The main problem is in his own mind, which seems weak and spongy. He has always prided himself on his grasp of facts, but now he cannot hold anything in his head for long. More than once he has had to ask a nurse to buy him a newspaper on her lunch break as a favour, because he was too embarrassed to ask the date. It hardly matters, he has no appointments for the foreseeable future, but it feels necessary to hold on to his sense of who he is. He will not become a person so irrelevant to the world he does not know which month it is.

When desperate to make conversation with Janet, he sometimes accidentally asks her about people who are gone. How is your mother, he says. How is Auntie Mollie? The first time it happened, she glared at him as if he were a troublesome student, as if he might have been joking. Now, she simply murmurs, “Dead, Pa,” then adroitly changes the subject as if to save them both from embarrassment.

He doesn’t know how to explain to her that he knows they are dead. Truly, he is aware of how much he has lost. And yet, they are inside him. He cannot tell her about the long conversations he has with the departed, whiling away long afternoons, as he tries over and over to understand where they went. He cannot tell her that sometimes his sister, and sometimes his wife, come to visit him in the small hours of the morning.

“Lost in his own past,” he heard her whisper once on the phone. People are becoming less cautious around him. Perhaps they think his hearing is going, since everything else is. Unlike her brother, Janet has never had time for bygones, preferring instead to focus on what she calls her goals. “You need to know where you’re headed,” she is fond of saying. “Otherwise how will you ever get there?”

Sometimes he thinks this is supposed to happen, his life flashing before his eyes at the end, the final moments expanding to fit everything that’s gone before. But the events are not unfolding in an orderly way, which would at least make them easy to follow. He finds his attention constantly wandering, sinking into the fog of memory, meeting old enemies, replaying arguments he should have won. Afterwards, he is angry for some time without being able to remember why.

Jason has lost a great deal—more, he considers, than the usual attrition of a long life. He spends the hot sleepless nights making lists. His parents, of course, long ago. His sister and his wife, taken from him in different ways. His son in London, a city on the other side of the world. Janet, who belongs to no one but herself. And Barnaby, his brother-in-law—he decides to add Barnaby to the list of the missing, even though they were never particularly close. Gone is gone.