4:17pm, Sunday April 18th, 2019
It started with his necktie. More specifically, it started with Vanya asking him why he wasn't wearing it.
He'd brushed the question aside as irrelevant, though with more benevolence than if anyone else had been asking. The answer was simple of course; he'd forgotten to put it on. But mundane as the answer might be the question shook him badly, because until that moment he would have sworn he'd been wearing one.
He'd forgotten to put it on.
He smiled at her with polite forbearance and shooed her away, jumped to his room and locked the door. He spent the rest of the afternoon cataloging his memory and found it imperfect. He was forgetting things. Little things, true, but he was forgetting. The truly chilling part was that he hadn't even noticed.
Five had an eidetic memory. Five never 'forgot' anything. (His life being what it was, he had long since accepted this as more curse than blessing.)
He'd spent 23.5 million minutes with Dolores before returning her to Gimbel's. Wrote out 2.4 million variations of the same Eisenstein equations. He remembered the title of every book he's ever read, the name of every person he'd ever killed (even if he pretended not to). He could calculate with absolute certainty how many days he'd spent in the apocalypse, if he cared to think about it (he didn't). In his head was a timeline that never existed (a lifetime that never existed) and today he'd forgotten to put on his tie.
If there was a constant in Five's world, it was his mind; the only thing he had ever been able to rely upon completely. The only thing that had never failed him in some capacity. True, he was trapped for forty years or so in a post-apocalyptic wasteland but it was his rashness that had taken him there, not his mind. (If he'd been using his brain at all that morning he never would have attempted it.)
It was that eidetic memory filled with years of mathematical equations and quantum physics which he could recall with perfect clarity that finally led him home; the Commission hadn't had anything to do with that. (He'd known the calculations were off, Dolores had told him as much).
The calculations were off and he'd forgotten his tie.
He had suspicions, of course. He suspected he knew what was happening to him. He suspected it would get much worse. He suspected there was no cure beyond the finality of a bullet to the head.
Five was a pragmatic man who'd dealt in harsh realities his entire life. He had no illusions about what would happen should his mind start to fail him completely. Were that time to come, he would finish it himself. After sixty years of hard choices, of surviving rather than living, of training himself not to think about the things he's done because it was the closest he could get to truly forgetting, he was not afraid to die. He didn't want to die, but he wasn't afraid (it was a waste of energy to fear something so inevitable). But the slow unwinding of his mind...that terrified him. Thus should it come to pass he was determined to go on his own terms, with full knowledge of the choices he made and at least some few shreds of dignity intact.
But although a gun in his mouth would put a quick and painless end to the problem it was a premature solution so he did not contemplate it too deeply. There was no way of knowing how far or fast his condition might deteriorate without further observation, thus he didn't yet have enough data to act in his own best interest. He must carefully monitor himself for signs of further regression, and act accordingly.
He began keeping notes.
His siblings were used to his constant scribbling and thus largely ignored him. It helped immensely that he had long ago created a code that substituted letters, words and common phrases for numbers and equations. To everyone else it looked like nothing more than a series of complex mathematical formula, and in a way it was. The difference being that once solved the equation revealed words instead of numbers. He'd developed it as a child as a way to keep everyone out of his business, refined it in the apocalypse as a way to stave off madness and finally perfected it during his time at the Commission to avoid the prying eyes of his superiors as he quietly planned mutiny. He could now write in code nearly twice as fast as normal handwriting. It was an elegant way to assure privacy, if he did say so himself.
He began carrying a notebook everywhere, integers and symbols filling the pages and scribbled up into the margins. What he had for breakfast, where he went, who he talked to and what they were wearing; an entire blueprint of his days transposed into mathematical formula. He didn't fear anyone deciphering it and thus wrote openly, keeping a running catalog of his actions.
At night he practiced eidetic recall and compared it to the notes he'd made throughout the day. It was disheartening to discover how many of the details had begun to escape him.