My Little Blue Dress by Bruno Maddox Page B

past eleven. Obviously it would be about a decade before I could show my face at the restaurant downstairs, but there was a new crepe place a few boulevards over that I’d had my eye on. I slung on my poncho, grabbed my keys, and started thundering down the stair. I made it as far as the final staircase.
    Somebody was on our doorstep, some sort of news urchin, waving a rolled-up newspaper at passersby and urging them to buy it.
    I felt sick again, and I remember thinking to myself, Oh dear. If he’s going to insist on standing there and shouting that . . . stuff, then I shall not be able to leave the building.
    And I went back upstairs.

    U PSTAIRS, USING THE ’phone at the end of the hall, I put a call through to the crepe place and ordered a delivery, then I hurried back to bed and pulled the covers over my face.
    My crepe arrived very quickly. I sprang up and ran to the door to receive it. My voice didn’t sound like my own when I said:
    â€œHail there. How much do I owe you?”
    â€œHello lady!” The delivery boy was of ethnic, possibly Algerian, origin with kinky hair and had a big toothy smile. “How you today!”
    â€œSorry, how much?”
    I could see my bag of food dangling right there at his side but the boy wasn’t even trying to give it to me. “Oh lady!” he exclaimed, eyebrows shooting skyward. “You hear about office workers in America?”
    I winced.
    â€œLook, can I . . . can I just have my food, please? I have the money right here.”
    â€œThey all suicide themself. Issin all da papers!”
    â€œLook . . .” I felt myself flushing red. “Look, you have to give me the food. I ordered it and it’s mine and . . .” Falling to my knees I scooped a dripping bouquet of notes and coins out of my handbag. It looked like a head of lettuce dipped in mercury. I thrust the money at the lad, grabbed for the bag, and slammed the door.
    Inside, on my bed, despite not knowing what was happening at all in my life anymore, I successfully unwrapped my spinach and crabmeat crepe and tipped it onto a plate. Hell, I even managed to hack off a little piece with my fork and get it in my mouth . . . but then the food sort of fell back on the plate again because I was crying and my mouth wouldn’t chew.
    Whatever it was hadn’t gone away.
    In fact it was getting worse.
    In the same way that some people’s digestive systems can’t process milk, I, for some appalling reason, had lost the ability to process information .

    I T WAS AN insane thing to have happened, an unbelievable thing.
    But happened it had.
    Nowadays in the twenty-first century, of course, we’re a lot more evolved in our understanding of the human mind than we were back then. These days we accept without question that not only can conditions like information-phobia suddenly cut people down in their prime, but that it happensall the time. In fact, let me quote to you briefly from The Caregiver’s Bible by Dr. Steven Hearne.
As weeks turn to months, increasingly the caregiver and care receiver find themselves inhabiting a sphere of lonely isolation. Curtains are drawn, newspaper subscriptions canceled or allowed to lapse, as the caregiver seeks to obliterate all evidence that an outside world even exists. At best the outside world is of no use to her, at worst it may even contribute to the chaos within the home against which she wages a daily battle.
    Obviously Dr. Hearne is talking specifically about information-phobia as it afflicts caregivers —a caregiver being a person who spends their days looking after another person who is terminally sick or elderly (hello!)—but I offer it here as evidence that from time to time people genuinely do find themselves in the same situation I was in on January 1, 1930. I have a caregiver myself, like most people over a hundred, and he has it himself. Although he doesn’t