Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease enters the story through Roy Freeman’s early-stage diagnosis, turning his investigation of Joseph Wieder’s murder into both an inquiry into the past and an effort to preserve his own grasp of it. His memory problems are still limited, but he understands that the disease is progressive and that the time available to finish the investigation may be short.

Diagnosis and Early Symptoms

About six months before telling Matt Dominis, Roy noticed that he was forgetting street names despite having long considered his memory good. He tried to exercise it by recalling which actors appeared in which films, who sang particular songs, and the scores of sporting events. Difficulties with names followed, prompting him to consult a doctor, undergo tests, and receive the diagnosis two weeks later.

Roy describes the disease as being in its early stages: he has not yet forgotten basic daily details such as what he ate the night before. His doctor advises him to keep his mind active and supplies a book and videos for exercises. Roy also takes prescribed pills and follows the doctor’s instructions, but he has read that Alzheimer’s disease has no cure and does not expect treatment to stop its progression.

The Investigation as a Way to Keep His Mind Active

The case gives Roy a demanding subject for the mental activity his doctor recommends. He had obtained archived papers about Wieder’s murder for a reporter, who sent him the findings; Roy then decided that investigating a case he considered important would engage him more than trying to remember old sporting results. He also recalls believing that he had failed the case because, at the time, he was a bad drunk. Returning to it therefore serves two purposes: keeping his mind occupied and examining what he sees as his own past failure.

Roy tells Matt that he wants to understand what happened and how he let the murderer escape. He fears that in a year or two—and, he says, no more than three—he may no longer remember who Wieder was or even that he used to be a police officer. If he eventually cannot care for himself, he expects to move into a nursing home. That anticipated loss gives the reopened investigation a deadline grounded not in a new clue but in Roy’s knowledge that his ability to remember may diminish.

Memory, Evidence, and Credibility

The diagnosis appears within a novel where recollection is repeatedly difficult to separate from suggestion, inference, and later retelling. Wieder explains that childhood fears can make hypnotically suggested events feel remembered: in his mall experiment, three-quarters of the students later described being lost as children, although none had initially recalled such an experience. He also argues that memory does not record events like a camera; it reshapes fragments into a story. These examples establish a wider uncertainty about memory, but they do not establish that Roy’s Alzheimer’s disease caused any particular error in his investigation.

The case also exposes the different reasons witnesses’ accounts may be doubted. Derek Simmons says that police dismissed his statement because he had previously been accused of murder, had been institutionalized, and was taking medication; a former investigator later recalls Simmons’s illness and amnesia as reasons his testimony could not be used effectively. Roy’s own conversations with Simmons reveal incompatible accounts of who was present at Wieder’s house and what happened there. The narrative places these credibility problems beside Roy’s diagnosis without treating Alzheimer’s disease, Simmons’s amnesia, and the unreliability of eyewitness memory as interchangeable conditions.

Narrative Significance

Roy’s diagnosis changes the meaning of his return to the case: investigation becomes a race against the possible erosion of the investigator’s own memories and identity. The prospect that he may forget Wieder and his former profession sharpens the contrast between recovering a disputed past and retaining the self who is trying to recover it. His medication and mental exercises offer practical responses, but the stated absence of a cure leaves the outcome uncertain; the account presents his commitment to the case as purposeful action under that uncertainty, not as evidence that it can halt the disease.