This archive document includes both parts of this story, which ran on July 17, 1995 and July 24, 1995.
If you asked him why he’s so restless, he wouldn’t be able to tell you. He has a hard time explaining or understanding anything about his situation these days–he’s simply afflicted by mysterious surges of nervous energy, like a lightning rod in an invisible thunderstorm. He jumps out of chairs, fusses endlessly with the objects on his nightstand, arranges himself in his bed with elaborate formality, and then, the moment he’s comfortable, bounds up to look out the window. He’s constantly wandering into the rooms of other patients, searching for things he can’t remember. His possessions–glasses, brushes, belt, shoes–turn up everywhere, scattered around other patients’ beds, in front of the nurse’s station, sometimes strewn down the corridor. One of his shirts was found once behind the big TV in the common room.
There are other times when we get an ominous call from the nursing home: “Nick is agitated.” It could mean that he had a screaming fit when the nurse tried to give him his medication, or that he got into a fistfight with the orderlies who kept him from escaping into the elevator–he’s in his mid-70s, but he’s still strong. Nina and I will ask to talk to him, hoping to calm him down, but often this doesn’t work because he doesn’t remember what it is he’s upset about by the time he gets on the phone. He thinks the nursing home staff are acting like lunatics for some reason he can’t imagine. Actually he thinks this even in his calmer moments; he says the orderlies inscrutably turn on him, or the doctors and nurses try to treat him for conditions he knows he doesn’t have. But he thinks that’s just typical of the way things always go for him. His current situation has served only to confirm his lifelong certainty that he’s surrounded by fools and madmen.
Still, I agreed to help him–partly because he was so obviously pained by the realization that he’d never be able to do it on his own, and partly because I wondered if his past would explain why he’d turned out the way he did. Yet I knew he didn’t want to explore his inner life (though he never set any conditions on what kind of story I could write about him, or what I could or couldn’t say). In fact, he usually denies that he even has an inner life; he’s always claimed that all his thoughts and actions emanate from a core of pure and transparent rationality.
“What did he do?” I’d ask.
Gradually his stories became more fragmentary. He started telling the same ones over and over again–but would trail off at an earlier point each time. Then too, he was having increasing difficulty remembering words. In the middle of a story he’d hit a mental roadblock and wouldn’t be able to think of some ordinary term, and he’d immediately go off on a long detour of paraphrase–a detour that would invariably lead to further detours when he forgot one of the words in the paraphrase and had to start paraphrasing that. For a while I was able to help him out; by then I knew most of the stories by heart and could unobtrusively supply the word that would get him back on track. But gradually his sentences began unraveling before I had any idea what he was talking about. That’s when we had to stop. The struggle to make sense was becoming too painful for him.
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But the most important thing that happened to Nick in those years had nothing to do with the grand events of history. He and his father had another gigantic battle, filled with desperate pleading and absolute refusals, over whether he could join the Boy Scouts. For Nikolai the scouts were another potential pool of dissolute company. But he finally relented, and Nick began attending meetings. And for the first time in his life he made a friend.
