What Time Is It?
Draw a circle on the blank page. Put the numbers in first: start with the 12, swing down to the 3, then over to the 6, and finally up to the 9. Draw the other numbers if you want, but they aren’t required.
The arrows are next. A long one and a short one. They should radiate from the center of the circle. The arrows may point to any numbers you like.
That’s it. That’s all there is. When you are done drawing, the doctor will ask, “What time is it?”
You’ll tell them.
* * *
I rehearse how to draw a clock face in my head at least once a week. There have been times in my life when I did it several times a day.
Neurologists use the clock face test as a screening for early onset dementia, as well as other disorders. It’s about 85% reliable, according to the internet. The internet also tells me why the clock face test works so well. It measures episodic memory, language fluency, time orientation, visuospatial function, and executive function. I didn’t know what all those terms meant when I first heard them, but now I know them well.
I’m very good at passing the clock face test. Ever since I watched my wife attempt to take it, I’ve been practicing.
* * *
Pewter gray stratus clouds blanketed the sky. It was winter, though no snow fell. Our kids were in school. Christmas was right around the corner. I drove.
My wife and I had had some sort of fight, I think, though I don’t remember what about, so it’s possible we were just nervous about the appointment. I only remember the drive over and the walk from the car, as being tense. We didn’t fight often, so the feeling is noteworthy.
The neurologist’s office was a comfy and homey 1940s house with a huge porch, a former home to an actual family. The waiting area was the living room and the doctor’s office was right up the stairs. I remember my wife’s and the doctor’s footsteps tramping up the ornate wooden stairway. I waited in the living room alone.
I don’t remember much about my hour in the waiting room. I tried to read. I remember feeling guilt over whatever it was that made my wife and me feel tense. I remember a feeling of unfocused dread.
Their footsteps clomped back down the wooden stairs, two sets of feet, distinctly. The neurologist asked us both to sit down. I remember him as a kind, quiet man. He had sad eyes.
* * *
My wife had long brown hair and eyes as blue as a mountain lake. In my favorite picture of her, she is in a forest, sitting on a stone, her hair slightly windblown, a range of mountains behind her. When I told her early on it was my favorite picture of her, she said it was because she was surrounded by nature, and so it was a picture of her at her most relaxed and natural.
We got married in nature. We walked far out into the dunes at Great Sand Dunes National Park and said our vows, four good friends in attendance. We honeymooned by backpacking into the wilds of the Utah Canyonlands.
We were nine years into our marriage, we had two kids, both in grade school, and we lived in a Victorian house.
Momentous shifts in life can begin in the quietest of ways. I walked down the back stairs into the kitchen that morning. Diana was already making herself a cup of tea. She gestured to the digital clock at the center of the counter. She laughed.
“They’re doing it again.”
“Who’s doing what again?” I asked, still half-awake.
“Can’t you tell?”
I shook my head.
“Look.” She walked over to the little digital clock and pointed at the display. “They have things. They’re doing them.”
“Who?”
“The numbers.”
My breath caught, sensing something wasn’t right.
She laughed again. “They don’t care. They’re not staying.” She seemed surprised I didn’t see what she was seeing.
“I don’t understand, honey.”
She walked away from the clock, shaking her head, still amused. “I’m thinking about putting them on top of the one in the bedroom.”
“The clock?”
“The numbers. Yeah. Maybe they can learn from the other things.”
She finished her tea and walked into the living room. I stood in the kitchen wondering what the conversation was about and what it portended. It felt like I was looking at the tip of a particularly large iceberg.
* * *
At that point, she still read books and understood them, still took part in conversations about politics and art, still helped with the unending work of raising a family. Most of the time it was difficult to notice anything was even amiss, but hints something was wrong had already been gathering.
Normally a tidy and organized person, my wife began to leave her purse and possessions spread across the kitchen counters when she came home. She watched more TV. She took more naps. Her job required her to travel; she started getting lost. She asked me to proofread a document for her at work, and I found multiple repeated paragraphs, something she’d never do.
She got let go by her job at the university. Budget cuts were the given reason, but the timing was suspicious. Her performance review had gone poorly.
We visited more doctors. They insisted there was no reason to panic. We made an appointment with a renowned cognitive therapist, but he was in great demand, so our appointment was not until March. While we waited, Diana took a test measuring her cognition, and we returned to the kind neurologist with the sad eyes.
* * *
“I can’t tell you much,” the neurologist explained. “I just administer the test.”
He showed us a piece of paper on which he had asked Diana to draw the face of a clock.
The circle of the clock face was clearly drawn. The twelve was centered at the top and the first few numbers curved down the right side of the clock. But after the six at the bottom, the numbers wandered off path, taking a trail of their own off the confines of the clock face, wandering onto the stark white of the blank sheet.
“The important thing is that you have each other,” the doctor said. “You seem to have a strong, loving marriage and a happy family. Depend on each other.”
“What do we do now?” Diana asked.
“See the next doctor. Continue to pursue a diagnosis,” he continued. “There are several benign possibilities that you can still explore. Nothing is written in stone.”
He pointedly avoided the word dementia.
He couldn’t tell us anything, but he knew.
He reiterated that the cognitive specialist would give us a more specific diagnosis in March, the following year. But his demeanor said it all.
He knew. And thus, we knew.
* * *
The walk back to the car under gray skies was mostly silent. The drive back was as well. This memory is fifteen years old, but I’m trying to get the details right. I drove. We held hands. Mostly we were trying to get our heads around what had just happened. The air was cold and still. Sounds carried far.
We parked in front of the house. Our kids were at school. Neither of us made a move to leave the car. We talked then, haltingly, unsure of our thoughts, unsure of how to put them in words. Is there a chance everything will be fine? Of course. Should we tell the kids? Let’s wait for the official prognosis in March. What will we do until then? We’ll wait.
Do you still love me?
I still love you. Do you still love me?
Of course. More than ever.
We cried for a while, together, there in the car.
We hugged awkwardly, still bound by our seatbelts.
Eventually we got out of the car, our doors slamming shut with two dull clunks that echoed down the street. We walked inside our home and faced the remainder of the day.
* * *
We drove to Denver to speak to the cognitive specialist, the third doctor in a rapidly growing line of experts assembled to help guide us: neurologists, therapists, driving evaluators, lawyers, psychiatrists. My wife was in tests nearly all day while I read and surveyed the stoic faces of the others in the waiting room.
The specialist confirmed our fears. Early onset dementia.
“There’s a vanishingly small chance it’s Alzheimer’s. For now, we’re calling it atypical dementia.” He ran a finger along the top of his head, perhaps an inch to the right of center, as if he were carving a furrow into the clay of my wife’s mind. “There’s damage to the temporal lobe, right here.” He gestured to the furrow. “We saw no activity in the cells along that small strip of brain cells.”
“Are the cells dead?” I asked.
“No. They aren't working. They will die, eventually.”
He recommended and wrote referrals for physical therapy and occupational therapy, both with the hopes they would retrain her mind, help her find new strategies to deal with complex tasks, and perhaps help forge some new neural pathways to compensate for the damaged portion. He suggested she take a driving test to determine if it was still safe for her to drive.
We drove home, sat the kids down at the kitchen table, and told them. They reacted in much the same way we reacted as we drove home from the neurologist months before. They didn’t have many questions for us at first. Their true questions, like mine, were too enormous to put into words. It was all too big to understand.
About six months later my wife handed me her car keys and told me she didn’t think she should drive anymore.
* * *
Draw the circle on the blank page. Add the 12, the 3, the 6, the 9. The long arrow and the short arrow radiate from the center. They may point to any number I like.
“You’re done!” the doctor will say. “What time is it?”
I’ll tell them.
* * *
My wife died about ten years ago. I have remarried, happily, and retired. My kids are out of the house and living their own lives.
I miss Diana.
I’m sixty-five now. Some days it seems like my own memory is going rapidly, like when I can’t remember the details of a movie I’ve recently watched or where I left my glasses. But I have no other symptoms. No cognitive problems. No behavioral changes. Still, I worry.
So, I give myself the clock face test. It’s a trick that allows me to combat insomnia and burn off a little excess anxiety. Most importantly, I always pass the test. Diana did not. In the intervening years I’ve realized my anxieties do not cling to failing the test, or even to being diagnosed with the horrors of dementia. It’s more a fear of time, of the power of those minute and hour hands as they sweep around a closed circle. The fear stems from my inability to stop, or slow, those hands.
I find comfort, then, in the blank spaces between the numbers. Inside those spaces, I imagine I can momentarily hide from the passage of time. The hands of the clock pass over me. My only obligation is to myself and my memories, and if those memories fade, the emptiness itself lends me comfort. Somewhere within that unnumbered emptiness, I return to Diana.
Jeff Wood (@clowncarne1) lives in Colorado with his second wife and several cats, where he spends a little too much time watching baseball and way too much time watching the night sky. He’s had over thirty stories published across multiple genres in magazines, websites, and anthologies. Representative publications include The Boston Phoenix, The New York Press, NoSleep Podcast, Dark Moon Digest, and Bright Desire. This story is from his forthcoming memoir, Christmas in Bedlam. His author website is at jeffmwood.com, and his newsletter, The Oort Cloud, is at jeffwood.substack.com.