Denial by Jon Raymond

Author:Jon Raymond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

9

I flew back to Guadalajara on New Year’s Day, 2052. The last week of the year had been blissfully dull and free of any physical symptoms listed in the journals. No ataxia, no spasticity, no akinetic mutism. Deboarding, I felt clean, and the city felt clean, too, like a hard wind had blown through, sweeping the holiday decorations off the walls and the trash from the ground, leaving the surfaces blank. Quietly, coldly, we’d crossed into the new year.

I had a better hotel room at the Best Western this time around. Liu seemed to smell some kind of glory down in Mexico, and he’d placed the resources not only of the newspaper’s travel budget but of some of his personal bank account behind me. The new room was a suite on the twelfth floor, with windows that opened and a little kitchenette with a stovetop and mini-fridge. I could see the rooftops sprawling in every direction, decorated with clotheslines and satellite dishes and bursts of palm trees, and faraway the tips of ancient, surrounding hills. When I checked in, a breeze was gently blowing through, scented with cement dust and frijoles. It was good to be Liu’s chosen emissary, I thought. If I had to carve his name in the annals of history with my flaming sword to get this upgrade, so be it.

I took a nap. The mattress was too soft, and the traffic horns blared on and off at irregular intervals. I couldn’t fall asleep, so I ended up spending hours staring at the ceiling, testing my brain in light of my recent diagnosis. I’d been making a conscious effort to dredge up old memories, seeking the limits of my mental powers. I went through every member of my grade school soccer team. I recollected the smell of my friend Josh’s Toyota Corolla. I walked the banks of the nameless creek running through my hometown where as kids we used to hunt crawdads and, later, smoked our first cigarettes. I roamed every year, every season, picking up impressions and checking them for damage.

Had anything been lost? I wondered. I didn’t think so. I still seemed to have all the images and facts I’d had before, such as they were. I still couldn’t sleep, so I sat on the bed and tried staring hard at the furniture in the room, zooming in on the doorknob and the lampshade, trying to feel the prions physically replicating in my eyes. I couldn’t sense anything in that way, either. I didn’t know what a misfolded protein felt like. I didn’t know what a neuron felt like, or an enzyme, or a cytoplasm. They were all just words. My breathing seemed normal. My muscles and nerves responded to orders.

I must have slept, because I woke up to the sound of birdcalls. They weren’t birds I recognized, but for a moment I imagined I was in my childhood bed. I’d grown up hearing orioles and chickadees, as I recalled, but at some point they’d all moved north, replaced by more southerly finches and warblers.

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