Five Days by Douglas Kennedy Read Free Book Online

Dan told me that we’d always go back to Quebec City. Just as we’d also visit Paris and London and Rio and . . .
    One of the many naive pleasures of being young is telling yourself that life is an open construct; that your possibilities are limitless. Until you conspire to limit them.
    I have rooted myself to one spot.
This thought has been on my mind considerably. But, honestly, there is no anger towards Dan underlying this realization. Whatever about the other problems in our marriage, I don’t blame him for the way my life has panned out. After all I was the co-conspirator in all this. It was my choice to marry him. I now see that I made certain huge decisions at a moment when my judgment was, at best, clouded. Is that how life so often works? Can your entire trajectory shift thanks to one hastily made resolution?
    I hear these sorts of ruminative regrets frequently from patients. The smokers who are now ruing the day they took their first puff. The morbidly obese who wonder out loud why they have always needed to compulsively eat. Then there are the truly sad souls who are wondering if some chance tumor – with no direct link to what doctors like to refer as ‘lifestyle’ – is some sort of retribution (divine or otherwise) for bad behavior, accumulated sins, or an inability to find simple happiness in this one and only life that has been granted to them.
    There was a time when these scan-room confessions – usually blurted out in moments of mortal terror, shadowed by the great fear of the unknown – were all in a day’s work for me. Are they beginning to unnerve me because, in their own direct way, they are now forcing me to reflect on the ever-accelerating passage of time? For here we are again in October. And I am now in my forty-third year and still can’t totally figure out how a year has simply vanished. My dad – who taught calculus at a high school in Waterville – once explained this to me with elegant simplicity a few years back, when I mentioned how one of the stranger aspects of impending middle age was the way a year was over in three blinks.
    â€˜And when you get to my age . . .’ he said.
    â€˜
If
I get to your age.’ (He was seventy-two back then.)
    â€˜Always the pessimist. But I guess it comes with your professional territory. OK, I will rephrase.
If
you get to my age . . . you will discover that a year passes in two blinks. And if I make it to, say, eighty-five, it will be, at best, a blink. And the reason is a simple mathematical formula – which has nothing to do with Euclidian precepts, and more with the law of diminishing returns. Remember when you were four years old and a year appeared huge and so slow . . .’
    â€˜Sure. I also remember thinking how, every time Christmas had come and gone, the wait until next year would be endless.’
    â€˜Exactly. But the thing was – a year back then was just one quarter of your life. Whereas now . . .’
    â€˜One thirty-ninth.’
    â€˜Or, in my case, one seventy-second. This means that time shrinks with the accumulation of years. Or, at least, that’s the perception. And all perception is, by its own nature, open to individual interpretation. The empirical fact is that time doesn’t elongate or shrink. A day will always have twenty-four hours, a week seven days, a year three-hundred and sixty-five days. What does change is our awareness of its speed – and its increasing preciousness as a commodity.’
    Dad. He died last year after a slow, cruel descent into the fog that is Alzheimer’s. Twelve months earlier he had still been so mentally sharp. As sharp as my mother before the pancreatic cancer that came out of nowhere and killed her just four summers ago. Was it the love story of the past and present century? I can certainly remember moments when I was younger – especially during my adolescence – when there