see Dan graduate. He’s your student.”

  She looked around the room at the faces of the people in the dark pink costumes. She didn’t know which one was Dan. She didn’t, in fact, recognize any of the faces, but she did recognize the emotion and the energy in the room. They were happy and hopeful, proud and relieved. They were ready and eager for new challenges, to discover and create and teach, to be the heroes in their own adventures.

  What she saw in them, she recognized in herself. This was something she knew, this place, this excitement and readiness, this beginning. This had been the beginning of her adventure, too, and although she couldn’t remember the details, she had an implicit knowing that it had been rich and worthwhile.

  “There he is, on the stage,” said John.

  “Who?”

  “Dan, your student.”

  “Which one?”

  “The blond.”

  “Daniel Maloney,” someone announced.

  Dan stepped forward and shook hands with the man on the stage in exchange for a red folder. Dan then raised the red folder high over his head and smiled in glorious victory. For his joy, for all that he had surely achieved to be here, for the adventure that he would embark upon, Alice applauded him, this student of hers whom she had no memory of.

  ALICE AND JOHN STOOD OUTSIDE under a big white tent among the students in dark pink costumes and the people who were happy for them and waited. A young, blond man approached Alice, grinning broadly. Unhesitating, he hugged her and kissed her on the cheek.

  “I’m Dan Maloney, your student.”

  “Congratulations, Dan, I’m so happy for you,” said Alice.

  “Thank you so much. I’m so glad you were able to come and see me graduate. I feel so lucky to have been your student. I want you to know, you were the reason I chose linguistics as my field of study. Your passion for understanding how language works, your rigorous and collaborative approach to research, your love of teaching, you’ve inspired me in so many ways. Thank you for all your guidance and wisdom, for setting the bar so much higher than I thought I could reach, and for giving me plenty of room to run with my own ideas. You’ve been the best teacher I’ve ever had. If I achieve in my life a fraction of what you’ve accomplished in yours, I’ll consider my life a success.”

  “You’re welcome. Thank you for saying that. You know, I don’t remember so well these days. I’m glad to know that you’ll remember these things about me.”

  He handed her a white envelope.

  “Here, I wrote it all down for you, everything I just said, so you can read it whenever you want and know what you gave to me even if you can’t remember.”

  “Thank you.”

  They each held their envelopes, hers white and his red, with deep pride and reverence.

  An older, heavier version of Dan and two women, one much older than the other, came over to them. The older, heavier version of Dan carried a tray of bubbly white wine in skinny glasses. The young woman handed a glass to each of them.

  “To Dan,” said the older, heavier version of Dan, holding up his glass.

  “To Dan,” said everyone, clinking the skinny glasses and taking sips.

  “To auspicious beginnings,” added Alice, “and finishing big.”

  THEY BEGAN WALKING AWAY FROM the tents and the old, brick buildings and the people in costumes and hats to where it was less populated and noisy. Someone in a black costume yelled and ran over to John. John stopped and let go of Alice’s hand to shake hands with the person who’d yelled. Caught in her own forward momentum, Alice kept walking.

  For a stretched-out second, Alice paused and made eye contact with a woman. She was sure she didn’t know the woman, but there was meaning in the exchange. The woman had blond hair, a phone by her ear, and glasses over her big, blue, startled eyes. The woman was driving in a car.

  Then, Alice’s hood pulled suddenly tight around her throat, and she was jerked backward. S
he landed hard and unsuspecting on her back and banged her head on the ground. Her costume and plush hat offered little protection against the pavement.

  “I’m sorry, Ali, are you okay?” asked a man in a dark pink robe, kneeling beside her.

  “No,” she said, sitting up and rubbing the back of her head. She expected to see blood on her hand but didn’t.

  “I’m sorry, you walked right into the street. That car almost hit you.”

  “Is she okay?”

  It was the woman from the car, her eyes still big and startled.

  “I think so,” said the man.

  “Oh my god, I could’ve killed her. If you didn’t pull her out of the way, I might’ve killed her.”

  “It’s okay, you didn’t kill her, I think she’s okay.”

  The man helped Alice stand. He felt and looked at her head.

  “I think you’re all right. You’re probably going to be really sore. Can you walk?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Can I give you a ride somewhere?” asked the woman.

  “No, no, that’s all right, we’re fine,” said the man.

  He put his arm around Alice’s waist and his hand under her elbow, and she walked home with the kind stranger who had saved her life.

  SUMMER 2005

  Alice sat in a big, comfortable, white chair and puzzled over the clock on the wall. It was the kind with hands and numbers, which was much harder to read than the kind with just numbers. Five maybe?

  “What time is it?” she asked the man sitting in the other big, white chair.

  He looked at his wrist.

  “Almost three thirty.”

  “I think it’s time for me to go home.”

  “You are home. This is your home on the Cape.”

  She looked around the room—the white furniture, the pictures of lighthouses and beaches on the walls, the giant windows, the spindly little trees outside the windows.

  “No, this isn’t my house. I don’t live here. I want to go home now.”

  “We’re going back to Cambridge in a couple of weeks. We’re here on vacation. You like it here.”

  The man in the chair continued reading his book and drinking his drink. The book was thick and the drink was yellowish brown, like the color of her eyes, with ice in it. He was enjoying and absorbed in both, the book and the drink.

  The white furniture, the pictures of lighthouses and beaches on the walls, the giant windows, and the spindly little trees outside the windows didn’t look at all familiar to her. The sounds here weren’t familiar to her either. She heard birds, the kinds that live at the ocean, the sound of the ice swirling and clinking in the glass when the man in the chair drank his drink, the sound of the man breathing through his nose as he read his book, and the ticking of the clock.

  “I think I’ve been here long enough. I’d like to go home now.”

  “You are home. This is your vacation home. This is where we come to relax and unwind.”

  This place didn’t look like her home or sound like her home, and she didn’t feel relaxed. The man reading and drinking in the big, white chair didn’t know what he was talking about. Maybe he was drunk.

  The man breathed and read and drank, and the clock ticked. Alice sat in the big, white chair and listened to the time go by, wishing someone would take her home.

  SHE SAT IN ONE OF the white, wooden chairs on a deck drinking iced tea and listening to the shrill cross talk of unseen frogs and twilight bugs.

  “Hey, Alice, I found your butterfly necklace,” said the man who owned the house.

  He dangled a jeweled butterfly by a silver chain in front of her.

  “That’s not my necklace, that’s my mother’s. And it’s special, so you’d better put it back, we’re not supposed to play with it.”

  “I talked to your mom, and she said that you could have it. She’s giving it to you.”

  She studied his eyes and mouth and body language, looking for some sign that would give away his motive. But before she could get a proper read on his sincerity, the beauty of the sparkling blue butterfly seduced her, overriding her rule-abiding concerns.

  “She said I could have it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He leaned over her from behind and fastened it around her neck. She ran her fingers over the blue gems on the wings, the silver body, and the diamond-studded antennae. She felt a smug thrill rush through her. Anne’s going to be so jealous.

  SHE SAT ON THE FLOOR in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom she slept in and examined her reflection. The girl in the mirror had sunken, darkened circles under her eyes. Her skin looked loose and spotty all over and wrinkled at the corners of her eyes and along her forehead. Her thick, scraggly eyebrows needed to be tweezed. Her curly hair was mostly black, but it was also noticeably gray. The girl in the mirror looked ugly and old.

  She ran her fingers over her cheeks and forehead, feeling her face on her fingers and her fingers on her face. That can’t be me. What’s wrong with my face? The girl in the mirror sickened her.

  She found the bathroom and flicked on the light. She met the same image in the mirror over the sink. There were her golden brown eyes, her serious nose, her heart-shaped lips, but everything else, the composition around her features, was grotesquely wrong. She ran her fingers over the smooth, cool glass. What’s wrong with these mirrors?

  The bathroom didn’t smell right either. Two shiny, white step stools, a brush, and a bucket sat on sheets of newspaper on the floor behind her. She squatted down and breathed in through her serious nose. She pried the lid off the bucket, dipped the brush in, and watched creamy white paint dribble down.

  She started with the ones she knew were defective, the one in the bathroom and the one in the bedroom she slept in. She found four more before she was finished and painted them all white.

  SHE SAT IN A BIG, white chair, and the man who owned the house sat in the other one. The man who owned the house was reading a book and drinking a drink. The book was thick and the drink was yellowish brown with ice in it.

  She picked up an even thicker book than the one the man was reading from the coffee table and thumbed through it. Her eyes paused on diagrams of words and letters connected to other words and letters by arrows, dashes, and little lollipops. She landed on individual words as she browsed through the pages—disinhibition, phosphorylation, genes, acetylcholine, priming, transience, demons, morphemes, phonological.

  “I think I’ve read this book before,” said Alice.

  The man looked over at the book she held and then at her.

  “You’ve done more than that. You wrote it. You and I wrote that book together.”

  Hesitant to take him at his word, she closed the book and read the shiny blue cover. From Molecules to Mind by John Howland, Ph.D. and Alice Howland, Ph.D. She looked up at the man in the chair. He’s John. She flipped to the front pages. “Table of Contents. Mood and Emotion, Motivation, Arousal and Attention, Memory, Language.” Language.

  She opened the book to somewhere near the end. “An infinite possibility of expression, learned yet instinctive, semanticity, syntax, case grammar, irregular verbs, effortless and automatic, universal.” The words she read seemed to push past the choking weeds and sludge in her mind to a place that was pristine and still intact, hanging on.

  “John,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  He put his book down and sat up straight at the edge of his big, white chair.

  “I wrote this book with you,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I remember. I remember you. I remember I used to be very smart.”

  “Yes, you were, you were the smartest person I’ve ever known.”

  This thick book with the shiny blue cover represented so much of what she used to be. I used to know how the mind handled language, and I could communicate what I knew. I used to be someone who knew a lot. No one asks for my opinion or advice anymore. I miss that. I used to be curious and independent an
d confident. I miss being sure of things. There’s no peace in being unsure of everything all the time. I miss doing everything easily. I miss being a part of what’s happening. I miss feeling wanted. I miss my life and my family. I loved my life and family.

  She wanted to tell him everything she remembered and thought, but she couldn’t send all those memories and thoughts, composed of so many words, phrases, and sentences, past the choking weeds and sludge into audible sound. She boiled it down and put all her effort into what was most essential. The rest would have to remain in the pristine place, hanging on.

  “I miss myself.”

  “I miss you, too, Ali, so much.”

  “I never planned to get like this.”

  “I know.”

  SEPTEMBER 2005

  John sat at the end of a long table and took a large sip from his black coffee. It tasted extremely strong and bitter, but he didn’t care. He didn’t drink it for its taste. He’d drink it faster if he could, but it was scalding hot. He’d need two or three more large cups before he’d become fully alert and functional.

  Most of the people who came in bought their caffeine to go and hurried on their way. John didn’t have lab meeting for another hour, and he felt no compelling pressure to get to his office early today. He was content to take his time, eat his cinnamon scone, drink his coffee, and read the New York Times.

  He opened to the “Health” section first, as he’d done with every newspaper he’d read for over a year now, a habit that had long ago replaced most of the hope that originally inspired the behavior. He read the first article on the page and cried openly as his coffee cooled.

  AMYLIX FAILS TRIAL

  According to the results of Synapson’s Phase III study, patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease who took Amylix during the fifteen-month trial failed to show a significant stabilization of dementia symptoms compared with placebo.

  Amylix is a selective amyloid-beta–lowering agent. By binding soluble Abeta 42, this experimental drug’s aim is to stop progression of the disease, and it is unlike the drugs currently available to patients with Alzheimer’s, which can at best only delay the disease’s ultimate course.