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Often, the highest levels recapitulate the lowest. A sheet of mica is formed of molecules of incredible flatness. The cells of a stalk of celery are vertical, rigid, and green. The rotation of the Milky Way, its particulate clouds swirling around a hot, bright nucleus, reflects the submicroscopic dynamics of an atom. The cells of our body are chaotic, watery sacks, bound together by the skin, and so are we. And since Life, at its base, is no more than Memory and Chance, then at the highest level of complexity yet known on the planet, the story of us is also the story of them. For example, the true narratives only hinted at in Dr. Shellard's report, the stories of the hundreds of lineages that spring from Lord Alban M Cheap mbt shoes applethorpe like the plastic mbt shoes <a href="http://www.jindantuan.com/"><strong>雪地靴*配 </strong></a> clearance sale strands of a pom-pom, are, from a certain perspective, nothing more than the stories of the engagement of Chance and Memory over time. The dissemination of the EOA-23 variant that began that afternoon in London Harbor may have been sparked by Memory (the fearful ship's captain knowing all about Iddylwahl's supposed curse), but it was conducted largely by Chance. By Chance, Maximilian Barret, the tailor of Iddylwahl and the great (× 10)grandfather of Sufferer A-50 (Conrad Hamner), climbed aboard a boat bound to Morocco. By Chance, Dr. Bennington, the great (× 9)-grandfather of A-24 (Dave Bennington), was able to hide for 242 stefan merrill block four days under the harbor's dock and then, by Chance, managed to slip into the cargo hold of a ship bound for the eastern coast of Canada. It was by Chance that Kenneth Marlboro, the great (× 11)-grandfather of A-67 (Claire Bennington), disappeared into London's crowds, ensuring the dispersion of the disease in the south of England, but it was by Memory that his great-greatgranddaughter fled London for America, as the people of her neighborhood began to look upon the Marlboro clan as a group mbt to be avoided as doggedly as one would avoid the lepers. It was by Chance that Maximilian Barret, living out his days in Casablanca, impregnated another British expat (the coquettish daughter of a prominent merchant in the East India Company), by Chance that he died in a feud over the price of figs when his son was only nine, but it was by Memory that his son took what little money his father left him and spent it on a boat ride to America, eventually resulting in North American EOA-23 familial early-onset Alzheimer's Sufferers A-70 through A-111. The lineage of EOA-23 Sufferer A-39 (Jamie Waller) is similarly spun. It was the intertwining of Memory and Chance that passed the disease from Millicent Haggard to Charles Haggard, then to two of Charles's six children, then to five of Charles's children's children, then to fourteen of Charles's children's children's children, and so on, and so on. It was, however, Memory alone, the memory of the family's curse, that scattered the great majority of Millicent Haggard's offspring. The fact that certain branches of the Haggard family tree were freed from the EOA-23 variant while others were doomed was almost entirely Chance, but it was almost entirely through Memory that other branches ceased altogether, sons and daughters swearing never to subject children of their own to their horror. The endless project of Chance and Memory is both expansive and minute. In the mid-1970s, for example, at the subneural level the story of forgetting 243 of sufferer A-56 (Paul Haggard), it was Chance that made the simplest form of Memory, nucleic recapitulation, responsible minute by minute for stripping the most sophisticated. Though, as with all diseases, Memory was both perpetrator and victim, the way it conducted itself was often by Chance. It was largely by Chance, for example, that Paul Haggard, in his earliest stages, forgot that his daughter's favorite color was blue, that when she was a baby she used to hum herself to sleep, that his wife loved nothing more than the sensation of fingernails on her scalp, that her name was Mae. Was it also, then, by Chance that he quickly forgot his brother's name, then forgot his brother altogether? Near the end of his life, Paul Haggard was left with a single salient memory. As Chance had worked its way into certainty, the memory of a man he loved filled the gaps. Was that also just Chance? Or had Memory, in Love, at last stood its ground, creating an offspring of its own, one strong enough to gird Memory, at least for a time, against Chance 's inevitable progression? But here one can only speculate. Just as one can only speculate which was responsible for the last moments of Mae and Paul Haggard's lives. That night, Paul Haggard wandered away from his house, wandered down the gravel drive and the dirt road beyond it, wandered his way to the crumbling pavement of FM 39. This was Memory, Paul Haggard looking for a man he had once known, who had died years before. It was, however, mostly Chance that his wife found him, hours later, standing in the center of the empty road, weeping into his hands, glowing bright in the car's headlights. On the way back home, at mbt uk sixty-five miles an hour on FM 39, Memory and Chance were side by side once more. And in the moment when FM 39 veered to the left and Mae Haggard watched it slip away from her headlights, was it Chance that she did not re244 stefan merrill block spond in kind, veering with it? Had Chance, too, placed the massive oak tree at the exact location of the curve, underhandedly encouraging Memory all those years to make it grow sturdy enough to slice straight through the hood of an oncoming car? Or had it been Memory, the memory of her family's suffering, the memory of what was yet to come, the memory of her own guilt, that compelled Mae Haggard to, in fact, steer toward the tree? Or had it been something else entirely? Was it not exactly Memory or Chance that steered Mae and Paul Haggard to the end of their lives? Had it instead been a certain will, invented only recently, known to Homo sapiens alone: Mae Haggard's will to allow her husband to die before Chance plucked the last memory from his mind; her will to allow her husband to be at last with the boy whose death was impossible; her will to free the three of them—her husband, his brother, and herself—from their otherwise inextricable, interminable suffering; her will to allow the only peace she could imagine, that of her daughter and her husband's brother together, a life to be lived only in the present, freed from the constant intrusions and obstructions of the past? In a place ruled by Chance, 4.5 billion light-years in all directions, run by Memory, twenty-five thousand miles in all directions, had Love, adolescent and cloistered in its little room, devised a rebellion and taken what it could? Seth data analysis EOA-23 Sufferer A-14, Donald Shafer, was dead. He died at fift mbt y-two, halfway through the course of the disease, the neurofibral tangles having snarled 1.5 pounds of his gray matter into a thick slice of dead meat. But long before the disease <a href="http://www.jindantuan.com/"><strong>特价包邮</strong></a> would have claimed every thought, long before Alzheimer's would have made its way to his brain stem's operational memory—the swallowing of food, the breathing of lungs, the beating of heart—he had died. The daughter of A-14, Taylor Shafer, explained this to me as I leaned against the door of her flat, boxlike, ranch-style house in the middle of a flat, boxlike neighborhood on the southern edge of Cedar Park. In the suburbs of Austin, they begin each subdivision with a blank slate, an empty, treeless prairie, and so you can glean a neighborhood's age by the height of its trees. Unlike in my neighborhood, where the top fifteen feet are nothing but tar shingles, in Taylor's neighborhood the trees formed a canopy high above the rooftops, which—in conjunction with the weed-strewn sidewalk cracks and the low, modest houses—meant that it had been built during a less flamboyant stage of suburban sprawl in the early 1980s. As if in evidence of our shared genetic origin, Taylor, as I did, looked away when talking, bent her chin to her sternum, and spoke softly, almost to herself. She wore an oversize University of Texas T-shirt, and occasionally, as she shifted in the door, a part of it would catch against her 246 stefan merrill block skin, revealing her startling skinniness. Her hair was a loose, dull brown mess, with thick bangs matted over her forehead. Her face, however, was undeniably beautiful, vaguely reminiscent of my mom's: a nearly perfect heart shape with eyes as outlandishly oversize as E.T.'s. As she stood there in the open door, sweat began to form on her forehead, pasting her hair to her skin, and as she dabbed it with the back of her hand, the reason someone with a face as attractive as hers would choose to hide so much of it behind an opaque chunk of hair became clear. From the far corners of her eyebrows stretched a long, semicircular streak. A scar, bone white in the center, red along the edges. The scar had an odd neatness to it, as if it had been planned and executed, as if someone had decided to make a chalk etching of the sun dawning over her eyebrows. When Taylor noticed me noticing it, she quickly covered it with her hand, her embar mbt stockists rassment shooting through us both, making us both look again at the ground. She then shook her head quickly, as if in confusion, trying to tuck the gesture into an expression other than shame. "Oh, I'm so rude! Would you like to come in?" I nodded, then followed the burnt orange sack of her T-shirt into the living room, where a dull, grimy light passed through the gingham curtains, which looked as if they hadn't been changed since the house had been built. Though she told me that her father had died three months earlier, the air still held a whiff of that unhealthy antiseptic scent that also fills The Waiting Room. At first, the dimness of the house blinded me, but second by second the room became legible. Dark, scrubby furniture lined the walls: a pair of di mbt shoes review rtied powder blue sofas and a chipped walnut coffee table, identical to the kind that could have been found in any suburban living room in the year 1985, as if that was when her house had been sealed from the outside, given over to decay ever since. "Do you want anything? Water? Coke?" Taylor asked. the story of forgetting 247 "Water would be great." Taylor smiled, nodded, and disappeared into the kitchen. She came back with two room-temperature Ozarkas. I chugged mine, the plastic buckling and snapping. Taylor chuckled quietly. We sat on opposite ends of a sofa, the landings of our butts causing a visible cloud of dust to poof from the zipper of the single, warped cushion. "So why again did you want to talk with my dad?" "It's part of a study I'm conducting with Dr. Shellard. At UT?" I half-lied. "Oh, right," she said. "Dr. Shellard. Marvin, right? He came here once. You're working with him? That's great. What year are you?" "Sophomore." "No offense, but I would have had you pegged as freshman." "None taken." "What dorm are mbt kisumu you living in?" "It's not really a dorm." "Oh, an apartment?" "Yes," I lied, completely. "I think about going back, I really do. I used to go there, you know?" Taylor spoke to the dark bookcases lined with their dim, gray spines. "But at this point, I don't even know if they would let me. I never really even told my professors I was leaving. I just sort of left." For a few minutes, in total violation of my modus operandi, I discount mbt trainers didn't talk about anything even remotely relating to my mom's genetic history. Instead, I talked like a normal member of planet Earth—complained about the weather, the public transportation system, the weather again—talked about the things that everyone has in common, maybe to avoid acknowledging that which we uniquely shared. 248 stefan merrill block Though it wasn't exactly relevant to my investigation, after a time I decided to ask Taylor why she had left school. For a moment, she made an expression identical to the one I imagine my mom having made in the moment before her fall, standing at the edge of something, balanced between the dependable, muted sadness of what's behind you and the release to be found in the void before you, in the elegant simplicity of gravity, of falling. Taylor teetered there for a moment, but as soon as she started to speak, it was as if the story had been waiting, taut and coiled, within her for months. She immediately launched into a memory, skin-itchingly personal, breathless word after breathless word. "It was like, one day nine, maybe ten weeks into my freshman year, my dad calls me at school," she began. "If I hadn't given him a cell phone with my number programmed in, who knows what might have happened? So he calls me and tells me he 's bleeding. I ask him how bad, and he starts to cry into the phone. I ask him where my mom is, and he just cries louder. I tell him to yell her name, and he does, but she 's not there. She 's at the mall. Can you believe it? The goddamn shopping mall. I don't know of any person who has ever spent less time in their own house than my mom. <a href="http://www.jindantuan.com/"><strong>UGG雪地靴</strong></a> Anyway, now she's gone for good. Moved in with her boyfriend. This guy Rod. It won't last. But anyway, I knew I couldn't depend on her. Not full-time, at least. So I just left school. Dropped out. I came home and took care of him. The doctors I talked to, they say a nursing home is usually needed for the last two or three years. But my dad never spent a day in a nursing home. I guess I can say at least that much for myself." I had been watching Taylor closely, observing the way that as she spoke her scar disappeared, then reappeared into her expressions, like a tight string being plucked. When she mentioned the nursing home, heat rose into my face, which I wiped with my hands. the story of forgetting 249 "I'm sorry," Taylor said. "Talking your ear off. God, I don't know why I always do this. It's— I guess it's nice to talk. Seems like every time I get the chance, I just go on and on. But you didn't come to listen to me gab, did you?" She turned to me, her expression hanging awkwardly on mine, waiting for some nudge to tell me more. "No, no, no. Please," I fumbled. "I mean, so what happened when you came home?" "So my mom and I make this kind of schedule together. When we'll each take care of my dad, all the things we have to buy for him, stuff like that. But we 're going broke, the insurance pays mayb mbt online e half of what it costs, and my dad is just getting worse and worse. He starts seeing things. They say it's rare but not unheard of. Dr. Shellard said that, actually. That when the disease gets into a certain part of your brain, it sort of, well, it sort of makes you see things that aren't there. Have you heard of that?" I nodded. Taylor then drew her fingers to her lips, which were trembling almost imperceptibly. Without thinking, I did the same. "So one day, it's my mom's turn. I'm asleep in bed. He was up all night crying, screaming really, and when he finally went to sleep so did I. It's supposed to be my mom's turn, only she 's sleeping too. So I guess my dad gets up and the house is empty. Maybe I woke up a little when I heard him fumbling around. I was halfawake when he came into my room. At first, I thought it was a dream. I used to dream about him every night. In my dreams, he died in a million awful ways. Only this time it wasn't a dream. He comes into the room, and his hands are mbt shoes clearance sale bleeding, and he 's holding a paring knife. You know the kind? One of these little curved knives, holding <a href="http://club.rexiaodg.net/view.php?id=2379"><strong>Jordan Brand Shoes » Blog Archive » Nike 2011 Hyperfuse shoelaces</strong></a> on to it by the blade. Squeezing it. He comes right to me and says in this low, calm voice, just like I was a little girl again and he was my dad and trying to protect me, he says, ‘You have to stay perfectly still.' I tell him to drop the knife, that he 's 250 stefan merrill block scaring me. But he says, ‘Don't worry, sweetie, I'll get them.' I said mbt anti shoe , ‘Get who?' He said, ‘The bats.' I asked him what bats, but it was too late. He jumped onto my bed, held back my hair. And he, he thought they were on my face. He thought they were biting out my eyes. He said, ‘Don't worry. I'll get them. Just don't move. I'll get them.' And he holds me down, puts his knees into my shoulders. I try to fight and push him away, but he 's too strong. He just keeps saying, ‘Don't worry. Don't worry.' "There's so much blood that I can't even see. I call the hospital, and I can't see anything. But I can hear my dad in the corner. He's crying at first, and then he 's just sort of moaning. I tried to wipe the blood from my eyes, but there was too much and I couldn't see a thing. But then I could see. He wasn't moving. In the end, it wasn't his brain. It was his heart," Taylor said, then sank her voice into a vaguely spiteful impersonation of the nameless doctor who must have offered his conclusion. "Myocardial infarction of the left ventricle." Taylor looped the collar of her T-shirt over her mouth, pressing it to her philtrum with her thumb, as if to filter her words, or else to hold them back. "I guess—I guess I'll never know why it happened then," she continued. "Maybe he was still seeing things. I don't know. Maybe he thought they were coming for him. Or maybe it's possible that he looked at me and for a split second understood what he 'd done. Terrible as it sounds, sometimes I think that maybe, either way, it might have been the best way out. I mean, with a future like that, you know? "Anyway. He wanted to be cremated, but he never told us what to do with the ashes. We decided to take them up to the place his family came from. A place near Dallas, called High Plains. I'd never been. He 'd only been once or twice himself. Nowhere special, really. But at least he was home. We couldn't find his family's the story of forgetting 251 graves, so we spread the ashes into a lake. I don't know why we chose that, but that's what we did. Anyway, the day after his funeral, I went to get tested for the gene. I might not have had the courage normally, but then. Well, then, I only needed to know. If they had said it was positive, if I had known that was my future, who knows what I might have done?" Something strange was that, when Taylor finished her story, folding her hands into her lap, all I wanted was for her not to stop telling it. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know how, exactly, her father had looked when she saw him. His blue, bloodless face. What her mother's expression had been when she finally arrived at
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