He lurched forward in the chair, nearly folding himself in half at the waist before throwing himself back again. His left leg kicked forward when his shoulders touched the chair. Though he turned his head up, the tears continued to trickle down his face.

“The reason they fired me is because they didn’t like me—I know this is true. There is no other way to explain it. They just don’t like me—I worked all of those years and this is how they thank me,” he said, his right hand tightly clutching several sheets of letterhead with “Microsoft” monogrammed across the top. Before I could read the lines of handwriting traveling across the page, his arm jerked away. The motion of his elbow tossed his wrist into the air like a slingshot launching a stone.

“Can I see the papers?” I asked, leaning against the frame of the door.

As he extended his right arm forward, his left arm shot out away from his body, as if he was flinging a gigantic cockroach from his hand.

He saw me flinch. The papers in his hand were trembling and the whispers of the rustling pages filled the room.

Before taking them, I gingerly asked him, “Are you getting angry?” I felt the muscles in my legs tighten to prepare for any sprints in my immediate future.

“NO!” he shouted, dropping his arm as his torso sharply twisted to the right. “I’m not getting angry! I just talk like this! Okay, yes, I am angry, but I’m not angry at you! I’m angry because this is happening to me and I was unfairly fired and my family is far away and—and—”

His sobs matched the uncoordinated jerking of his limbs; they were choking staccatos that sounded more mechanical than mournful.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, his arms still jerking at the shoulders and elbows. “I’m sorry.”

He again raised his arm—still trembling—and I took the papers from his hand. It was difficult to look at him and register his suffering; I was grateful that I could distract myself with another sight.

Scribbled across the pages were fragments of phrases, impassioned sentences, and rows of numbers, some interrupted with dashes:

4698 Harrison Drive 469 Harrison Drive 46 Harrison Drive Harrison Drive Harrison Drive Drive Drive
I speak only the truth. I tell no lies. They speak falsehoods.
425-425-425425 Microsoft Windows login pass login pass login pass login
The truth only. That is what matters. Only the truth. I know the truth. They know the lies. I know the truth. The truth. Truth. Truth. True.

“They told lies, that is why they fired me, they told lies,” he said, getting out of the chair. His body wobbled, as if his torso was not under his control. His left arm jerked out away from his body again as he reached for a sheet of paper in my hand.

I nodded, unsure of what to say. I knew he had recently learned of his diagnosis; saying “sorry” seemed empty and useless.

“Did they fire you before or after you learned you have Huntington’s Disease?” I asked.

“I was fired months and months ago, but my body was already starting to do all of this,” he answered, tossing himself back into the chair. His limbs did not rest when the rest of his body settled; they continued to move about as if controlled by a novice puppeteer. He sloppily wiped his eyes with the back of a hand before continuing, “No one in my family had this; I don’t understand why this is happening to me. No one—no one! I’ve never even heard of Huntington’s Disease! And now everyone is holding it against me—Microsoft, my family, my friends—but they all tell lies, they all tell lies. I speak only the truth. Only the truth.”

I breathed in sharply—I wanted to look away.

“I don’t understand what is happening to me,” he said, his voice becoming quiet. “I never wrote things like this before in the past—I was good at what I did. I’m changing. I never did this before—I worry that it will never go away.”

Oh God… he knows he’s losing his mind. He has insight.

“You have to help me,” he said, his right arm still twitching in his lap. My mind’s eye saw the strand of excess genetic material swirling off of his fourth chromosome, as if it was the animated tail of an exuberant kite. “I can’t go out there; people are going to think I’m a freak because I can’t stop moving; I’m going to get beat up and my stuff will get stolen and people will continue to lie about it all. I can’t do this anymore by myself.”

I tried to capture everything in that moment in my memory because I knew that, in a few months, his condition would likely be much worse. And I wanted at least one of us to remember him before he deteriorated further.