The Man Who Walked Away A Novel (10 page)

“Lacrimal, lacrimal, lacrimal.”

Click-clickety-click. The pleasure is the system; the system is the pleasure. If only he had invented the bicycle. Even to have invented the clever pedal! One day, some rich man had brought his
draisienne
, a mere toy, an oddity hobbyhorse made of wood, to the blacksmith for repair. How had Michaux known to use cranks to connect pedals to the front wheels? The sharp beauty of that idea must have sliced so cleanly through his mind. Pedals led to the use of ball bearings to make a free wheel, and then to the invention of individual spokes to link the hub to the rim. Soon after, wooden frames and then solid rubber tires replaced the wooden ones for better shock absorption, and then gears. The creation of the metal machine the Doctor rode now was a series of perfect discoveries. And now here he is, balancing miraculously on two wheels, an elegant example of the beauty of progress.

He rides out of the garden, past the flickering gas lamps soon to be snuffed out by the lamplighter (it is that early still). He imagines they are doing their flickering dance just for him.
Bravo,
Doctor
.
Bravo
, they flicker.
Thank you
, the Doctor whispers back.
Thank you. It was nothing, really.

Then past the stern stone justices on the top of the Palace of Justice:
And? So?
Past the witchy-looking woman outside the small stone church of St. Eulalie, who is in a particular twist this morning. “Unspeakable, the things that man has done!” she is saying, but when she sees him she says sweetly, “Good morning, Doctor.” He has always appreciated that she interrupts her harangues to greet him politely.

“Good morning,” he says, and as he slips off his bicycle and rolls it through the iron gates into the still air of the asylum courtyard, he feels once again the buoying optimism of the wind. His work doesn’t require of him that he make a perfect discovery like Michaux’s. He doesn’t need to invent the clever pedal. He doesn’t need to resurrect an ancient word and refashion it for the ages. What is required of him here is subtler than that.
Mother, I am frightened.
He needs to listen to the words. He needs to listen past the words.

“Stop that,” says a familiar voice.

“But I haven’t even begun,” says the Doctor.

Marian sits on one of the wooden benches along the path lined with silver birch trees, as she likes to do on the mornings she is feeling bold. She sits with Claude, underneath one of the stained-glass windows left over from the asylum’s days as a church, the Redemption window depicting the Ascension and Jesus on the road sparkling red, yellow, and blue to Cavalry.

“Why did you do that for no reason?” she asks. Last night the sun stole her other kidney.

Behind her words, for example, the Doctor knows, is a father, a wine merchant, who rejoiced when she agreed to marry a rival’s son for the sake of good business, but when her new husband, anxious to begin a family, asked her why she was always too tired to make love, Marian confided her suspicion. When she slept, the sun, who had everyone duped into believing it had set, had been replacing her heart with a substitute heart. Behind her words is Marian explaining to her husband she had tried to stay awake all night in order to prevent the theft but she failed; behind her words are other words, “I am so tired,” she said to her husband, and then her face, her arms, her legs, the entire left side of her body went stiff with paralysis. But her husband wasn’t listening; he was busy packing her bag.

“How are you this morning?” the Doctor asks.

She gives the Doctor the withering look to which he has grown accustomed, a look that says she can’t be bothered to explain something so complex to such a simple man. Claude nods to the Doctor. Claude’s face is pouched; his red-rimmed eyes red-rimmed since the day he began the job. He unpins Marian’s thick hair and tugs a fine-toothed comb through it until she closes her eyes, tilts her head back. He smiles at the Doctor, who, watching the miracle of Claude’s posture—an enormous round man, he has elegant posture—is grateful that he is helping. He seems to be finding comfort even as he is giving it. The Doctor knows a conversation with Marian can feel like a loose sock slipping down his leg after he has just finished pulling it back up. But this analogy is not even his own but something Elizabeth shouts when she cannot finish whatever puzzle she is currently working on: My stockings are falling down again!

“There’s someone new,” Claude says. “It’s upset the balance.”

“I’ll be back,” the Doctor says to Marian, nodding to Claude.

“Always vigilant,” she says, eyes still closed.

“You’re back,” says the Director when the Doctor walks into the common room. The Director wields a rake as though it were a rifle, gathering everyone for a walk. “Come, everyone, up, up. Time to take some air.”

The usual crowd is assembled. Walter plays chess with himself, sharing the table with Elizabeth and the half-finished jigsaw puzzle of the funicular railroad in Lyon that has been distracting her from the divine miracle of the scratch on her cheek long enough that Claude’s son Henri was able to trim her fingernails this morning. At the piano, Rachel plays the last movement of Schumann’s Kresleriana; her frog is in a playful, menacing mood.

Gliding down the long hall that runs along the living room and the men’s bedrooms to the billiard room is Nurse Anne. The Doctor has never seen her standing still. Her walk is so swift and efficient that Claude and Henri have started a rumor among the other attendants that her feet don’t actually touch the ground. As she floats in his direction, the Doctor thinks, as he often does,
She could be my sister.
Her features, like the Doctor’s, are crowded on her small face; her brown-flecked green eyes a little close together as though she is always in the midst of solving a problem elsewhere even as she is in the midst of the one in front of her, which is usually true. When he first met her, he thought,
She could be my sister
,
and then,
She would have been my unfortunate sister
. But the truth was she never would have been his sister, unfortunate or not. She arrived here from an entirely different world—educated at home in London by an eccentric wealthy father. (Had she said something once about a pet owl, or was the Doctor confusing her with a character in a novel he read recently?) Her father hadn’t believed governesses were up to the task, so he took her around the world in order to cultivate her natural intelligence, but when she said she wanted to become a nurse and wear plain woolen dresses instead of marrying the flatulent cousin her father had chosen for her, he exploded. “There will be no slumming it in almshouses and penitentiaries. No cholera graveyard for you!” So she married the flatulent cousin until, as she explained to the Doctor, “I was up to my chin in linen and glass,” and she left. In this, she and the Doctor
were
related; she, too, had walked out of a life. She also lives with regret. The Doctor has seen the bracelet she wears underneath her sleeve, woven from the hair of her father, her mother, and her two younger sisters, who disowned her when she became the lady superintendent at the Institute for Sick Gentlemen. After that she went to the front as a nurse and met a man near death who, instead of dying, lived on to father three children with her, so grateful she’d saved his life he didn’t care that she hadn’t received a proper divorce from the flatulent cousin.

“Someone new?” the Doctor asks.

“Yes,” the Director says. “In the billiard room. Nurse Anne will introduce you,” and he gestures to her with the rake he is carrying. He claps his hands and Walter and Elizabeth and Rachel reluctantly stand. “Who are we missing?” he asks. “Marian! We are going to work in the garden. If it weren’t for the treacherous sunshine, there would be no garden at all.”

“The carrots are a divine miracle,” Elizabeth notes gravely.

“But who’s to say they are real?” asks Walter.

“Walter,” Nurse Anne says. “Must you?”

“Are you saying they
are
real?”

“Everyone, outside.” the Director says. “We will find Lady Sunshine, and then we’ll see for ourselves.”

“Come,” Nurse Anne says to the Doctor in that gentle yet persuasive voice of hers and takes him by the arm and begins to steer him down the hall. He imagines her practicing solace in the mirror at home:
I am here. You are better now.
The woman’s finger tracing a circle on his thigh lingers from last night.
There, there.
And then the girl’s voice returns.
Mother, I am frightened.

He is distracted and tired and grateful for the way Nurse Anne leads him. As they float down the hall, the seashells she always carries in her pocket rattle and the Doctor’s pocket watch tick-tocks, all the way to the billiard room.

“It is best not to think, for example,
What am I thinking?
” the veteran is saying when they arrive in the doorway. He rolls another billiard ball across the felt table. “What am I thinking? The way it is best not to think about certain bodily functions.” He counts on his fingers. “Blinking. Breathing. Fuuu—” He pauses when he sees Nurse Anne. “. . . arting.”

“Over there.” Nurse Anne turns the Doctor so he faces the corner of the room where a man stands with his back to them, neck craned for a better view of the window with Jesus walking the sparkling stained-glass road to Calvary, oblivious as people weep and rend their clothes all around him.

“You might be thinking a million things or you might be thinking nothing,” the veteran says.

“Fascinating,” the man whispers, but he is not speaking to the veteran.

“If he is to be believed,” Nurse Anne says, “he has been traveling on foot for years, or months. Maybe weeks. It is entirely possible he set out the day before yesterday. There is the problem of his memory.”

“Magnificent,” whispers the man.

The veteran rolls a billiard ball violently and it hops over the edge, crashes to the floor, and rolls to the feet of the man, who picks it up, considers it, and then returns it to the billiard table.

“Yes, that’s right. There will be none of that,” the veteran says as if the man were trying to steal the ball. Though the veteran professes disdain for most of the other patients, he prides himself on keeping order; he has been known to lurk outside the rooms of other patients, listening in, in the name of order.

In profile, the coil of one of the man’s large ears is revealed, as well as his striking nose, whose distinctive arch begins above his large, deep-set eyes. His shoulders are slumped, but that is the only sloppy thing about him. His mustache is finely combed, and not a single button is missing from his spotless vest and waistcoat, and he has a neatly wrapped cravat.

Someone comes
. . . it is the beginning of a sentence from a book the Doctor has read recently. The day he walked out of his house to join his family on the side of the road to wait for the great Léotard, he paused in the foyer to look at his reflection in the mirror. There in his own eyes was the look he recognizes now in this man’s eye. It is more than just a look, it is conviction: Something is about to come whirring around the bend.

Someone comes.
His father’s pocket watch ticks in his hand with his pulse, ticking the blood through his veins. “There is time enough,” his father said. But a few days after his father gave him the watch, it stopped. His mother took him with her to a jeweler, who, over the boy’s protests, took the back off of the watch. “What are you afraid of?” his mother asked, scolding him out of embarrassment. How could he explain that he was worried the jeweler would steal the watch’s magic? The jeweler was very kind and, seeing his fear, explained each step—“and now I’m unscrewing the screws, and here’s the pinion and the pallet and the mainspring, see, there’s dirt gummed up in there. It will only take a little cleaning”—and the jeweler had the watch ticking again. And those intricate tiny mechanisms inside the watch! “Beautiful,” the jeweler said.
“Look how beautiful that is!” And it was. The same as with every new patient—inside, somewhere, waiting to be discovered: beautiful, intricate mechanisms.

Someone comes
. . . The Doctor can’t remember the rest. There is salt on his tongue from the gust of wind blowing through an open window into the long hall. Outside, Marian’s red flower, its knot waiting to be undone, sways in the garden.

“His name,” Nurse Anne says, “is Albert.”

At the sound of his name this man, Albert, turns. His face sags with the familiar exhaustion of all of the other patients, but there is something else too. Something of his own, waiting to be discovered.

Someone comes
.

“It’s not a happy story,” Albert says, looking at the Doctor.

It never is. Still, in this man’s eyes, the Doctor sees it: an invitation.

PART TWO

Albert Observed