Excerpt from The Man Who Wasn't There by Anil Ananthaswamy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I'm OK," replied Graham.

"Alive and kicking?" she asked.

"Kicking," said Graham, pointedly.

The self is both remarkably robust and frighteningly fragile. This book, I hope, brings to life this essential paradox of who we are.





2

MEMORIES, A PERSON, A NARRATIVE—AND ITS UNRAVELING

Memory, connecting inconceivable mystery to inconceivable mystery, performs the impossible by the strength of her divine arms; holds together past and present,—beholding both,—existing in both . . . and gives continuity and dignity to human life. It holds us to our family, to our friends. Hereby a home is possible.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

—Replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner

Allan, Michaele, and I are sitting in the living room of their home in California. Allan is settled into a large, high-backed, brown leather sofa, looking distinguished with his white beard and mustache and balding pate, and surprisingly dark eyebrows. At first glance I'm unable to tell anything's amiss. Michaele sits on a chair next to him. I ask Allan if he has any brothers or sisters. He says no, and then corrects himself immediately. "Oh, I had a brother who was demented," he says.

"Retarded," Michaele gently corrects him.

"Retarded," Allan agrees. "No one knew he was retarded until he was [about] four. I was eighteen. I didn't understand a lot."

"But you were ten when he was four," Michaele says.

"OK," says Allan.

"Allan, do you remember much about your brother?" I ask.

"A sadness about him," says Allan. "Because he couldn't talk and stuff like that. I'd take him for a walk or something like that. He never said a word."

After a small pause, he adds, "I don't even know if he's still alive."

"No, honey, he died," says Michaele. "He died the year you and I met."

Allan and Michaele met nearly thirty years ago. Allan had been a philosophy professor at a community college, Michaele a forty-year-old working as a midwife, back at school after finding herself at a cusp in her life.

"Do you remember how he died?" asks Michaele.

"I thought he died in his sleep or something," says Allan.

Actually, Allan's brother had been hospitalized for a blood clot, and while at the hospital he fell out of an upper-floor window and died. At the time, thirty years ago, Allan had told Michaele that his brother, given his diminished mental capacities, would not have had the wherewithal to jump; he had probably wanted to get home and likely stepped out of the window thinking he was on the ground floor.

When Michaele reminds Allan of this during our conversation, he says, "Oh, that's something I wanted to forget, but no . . . fell out of the window . . ." He mumbles; his words meander.

"What did they say at the hospital?" asks Michaele.

"I was too sad and too young to take it in," says Allan.

Michaele turns to me and points out that Allan was fifty years old when his brother died.

On December 21, 1995, researchers in Germany found a blue cardboard file that had been missing for nearly ninety years. The file contained the case report for a patient named Auguste D, a fifty-one-year-old woman from Frankfurt. A handwritten note in the file, dated November 26, 1901, captured an exchange between Auguste and her doctor, Aloysius "Alois" Alzheimer, which the German researchers published in the journal Lancet in 1997 (with Auguste's answers italicized):

She sits on the bed with a helpless expression. What is your name? Auguste. Last name? Auguste. What is your husband's name? Auguste, I think. Your husband? Ah, my husband. She looks as if she didn't understand the question. Are you married? To Auguste. Mrs D? Yes, yes, Auguste D. How long have you been here? She seems to be trying to remember. Three weeks. What is this? I show her a pencil. A pen. A purse and key, diary, cigar are identified correctly. At lunch she eats cauliflower and pork. Asked what she is eating she answers spinach. When she was chewing meat and asked what she was doing, she answered potatoes and then horseradish. When objects are shown to her, she does not remember after a short time which objects have been shown. In between she always speaks about twins.

Excerpted from The Man Who Wasn't There by Anil Ananthaswamy. Copyright © 2015 by Anil Ananthaswamy. Excerpted by permission of Dutton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.