Though Howard doesn’t seem any different to her at first, the clues stack up.
When Ruth, Howard’s adult daughter, visits home after a long hiatus, it doesn’t take her long to solve the riddle. “I’m just straight-up demented,” he says. Howard himself is the only one who will speak of it directly. Nobody wants to call Howard’s problem by its putative name - Alzheimer’s disease - so instead it remains a kind of riddle. His problem is implied by the arrival of low-sodium salt and costly vitamins to the family kitchen, by a browser tab left open on a shared computer to a search for “memory improvement,” and by the measures taken to childproof a home with no children in it. It’s on account of “inconsistencies” that Howard’s boss tells him to return to work only when he can behave himself again. Family members cite “lapses” when they answer calls from neighbors who have found his clothing hanging from the branches of trees. Because there is no test or scan that can diagnose his problem with complete accuracy, it must be charted by clues.
0 kommentar(er)
