October 19
Motor activity impaired.
I keep tripping and dropping things.
At first I didn't think it was me. I thought she was changing things around.
The wastebasket was in my way, and so were the chairs, and I thought she had moved them.
Now I realize my coordination is bad. I have to move slowly to get things right. And it's increasingly difficult to type.
Why do I keep blaming Alice? And why doesn't she argue?
That irritates me even more because I see the pity in her face.
My only pleasure now is the TV set.
I spend most of the day watching the quiz programs, the old movies, the soap operas, and even the kiddie shows and cartoons.
And then I can't bring myself to turn it off.
Late at night there are the old movies, the horror pictures, the late show, and the late-late show, and even the little sermon before the channel signs off for the night, and the "Star-Spangled Banner" with the flag waving in the background, and finally the channel test pattern that stares back at me through the little square window with its unclosing eye….
Why am I always looking at life through a window?
And after it's all over I'm sick with myself because there is so little time left for me to read and write and think, and because I should know better than to drug my mind with this dishonest stuff that's aimed at the child in me.
Especially me, because the child in me is reclaiming my mind.
I know all this, but when Alice tells me I shouldn't waste my time, I get angry and tell her to leave me alone.
I have a feeling I'm watching because it's important for me not to think, not to remember about the bakery, and my mother and father, and Norma.
I don't want to remember any more of the past.
I had a terrible shock today.
Picked up a copy of an article I had used in my research, Krueger's Uber Psychische Ganzheit, to see if it would help me understand the paper I wrote and what I had done in it.
First I thought there was something wrong with my eyes.
Then I realized I could no longer read German.
Tested myself in other languages.
All gone.
October 21
Alice is gone.
Let's see if I can remember. It started when she said we couldn't live like this with the torn books and papers and records all over the floor and the place in such a mess.
"Leave everything the way it is," I warned her.
"Why do you want to live this way?"
"I want everything where I put it. I want to see it all out here.
You don't know what it's like to have something happening inside you, that you can't see and can't control, and know it's all slipping through your fingers."
"You're right.
I never said I could understand the things that were happening to you. Not when you became too intelligent for me, and not now.
But I'll tell you one thing.
Before you had the operation, you weren't like this.
You didn't wallow in your own filth and self-pity, you didn't pollute your own mind by sitting in front of the TV set all day and night, you didn't snarl and snap at people.
There was something about you that made us respect you—yes, even as you were.
You had something I had never seen in a retarded person before."
"I don't regret the experiment."
"Neither do I, but you've lost something you had before.
You had a smile…"
"An empty, stupid smile."
"No, a warm, real smile, because you wanted people to like you."
"And they played tricks on me, and laughed at me."
"Yes, but even though you didn't understand why they were laughing, you sensed that if they could laugh at you they would like you.
And you wanted them to like you.
You acted like a child and you even laughed at yourself along with them."
"I don't feel like laughing at myself right now, if you don't mind."
She was trying to keep from crying.
I think I wanted to make her cry.