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“I can’t be sure is all I’m saying.”

“But you think so.”

“Have you ever seen a female clown?”

“I’ve dated them, Samia. Did you talk to him?”

“No. I was only passing by.”

“Did he see you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“He kept juggling, though?”

“Yes. He kept juggling.”

“Did the children seem bothered by this?”

“They seemed happy. The little girl put her hands out in front of her and clapped them together and giggled.”

Mayo stared at the nurse without expression. Then he lowered his gaze to his desktop and nodded. “Yes,” he said, staring abstractedly. “I believe you. It’s all as you’ve said.”

Mayo glanced back up.

“You called Security, Samia?”

“No. I thought maybe it was authorized and I’d ask her first, ask Tzipi. When I got to her station, though, she wasn’t there. So I walked back to find out what was going on but when I looked into the ward again he was gone.”

“You mean the clown?”

“Yeah, the clown.”

“The two children. Still awake?”

“Just the boy.”

“Did he seem somehow different to you?”

“Different? Like what?”

“Well, like healthier, perhaps.”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t know.”

“More alert?”

“I wouldn’t know. Not my ward.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I was reading: there’s this drug now in Europe, a hypnotic,
men are slipping it to women and then raping them, Mayo.”

Mayo nodded. “Yes. Rohypnol.”

“Does it actually work?”

“Why, Samia? Want to slip it to yourself?”

The nurse emitted a chuckling snort and then stared at the neurologist fondly. “You’re so funny,” she said.

Mayo lowered his gaze.

“Yes, funny is forever,” he uttered distantly.

“You want to hear about Lakhme again?”

Mayo looked up with a frozen expression, then leaned forward, shuffling papers around on his desk.

“No, not now, Samia. Thanks. I’ve got a lecture to prepare.”

“Oh, well, I’ve got to get going myself.”

Samia stood up.

“Let me know if you’ve got some more questions.”

“I will.”

“Thank you, Moses.”

“For what?”

“Oh, you know.”

The nurse turned and walked out of the office, and even after she had vanished from his sight, Mayo’s gaze remained fixed on the empty hall until the squishing of her footsteps faded away. He remembered reading in a medical journal that in London there was once a Sleep Disorder Clinic located directly across the street from “Big Ben.” After that, Mayo thought, could there be any tale mad enough to doubt
?
An elevator door sighed open somewhere, waited, and then slowly and quietly closed.
Maurice making his getaway,
Mayo reflected,
before the
“Crazy God Police” come to pick him up
.
Can we ever have a rational, dependable universe with this kind of crazy hocus-pocus going on?

“Never mind,” he then murmured: “Just so long as the magic is white.”

A faraway melancholy painted Mayo’s eyes as for a moment he stared at the
Casablanca
photo, and from there he turned his gaze to the Europa cigarette butts bent and mounded in an ashtray on his desk, and from there to the blackness outside his window, wishing it were dawn when the U.N. Headquarters building could be seen high on a hilltop to the east in Ein Kerem where John the Baptist had been born, thus permitting the neurologist his customary smile upon reflecting that the rise on which the building now stood was the biblical Hill of Evil Counsel. Then he quietly lowered his head to his work, desultorily studying the paper on pain and scribbling notes on a blue-lined yellow pad. Twenty minutes later he tossed down his pen. Racing thoughts. The foreboding. The dream. Restless, he got up and left his office to wander, prowling the quiet pre-dawn halls with their regularly posted
SPEAK SOFTLY
signs.

In the Burn Ward he chatted with a sleepless young soldier who had carried his own severed arm from the battlefield of October’s Yom Kippur War in the hope that surgeons could reattach it:
“That’s what I remember, that I took my arm by the hand.”
Then Mayo drifted up to the fourth floor Neurology Ward where, on stepping out of the elevator, he saw Father Mooney approaching. Seeing Mayo, the fortyish and handsome Franciscan paused in his stride for a moment, looking hesitant and somehow blocked; and then, smiling broadly, he resumed his approach with his hand outstretched to shake Mayo’s. The neurologist inwardly grimaced: a relentlessly hearty raconteur, the Franciscan would batter any cornered listener with tiresome
and seemingly endless recitals meant to illustrate his daringly mad sense of humor, such as posing as a pregnant nun in a wheelchair when meeting a fellow priest at an airport and loudly and joyously exclaiming with his arms thrust out to the mortified arrival, “Oh, Jim! I’m so glad it was you!”

“Hey, Mayo! Good to see you!” Mooney exclaimed.

Mayo put an index finger to his lips.

“Oh, yes, sorry,” said Mooney in a lowered tone. “Forgot the time.” As the elevator door began to close, Mooney’s hand stabbed out to hold it back. “How’ve you been, Mayo?”

“Still on this side of the grass. Saw you passing by earlier.”

“Yes, I know. Couldn’t stop. I was taking communion to someone. Emergency. One of those things.” Mooney raised an arm for a glance at his watch. It was a chunky gold Rolex. “Oh, well, got to get back,” he sighed. “Lots of tourists due early at the chapel today.” The rounded walls of the priest’s little church were filled with mosaics of heralding angels chorusing “
Gloria in Excelsis Deo
,” and no matter the season, December or July, tourists gathered underneath its glass-domed nave to sing Christmas carols, often with an unexpected stirring in their hearts. As Mooney stepped into the elevator, Mayo glimpsed a scar at the base of his neck. The priest turned, pressed the ground floor button, and then lifted his hand in farewell so that Mayo saw the wide white Band-Aid that was wrapped around the top of a middle finger.

“Got some new stories for you, Mayo. Come and see us.”

“Yes, I will,” Mayo murmured absently.

“Oh, well, good! Make it soon, then! Okay? Make it soon!”

The elevator door whined shut.

Hands tucked into the pockets of his medical jacket, the neurologist lowered his head in thought, and as he listened to
the elevator’s lurch at the start of its descent, he tried to fathom why an icy tingling in his bloodstream was raising up hairs on the back of his neck.

A thump of the elevator stopping below.

Mayo looked up and stared abstractedly down a long hall and its rows of numbered patient rooms. What was wrong with him? he wondered. Which among the colorful and crowded palette of bizarre disorders of the mind had left the ghost of a brushstroke on his brain? A flash of white as a nurse appeared abruptly, emerging from an intersecting hall in the distance, and then an attendant, possibly Wilson, Mayo guessed. He waited until they had walked out of view, and then again began shuffling down the hall until he arrived at Room 406, where he stopped and stared sadly through the door’s observation port into darkness and a night light’s feeble glow. The room’s last occupant was a man named Ricardo Rey. He’d been Mayo’s patient. The one who had died. With a soul of patient kindness and the face of a white-haired elderly cherub, Rey was an official of the Spanish consulate who had come under Mayo’s care after suffering a devastating stroke. As the nurturing weeks of convalescence slipped by, Mayo’s outlook had grown cautiously optimistic, this in spite of a problem with the patient’s eyesight: he could not see anything beyond two feet. Then the matter turned somehow vaguely sinister, as Rey began reporting seeing people in his room who weren’t there. This included an incident in which the Spaniard, while sitting up in bed conversing with Mayo, interrupted himself in mid-sentence to turn and look up and a little to his left to inquire with aplomb and exquisite courtliness, even in the face of an apparition, “I’m so terribly sorry. Do I know you?” Mayo had at first not been overly concerned, attributing the visions to
probable damage to the ocular portions of Rey’s brain, but things changed when Mayo asked what the apparitions said to him.

“Nothing,” Rey had answered.

“Nothing? What about to each other? Do they talk to one another?”

“No, they don’t.”

“Well, then, what do they do?”

Here Rey had looked down in thought for some moments as he seemed to be weighing the question judiciously. He then looked up and answered simply, “They witness.” For some reason that he couldn’t precisely grasp, this response had caused Mayo to worry.

Five weeks later Rey was dead.

Mayo brushed at the bottom of his nose with a knuckle. Rey’s death. Was that the problem after all? he brooded. He recalled being haunted very early in his practice by the dying words of a motion picture star who was barely into his sixties, the plaintively whispered words, “I just got here.” But in time Mayo grew to be inured to such loss.
And besides
,
this isn’t grief,
he thought;
grief I would damn well know.
From afar, the muffled clatter of dishware and clinking glass. Mayo glanced at his watch. Almost four. Preparation of patient breakfasts had begun.
And soon the dawn will render visible the U.N. building,
Mayo thought with wan gratification
: Not every conceivable event is to be feared.

Mayo continued his amble down the hall, turning right at an intersecting corridor, and when he saw that light was spilling out of a window in the door to patient room 422, his spirits immediately began to pick up. The room’s patient was Eddie Shore, the legendary 1940’s “Big Band” leader who, at
the brassiest peak of his fame, had mysteriously decided to give up music and retire to a farm in northern Virginia to begin a career as a writer of novels. In Jerusalem to research a historical novel that was to be set in the time of Christ, he was here in Hadassah, not because of any neurologic disorder but rather with the symptoms of salmonella poisoning. He had been given a bed in the Neurology Ward because of its superior rooms. Mayo picked up his pace. In his youth an avid fan of Shore’s music, Mayo had boldly introduced himself and had already had long conversations with his idol in which he discovered him to be a completely unexpected human being: at once genial and warm and yet brusquely curmudgeonly; keenly insightful and brutally candid. Though at times there was an air of evasiveness about him, when he would seem to deflect or evade a question and sometimes pretending, Mayo thought, not to hear it, and it was on these occasions that a veil of mystery seemed to enshroud him.

Almost totally bald, yet with high jutting cheekbones and a riveting stare that made him strikingly handsome even now in his sixties, Shore had been briefly and serially married to a number of Hollywood’s most glamorous starlets, once explaining to Mayo, who had asked how he could possibly have cast them aside, “Are you kidding? It was
hard
! I mean, how do you turn to this naked goddess lying in bed with you that every other guy in the world wants to jump and just tell her straight out, ‘You bore me!’ You really think that was easy? For God’s sakes,
think,
Mayo, will you?
Think!
”

He had also confided what had caused him to abandon his career in music. “So one time I’d decided I’d do a very special tour,” he began to explain. “I mean, a tour with a really great band. The top musicians in the country. The
best
! And we were
going to do original, innovative stuff, not that tired dumb
drek
that we played at the Paramount on Times Square, right after ‘Don Dickhead at the Mighty Wurlitzer’ was done, and at college and high school proms. So I came up with some classy compositions, really wild, really wonderful stuff, and I put this terrific band together and we toured. And guess what? People hated it, Mayo! They booed! Yeah, every gig that we played they’d start booing and yelling we should play my big hits, all the popular faves, until finally I said, “Fuck it!” and I cut the tour short and went back to my penthouse apartment in Manhattan where I stewed and I grumped and I farted around. And then I got really pissed off, really ticked, and I went to my booker and I told him to round up some hands, I was doing another tour, but I didn’t want to pay any more than minimum, I told him. ‘Minimum?’ he yelps at me. Eddie, Are you crazy? You can’t get good musicians for that! You’ll get stiffs! You’ll get trumpet players with emphysema!’ But I said to him, ‘Stiffs are exactly what I want! I don’t care if they can barely read music! I mean it! Make it happen!’

“So he gets me these guys, these bums who think sheet music’s some kind of Rorschach test, and we go out on this tour and it’s sounding really putrid, just awful,—‘The Romantic Mantovani’s Greatest Stock Car Racing Hits’—but we’re playing all my biggies, my most popular numbers, all that Viennese pastry Mozart’s wife threw in his face, and all the troglodytes, they’re cheering and applauding and stamping their feet. I can’t believe it! I’m sick! I’m disgusted! So one night when we’re playing and I hold up my hand to show the boys with my fingers what stanza comes next—see, like this—I held my hand up
sideways
so they couldn’t really tell how many fingers were up, they had to guess, so they all wound
up playing different stanzas and it’s sounding like galaxies in collision. Just cacophony. Sawmill sounds. Total garbage. So what happens?
They give us a standing ovation!
” Here Shore had stared glumly into space. “That’s what did it,” he said. “That was it. I called off the rest of the tour that night, bought a farm, took up writing, and I’ve never looked back.”