Gwendy’s Final Task

“I don’t think so.” Ambrose leaned forward. “What usually goes with hotdogs at a picnic or a barbecue, Gwendy?”

She understood at once. “Hamburgers!”

“I think your mind was trying to form a chain of connections that would lead you back to the word you were looking for. Crankshafts are straight cylinders. So are hotdogs. Burgomeisters are a step closer. I believe if you’d taken your eyes from the screen with your essay on it, and relaxed your mind, you would have found the word.”

“Can I train myself to do that?”

“Yes.” He said it without hesitation. “This is a trainable skill. Tell me, do you have a pet?”

“No. My father does. A troublesome old dachshund.”

“What is the troublesome dachshund’s name?”

Gwendy opens her mouth, comes up blank, and closes it again.

“Fucked if I can remember. Sorry, that just slipped out. This thing … it’s infuriating.”

Ambrose smiled. “Quite all right. Can you associate your way to it? Look up at the ceiling. Let your mind run in neutral. This is a process we teach patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, but also to recovering stroke victims. Don’t push. Don’t hunt. Your mind knows what you want, but it needs to take a detour, and detours take time.”

Gwendy looked up at the ceiling. She thought about her father’s smile, so warm and welcoming … she thought about the maroon sweater he always wore when the weather turned cold … watching musicals with him and Mom on TV because they loved them and would sing along … Gwendy watching and singing along with them … West Side Story was her favorite, but her father’s was that one with Ben Vereen. That one was—

“His dachshund is Pippa. My dad named her after his favorite musical. Pippin.”

Ambrose nodded. “You see how it works?”

Gwendy began to cry, which didn’t discommode Ambrose in the slightest. He just handed her a box of Kleenex. She supposed tears in this office were pretty common.

“Will it always work?”

Ambrose grinned, making him look boyish. “Does anything?”

Gwendy laughed shakily. “I suppose not.”

“Depending on how your test comes out, Gwendy—we’ll do that today, as your situation is clearly difficult—I may prescribe drugs which might slow the progression of your illness. Which, I want to emphasize, is not yet proven. At this point simple stress seems more likely to me.”

You may be a great headshrinker, but I don’t think you’re much of a liar, Gwendy thought. You’ve seen all these symptoms before. It’s not, as they say, your first rodeo.

“What drugs?”

“Aricept is my go-to. Exelon sometimes works well in the early stages. But all that is putting the cart before the horse. We need to see how you do on the mini-cog. Come back at five this afternoon, if your schedule permits.”

“It does.” Gwendy had cleared the day for Ambrose.

“In the meantime, get something to eat and help yourself to a caffeine drink. Coffee, soda, even a Monster Energy.”

“Thank you, Dr. Ambrose.”

“You’re very welcome, Senator.”

“Gwendy, remember?”

“Yes. Gwendy. And I don’t suppose you can tell me anything about this job that’s so important?”

She gave him a level look—her Senator Peterson look. “You wouldn’t want to know, Dr. Ambrose. Believe me.”

She donned a headscarf and dark glasses and slipped into a nearby Burger King, where she ordered a Whopper with Cheese, a large order of fries, and slurped a large Coke until the straw crackled in the bottom of the cup. Her first bite of the Whopper made her realize that she was ravenous. She supposed relief spurred appetite. And sharing the burden, of course. Now she had a strategy to cope with the Brain Freezes, and she could hope that Ambrose was right, and it was only stress. The test—what Ambrose had called a mini-cog—might confirm that.

She laughed when Ambrose began asking the questions, because they reminded her of the test Donald Trump had boasted about passing. Easy-peasy, she thought … but by the time she completed it she was no longer laughing. Neither was Ambrose.

She did okay on the season (spring) and the date, but could not immediately remember what month this was. She was sure she could have used Ambrose’s associative method and come up with it if he’d given her time, but he didn’t. She was even worse at counting back from a hundred by sevens. She got 93, then said 85, which was really just a guess. She was able to repeat back apple-table-penny five minutes later but found herself completely incapable of spelling WORLD backwards. There was plenty of stuff she got right—copying a cartoon drawing, folding a sheet of paper in thirds—but there were distressing and inexplicable (to her, at least) failures. When Ambrose asked her to draw a clock face, for instance, she drew an oblong with a curve like a smile beneath it. She showed it to him and said, “I think this might be wrong.”

So much was wrong.