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Eventually there's a box filled with notepads - some full, some almost empty, some just a cover and a backboard, covered in things he writes down but doesn't pull out into the map he pins across the wall. He writes in Russian because it's easier. Sometimes he hates that. Sometimes it doesn't matter. Looking at his handwriting in English words, Latin script - somehow it's wrong, somehow it's always wrong.
There's nothing surviving that could show him how he used to write, so he doesn't know if that's it. He could ask Steve but he . . . doesn't. He's crazy, not stupid. He can see when the things that change trip Steve up, make him stumble. It's not that much fun to watch. And it doesn't really matter: if he knew, what would he know? Something else got changed, something else got lost.
And if it didn't change, then it's just lost a different way, because the wrongness itches in his head and he doesn't want to see the shape of those letters anymore. So he stays in the language he hates sometimes and doesn't hate other times but doesn't really matter any time, not the way it could.
Some of the pads are filled with notes, from books, articles, shows, tapes. He doesn't really need to take them, there's no test, but if he makes himself write bits of what he reads or what he hears he doesn't . . . close out, lose track and get lost in his own head as much. Which is nice, since his own head isn't anywhere anyone would want to be, least of all him.
He could probably send some of them to some fucking neurobiologist somewhere to write a paper on - here, I remember the fucking collected works of Shakespeare but I don't remember reading or seeing a God-damn one of them, except that I think Macbeth pisses me off more than I can account for by its just being a fucking stupid play. He's thought about things like that more than once, and pretty much always decided to make sure he burns the whole box, douses it in fucking kerosine and watches till it's ashes, on that mythical future day when he doesn't need them anymore.
When he isn't afraid that if he doesn't have something to go back and check, it might not be there. And only some of the pads are filled with notes.
Some of them are memories, or could be memories, or maybe he just wants them to be memories, and some of them are both. And if he scratches them down here then he isn't saying they're real, he isn't deciding they're real yet but they can't get away.
It's too easy to be sure of something that isn't real - you get a flash and then you push at it, trying to decide what it is and it gets clearer and better but it's just because that's where you're looking. Like fairy-shit, like magic gold, and just as worthless. So he writes it down instead and doesn't push, waits until something else comes on its own because he'll remember that he wrote it down (maybe) and then he can check.
Maybe.
Mostly they just go in the box and he leaves them there, thrown in haphazard like spent casings and paid just about as much attention. They probably help about as much as prayer helps a firefight, but given the choice he'll take the fucking notebooks.
And some day he'll burn them, so no one else does.