“I don’t want more,” I say, my eyes greedily chomping through the information on screen and deducing a thousand more unprinted facts by reading between the well-spaced lines.
After seeing Wilbur Braxen with Em, I’d picked up my original research and got stuck at the same point. Now my mother has used that as a starting point to bulldoze her way into a truckload of information she shouldn’t have access to.
Although I understand that the man I work for and the boys I hang around with think I’m some sort of computer genius, they don’t understand what the phrase really means. They can’t decipher the world of difference between my fledgling efforts and the way my mother can break down code.
Not that she solely uses heractualgenius level skills to break into websites and extract information that she definitely should not be able to access. When she was younger, she’d worked on projects that still curry favour in the right circles.
Government projects, ‘think big’ schemes. The code she’d written as a university student, while working towards a PhD on computer interfaces for disabled and diverse users, still ran behind the largest online work seeker website.
Apart from upgrading the look as aesthetics changed, very little has been altered. It hasn’t needed to be.
She should be famous. Even if only to those who directly interacted with her chosen field. Instead, she completed her degree, finished her government contracts, embarked on her first for-profit project, and immediately went insane.
Outside our tiny family unit, that’s not the polite word for it, but when it’s just me and Mum it fits, and ‘crazy’ is a lot easier to spell than schizophrenia. We’re not much into politeness in our household, anyway. A few bouts of psychosis wears through your manners pretty quick.
“You gonna tell me why you’re poking around where you shouldn’t be?”
“You’re the one who’s poking around,” I say idly, flipping back through the open tabs to discover a new wealth of information hidden inside each page. “I was just curious. I see him at work, sometimes.”
“Ah. Work.” She raises her eyebrows and I mug back at her, making her smile.
I don’t tell her about the things I do for Stefan, and in return, she doesn’t ask. It’s worked out well for both of us so far. Hopefully, it’ll continue that way.
While she turns back to the movie, I sit and copy some of the command lines into a folder to study later. When Mum’s brain chemistry aligns, something that becomes rarer with each passing year, she can effortlessly pull together sequences that would never occur to me. Her logic flourishes along completely different pathways, like she has an alternate to every proof known to man.
I’m too tired to break it down now but once I’ve copied the coding into safe places, I put the computer aside and settle deeper into the cushions next to her.
She jerks her head around as we continue watching telly. The way she cocks it to the side, I can tell she’s hearing someone speaking her name. Not ‘someone’ in the classic sense but the ‘someone’ who hangs out in her head, coming alive in fully immersive hallucinations.
I put my arm around her shoulder, and she refocuses easily. She was up to the third movie in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Easily, the best one of the lot. I wait until after Jennifer Caulfield is welcomed to prime time and make an excuse of fetching a soda to walk into the kitchen.
Mum’s medication is on the middle shelf of the pantry, right next to the breakfast spreads so she won’t forget to take it each morning. I lift the bottle and tip it back and forth to check the level of the pills inside. At just a week since the last refill, it seems about right.
I watched her take the pill yesterday morning. Like I always watch her take her pills; the habit ingrained since early childhood. She put it in her mouth, sculled the glass of orange juice, and there’d been nothing grainy in the bottom of the tumbler when I rinsed it before putting it in the dishwasher.
Her sleeves hadn’t been long enough to sneak a pill into, and she hadn’t palmed it. Her left hand—the smart one of the pair—held onto her fork while the right was wrapped around her glass.
I bring up the memory and run it through, rewind, run it through again. Checking every detail.
She hadn’t ditched it under any scraps of food on her plate. There’d been a corner of her crust left after everything else was eaten, the burnt edge too dark even for her hard-core palate. But I’d flipped it over and shaken it before tossing it on the lawn for the birds, just like always.
I open the child lock on the medication and tip a few pills onto my hand. Stamped with the right number and symbol, with a crease through the middle to make it easier to break in half.
She’s been taking them and they’re the right pills, which means it’s time to review her medication in its entirety. Once the aural hallucinations start, the plethora of other symptoms are never very far behind.
They always start by calling her name, a simple thing to spot. People’s faces change when they’re addressed that way; so different to eavesdropping on anything else.
Doctor Urdahl’s name is programmed into my phone, and I press the screen to dial while I back out of the pantry. No answer. He’s meant to be on-call—I took note of the planning calendar in his office the last time we visited for a repeat prescription—but I guess the vagaries of doctorhood might have changed it around in the past few months.
A pleasant robotic voice tells me another doctor I can phone if it’s an emergency, but I click the star seven and her patient code to make an appointment and ring off. Mum has enough problems dealing with her usual doctor; switching to another would only make the emergency—if this even counts as an emergency—far worse.
The onset of Mum’s disease happened when she was twenty-six. About the average for females. The average onset for males is younger.
Eighteen. Pretty close to the age I am now.
The odds of developing the disease when one parent has it, about six percent.
The odds of developing it when your luck is as shit as mine? Something I actively try not to think about.
