41 Numbered Paragraphs About Dementia and Fiction
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1. Before there was Wacky Warehouse, there was the local psychiatric hospital. This was November 1991. My birthday. My parents – whose marriage was ending – needed a safe way to occupy twenty eight-year-old boys jacked on Um-Bongo and Opal Fruits. The solution was to rent a soft-play room from Monyhull Hospital, a residential care facility in South Birmingham for people with learning disabilities, bought by the state from a gun manufacturer in 1908.
2. The artist Song Dong was worried about his mum Xhao Xianguyan. This was in the early 2000s. After Dong’s dad died, his mum lived in her Beijing flat with only her possessions and songbirds for company. She was lonely.
3. After my dad died, my sister retrieved his possessions from the care home. This was in 2022. He’d lived there a year. Everything was in a shoe box. In the shoe box were a few items that he must have found around the building – empty biscuit packaging, a fork, tissue paper – and taken back to his room. There was an empty diary and one book. I did not find this activity, looking through the box of things, particularly enjoyable, but when I saw the book I laughed.
4. In the documentary, Mother, a Swiss family travels to Thailand. They are a mother, father, three adult daughters. It is a few days before Christmas. They enjoy a boat trip down the Chao Phraya and take photographs of elephants. They are smartly dressed, with clean hair and glinting jewellery. One member of the family is silent. Her face is watchful and taut. Her eyes dart from side to side. She has trouble boarding the boat. The rest of the family seems unsure how to act around her. They speak in a way – ‘Are you cold? I think she is cold.’ – that addresses her and at the same time does not address her. She is at once talked to and about, central focus and background.
Sometimes writing felt like remembering. Sometimes writing felt like being told a story.
5. Song Dong proposed to his mum that he take every object out of her flat and rehouse them in an art gallery. The 10,000 things were laid out so that, for the first time, every single one could be seen. They were captured as they were at that moment in time. No one would squeeze the last dregs of toothpaste from the twenty tubes of toothpaste that were on display. No one would switch on the five televisions. No birds would live in the birdcages. They were still Xhao Xianguyan’s things, but now they also belonged to the artist, and in some way to each visitor who came to look at the artwork called Waste Not.
6. The family goes home to Switzerland. Maya stays in Thailand. She lives in Thailand now.
7. I didn’t want to go back to the house. I couldn’t go back there anyway – it belonged to someone else. But I did go back there.
8. When Waste Not first exhibited, Xhao Xianguyan was part of the show. This was in 2005. She arrived when the gallery opened and left when it closed. She told stories to visitors. She told them who had given her this bar of soap, who had scuffed the holes into those shoes. She kept the many single-use takeaway boxes, she said, as containers for food for the twenty-two stray cats in her neighbourhood that would otherwise go hungry. If there was no one in the gallery to talk to, she might open a wardrobe, take out the clothes, fold them again, more neatly.
9. I carried on talking to him in his house in the book. This was in 2021 and in 2022. I wanted to find out what it had been like for him to live there on his own all those years, and what it had been like for me to live there when I was a child, and what he and I made of one another, in the end. Sometimes writing felt like remembering. Sometimes writing felt like being told a story. I drew many timelines.
10. The central character of Spanish novelist Javier Marías’ trilogy of novels, Your Face Tomorrow, is called Jacques Deza. Deza advises a shadowy organisation how to manipulate powerful people. He is tasked with assessing the weaknesses of a man called Dick Dearlove. Dearlove is not so influenced, Deza decides, by moral qualms about what he knows he has done, but by an anxiety about how he perceives his life will look from the outside, in the ‘official portrait’. Dearlove suffers from ‘biographical horror’, which is the fear that the story of his life could at any moment be deformed by a ‘terrible narrative protuberance’.
11. The book was funny because it was so serious. Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others is an uncompromising essay about images of suffering. This was in 2003 and in 2022. I was surprised to find that my dad had written notes in blue biro on various pages – I thought that he had lost the ability to write. Some of his writing was upside down. On the title page Sontag dedicates the book to her son: ‘for David’. My dad, whose name was David, mistook this as a direct address to him. He asked questions of someone who might have been himself. He asked who the book came from and when. He expressed hope that his wife ‘returns tomorrow from LONDON or thereabouts’.
12. Xhao Xianguyan’s flat was demolished, along with its neighbourhood, in preparation for the Beijing Olympics. Xhao Xianguyan died the year after, in 2009, trying to help a bird in a tree.
13. I have a vague impression of the soft-play room’s wipe-clean landscape of primary colours. I remember the physical thrill of throwing my body around as though trying to get rid of it. I remember the uneasy awareness that the place was meant for other children – children who were different – and I remember that the jokes about these imagined other children were cruel, and that it was fun.
14. Who will look after me when I am unable to look after myself? This has already happened. I was an eight-year-old boy. I was a baby. I survived because people cared for me.
15. Pomm becomes close to Maya. She helps Maya to wash, eat, dress, put on makeup. Maya smiles as Pomm talks about her children. Maya skips, delighted, in her new shoes. Then Maya changes. She seems melancholy and lost. Pomm tries to explain to her boss at the care home what the new mood means for both of them. ‘The caregiver is also stressed out,’ she says, ‘because neither of us can adjust our emotions to keep up with each other.’
16. Xhao Xianguyan kept medicine boxes, though the medicine had failed to keep her husband alive. She kept fluffy toys, though her son had grown up and become a famous artist. When I saw Waste Not in 2012 I laughed and cried in the room with the 10,000 things. I didn’t know why they had such an effect on me.
An individual and a society cannot keep up with one another.
17. I could not tell you what it looked like, my dad’s fury, because I do not have clear memories from when I was eight. I could not tell you what it sounded like. But I know it was there. It was dangerous and it was sad. He stood at the front of a room with sticky floors and tried to lead a game of ‘Simon Says’. No one did what Simon said. Someone shouted that Simon was a fat bastard with a dirty beard.
18. David had never phoned me before. This was in 2020. He phoned once. He phoned again. He phoned every day and several times a day. He wanted to set something straight, as though suddenly, desperately conscious of how his life looked from the outside. He wanted to talk about the 1990s and how it had been a good time. Perhaps it had been an extraordinary time. The 1990s were better in so many ways than the present moment, he said, a time when so many things seemed to be ending. Yes, I said. The 1990s were good.
19. I only realised much later what I’d seen in Waste Not. This was in 2021. My sister and I were clearing David’s house, in a frenzied week during lockdown. I recognised the surfeit. The maddening jumble of the significant with the insignificant. Some objects matter. They have personal significance. They are beautiful. They are a form of memory. Some things, by contrast, do not matter. They remember nothing. They have been deposited in someone’s life, by the endless, boring stream of stuff, like detritus in a drain grate.
20. David was born in 1940. Xhao Xianguyan was born two years before, in 1938. She was twenty-eight at the start of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. She was forty when Deng Xiaoping began market reforms and sixty-three when China joined the World Trade Organisation. An individual and a society cannot keep up with one another. Perhaps Xhao Xianguyan treated the objects of the new disposable culture with the values of the old culture of thrift and equity. Waste Not is her failure to forget how to care.
21. Lies can be compassionate, playful, painful all at the same time. Every morning, when Elizabeth wakes up, Pomm tells her that she is on holiday in Thailand.
22. The hoarding compulsion might be explained as a logical response to a loss that is impossible, emotionally, to accept. The lesson of the loss – of the terrible, overwhelming injury of losing – is never to let anything go ever again.
23. This collection of bars of soaps that look like stones, for example: do they signify something about Xhao Xianguyan’s inner life? Do they communicate her unconscious, insatiable desire to cleanse not just her body but also her mind?
24. Maya’s daughter tells the camera that her mum’s condition makes her afraid. ‘Whenever I forget something or can’t remember something that I should know, I think: “Joyce, maybe you have Alzheimer’s, too.” But I’m not going to think about it now […] It’s like a shadow that’s always hanging over you.’
25. Deza broadens the idea of ‘biographical horror’ to include the fear that an event almost completely beyond a person’s control – such as the manner of their death – might blot out everything else. A president’s multifaceted life, for example, is shrunk to a pool of blood on the back seat of an open topped Lincoln Continental.
26. He wanted to know, above all, that me and my family were well. ‘Are you all OK?’ he asked. ‘You are all OK, aren’t you?’
27. It is normal for people who consider themselves healthy to feel anxiety, as the critic Lucy Burke puts it, ‘about the consequences of an encounter with such vulnerability and dependency’. Maya’s presence prompts her family to think about how she used to be – and this makes them feel the loss of that person. Perhaps by moving Maya in space, they are trying to move her out of their minds. They are trying to protect the past from the present.
There is a comfort to putting things in order. It scarcely matters what order.
28. But often it is unclear to whom the horror belongs, in the difficult intimacy of care, as people adjust to keep up with each other. A son begs his father to take something particular – a copy of the son’s own book – into a care home with him. This is in 2021. The son cannot explain why this is so important to him. The father refuses. He doesn’t want the book. The book does nothing for him. He wants a statue of a smiling meerkat instead.
29. David had moved from his house, cluttered with his own possessions, to a new place where almost nothing belonged to him. ‘Look,’ he writes on Regarding the Pain of Others, ‘my wardrobe, look, my clothes hanging on the door’. The words are also things in the room. They are things that witness him looking at the wardrobe and the clothes. Simon Says, ‘This is real.’
30. Maya enters someone else’s life story. Pomm has three children, just like Maya. Unlike Maya, Pomm is in debt. She has to work two jobs just to stay afloat. Her own mum looks after the kids while she is away. Her dad died in a motorcycle accident. It wasn’t an accident. He committed suicide. Pomm confides all this to Maya. She tells her things that she cannot ‘say out loud to anyone else’.
31. Maya’s close family are confronted with the prospect that Maya’s internal version of each of them – the private ways that she alone perceives her three daughters and her husband, what she alone notices about them, what she alone loves in them – has disappeared. When they are around Maya they feel, therefore, that they are losing themselves.
32. A kind person says to me, ‘He’s not himself anymore. But that doesn’t change your memories of the real him, the person he was before all of this. Deep down, he’s still the same old David.’ This is in 2020. The words are meant to be comforting – and, because they are said with warmth and conviction, they are comforting.
33. Waste Not has changed by continuing to exist. It continued to exist when the flat was gone. It continued to exist when Xhao Xianguyan was gone. The circle that holds the objects together in the mind grows more faint. They are no longer prompts for living memory. The objects grow silent and at the same time restless. They could belong to anyone – almost.
34. There is a comfort to putting things in order. It scarcely matters what order. The pots should sit with the pots. The toothpaste tubes should rest with the toothpaste tubes. The present should remain in the present. The past should remain in the past. David should be David.
35. Pomm is not from Chiang Mai. When Elizabeth dies, Pomm negotiates two days off. She travels to the village where her three children live with their grandmother. Pomm asks her older daughter if she has blocked her number on her phone. Her daughter says that Pomm complains about her too much. Her younger daughter cries and clings to her mother. She cries and she cries. ‘If you’d like me to visit,’ Pomm says, in desperation, ‘then you need to stop crying. If you don’t stop crying your dad won’t let me see you anymore.’
36. The words of reassurance assume something like this: David remains David, whatever happens, as long as someone remembers who he was. But I kept asking myself: When was he who he really was? When exactly was that? And what’s to say that it is not right now?
37. I suspect that the year David spent in the care home was one of the happiest of his life. He had often been desperately lonely. I can’t know for certain, because pandemic restrictions meant I never went inside, but when I phoned he was often too busy to talk. He was singing in the garden. He was walking. He was with people who fed him and cut his hair and asked him how he was doing. He had escaped from his hoarded objects.
38. I lay out 41 paragraphs like objects. This is in 2025. There is one paragraph for each year of my life. I number them, as though they follow a linear order. This order is designed to hold everything together for long enough to consider the disarray. It is the disarray that is the real subject. It is reality that is wrong.
39. In the novel, objects become frightening. Thomas does not like the faces that look back at him from the walls, even though some of those faces are his own face. He wants to get away from the objects, and from the home where they live and where he lives, and perhaps this is what he needs. Perhaps this is what he has needed for a long time.
40. Or do the bars of soap just say: soap?
41. The care home is bright, quiet, calm. Each of the 14 Western residents has personal care. Maya lies down, in a red Christmas jumper, to sleep. ‘Every day when I see patients in this condition,’ Pomm says, ‘I think to myself: “How lucky they are.”’ Pomm wonders who will look after her when she cannot look after herself.
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Caleb Klaces’ most recent book is Mr Outside, a novel. He is also the author of Fatherhood and the poetry collections Bottled Air and Away From Me.
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