Free Trust No One by Paul Cleave

can remember bits and pieces,” Jerry says. “I remember Eva took me to the beach.”
    “We’ve been charting the progression of the disease, Jerry,” Goodstory says. “It can vary from day to day, some days you are extremely lucid, other days you’re never fully aware of where you are, or even who you are. Like I say, things vary, but there are consistent themes to your overall state. One of those themes is that often, when you wake up, you wake up believing you’re back in your old life. The sense that everything is as it used to be stays with you sometimes only for a few minutes, sometimes for a few hours. It’s as though you regress to a certain time in your life. This morning, for example, I’m told you woke up believing you were on tour. Mostly you revert back to a time over the last few years, though on occasion back to when you were much younger. There are days where you have absolutely no idea what is going on, where you can’t even feed yourself. These days are rare, but they do happen and, sadly, will begin to happen even more.”
    Jerry looks at his hands as Goodstory talks to him. He feels so silly.
    “Even at your best now there are still so many things you’ve forgotten,” Goodstory says. “There are memories you’ve repressed.”
    “What kind of memories?”
    “Just memories. We’ll ask you something that you’ll have no idea about. Some things will come back to you, but there are things that refuse to. Mornings are the hardest. Once you become aware, then often you become very lucid, very aware, just like now. I’ve had conversations where I’m talking to you and I can see the words just falling off you, and I’ve had conversations where you’re almost like the man you used to be. The theme of struggling in the morning after waking up also extends to naps. Often you’ll take an afternoon nap, and when you wake up you’ll be confused, yet that tends to only last a few minutes. Sometimes much less than that, fifteen minutes at the most, then you become alert again.”
    “Am I able to function in these other states?”
    “Sometimes quite well. You just don’t seem to develop the memories. You don’t remember any of this morning, do you, about believing you were on tour.”
    “Little bits and pieces, but not really,” Jerry says.
    “But you can remember being on tour years ago?”
    “Yes,” Jerry says. “Sometimes quite clearly. Other times hardly at all.”
    “Well, you’re definitely functioning when you’re making your way into town. It’s almost twenty miles between here and the library, and that’s a lot of ground to cover. You could have walked, or you could have hitchhiked, but the mere fact you were able to means on some level you’re very much aware of what’s going on.”
    “But I don’t keep the memories. It’s almost as though I’m sleepwalking.”
    “That’s as good an analogy as any,” Goodstory says. “It’s what Alzheimer’s does, Jerry. It erases things, it creates, it rewrites.”
    “Will I remember this conversation?”
    “I imagine you will, right up until the moment you won’t. That could be twenty-four hours. It could be a week. You might not think about it for twenty years, then it will just seem like yesterday.”
    “Is there a crueler disease, Doctor?”
    “Sometimes I’m not so sure there is. They really should be keeping a better eye on you here,” Goodstory adds. “It’s one of the conditions.”
    When he’s gone Jerry heads out into the sun with A Christmas Murder. For the next few hours all he does is read, caught up in the momentum of a killer and a cop. The book has a theme running through it that he recalls being in some of the others—a theme about balance. The world in his books is out of balance, it’s out of whack, and sometimes his characters—the good guys at least—try to fix that. He has the feeling that theme carries over into his life as well. He must have done something terrible for the Universe to treat