The Rumpelstiltskin
By Nan Goldberg
DUALISM: Doctrine in philosophy and metaphysics, theorizing that the world is composed of two independent, sometimes conflicting elements, such as mind and matter, body and soul, or good and evil. cf. IDEALISM, MATERIALISM. (Norton Dictionary) Recently disproved by advances in neurological science. – Jacob Jardan, psychopharmacologist/professor
Oh no it isn’t. – The author
6th October
The work goes well. 300 words today, more than a page. Clearly I did the right thing in retiring before the start of this term. I feel a bit unfocused, sometimes, without my patients, my students, my busy department office... But it is immeasurably more productive at this stage for me to concentrate on my book.
If I were able to continue at this rate, I believe the first draft could be complete within two years. But I shouldn’t anticipate.
9th November
It’s strange how, living alone, one’s memories begin to populate every room. Children chase each other down corridors, making a ruckus; I am undisturbed, since they are long grown and gone. In the study, heat emanates from the heady brew of student debate, a combustion of wine and cookies, perspiration and passion. The intense odor of tomato sauce, sharp and fragrant, breezes in from the kitchen; it is Elizabeth’s, though she is dead.
Yes I am lonely. This is how I know I’m lonely – when these spirits wander through, called upon not by me but by some need of mine that has a voice only they can hear. My adult children do not hear it. On the telephone, my cheery voice assures their cheery voices how very fine I am, and they believe me. And truly, the work goes well, the retirement is relaxing. I am content. I write. I do not care to travel, or make visits, or plan vacations, or go fishing, or invite company, or, usually, take a nap. Everything I am I am by choice. And yet? ... Something is bothering me. Am I worrying about death? Am I depressed? I am confused.
15th November
I have got into quite an efficient regimen now. Rise at 8 precisely; coffee, Danish, and paper till 9; shower and dress and music (Verdi’s La Traviata or Falstaff almost exclusively these days, for some reason) till 9:45; and in the office with fresh coffee by 10. Three hours of thinking and writing, till 1; then lunch and a brisk walk around the neighborhood (varying the destination each day). Back to work from 2:30 to 5. Then read, relax, shop, pay bills, a little TV, sometimes I go to a movie. I return phone calls. Laundry on Mondays, the way Elizabeth always did it (though I can’t say why). In bed with this journal or a book, usually by 10, and lights out at 11 or sometimes even before.
Reading this over, I almost laugh out loud: What an old man you are, Jacob, what a creature of habit. And it’s true: I am so old that I’m too old to be embarrassed by my own newborn rigidity – upon which, I will admit, I thrive. It helps, of course, that the culmination of my life’s work, the logical resolution of my inquiry, remains to be set down.
17th November
My aphasia plagues me. Today I could not find the word “premise,” and came to a sudden halt, mentally groping, fingers twitching at the keyboard, for what seemed like eternity. No synonym, unfortunately, for “premise.” I was forced to wait till the word finally deigned to pass back into consciousness from wherever it had been hiding. My mind’s capriciousness now threatens my work. I am totally at its mercy – not a happy feeling.
20th November
Titles: The Mind as a Figment of the Imagination? Chemistry of the Soul? The Soul and Other Superstitions? How to sum up this vast concept? If everything in the universe can be broken down into one essential, material element, obeying universal scientific principles, then certain things are true: The soul is negated; Descartes’s famous mind-body problem is moot; and it becomes necessary to reopen that Pandora’s box, the question of good and evil.
I stimulate an area of the cortex and the arm moves; another, and the eyes behold a flash of light. Mere physical phenomena, certainly. But now: I chemically augment the production of serotonin, or slow its uptake, and predictably, the patient’s mood, temper, sweetness, outlook, patience, happiness, cooperativeness, satisfaction, appreciation, ability to compromise, are suddenly elevated – until the drug is withdrawn.
What we know, we know. Now even free will becomes questionable – albeit regrettably. And the soul? A myth, a religious conceit. A folk tale.
One must not be dissuaded by sentimental traditions, by superstitions, no matter how comforting. There is no “ghost in the machine.”
26th November
Thanksgiving was delightful. Richard would not let me drive out but insisted on coming for me the night before. I was grateful, though I acted the crotchety old dad, flaunting my hurt feelings and complaining that he didn’t trust me to drive. His wife lovely as always, her name escapes me at the moment, but I shall go on and it will certainly come back to me. Rachel. There it is. Richard’s children are all boys, just as mine were, and one of them, the 12-year-old, so reminded me of Davey at that age that I kept calling him Davey by mistake. Richard and Ethan exchanged looks, I noticed, but the child merely said: “Tell me a story about Davey, Grandpa,” and I told him about how when Davey was small, his greatest pleasure was to take things apart and see how they worked, and how one Christmas, when he was 5, we gave him a broken telephone and a broken clock. I believe he fixed the clock, eventually. He was so careful with all those tiny pieces, so careless of his own precious self. He probably never saw the car that hit him.
Strange how through all the years that separate my life from his, invariably I become as tearful as an old man at the merest thought of that boy. Well, now I guess I am an old man.
Someday soon, a drug will become available to alleviate such grief. Simply a matter of finding the chemical that controls it – likely the same one that regulates love – and figuring out how to raise, or lower, the level. A love potion? Ha! That’s a good one. An anti-love potion. It’s child’s play, once you find it.
Ah, but would I take it? Somehow, this makes me uncomfortable, as if I would be a different man if I did not miss my son so painfully. And perhaps I prefer the pain to the alteration. Why? A conundrum.
Ethan’s two girls are both breathtaking. But I still don’t like Allegra: She likes to pretend I am senile. I suppose she’s more comfortable ignoring my theories – and me – than dealing with the implications. Someone ought to tell her it’s possible to disagree without being disagreeable.
Elizabeth always claimed to like both daughters-in-law, but in Allegra’s case I never believed it.
I don’t remember exactly what sort of food we ate, but I do remember it was delicious.
26th December
Something extraordinary has happened.
I was working as usual, and experiencing as usual that peculiar lack of concentration that allows me to lose perfectly common words just as they reach the tip of my tongue (actually the tips of my fingers).
Outside, it was far below freezing. Snow had buried the neighborhood overnight, and icicles hung from the trees like stalactites. Because it was the day after Christmas and a Saturday, no one on the block had had to venture out, and so no one did: Not a single tire track, not a footprint, bruised the snow, even by early afternoon. I imagined that in every house families snuggled against each other, watching TV, drinking hot chocolate, the children toying with gifts they hadn’t yet wearied of.
I had just stopped writing again, searching for another ordinary English word that refused to come to mind, when the doorbell rang.
Slowly, I made my laborious way from the third floor to the first, and it crossed my mind that it might be a mistake or a prank, that I would reach the vestibule and find that whoever it was had already gone away. But no, he was waiting for me when I opened the door.
Through the layers of clothing, the scarf and hat that masked him, I had the impression of an embryonic face, expressionless, unformed, and therefore hideous, almost imbecilic in a grown man. It was impossible to tell how old he was. He seemed tall but stooped, like an elderly man, and he was shivering with cold, emphasizing an apparent fragility; but his muscular limbs conveyed a healthy, stupid energy that contradicted the rest. His hair was a metallic, shimmering gold. In a precisely neutral tone, as if reading from a dictionary, he said very clearly: “Sentient,” and then he turned to go.
“Sentient” was the word I had been missing.
A dreadful feeling ran through me, colder even than the inhuman outdoor chill. I could not speak. I watched him struggle up the snowy hill toward Park Street. When he’d gone about half the way, I jerked into motion, closed the door, and returned to my office, where I continued to shiver and stare out at him though the picture window until he was out of sight. He didn’t disappear, like in a fairy tale; he just kept walking until I couldn’t see him anymore.
Then I sat down and typed “sentient,” pushing the incident out of my mind, however temporarily; then kept on working.
But I am frightened.
28th December
He came again today. Not yesterday – yesterday I took the day off, something I hardly ever do. But today I started off promptly, and promptly the words began to disappear, worse than ever before, and then the doorbell rang.
This time the word he wanted to give me was ______– damn! I’ve forgotten it again. I’m shaken, there’s no doubt of that. In fact I think I’ll leave off writing for the night. I’m quite exhausted.
29th December
Cannot work today for staring out the window. My mind wanders. I sit glued to my office chair in front of the keyboard, and instead of my elegantly reasoned treatise I am thinking of ghosts and fairy tales, telltale hearts, casks of amontillado. Witches of Coos. Highwaymen. Marley. Unquiet souls, all.
Of course I know the explanation, like all explanations, is to be found in science. But I am old, and tired, and a little unnerved; I would rather plunge ahead with my work and let someone else solve the riddle.
And yet … I think, childishly, of Rumpelstiltskin the alchemist, turning straw into gold.
Mind into matter.
Faith into reason. Theory into proof. Idea into book.
Thought into words.
Who is this creature, and what does he want?
3rd January
When the doorbell rang this time I knew who it was, of course. I was almost expecting it, as I’d been sitting, paralyzed, over my ______ for long minutes already, waiting for a word. The word turned out to be “virtual,” and this time, anticipating some relief, I confess to smiling at him as I opened the door. He said, “Virtual,” loud and clear, then turned as if to go, but then I thought I saw him hesitate at my smile. “Thank you,” I said, encouraged by this more or less human moment. “If it’s my first-born you want, you can have him. He never visits anyway.” At this he seemed to _______, though he didn’t answer, and after a moment he began walking away. Still, I feel as if we are colluding now.
15th January
If I leave the spaces blank and go on working without them, the Rumpelstiltskin comes and fills them up later. He ______ and I write them down. Today: “root,” “doctrine,” “instance,” “whether,” “essential,” “irreversible,” “distance,” and the number seven. Yesterday: “infinite,” “within,” “instrument,” “cognitive,” “form,” “serotonin,” “measure,” and “fortuitous.” I am still unable to “calculate the downside,” as Ethan likes to _______.
1st March
I am still most upset and have been unable to write for at least two days, I think. It must have been on Monday, Monday or Tuesday, that this happened: I went out for my daily walk after lunch. It had snowed again, and it’s true everything was ______, not just dusted on but almost dumped upon, the houses colorless, the trees monstrous white shapes in the pearl-gray light, the sun in no place particular, the sidewalks a thin muddy ribbon, the width of a shovel only. Still, that is not a sufficient explanation. I got lost. Twenty minutes into my careful stroll, I looked up from my struggling feet and realized I did not ______ the houses, the street names were entirely unfamiliar, and I had not the least idea how to get home.
Impossible: A 20-minute walk after a snowstorm could have taken me, at most, several _______ from my house. I have lived in this house for I cannot even remember how long. I have practiced my daily walk for many years. There is no nearby street that I have not traversed dozens of times. And yet, lost. I turned around and began walking in the _______ direction, hoping to come upon a landmark, but nothing showed itself. I would not ask anyone; anyway, there was no one to ask; I would have had to stop a ______ car. Eventually the sky began to darken, and I looked at my watch. Hours, somehow, had passed. I was freezing. My fingers were numb inside my gloves. I was exhausted. The neighborhood – one indistinguishable house after another, one block after another, one tree after another, one single driveway, one double driveway, one streetlight, one stop sign, one fence, one dog – had become, horrifyingly, a labyrinth, a deadly labyrinth I could not escape.
Finally, it being the hour when people return from work, I happened to be passing a house when a car pulled up and parked, and somebody got out. I called out: “Excuse me? Hello?” in the dark. The man came _______, toward the sidewalk. “Is that you, Jacob?” he said. I squinted in the dark. I could not recognize him, and simultaneously I realized I could not ask him for directions. I had forgotten my address.
“Jacob?” He came abreast of me; I could feel the heat coming off him from the inside of his comfortable car. “How are you, man? What’s new?”
“I’ve been out walking,” I stammered. He was a young man, perhaps a former student? But slowly in my mind there gathered a picture of a pretty wife, a baby, a ladder, flowers. This man _______ up the ladder, the pretty wife planting flowers, the baby’s hand cupped in her own practiced hand. Their two hands – one small, one tiny – patting the dirt. Nevertheless, I could not place him.
“It’s awfully late for your walk, isn’t it?” he asked.
“I’m just on my way back.”
He looked a little confused at that. “Oh, good. I thought you were walking away from your house.” He pointed up the street, in the direction I had come from. “You ought to get yourself something hot to drink before dinner. You look frozen,” he added, looking me over rather closely.
“I’m all right.”
“Okay, then, I’ve got to be going. Take care, now, Jacob,” he said, stepping back toward his driveway. Then he stopped and turned around, slowly, as if _______ something through. “It’s really lucky,” he said carefully, “that you’re only across the street and two houses up.” In the dark, I felt my cheeks begin to _______. “It’s just too damn dark to be out hiking tonight. ‘Night, Jacob.” Then he turned and walked hurriedly to his front door.
I crossed the street and walked up the hill I’d just walked down. Two houses up, I stopped and stood on the sidewalk. Although the outside lights weren’t on, I could see plainly that it was my house. I stood for a minute staring at it, my heart _______, and as I groped in my pocket for the keys I felt the enormous, canyonesque gap of that afternoon begin to close up, whatever had leaked away begin to regroup, facts begin to line up in my mind again like obedient little soldiers. I went inside. There is something very wrong with me.
30th March
“The medication only works if you remember to take it,” the drug-store man said. I suppose that was a joke, an Alzheimer’s joke. The real joke is, nobody’s sure it will work even if you do take it.
14th April
Too many tests, too many drugs. I am not myself. Who am I?
30th May
The brain softens. Chemically, the brain atrophies, and there is a loss of brain cells. Specific changes in the cerebral cortex, accompanied by intellectual deterioration, even moral deterioration, loss of emotion, loss of connection, paranoia, leading to a total breakdown of mental activity. The body, however, sometimes retains an almost appalling good health, and continues to function for a long, long time.
25th June
Work proceeds relatively smoothly, now that we’re in a routine again. I leave the blank spaces all over, and around 5 o’clock he comes and recites them all to me, while I write them down. I’ve put a little ______ and pen on the little table near the _______. The front ______. It goes quite rapidly now. I am filling page after page in great excitement, not stopping to revise or even glance back. At 5 he brings my long list of ______ – which grows longer every day, I’m afraid – then I go back upstairs and fill in all the ______. Then I ______ for the day. I try not to look at what I’ve done. I don’t want to lose my ______.
3rd August
An exercise: I am in my bedroom; I attempt to visualize my office. I close my _______. A word machine, a window. I try harder. The word machine must be on something. A desk. I try to visualize the desk. Many desks come to ______, all of them imagined desks, not remembered desks. Wait! On my desk, something gold. What is it? I can think of nothing gold, except the Rumpelstiltskin’s hair.______, go to my office, look around. I am writing down what I ______. It’s quite beautiful, all in woods and dark colors except for a bright red pillow and quilt on the _______ that my wife must have bought for me. The floors are dark oak and glossy. Three of the walls are hidden behind floor-to-ceiling ______ bookcases, lined with books, all of which I’m sure I have _______, almost all of which forgotten. I don’t ______ many of the titles. The fourth wall, which juts out in a semi-circular bay, contains a large picture window in the _______, surrounded by photographs of children, probably my children. On my ancient, thick oak-wood desk is the word machine, a black lacquer ______ that adds more glare than light and which I avoid using, and a single photograph in a gold frame. I don’t _______ the woman in it. It must be my wife. My wife is dead. The door is on my left. Outside the door, the stairs down to the ______ of the house are also on the left. Left, left, to answer the doorbell. A large handmade signpost in the corridor notes, “Third Floor.”
Once, the only missing pieces were the words.
October
I won’t have Richard near me any more, he or his _______, or even his children. Or that other son. I know why they come. They want to lock me away, and I won’t have it. They want to keep me away from him. I’ve told them nothing, but they know. I told them, “No more _______, except Davey can come.” But they don’t bring him. Richard calls. I yell into the _______, “Your wife is fat! Your children are ugly! You are my least favorite child!” He always _______ when I say that.
November
He sits in the car with me. He tells me how to get to town. He reminds me which groceries. He remembers my words. He only comes when I need him. He never minds how I am.
But we are like strangers. He does his job, I do mine. Strictly _______. When I try to _____ with him, he doesn’t reply. It is so dark in here, in the labyrinth. “And Jacob was left alone, to wrestle with demons.” Genesis.
November
I do not recognize myself in the mirror. I startle myself. Where is the other man, the one I was before? When memory goes, what ______? Am I the same, or different? If different, then what became of that man, and who is this man? I mean chemically, of course.
December
He came today, the way he always does every day now, but today I saw his ______ clearly – why? I don’t know; perhaps it was a _______ of the perfect light, the way the 3 o’clock _______ shone upon his handsome animated face – never mind, it hardly matters, what matters is he’s rapidly growing older. A new spirit, an intentionality, even a sort of good humor underneath the _______ exterior. He looks to be in his 30s.
The shock of it _______, it was _______, he recited his words and I forgot to write them down, I only stared, lost. (Another horror: Now the long list is irretrievable.)
I don’t understand. Is he the cure, or the disease?
December
I spoke to him today. I never do anymore, just write what he _______, but today an experiment, he said his _______ and I said, “Davey.” Just that. _______ I saw the tears start to his _______ and splash over and roll down his face. I saw my own anguish, mine! He turned away. I did nothing, I watched him, cold as _______, and the realization came to me that he is sucking me dry.
December
A lucid moment. There is more of him, and less of me, every day.
January
I’m onto him, the mind-sucker, but he doesn’t ______ it, not yet. I can ______ something out, still, maybe. Need him for words never finish tells me what. Must pull myself _______. Book.
January
Apparently the wretch feels he can _______ and go at will. Today he did not ______ bother to show up. I must ______ something; must kill him eat him. Kill him and eat him up.
January
He bled and screamed, he ________, he called out my children’s _______, he grew pale, his blood was everywhere, very difficult to get into the container. Whatever he once was, by the end he was a man, or very close to one, and I have _______ him, or me, or both. I have _______ my own soul, and murdered it.
At least I was wrong. Thank _____.
