Read One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir for Free Online

the schedule, he floated anxiously, with nerves frayed and scrambled, through blurred time, not knowing who or what would come next.
    “But such sensations and noises belonged presumably to no one else,” he would tell me later, “and I took pride in that, while yearning for the quiet I once knew. I, who had been a little slothful, now felt constantly agitated. Yes, it was all a matter of what came next. Life had seemed to me a toss-up between not knowing what came next and a bright insistent message that everything was all right. I had no idea what or who or when. Only where, only here, and even that was hazy.
    “I was a case of a man who had come round from delirium to find a cascade of minute changes in his world, which couldn’t be ignored as the big bustle of everyday living took charge. I sensed in the complex fabric of my being that I had been remarkably altered. Changes irrevocable and final. I accepted these hammer blows from creation as overdue, as part of the mystery that people simply have to be dispatched for other people to replace them.”
    My own mind returned to the chilling road sign: BE PREPARED TO STOP AT ANY MOMENT . Then, instead of a void or a blockade, I remembered a day I happened upon Paul in our library, humming happily as he rummaged through his treasures. He collected spotters’ guides to world aircraft; lavishly illustrated views of astronomy and the oceans; airplane magazines; British schoolboys’ adventures; accounts of WWII; movie guides; and biographies of composers, boxers, cricket players, gunmen of the Old West, and UFO abductees. On this occasion he was searching through his old railway timetables from countries he’d never visited (just because he enjoyed imagining the trains chugging through the landscapes) for a nineteenth-century schedule of tea trains in Ceylon. Not even for research. He just wanted to thumb through it in the sun and imagine catching a ride.
    “I see you’re up to your old tricks,” was all I’d needed to say.
    “It’s that, or pack a duffel bag for India . . . ah-hah!” He pulled a moth-eaten pocket-size booklet from a shelf. “This is cheaper.”
    What would he thumb through now? Maybe photography books . . .
    A green-garbed cafeteria worker swooshed in bearing a tray, plunked it down heavily on a side table, and I helped swivel it into position over Paul’s bed. Hovering, I supported his back with extra pillows so that he could sit up straight, as we’d been soberly instructed to do since Paul was having difficulty swallowing and he’d be less likely to choke if sitting upright. Then I coaxed him to lean forward as he ate, and urged him to take very small bites. Meal trays offered soft food and stiff trials.
    “Here’s your spoon, honey.” I handed him the normal cafeteria spoon, which twiddled right out of his fingers and rang as it hit the floor. Next he tried a spoon with a fat handle—more like the Styrofoam cone—better for grasping. I placed it slowly in his hand and locked the fingers around it. He moved it like a snow shovel, plowing at the scrambled eggs until some ridged onto the spoon, then spilling most of it down his gown before it reached his mouth. He closed his eyes in disgust and waited while I laid a towel over his chest to catch further spills. Instead of saying “Mem, mem, mem,” he tried to pronounce something alien and profound, which came out as “Mem, mem, mem, mem,” nonetheless. He meant: What’s wrong with me that a jam-butty can’t fix? Jam-butty: the strawberry-jam-and-butter slabs of bread that highlighted his childhood. If the jam made it to his mouth, that is, without plummeting down his chest.
    “That’s okay. Your coordination is a little off. Try again.”
    Wrapping his fingers around the log-like handle, I helped him scoop up eggs and aim for his mouth, which he opened much wider than he needed to, offering a gaping target, and I thought he smiled a little as the eggs fell in. But with a rubbery,