Alice knows everything about me now, and accepts the fact that we can be together for only a short while.
She has agreed to go away when I tell her to go.
It's painful to think about that, but what we have, I suspect, is more than most people find in a lifetime.
October 14
I wake up in the morning and don't know where I am or what I'm doing here, and then I see her beside me and I remember.
She senses when something is happening to me, and she moves quietly around the apartment, making breakfast, cleaning up the place, or going out and leaving me to myself, without any questions.
We went to a concert this evening, but I got bored and we left in the middle.
Can't seem to pay much attention any more.
I went because I know I used to like Stravinsky but somehow I no longer have the patience for it.
The only bad thing about having Alice here with me is that now I feel I should fight this thing.
I want to stop time, freeze myself at this level and never let go of her.
October 17
Why can't I remember? I've got to try to resist this slackness.
Alice tells me I lie in bed for days and don't seem to know who or where I am.
Then it all comes back and I recognize her and remember what's happening.
Fugues of amnesia.
Symptoms of second childhood— what do they call it?—senility?
I can watch it coming on.
All so cruelly logical, the result of speeding up all the processes of the mind.
I learned so much so fast, and now my mind is deteriorating rapidly.
What if I won't let it happen?
What if I fight it?
Think of those people at Warren, the empty smiles, the blank expressions, everyone laughing at them.
Little Charlie Gordon staring at me through the window—waiting.
Please, not that again.
October 18
I'm forgetting things I learned recently.
It seems to be following the classic pattern, the last things learned are first things forgotten. Or is that the pattern? Better look it up again.
Reread my paper on the Algernon-Gordon Effect and even though I know I wrote it, I keep feeling it was written by someone else.
Most of it I don't even understand.
But why am I so irritable?
Especially when Alice is so good to me?
She keeps the place neat and clean, always putting my things away and washing dishes and scrubbing floors.
I shouldn't have shouted at her the way I did this morning because it made her cry, and I didn't want that to happen.
But she shouldn't have picked up the broken records and the music and the book and put them all neatly into a box.
That made me furious.
I don't want anyone to touch any of those things.
I want to see them pile up. I want them to remind me of what I'm leaving behind.
I kicked the box and scattered the stuff all over the floor and told her to leave them just where they were.
Foolish.
No reason for it.
I guess I got sore because I knew she thought it was silly to keep those things, and she didn't tell me she thought it was silly.
She just pretended it was perfectly normal.
She's humoring me.
And when I saw that box I remembered the boy at Warren and the lousy lamp he made and the way we were all humoring him, pretending he had done something wonderful when he hadn't.
That was what she was doing to me, and I couldn't stand it.
When she went to the bedroom and cried I felt bad about it and I told her it was all my fault.
I don't deserve someone as good as her.
Why can't I control myself just enough to keep on loving her?
Just enough.