The Wall by Jeff Long

knew.”
    “The Annie you knew was only the Annie she let you know,” Hugh said.
    “We had no secrets.”
    “Everyone has secrets, Rachel.”
    “Not us.”
    Hugh could have let it die there. But he was tired of hiding the truth. He was tired of the pity and the whispers. “Did she ever say anything to you about her Swiss cheese?”
    “ ‘Swiss cheese’?”
    “I didn’t think so,” he said. “It was our little code for the holes in her memory. The little lapses that started turning into big ones. Her spells.”
    The slightest storm appeared on Rachel’s taut forehead.
    “She did her best to hide it,” Hugh continued. “For a while we thought it was just the summer heat or maybe a bacteria in the air-conditioning. Or menopause. That was the great hope, that it would get better. She quit drinking alcohol, then coffee and her Diet Cokes, thinking, you know, it might be the artificial sweeteners or the caffeine.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I came home one day and she was sitting in front of the TV. But it was off. I touched the set and it wasn’t even warm. She’d been there all day. Watching nothing.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “I didn’t either, not for the longest time. She was too young. It crept up on both of us, and then it was too late.”
    “What, Hugh?”
    “Alzheimer’s.”
    “Annie?” said Rachel.
    “We stopped going to parties because there would be these lapses. She would fumble little shared moments, or get a friend’s name wrong. It got worse. She did everything to keep up appearances, even in front of me, but we both saw what was happening. The pounds just fell off of her. She’d forget to eat during the day. The expat wives all wore gold bangles from the medina, just like the Arab women. But Annie’s wrists got so thin the bangles dropped like rain. I’d find them on the floor. One day I stepped on her wedding ring, by the front door.”
    “I had no idea.” Rachel was in shock.
    “While it still mattered to her, she didn’t want anyone to know. By the last year, she didn’t know herself.”
    “This is so…I thought she shared everything with me.”
    “She felt like a leper. She dropped from sight.”
    “How long did this go on?”
    “In retrospect, years. Like I said, at first it seemed just a lapse here and there.”
    “How did you manage?”
    “You mean the doctors? We tried them all. I took her to Switzerland. They all said the same thing. A losing battle. They didn’t use those words, but that’s what they meant. It was just a matter of waiting for the end.”
    She squeezed his hand. “I’m talking about you. How did you manage?”
    “I didn’t want it to be true either. I was in denial just as much as she was. But then one afternoon, there was a knock on my door. It was the mutawaeen, the religious police. Holier than holy. They roam the streets with camel switches, looking for vice, stuff like a woman’s hair poking from her head scarf, or nail polish on their toes.”
    “She wrote about them. Vicious fanatics.”
    “Some are good men, some are very bad,” Hugh said. “But Annie was right. She was a bird in a cage. There are so many rules to follow over there, especially for the women. There’s the dress code and the head scarf. And every guest worker has to carry an ID card. Married women have to carry a copy of their husband’s identification or they’ll arrest you. This can get very serious. The mutawaeen take Sudanese or Ethiopian women, black women, into the desert and rape them, and leave them to die.”
    Rachel looked stunned. “And they came to your house?”
    “That day I answered the door, and there were two mutawaeen. They had Annie with them. That was bad enough. She had wandered out of the compound in shorts, and with no head scarf, and no I.D. She didn’t know her own name. They could have disappeared her. Instead they made inquiries and were returning her to me. It was the most terrifying moment in my