The Man Who Walked Away A Novel (2 page)

But it is, most of all, the Doctor’s bicycle, a recent purchase, which is responsible for his good mood. Since he was a child, he has dreamed of having one of his own, but it was only recently that he could afford it. A pinch, but he has never once regretted the purchase; the bicycle has reignited a childlike quality in the Doctor. Click-clickety-click. There is a system to his pleasure when he rides; his pleasure is the system. He begins always with the bones: stripped of their flesh, hollow and pockmarked, beautiful coral washed ashore. The elegant clavicle and scapula; the gently curved sections of the spinal column: cervical, thoracic, lumbar. The sacrum, the spine’s punctuation. The slender, long fibula next to the stalwart tibia, that sturdy leg bone, only the second largest but which bore more weight than any other. The delicate birdlike bones of the feet: tarsals and metatarsals. The exquisite phalanges, quivering with the movement of the machine, or is it the machine quivering with the movement of his bones? Cranking away—click-clickety-click—the machine itself a miraculous body. Some nights the Doctor dreams of pedaling and he wakes up, his ankles already sore.

His good mood might also be attributed to the lingering effect of last night’s visit to the docks. He woke in the night from his dreams of pedaling, filled with a restless hunger that made his shabby apartment appear even shabbier—the small kitchen dusty from disuse, the ends of a loaf of bread left uncovered nibbled by mice, his bedclothes hopelessly tangled. Even the book by his bed didn’t entice him—he has recently been enjoying an account of a man and his donkey making their way through the country in Cassagnas. He left his apartment and headed out into the night. Though the Doctor has never once been inside the bar underneath his apartment, the bartender always waves to him. He waved last night but the Doctor pretended not to see, continuing on past the Place de la Bourse, past his favorite monument—unfinished, the haunch of a great horse waiting for its rider to be built—past the small cemetery filled with tree stumps like amputees, cut down to make room for more dead. He hurried past, down to the docks, where only a few gas lamps flickered dimly, all the way to the brothels.

“Trouble sleeping?” the woman said when she opened the door. What relief, her pretty tousled hair. His restlessness was given a focus and a task. He muffled the tick, tick of his father’s pocket watch on the dresser with his shirt, his waistcoat, his jacket, until there wasn’t even the dullest echo of that painful sound. The cathedral bells rang up into the sky, disappearing along with her dress, and then he was gone with the bells and the dress, gone into the tang of sharp perfume, into the soft, warm, fleshy relief of her.

“There you are,” she said, taking shape beneath him once again. “Better now?” He had said those same words the day before to Marian, who was weeping over a stolen kidney. The theft caused another patient to wonder if, by divine miracle, she too had had a kidney stolen.

“You’ll be fine,” he said to Marian, leaving Elizabeth to Nurse Anne. “Take her away from the others or we’ll have an entire asylum of kidneyless patients.” He gave Marian a bromide and sat with her until she fell asleep; when she woke up he put his hand on hers. “You are better now,” he said. And she
was
better
.
Medicine’s power, secreted away in these small, rehearsed gestures—the steady, unwavering touch, the certain tone giving the ethereal
if
a solid spine:
You are.

“Yes,” he said to the woman lying next to him. “Thank you.”

And for a moment he was better, but as he made his way home the restlessness returned. It was everywhere—in the rows of houses shuttered for the night that seemed on the verge of bursting; in the statue of Diana still dragging the fallen stag, in the statue dedicated to the soldiers who died for their country. When he reached his building, the restlessness was there in the swollen, drunken voices of the same two men huddled at the bar night after night. “Come on, don’t be a stranger,” called the bartender, but the Doctor remained a stranger, climbing the stairs to his room where he put the kettle on for tea, collapsing in the armchair by the window to read the same page from his book until the man in it had knocked walnuts from the trees that lined the road two, three, four times. The fifth time, the Doctor gave up and looked out the window at the stars, so many mysterious pinpricks of light. The kettle boiled, whistling his restlessness:
What do you know? What do you know?

Click-clickety-click. The statues of the stern justices stare stonily down at him from the top of the Palace of Justice as he pedals past.
And
?
So?
What do you know of medicine?
Just wait
,
he thinks. He watches as the woman, her oilskin hat clutched to her chest, runs to catch up with the handsome man holding his cape open to her as the dove flutters in the cage at his feet. The Doctor knows
he
is not a handsome man; he is aware his crowded features give him the look of someone who is perpetually worried.

And?
So?

“Oh, shut up,” he says out loud, but the wind snatches his words, carrying them all the way back down to the river.

The locomotion of the train hurtles the Doctor along the iron tracks to Paris, rumbling through his feet, up his shins, into his thighs, the base of his spine, and then up each vertebra until he is breathing it. It fills him with a keen sense of anticipation of the sort he hasn’t felt since he was the same age as the children who laughed as the woman retrieved her oilskin hat. The same
what next
feeling he had as a young boy waiting for the great Léotard, son of a renowned gymnast, a man who wore a spectacular form-fitting outfit, to come pedaling through his hometown on the bicycle with its high front wheel (the same bicycle that planted the seed of longing in the Doctor’s heart). The occasion was the great Léotard’s unprecedented forty-mile bicycle ride, and the Doctor waited with his parents along the side of the road with a throng of others, all of them staring at the horizon, willing something to appear. The night before, the great Léotard had performed a miraculous trapeze feat at an elegant banquet hosted by a duke. Racing into the dining room on his bicycle, he squealed to a stop just before he reached the table, then executed a perfect somersault over the heads of the unsuspecting diners.

When the great Léotard finally did whir past that day in his spectacular form-fitting outfit, the boy who did not yet dream of being a doctor, who dreamed only of being an acrobat in a spectacular form-fitting outfit, gripped the hands of his father and his mother. He was a boy of great imagination, according to his parents. “Sometimes too great,” his father said when he forgot to do this or that because he was dreaming of a life beyond their small town, one that didn’t involve his father’s dry goods store. He was so excited when the great Léotard rode by that he closed his eyes to imagine the man somersaulting over their heads, landing precisely, sublimely, in the seat of his magical machine. He imagined the great Léotard turning to him and saying:
Come with me and we’ll somersault over thousands of heads
. With his eyes shut tight, the only thing the boy experienced of the great Léotard and his magical machine that day was the whir of the wind on his face. But that glorious invitation!
Be this great
. It has stayed with him ever since, tugging him forward.

Today, the glorious invitation tugs the Doctor all the way to the City of Lights to a hospital altogether different from the simple vase of the asylum. This ward for insane women that was once a gunpowder factory and before that a poorhouse is complete with the first chemical laboratory, rooms for electrotherapy and hydrotherapy, a photographic laboratory, and a lecture hall that holds an audience of six hundred. The Doctor will soon be one of those six hundred, including doctors from Berlin and Vienna and as far afield as Riga, all come to see the great doctor discuss one of his cases as part of a lecture about the disorder that has condensed centuries of medicine.

“Hysteria,” the great doctor declared in a recent journal article, “will find its place in the sun.” The truth is it has already found its place. It has given a name to the young woman who collapses in fits, thrashing and grabbing at her throat as though she were being choked, and to the girl caught pleasuring herself in public, laughing uncontrollably though one side of her body has been struck with paralysis. It rolls along the new railway lines, its name whispered in café cars. At society parties, women play at having attacks—making faces, arms extended, rigid and strange, as if they were being crucified. A character in a recent novel even suffers from it.

Those doctors from Berlin and Vienna and Riga? After hearing the great doctor’s earlier lectures, they returned home to their own hospitals and now there were patients in Berlin and Vienna and Riga performing beautiful
arcs de cercle
and falling into exquisite paralysis. The Great Neurosis, as the great doctor sometimes calls it, is contagious. It is impossible to ignore, this disorder whose origin, the great doctor claims, may be traced to a physical defect of the nervous system, the result of an injury or of neuropathic heredity but whose manifestation is a mysterious alteration of unknown nature or location in the central nervous system. Ingenious: a lesion that is invisible! How could the Doctor ignore it?

The metal face of the train spews steam as it pulls in and out of stations. The light shines through the roofs of the stations, speckling the bodies of the bustling, pomaded men carrying suitcases and the perfumed women towing young children behind them. The Doctor watches as people walk out of the steam and then disappear back into it again. At the next station, a group of children run after the train as it pulls out, waving as it chugs away. “Wait for us!” they cry as if the train is something wondrous and magical, and it is. Progress is beautiful and the Doctor yearns to be part of it. The train makes its way north, connecting towns and villages not unlike the one where the Doctor lived with his parents—his parents who as children had drawn water from wells and lit their houses with tallow tapers, for whom sending a letter was a great luxury, who dreamed of Paris but never had the opportunity to visit. The train is an extraordinary vision they are all having together.

It pulls into the next station and the next and the next with a great puff and
shhhh
, as though relieved to have finally arrived at its destination. The exhalation of warm, wet steam rushes through the Doctor and then it is gone, replaced by the squeal of the brakes, so loud that at first he doesn’t hear the man speaking to him. He is startled to find someone sharing his compartment at all, never mind this vision in Scotch tweed, wearing a wide-brimmed felt hat, double-soled shoes, and gaiters.

“That’s a fine timepiece,” the red-cheeked man says again, pointing to the Doctor’s hand. His words rush out as though, finally, a great dam has broken.

It is only then the Doctor realizes he has been clutching his father’s watch. He returns it quickly to his pocket.

“The day of two noons,” the man says.

The Doctor nods, though he has no idea what the man is talking about. He looks out the window, hoping this will convey the enormity of his desire to be left alone. He had hoped to spend some of the train ride thinking through the case of Rachel, an asylum patient who believes she has a frog living in her stomach who demands she play the piano. Out the window, there is a field full of cows, a river full of fishermen casting lines from small boats, a forest full of trees, a thick, dark tangle. He closes his eyes, pretending to sleep.

“At midday, the clocks set back to coordinate the railroad schedules?” and the Doctor decides the man is not someone who might appear one day at the iron gates of his asylum after all, unless being boring were suddenly declared a pathology. He is just another person determined to give a lesson. “Twenty-four time zones? The day of two noons? The universal day was established, like the slicing of a pie.”

The Doctor opens his eyes, looking at the man in a way he hopes conveys exactly how little he wants to engage in this conversation.

“Owning such a fine timepiece, I assumed,” the man sniffs, “
incorrectly
that you would be interested.” He riffles through his bag as though searching for something.

“Oh,” the Doctor says. “But of course I am.” He wants to be left alone, but he also doesn’t like other people’s sadness. He has been trained after all to fix it. Out the window, another dark tangle of trees, another open field.

“There has been talk, you know,” the man says, his cheeks glowing just a bit redder. It doesn’t take much to renew his hope. “People dying of apoplexy caused by the rapidity of these newer, faster trains. I don’t usually ride the train.” He pulls a little green book from his satchel and holds it up—evidence! “A Baedeker’s,” he says, as if the name isn’t right there on the front cover for the Doctor to read.

“Are you touring?” the Doctor asks, and the man smiles. There is a certain satisfaction in asking the right question.

“I
am
,” says the man, as though he is saying,
Finally
. The Doctor sees in his eyes that the floodgates have opened and there is no closing them. “The roads are changing the world, my friend. If the whistle of the train engine is awakening us from slumber, then the road is a giant, wondrous hammer to the head!”