The Man Who Walked Away A Novel (14 page)

When he walks in to the room, the man whose name is Albert is sitting with his back to the door, looking out the window at the park in front of the Palace of Justice. He appears to be listening to something. Did he hear the fierce statues on top of the palace who glared at the Doctor:
And? So?
He is dressed in fresh clothes, but his long, callused feet are bare. They are
huge
, these feet that have traveled—if the man’s story is true—all over Europe. They are as big as the feet of the Doctor’s father. One summer, he studied those feet as they walked along the beach. The footprints in the sand were twice the size of his boy feet. His mother showed him how she could fit her hand three times in just one print. As the three of them walked, the moment seemed as though it would last forever, and it has, hasn’t it?

The man’s slumped shoulders shake slightly. At first he appears to be laughing, but when he turns from the window he is not laughing at all. He coughs, choking on tears that come too fast. Leaning forward, he spits up a tumbler’s worth of vermilion blood into his hands.

“Oh, dear,” he says.

The Doctor is relieved to be given something to do.

“Here.” He offers the man his arm, helps him to his feet. “Here.” He walks him to the bed where he lays him down and applies a plaster to his chest near the top of his right lung and another underneath his shoulder blade. There is no reason to believe he is tubercular, but what does it matter? The answer to the wrong question is still an answer. Not
the
answer, but
an
answer. The plaster does its work, drawing blisters, but the man closes his eyes as though he is wrapped in the softest blanket, and when the Doctor gives him the hemostatic mixture of cod-liver oil, he swallows it as if it were a bite of the first ripe peach of summer. He pushes gently on the man’s shoulder, coaxing him to lie back.

“Are you well enough to talk?” the Doctor asks after the man has lain quietly for several minutes.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes.”

“You’ve had a good, long sleep. Exactly what you need.” He puts his hand on the man’s shoulder.
And, so, you are better now.
These practiced small gestures—the steady, unwavering touch, the certain tone that gives the ethereal
if
a solid spine:
You are.

“I have never slept so well,” the man says, his eyes still closed, holding himself stiff and still.

“So perhaps I may ask you a few questions?”

“I will do my best to discover the answers.”

“How old are you?”

“I am not sure,” he says. “Inquiries could be made.”

The ghostly murmurs of the other patients drift down the hall. Beethoven’s Sonata No. 8 in C minor finds them too, fitful, melancholy, then finding its way, full, and urgent. Rachel and her frog have decided to give death a break for now.

“There is no need for inquiries,” the Doctor says. “I would guess your age is twenty
.”

“What a useful thing, to know one’s age,” the man says, as if the Doctor has restored his whole life. “I am delighted to know that. Thank you.”

Suddenly the man sits up. “I am not able to say how I got here,” he says. “I am always leaving. I cannot prevent myself from leaving. I go straight ahead, and then I discover myself, not knowing how I got there, far away. I discover myself in this public square and then suddenly I am in another. I wake up somewhere else entirely.”

“Why do you cry?” the Doctor asks, gently coaxing him to lie down again. “We have only just started.” He hopes to speak to the man just a little longer. It is true what Nurse Anne said. He does not appear to be a vagrant, but he doesn’t appear to be a tourist either. He is not, for example, the man the Doctor met on the train for whom travel is a souvenir, a lovely vase to be lifted from the mantelpiece and admired and then returned. Maybe he would go; maybe he wouldn’t. For this man, it appears travel is a broken shard that has lodged inside of him, causing him not to be so much consumed by an obsession to pursue travel as consumed by travel itself.
Travel,
from
travail
,
bodily or mental labor or toil of a painful, oppressive nature. From the Old French
travail
,
suffering or trouble. In German, “tearing free.”
Travel
, from the Latin word for a three-pronged stake.

“Please don’t send me away,” the man says. “I am so tired.”

“We won’t send you away,” the Doctor says, closing the shutters to block out the sun’s glare, as well as that of the statues on the Palace of Justice. “You need to rest. You can rest here.”
And? So?
He carefully removes the plaster and then covers the man with the sheet.
And, so, you are better now
.

“The leaves of the trees in the public garden were gold that time,” the man says. “From the gas lamps, I believe.” He props himself up on his elbows, leaning his head against the wall. “I once discovered myself in Aix pitching hay. And once I woke to find myself in Brussels. There was work in a ceruse factory there. There may have been an avalanche. In Andernach.”

“That is very helpful,” the Doctor says. “When were you in Aix, and Brussels, and Andernach?”

The man looks at him miserably and closes his eyes. “I do not want to disappear anymore,” he says.

“You will remember,” the Doctor says. “Your life, it will come back. There is plenty of time to talk.”

“What day is today?”

“Friday.”

“And tomorrow is Saturday?”

“Tomorrow is Saturday,” says the Doctor, taking the man’s hand in his.

In the man’s large eyes, the Doctor sees it again, the same look he recognized when he first saw him in the billiard room.
What will happen next
? it says. That invitation. But to where? “I will see you tomorrow,” the Doctor says. “Rest.” He touches the man’s forehead to distract himself from his unsettlement, but the man’s warm forehead sends him back to the Niger where he is once again a teenager on a ship wondering what will become of him, orphaned and alone, so seasick he thinks he will die, looking out over the vast and endless ocean insurmountable as his life.

“I fear I will walk far, very far, with no one to watch over me,” the man says, startling the Doctor off the treacherous, indifferent sea and back into the narrower corridor of his life here in this room. It is as though the man is hauling the words up from the bottom of the ocean, as though he were on the ship too, all those years ago with the Doctor.

“There is time,” the Doctor says, to steady himself as much as the patient. “We will help you to remember. Do not worry. There is time.”

As the bell of St. Eloi rings, the Doctor recalls the inscription underneath the clock: I call to arms; I announce the days; I give the hours; I chase away the shadows; I sound the celebrations; I cry fire.
The man smiles up at him. Is this what the ship’s doctor meant when he said to the Doctor,
You have a gift
, and set him on the path that has led him to this moment? That there would be moments like this when he would treat a patient and a bell would ring in him?

“You are safe here. We will watch over you,” the Doctor says. “If you walk, we will bring you back.” His words drift out the window, floating up like the smoke from the factory chimneys, disappearing with the sound of the church carillons. “You are here now.”

Someone comes
.

What was the rest?

Since he first saw this man standing in the billiard room, since the wind blew through the room and salted his tongue, the phrase has been lodged in the Doctor’s brain, unfinished:
Someone comes
.

“We will talk more tomorrow,” the Doctor says. “I will stay here while you fall asleep.”

This man called Albert appears reassured. His eyelids close and his face, which has appeared wrapped in a shroud of sorrow—the hooded eyes, the long nose, the cowlick that begins at the center of his forehead—relaxes.

The Doctor pulls a chair up next to the bed and watches as the man falls more deeply into sleep. His leg moves—maybe he is dreaming of walking?—and his pants leg rides up to reveal a naked calf. It is exquisitely shaped. That calf, its smooth curve against the rough blanket, stirs something in the Doctor. How strange it is to move through the world, through the depths of one’s own solitude. Details that would normally pass unnoticed rise up, offering themselves to him—the far away smell of wildflowers; the bob and tug, tug and bob of boats anchored on the river; the iron rings of bed curtains rattling down the hall.

Someone comes . . . someone to whom one wants to give
. . .
something. Something something, something, and another part of a phrase arrives . . .
there’s no need for words—people just find one another—they have glimpsed each other in dreams
. A line from a novel he read months ago? A line spoken by a wicked man to lure a restless woman into an affair. There was a word the wicked man used to describe how he felt as he looked at the woman’s face. In the quiet of the room, there is only the tick, tick, tick of his father’s pocket watch. Tick, tick, tick, and the forgotten word returns:
dazzled.

The man’s mind is a dark street and the Doctor will light the lamps, one by one.

Chapter 10

Today, which is Saturday; tomorrow, which is Sunday; then Monday and then Tuesday, the days coming one after the other as if that were all there was to it. It is Saturday, and as he lies in this bed, his bed, he hears mothers out on the street calling their children.
We will talk more tomorrow
,
the Doctor said, and today is tomorrow.
If you walk, we will bring you back.
Albert wants nothing more.
We will help you to remember.

“Baptiste!” The sound of his friend’s name, and he is offered another glimpse. “Madeleine!” The daughter of the butcher. “Jean-Luc!” The son of the varnisher. “Alexandre!” The son of the wheelwright. “Marie!” the daughter of one of the fishermen. “Albert!” his mother would call right over his head as it grew dark, the only light from the gas lamps along the quay. Albert, too shy to play with other children, sat at her feet on the lip of the door of the cottage, listening to the river and to the mothers of the neighborhood calling their children inside. She would pretend she didn’t see him sitting there at her feet; she would pretend he was somewhere out there playing with the other children. “Albert!” she would shout into the street, but she was never able to hide her smile, and soon she was laughing. “Where are you, Albert?” as he squirmed and giggled. “Where am I?” he would shout into the night. “I think I hear me out there,” he would say, and his mother would cup her hand to her ear. There had once been so much love. How could he have forgotten it for so long? It hadn’t disappeared; it had only gone into hiding.

Ring
(
shadow ring
). Time doesn’t pummel him; it doesn’t smash him like a hammer. It sings:
Today is
this
day. This is the music of days. This is what it is to be a citizen moving through the days; this is what it is to be a citizen moving alongside the hours and the minutes.

The bells peal all day long, beautiful in their constancy.

What time is it now?

It is time for breakfast. He puts on the new-smelling shoes Nurse Anne had set out for him and walks down the hall, past the billiard room, where he pauses to admire the walking red, blue, and yellow glass Jesus walking without shame, no menace he, too busy walking to be bothered by such accusations. He wedges himself between Walter and his pudding smell and tall Marian with her lovely curves, all of them held by the gravitational embrace of the table anchoring one side of the large common room, the piano and the fireplace and the table with Elizabeth’s puzzle.

“Good morning,” Walter says, leaning behind Albert to whisper to Marian, “This way we can keep an eye on him.” He gives Albert’s arm a squeeze and winks at him.

It is all Albert has ever wanted.
If you walk, we will bring you back.
Underneath the long table, as Rachel slides a bowl his way, he counts the nights and the days on his fingers: Soon he will know what it is to be a citizen held by an entire week.

“There you are, Albert,” says the Doctor. “I’m very glad to see you.” A warm hand on the back of Albert’s neck as he passes through the room, and Albert feels it, the truth of that gladness.

“Hello, hello,” says Samuel.

“I have already said my hellos,” says Marian.

“Doctor,” calls Nurse Anne, and he is on his way again but the gladness remains, hovering over Albert’s neck.

Ring
(
shadow ring
). And then it is time to walk to the creek. The Director, whose mottled red face reminds Albert of a man in Berlin who saved him from a vicious dog, clap-claps his hands and everyone gathers at the door. “Off we go,” he says, lifting his knees high as he marches in place. “Nature is waiting.” And soon everyone is marching after him, and Albert is part of everyone marching out into the day.