First Person Peculiar by Mike Resnick Page A

seeds out for the birds and watching them come by to feed—but she could no longer hum along with the melodies or identify the birds.
    She had never allowed me to keep a gun in the house. It was better, she said, to let thieves steal everything then to get killed in a shootout—they were just possessions; we were all that counted—and I honored her wishes for 60 years. But now I went out and bought a small handgun and a box of bullets, and kept them locked in my desk against the day that she was so far gone she no longer knew who I was. I told myself that when that day occurred, I would put a bullet into her head and another into my own … but I knew that I couldn’t. Myself, yes; the woman who’d been my life, never.
    * * *
    I met her in college. She was an honor student. I was a not-very-successful jock—3rd-string defensive end in football, back-up power forward in basketball, big, strong, and dumb—but she saw something in me. I’d noticed her around the campus—she was too good-looking not to notice—but she hung out with the brains, and our paths almost never crossed. The only reason I asked her out the first time was because one of my frat brothers bet me ten dollars she wouldn’t give me the time of day. But for some reason I’ll never know she said yes, and for the next 60 years I was never willingly out of her presence. When we had money we spent it, and when we didn’t have money we were every bit as happy; we just didn’t live as well or travel as much. We raised our kids, sent them out into the world, watched one die and two move away to begin their own lives, and wound up the way we’d started—just the two of us.
    And now one of us was vanishing, day by day, minute by minute.
    * * *
    One morning she locked the bathroom door and couldn’t remember how to unlock it. She was so panicky that she couldn’t hear me giving her instructions from the other side. I was on the phone, calling the fire department, when she appeared at my side to ask why I was talking to them and what was burning.
    “She had no memory of locking herself in,” I explained to Dr. Castleman the next day. “One moment she couldn’t cope with a lock any three-year-old could manipulate, and the next moment she opened the door and didn’t remember having any problem with it.”
    “That’s the way these things progress,” he said.
    “How long before she doesn’t know me any more?”
    Castleman sighed. “I really don’t know, Paul. You’ve been the most important thing in her life, the most constant thing, so it stands to reason that you’ll be the last thing she forgets.” He sighed again. “It could be a few months, or a few years—or it could be tomorrow.”
    “It’s not fair,” I muttered.
    “Nobody ever said it was,” he replied. “I had her checked over while she was here, and for what it’s worth she’s in excellent physical health for a woman of her age. Heart and lungs are fine, blood pressure’s normal.”
    Of course her blood pressure was normal, I thought bitterly. She didn’t spend most of her waking hours wondering what it would be like when the person she had spent her life with no longer recognized her.
    Then I realized that she didn’t spend most of her waking hours thinking of anything , and I felt guilty for pitying myself when she was the one whose mind and memories were racing away at an ever-faster rate.
    * * *
    Two weeks later we went shopping for groceries. She wandered off to get something—ice cream, I think—and when I’d picked up what I needed and went over to the frozen food section she wasn’t there. I looked around, checked out the next few aisles. No luck.
    I asked one of the stock girls to check the women’s rest room. It was empty.
    I started getting a panicky feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was just about to go out into the parking lot to look for her when a cop brought her into the store, leading her very gently by the arm.
    “She was wandering around