This is something you can consider a teaser trailer for my forthcoming novel, Speaking Well about Things that Matter Together. All of this material will most likely stay in the final, published text, but I wanted to get everyone thinking about what is to come, what is still hiding in my head. Hope you enjoy!

The explosion of thoughts, like a bat to the head, woke her from her daydream, something about her mom and an old girlfriend—she couldn’t remember; she wasn’t really paying attention—and she began to examine the ceiling. It was popcorned—the ceiling (the way ceilings often are these days)—so she began wondering, not for the first time, why it was called popcorned; she could find no resemblance anywhere between the tiny white stalactites hanging above her and the buttery goodness that is popcorn. Still, it wasn’t the strangest name ever encountered by this observer of the English language (that’s actually what she called herself: an observer of the English language; see the above statement about popcorned ceilings).

That was as far as she could trace the origin of the name; yes, she had access to the internet, but using only knowledge individually available to her, not relying at all on the collective intelligence of her species (except for all of the knowledge she had already gleaned from her species’ interconnected web of ideas), this was the end of that journey. It was slightly depressing watching the credits roll on that idea, but that is the way of such things, fleeting; she knew the rules of thinking: each thought is here but for a moment and can be expanded upon by digging deeper, but there is a limit to the number of layers of said thought you inherently have access to.

Finding the final layer to any thought was always a sad affair for her, knowing that she would have to exert some amount of effort to drink deeper of the cup of this particular knowledge; she knew this thought wasn’t worth spending any more precious time on—oh, how many times she has put this plan into motion!—and would let it go, a pathetic game of catch and release. The trouble was, she was fishing wearing a blindfold. Sometimes, she could reel those suckers in, bring them right to her face, the ability to touch and smell and taste, but never see; other times, like right at that moment, the blindfold was lifted, and she was granted access to all of her senses again. Some might say this is a gift, a miracle, and others may say it is a damnable curse; where you fall on the spectrum of those options is really up to personal preference, now isn’t it?

Anyway, she had thought this thought before, had reached its inevitable conclusion several times in the past. Experiencing an idea of this banality for the second, third, or god help her, fourth time was tantamount to torture; she didn’t know how long the blindfold would be off. Any second could be the last that she still possessed this context of thought. Come to think of it, a blindfold might not be the best metaphor; it would be more like trying to fish while a movie is playing in your head, every scene running past your inner eye in crystal clear hi definition and every sound plugged directly into your ears. Sure, you can still cast the line and reel it in, you are still physically capable of performing those series of actions—and you know what, it’s something you enjoy doing, damnit!—but you are so very distracted by this running narrative that for all you know is fiction getting completely in the way of reality. Like, what the fuck, right?

She hated this cat and mouse game with lucidity, though cat and mouse had become far too tame a term to describe the brutal ass kicking she was receiving from insanity. Long gone are the days of Tom and Jerry, her mind constantly being able to outwit the slower manifestation of its own annihilation even if that manifestation was constantly attacking (though, she would have to confess to, at times, poking the bear so to speak); no, now she was in the era of Predator, the sci-fi lord of the hunt hot on her tail, and she still just a fucking mouse. Like, Arnold was able to take out that ugly motherfucker, but that’s fucking Arnie! How in the name of hell do you expect Jerry to survive against that kind of onslaught?

It’s not possible, if we’re being honest with ourselves, and she was being honest with herself. Even in these ever shrinking moments of being fully connected to reality, she would fall down the rabbit hole of thought, just letting synapses fire for the sake of firing, instead of trying to do something with his ever rarer coherence. She was acutely aware at times like these it didn’t actually matter what kinds of thoughts she chose to entertain because she wouldn’t remember those very thoughts shortly. At some point a shark would nibble on her line, yanking it, the pole it’s attached to, and the individual holding onto the pole, into the water. Then that shark will devour the tasty meal that’s just ever so kindly fallen into its waiting maw (yes, she is aware that sharks don’t really eat humans, but since this is one of the few thoughts she will get to enjoy for who knows how long, she’s going to let the Jaws fantasy happen). She smiled briefly, reveling but for a second in the brilliance of that shark attack comparison, knowing it was very apt to describe this disease in terms of consumption. Just like the shark not being as dangerous as once perceived, maybe dementia was just another carnivore eating to survive, sustaining itself on a diet of memories and conscious thought. Maybe someone would make a horrifying—for its time—film about dementia, only for humanity to do an about face just a generation later when we understand it better.

That was always her hope in those moments, that this illness would someday go the route of the boogeyman, evolving from a terrifying monster that parents tell their unruly children about at night and that makes audiences faint right there in the movie theater, to just another thing that exists in the world, a part of creation—neither good nor bad, just is—living for the sake of living like everything else is. She sometimes wondered if diseases had motivations, if they targeted certain individuals for a reason, or if they were mindless, machines with a narrowly focused impetus: consume, reproduce, colonize. Regardless of the true nature behind why sickness—whether bacterial or viral—behaves in the manner in which it does, she was convinced that humanity had evolved from illnesses. We weren’t the descendants of some ancient primates, no, we had been born of plague, something contagious and virulent, persistent and sustainable in almost any environment. After we had infected everything on the planet, after we had altered DNA and rewritten nature, we had decided to hunt the biggest prey of all: the planet itself. We occupied the very rock every other living thing had found a way to coexist with peacefully. If we were genetically related to things like dementia, the way she believed we were, our motivations could matter very little and we could be driven by the same inane impulses: consume, reproduce, colonize.

She imagined the first space colonists having these kinds of thoughts, looking out of their cockpits to see nothing but the everlasting emptiness that is the expanse of space, pondering on the very nature of their mission from the species wide implications of their actions and their history. It broke her old heart that he would never get to see the virus of humanity spread to the corners of the universe; she knew we would utterly devastate the whole of reality the more of it we find ourselves able to conquer, but what would being the first human launched into deep space be like, as far as thought progression and loneliness is concerned? She imagined it would be similar to having dementia. She imagined it would be like casting a fishing line into a deep part of the ocean, not sure if you were going to pull up a shark that would devour your consciousness or an interesting morsel of fact you could chew on for a few moments.

And so it went, she enjoying her briefer and briefer minutes of being awake, like a space explorer stranded to an eternal mission of hopefully landing on a planet that supports life and propagating. Too bad his female copilot was already dead and he was running dangerously low on fuel and other resources. He had been on his mission for so long without successfully locating a habitable planet that the craft built to sustain his life was beginning to fall apart, his mission coming closer and closer to an abrupt end. This mission could be considered a failure from that perspective, from the continuing march of the species, the spread of the disease, viewpoint. But that isn’t how he looked at it; no, instead he saw the culmination of all of his experiences as a rousing success. Sure, the woman that had been flying through the cosmos with him had expired, but what fun they had had landing on other planets inhospitable for sustained human existence or meeting new species and learning their customs and trades and generally finding odd shit throughout space. If she were one of the first space explorers, humanity would have invented a way to catalogue experiences such as those and quantify them; following the rules of this yet-to-be-discovered mathematical equation that values experience, her life would be considered well-lived. Maybe that would be a good thing in this far future, but then again, maybe it wouldn’t matter.

Her one regret that she struggled with in those moments where she was able to enjoy the tranquility of the deep ocean and the silence of deep space was that she had never recorded certain events and experiences from her life. She had told herself time and time again that she needed to write this story down or that she should have filmed this moment in history. Somebody, somewhere in the world, would have benefitted from getting to experience her story in some way. Maybe she should have written an autobiography or allowed any of the number of people interested in her life to write a biography, but neither of those things had occurred, and while she wasn’t exactly sad, she felt that the future of humanity would be missing her story. God, what an arrogant thought.

It didn’t really matter anyway, though. Any second, that shark would tear her from the boat and into the deep water, thrashing and biting and drowning her in subconscious thought. And then, at some point later in the future, she would come back to reality, remember that she is alone in this craft drifting through space, his partner gone and his rations running low, his mission reaching its lonely conclusion. She sighed, just once, looking back up at that damned popcorned ceiling (wishing all of a sudden she had actual popcorn to munch on), smelling that warm butter as if she were in the lobby of a theater, the bustling sounds of movie goers and theater employees droning incessantly about her ears. She couldn’t remember what movie she was there to see, but she knew it was something good, something thrilling and heart pounding because she could feel her pulse tighten even as she made her way to the front of the snack line to buy that popcorn, a snack that she so desperately craved all of a sudden. With one deep breath, she began to recall scant details about what she knows of the film she is about to see: something about a lone space traveler fishing for life forms in an asteroid field battling the space shark that has made that asteroid field its hunting grounds. Or maybe it was a character driven drama about long lost friends reuniting. Or it could be that monster one, the film so bloody and gory and gross that she could feel the bile rising in her throat alright. The best part is the theater was in 6-D, so she got to feel what the characters in the movie got to feel. She walked into the theater, bucket of popcorn under her arm, with a goofy smile plastered to her face, ready for whatever cinematic adventure she was about to go on.

And so it went, her moment of clarity devoured by the shark, his space traveler falling back into cryostasis or hypersleep or whatever. She would wake up again, come out of her movie theater, she knew.

There was coming a time when she wouldn’t, though.

***

She felt like she was in her forties, though she wasn’t sure why that was suddenly so important; she had always (Always: a concept that someone suffering from dementia has lost, sadly, as she could no longer remember what she had Always done) said that age was just a number, but right now, in this moment, how old she was was essential. Mid-forties, somewhere between forty-four and forty-seven, seemed about right, but narrowing it down any further than that was a task she found so difficult to complete.

“Answers without questions are just facts,” she stated to the near empty room. There was her bed in the center, with its machines and wires, a dresser to its right, a single window along the same wall as the dresser, and television on the wall opposite the bed. She didn’t know all of this, because laying how she was on that very bed, all she saw was the popcorned ceiling. While it still demanded her attention, she was too focused on her age to even entertain the thought of pursuing, once again, the ceiling. “And questions without answers are just frustrations.”

It was a sentiment she had long held, and even though she couldn’t remember saying it before, I can tell you with certainty that this was one of her core beliefs; she held it with conviction, Always wanting an answer to her every question, long before the parasite of dementia had lodged itself deep within her brain. She was right, about her age, even if she couldn’t find that answer when she most wanted it: she was forty-four years old.

Did finding out her age even really matter then? She knew that ultimately, it did not, that it should hold no significant weight on her ever shortening span of attention, that she should devote every second of lucidity, no matter how incomplete that lucidity was, to finding a solution to her mental problems. Even as the disease devoured her every waking moment, she held fast to the belief that she could will herself better, that dementia was no more a threat to her well-being than a common cold. She had battled far worse than this, after all, like that time she told herself to quit having the flu and her body had listened, or that time the adenovirus had stepped up to take her down, and she had told it to fuck right the hell off. There was not an illness strong enough to beat her, to really put her highly developed immune system to the test. This was just a setback, not being able to remember her age, something she could bounce back from.

She couldn’t remember this either, but she had Always bounced back.

“Then again,” she whispers to the ceiling, “Always slightly mispronounces hallways. It also echoes it.”

That was just a nonsensical thing to say, but in that moment, lying in bed, trying to find her age, it was exactly what she needed to hear. Since nobody else was in the room to offer her confusing sentences about words and their echoes, she’d just have to do it herself. Because she was a strong, independent woman. Of that she was certain, even if her exact age continued to win at their game of hide and seek.

She was so tired of Always having to seek, missing the days when she had tried to hide from her thoughts. It was Always a losing game, much the same that it was now; thoughts were just better at hiding and seeking than their creators. It was just their game, which didn’t really bother her, because she believed everything was good at something, even if that thing happened to be useless. Hide and seek wasn’t the most useful thing to be good at, but it also wasn’t the most useless. Man, she could remember an old friend who used to be really good at finding small amounts of weed, Always enough to make a bowl out of. Talk about a useless gift, right? At least being good at hide and seek, her thoughts were Always one step ahead of her.

There it was, the theme of this particular period in mental cohesion: Always. She had used it a total of twenty-eight times since the last time she couldn’t remember things (not including her age). Abandoning the quest for how many rotations she had around the Sun—she was sure, however, she would have a foolproof plan to tackle those bastards shortly—she began to wonder what was so important about Always, wandering down corridors of thought with a sense of adventure. No longer was she fishing, waiting for the nibble of the shark to become her death, no. She was venturing into the unknown, heading deep into her own head, trying to locate any and everything that might help in this fight against the disease. Somehow, in some way she couldn’t begin to fathom yet, Always was important to this investigation.

But why? Why was Always so integral to this fight? She rummaged through trunks and suitcases, left behind by her sane brain cells when dementia came to their neck of the woods, the thought of being devoured by this menace terrifying enough to leave behind scant belongings. Whenever she would get the opportunity to scavenge, she would usually find a few key puzzle pieces for how to win, even if she didn’t know how those pieces fit toget—Wait…

Yes! That was it! The pieces currently in her ruck were her biological sex, her general age down to the decade, her fondness for marijuana, and a sense of victory over illnesses throughout her life. Now she had the piece of Always, which when placed with others, pointed to her needing to figure out who she has Always been. She would need things like her name, her exact age down to the year, and important details from her life. No more random popcorned ceilings or fishing metaphors. She knew which thoughts to pursue! Since she had already began wondering about her age, it made logical sense to keep tugging at that particular thread.

“Hang on. There’s an easier place to start.”

She held her arm up to her eyes, eclipsing her view of the ceiling. It was white, like actually white, pale and near translucent.

“Okay, so I’m a vampire,” she quipped.

While not extremely important, she now knew the amount of melanin in her skin was very low. Race was a word that popped up into her head, but she dismissed it, seeing no correlation between a competition and this new knowledge. She filed her skin color away with her biological sex, feeling like these facts weren’t important parts of the puzzle she had Always been. They were good pieces to physically identify her, but that did nothing for who she actually was. Her age would help so much more, allowing her to pin point which historical moments had occurred while she was alive instead of the ones that happened long before she had begun existing. This is what having thoughts with no context was like, at least in her experience, but she knew she could do this, could slowly piece herself back together.

It would help if she either knew what year it was or the year in which she was born. Having the general age range helped not at all without one of those years. What other avenues were available to her to further this thought? Or was this as far as she could go without more information? She could turn the TV on, but that wouldn’t exactly help figure out what year it was or when she was born. Maybe the info screen about whatever was on could give her some of that information, but having to read would throw her mind into the blender and she would lose all of this progress. She remembered once enjoying reading, but now it was something she could only bear when she was trying to forget some newly learned piece of knowledge.

This was it then. Of all the years she could remember, none of them felt like the current year or the one in which she came tumbling out of her mom’s uterus. Hey, at least she still knew how birth worked, even if she couldn’t narrow her age down. A single year repeated itself several times, though, even if it was an answer that didn’t fit either of the questions she was asking: two thousand sixteen. She filed it away with her skin color and biological sex, figuring it might come in handy, but not holding her breath. Still fumbling with her thoughts, she didn’t hear the nurse walk into the room.

“And how are we this afternoon?” the newcomer asked, coming to check the machines next to the bed, making no move toward the lying woman at all. “Do you need anything?”

Yes! Yes, she needed all of her questions answered. But nothing about this person—from their short, black hair or brown eyes to their blue scrubs—gave the impression that they would have any answers at all. Unfortunately, she couldn’t conceive that the nurse had access to her blood type, her protein and enzyme levels, her fucking birthday. She knew the word nurse meant some sort of help (she had picked that up in her stay here, wherever here was), but she couldn’t remember what else nurses might know.

She just lay there, mouth slightly agape, pleading with god-knows-what color eyes for any kind of knowledge this nurse could offer. But she didn’t know which question to ask first, which one would end up being most important, which one would lead to figuring out who she had Always been the fastest. It was a moment of panic, one that almost ended in silent tears, as the nurse walked back towards the door. This was her only chance and she was blowing it, but she didn’t know how to not blow it!

“Wait!” she finally called, finding her voice somewhere in the weeds, just in time to make it known that she did in fact need some kind of help. The nurse looked hopeful, as if it were their sole mission to ease any discomfort she might have at any given moment. Maybe that was the rest of the definition of nurse, but that wasn’t a worry right now. She had to get one question answered. “Do you know how long ago the year 2016 was?”

“Of course,” the nurse answered. “It’s been twelve years. The current year is 2028.”

Her smile was the biggest the nurse had ever seen it.

***

The year was 2028! That would put her birth year somewhere between 1974 and 1977, which gave her some historical context for her life, couching her in a time period. Like, she now knew she should have some strong feelings about the fall of the Soviet Union, should likely know where she had been when Iron Curtain collapsed. Maybe she had been upset, maybe she had been elated, maybe she hadn’t cared in the slightest; she wasn’t quite sure what her thoughts had been about the implosion of communism had actually been, she just now knew she should feel something about it! The first names Samuel and Francis, surnames Fukuyama and Huntington, came to mind in regards to the USSR and its death, but she wasn’t sure why.

The important thing was, though, that she had another piece to the puzzle, another clue in her search for identity, in her search for what she had always been. There had clearly been a time before this room, before this bed, before this fucking popcorned ceiling, and even if she couldn’t access it yet, she now knew for certain that she had existed in that time. Was it frustrating that her history was nothing more than tattered pieces, and incomplete map that one fucking disease had ripped into verifiable shreds, feasting on the vital connections between moments that made human life in any way possible? Yeah, it was fucking frustrating! But in all her life, this life that she had very little context for, she knew that she had never faced an adversary like dementia.

The competition was thrilling!

It was readily apparent that the disease had the upper hand, was winning in this Predator vs. Jerry game of galactic hide and seek, but she didn’t care, refused to care. If the outcome was already decided, if ultimately dementia would win in the end, then she was going to play for keeps, ignoring any and all rules of engagement and going for whatever weak spot the disease gave up, exploiting whatever loopholes in the agreement between parasite and host she could find. If this was going to be a bloodbath that would leave her dead on the floor, then was going to cripple the disease, maim it beyond recognition, so that next time it picked a fight with a member of her species, it would remember the throttling it had received, how hard the kill had actually been to achieve.

She wanted to dementia to shudder when it considered going after a human.

Even with her near-total lack of clarity, she had read the board, knew that checkmate was something the disease would get to claim, that at this point, she was just staving off the inevitable, but she refused to give up. Dementia would have to earn each and every piece of hers that it struck down, each and every small victory costing the disease dearly. For every pawn of hers it took, she would take one of its, and she had already done so. Hopefully the disease will write its difficulty with her into its genetic code, a memory written in DNA about the hard fought battle she turned out to be.

Isn’t that just the way of evolution, an old, tired, worn out and outdated organism clinging to some semblance of relevance by fighting tooth and nail against whatever killer reality has cooked up to reap its soul? Dementia was supposed to kill her, was supposed to claim her life for its trophy, but what hunter wanted an easy hunt? None that she would ever respect, and she respected this adversary. If only the strongest organisms were supposed to survive, she would make damn sure the disease that took her life would have to be strongest possible disease nature could come up with.

She now knew when she was born, not to the exact date, but close enough that figuring out what she had always been should be easier. Should was always the operative word, huh?

It was while she was planning her next offensive against dementia, that the nurse walked in, checked her vitals, and walked back out. If she had looked, maybe she would have noticed that the nurse wore a different face today, but it wouldn’t have mattered much to her. As far as she could tell, the nurse always had a different face, one that didn’t like to stay still. She could respect that need for change, knowing that one look could be very boring. Not that she even noticed the nurse or anything.

The nurse, however, sure noticed her, this strange waif of a patient, a woman who had clearly been through some tough shit, though it wasn’t in her chart just what kind of shit. Maybe it wasn’t medically relevant, but the nurse desperately wanted to know just what kind of story the older woman had to tell, what kind of story she had lived. She had only been at the private, in-patient clinic for a few days, but something about this patient stood out as odd to her, and it wasn’t just the severity of her condition, not that her condition wasn’t debilitating. God, this nurse had seen patients live well into their hundreds without facing dementia as aggressively as this woman, and she was only forty five years old! Her curiosity had stopped her legs from moving as soon as she was out of the small room, standing right in the middle of the hallway.

“What has she said that has you so flummoxed you’re that still?” The question was bemused, the thick voice surrounding it amused and friendly. Dr. Turner knew just how fascinating, how distracting, this patient could be.

“I’m sorry, doctor,” the nurse responded when her voice returned from vacation. “She hasn’t said anything, but, well…”

“Trust me, I know, she’s interesting. When, or if, you ever get to hear her speak, listen, I mean really listen. She’s quite insightful when she’s lucid.”

Dr. Turner walked away, heading for either his office or another patient’s room. The nurse had not yet see him enter this patient’s room, the one he found so intriguing, so why did he speak about her with such reverence? What was it about her?

“Doctor!” she called, jogging to catch up with him. For a man of six feet, he had a long stride, the kind that covered great distances quickly. Maybe it was that stride that had allowed him to become such a renowned and respected neurosurgeon at such a young age; maybe his intellect was just as long as his gait. “Wait!”

“You have questions about 1408, yes?” he asked when she caught up to him, his brown eyes hidden behind glasses and another patient’s chart. It wasn’t that he wasn’t acknowledging her, he was just capable of reading a medical chart and carrying on a conversation at the same time. He had a tall mind after all.

“Yes sir, I do,” she said, knowing already his no bullshit policy. If a staff member had a question, they were free to ask, and if he didn’t have the answer, they would search for it together. That had been his stance on things since meeting the patient in room 1408.

“Come to my office then. There’s no point in standing on ceremony about this.”

They moved to his office, he settling himself behind his paper-strewn desk, her settling into the chairs usually reserved for grieving families hearing for the first time that their loved ones had passed away. The doctor gave his nurse the same look he gave those families, knowing that he was about to impart some depressing news. It always hurt, telling people this, but he had made a habit out of it, knowing that he owed Hunter that much. Unlocking his bottom desk drawer, he pulled out the manuscript, the one he had promised to publish to when its author passed away.

“You’ve read her chart, her file, I’m assuming?”

“Yes sir. A full, successful brain transplant…wow! Even with the side effect of dementia, that is so impressive! Think about all the possibilities, the applications!”

“I do, nurse…” he waited for her name, knowing it already, but wanting her to feel the weight of his authority. It wasn’t a power thing or a gender thing, just something he needed her to recognize before he could slide the manuscript over to her. He needed her to understand that even someone as noteworthy as he was, as accomplished as he was, could be humbled by this story.

“Simmons, sir,” she said.

“Nurse Simmons, the patient in room 1408 used to be a brilliant young man, who in 2011 suffered severe bodily trauma. We put his brain the body of a woman who had recently overdosed on heroin, because while she was brain-dead, her body still functioned. In five years, the only major side effect or complication was migraine headaches. In 2016, however, this brilliant young man trapped in a woman’s body stopped taking his immunosuppresants, and the body began to reject the brain. This rejection so closely mimics the effects of aggressive early onset dementia that we have been treating this patient as if they have that disease, but the truth is, the connections between his brain and her body are just deteriorating at a very slow rate.

“Before this person allowed their body to reject their brain, they wrote this. It’s the only story from their life that we actually have now, that they wrote, and it was written a month after they had stopped taking their medication. Some of the details within can be corroborated, but not all of them. If you really want to know about this patient, read through it. I promised them I would publish it after they had kicked the proverbial bucket—their words, not mine—so I try to share it with the nurses that work with her. And yes, figuring out which pronouns to use in regards to this patient, is maddening, which is why we don’t stick to any which ones. She’ll use whichever ones she feels like, so we just do the same.”

Nurse Simmons examined the manuscript before running her fingers over the bland title page. Speaking Well about Things that Matter Together it read, and she picked it up, nodding to the good doctor as she left his office, a silent promise to read through it.

Dr. Franklin Turner watched the new nurse leave the room, running his fingers across the bridge of his nose, the calloused tips providing just enough pressure to ease the headache as it settled in for the night. How many times was he going to do this, have to have this conversation, hand over that tattered fucking manuscript? This process was becoming unwieldy, encumbering, and downright old. He was tired, goddamnit, of having to do this every time a nurse quit, every time someone could no longer stomach to see that woman, the one who shouldn’t be! It was maddening hell on him, unrequited responsibility on his staff (especially the ones that could only hack it for a few weeks or months), and gut-wrenching on his patient.

“Are you sure want the world reading this story, Hunter, at least while you’re still sucking in air? Are you sure you want to keep doing this to yourself?” he asked to his empty office, the silence the only answer he would likely ever get.