All the Lasting Things

Начало книги

My name will be the last to go. If the doctors are right, if the last memory in is the first one out, then yesterday disappears before anything else. Yesterday, then last week, then, like sandcastles meeting the tide, the months. The years. My wife, my children, my work, even her, even Jane, all of it swallowed and churned. No less gone than if I’d dropped my life into the sea. But Henry. They’ll have me in diapers before I forget my name. Henry, they’ll say, and up I’ll look, not knowing who is speaking or why. Just Henry. Before another wave rolls in and the last castle falls.

There would be no ghost, not tonight.

No “Adieu! Adieu!” Benji thought. No “Remember me.”

He stood in front of the mirror, arms spread wide, as a strange man rushed to dress him. Jerry, the man who usually dressed him, had called in with a migraine, which Kay, the Stalinist stage manager / code cracker, immediately deciphered as “too drunk to stand.” Now, as inquisitor, she used her considerable hip to hold open the door of the men’s dressing room and waited for Benji’s bloodshot eyes to meet hers in the mirror.

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