The MacGuffin

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Though he was probably about the right age for it — fifty-eight — Druff didn’t suppose — not even when he was most fitfully struggling to bring forth a name like something caught in his throat, or spit out the word momentarily stuck on the tip of his tongue — that what he was experiencing was aphasia, or Alzheimer’s, or the beginnings of senility, or anything importantly neurological at all. Though he wouldn’t have been surprised if something dark was going on in the old gray matter — a kind of lava tube forming, say, or, oh, stuff creeping in the fossil record, putty leaking into his creases and crevices, his narrows, folds and fissures, some sluggish, white stupidity forming and hardening there like an impression formed in a mold. He hadn’t become absent- minded. Indeed, if he was asked to do anything, anything at all — call up to his son when he had finished his shower, pass on telephone messages, tell Rose Helen that the jeweler had called, the clasp on her necklace was ready, she could pick it up when she wanted — not only did he deliver the messages intact, he couldn’t rest until they were delivered; the light, ordinary tasks being what they’d always been, annoying chores, petty charges of being, small anxieties, like, oh, detours on unfamiliar roads whose extent was not known to him, or the go-here, go-there arrangements of red tape. Which was ironic, wasn’t it, his being City Commissioner of Streets and all.

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