The Man Who Walked Away A Novel (23 page)

Chapter 15

The air in the amphitheater is already electric, but this time the girl is not small or weak or fading. This time, there is no girl at all. All the Doctor can make out from where he sits waiting for the great doctor to appear is a lump of something on a platter. It might be lunch. The Doctor doesn’t want to think about lunch; he doesn’t want to think about food at all. He is not feeling well. Even the murmuring in the amphitheater—a thousand tiny hammers in his head. How could he possibly think about lunch? In the corner, the tall, skinny photographer has appeared, once again magically transported, glasses perched on his pointed head as he unwraps the plates from their cotton swathing, the clunk-clunking a larger pounding hammer that joins the tap, tap, tap of the amphitheater conversation inside the Doctor’s skull. Behind the platter is a large chalkboard on which is scribbled:
To force the womb to descend: bitumen, sulfur, and petroleum oils, woodcock feathers, billy goat hairs, gunpowder, old sheets.
He doesn’t want to think about billy goat hairs, or old sheets either. What was he thinking when he accepted the bartender’s invitation the night before last—
Don’t be a stranger
—? He should have remained a stranger.

When he woke up yesterday morning, fully clothed, on top of the covers of his lumpy bed, he had only a vague recollection of making his way up the stairs from the bar underneath his apartment.
I’ll be at the top by the end of the week
. This is the part he remembers, a hand on either wall for balance.
One day for each step.
Had one of the men huddled at the bar—the one whose face up close was as lined as the map of Albert’s travels—put a hand on either side of his face? “The good doctor,” the man’s breath thick on the Doctor’s cheek. “You’ll be fine.” The men’s laughter, a streak of sound through the sky of his dreams all night long and again, still, last night in the hotel.

When he walked into the bar the night before last, the bartender cried out gleefully, “A stranger no more!” The Doctor was no longer a stranger, but after several drinks he wasn’t entirely sure what it was he had become. He had only wanted to escape the feeling of riding his bicycle up into his parents’ arms, their forgiveness so sweet he was better off erasing it completely.

“Tell us that story again, sir doctor,” the man with the map-lined face said. “The one about the Greeks and the electric eels.” Had he told them a story? Had he told them he was a doctor?

“I’ve got an electric eel for you,” said the map-lined-face man’s companion, always one drink ahead.

“Come, now,” the man with the map-lined face said, nudging the Doctor with his shoulder. And when the Doctor couldn’t remember the story he wasn’t sure he’d told the first time, the men returned to their banter, the easy hop from one subject to the next—their work at the docks (which drove them to drink), their wives (who drove them to drink), the relentless wind off the river (which drove them to drink).

It was then that
they
slithered through his mind—the electric eels.
Zzzzzz
. “The Greeks,” he said, remembering, “treated gout by having the patient stand on an electric eel.”

The men laughed and laughed and the laughter surrounded him. It
was
funny. Standing on eels to cure gout, but also to be sitting here, with these men whose laughter had always been in another room. This is what his life might be if his ethereal
if
ever developed a solid spine—a life full of nights in which laughter was in the same room.

“No one cares about
your
eel,” the man with the map-lined face said, shoving his companion playfully.

“But it is
enormous
.”

The bartender had retreated to the other end of the bar to rummage through clinking bottles, the novelty of the Doctor’s presence having worn off.

“To the eels!” the drunker man said, clinking glasses first with the map-faced man and then the Doctor.

“To the eels!” Why not?

But he didn’t really care about the eels.
Soul murder
. Walter’s strange phrase had been stuck in his head and he wanted to chase it out.
Soul murderer. Careless man.
Those words Albert spoke at the end of his story that wasn’t actually his about being mistaken for the czar’s assassin. Why wouldn’t the man weave himself into history? The Doctor had driven him to it. The drinking had helped for a little while and then he had collapsed into his lumpy bed, dreaming of the amphitheater. He was wearing a new suit and the great doctor was whispering in his ear. What was he whispering? The laughter of the men downstairs became the murmur of the high foreheads and aristocratic noses.
Aaaah. Ooooh
. “A toast!” the great doctor cried. To what? The Doctor was not yet finished with his case study. He had not even begun. “To Albert!” cried the hairy bear. When the morning finally came, it felt like years later, and the Doctor was drenched in the sweat of envy and failure. Shivering naked over his pail of water he tried to sponge it away, but it clung to his skin in persistent beads.

Careless man.
He didn’t want to be one, so he put himself on a train to Paris in order to be less careless, resolving as the train hurtled through the countryside to take more care. And here he is once again, foggy still even after drinking the awful concoction the bartender offered him yesterday morning. Myrrh, rhubarb, chamomile, aloe, cardamom, peppermint oil and a number of other ingredients the Doctor was afraid to ask about, including a grape-infused spirit. And on top of it all, here he is once again, enduring this amphitheater full of pointy knees and aristocratic noses and high foreheads, all these waiting bodies, hot and lemony with sweat.

“There’s been an incident with the monkey,” the high forehead in front of the Doctor is saying to the aristocratic nose next to him. “It got loose,” the high forehead says with evident delight. “Crashed through the door and bounded around, climbed on top of peoples’ heads. The doctor finally pulled a banana out of his coat and that was the end of it.”

The Doctor’s not sure he believes it, but there’s a certain pleasure in imagining the stout oak door banging open and the monkey, shrieking, bursting free, taunting the hairy bear, the hairy bear taking a swipe at the monkey, the monkey going faster and faster, just out of reach, the hairy bear stumbling and falling facedown into the sawdust.

“This is what happens when wild animals are turned into pets,” sniffs the aristocratic nose.

“This circus could use a monkey,” the high forehead says. “It’s gotten a bit dull.”

The Doctor realizes now he too has been missing the
thump thump
of the monkey. It would be better than the
zzzzzz
of the eels that lingers still. He tries to focus on what is about to unfold—a demonstration of the great doctor’s new treatment that isn’t new at all. It is in fact quite ancient. Not even its resurrection is new. The Doctor tracked down an article that gave the lie to the great doctor’s reinvention of it. A Danish entertainer had finessed that trick on a tour through Central Europe.
Clench your jaw muscles
, the Danish entertainer instructed volunteers he plucked from the audience and quickly put into a trance. He asked politely.
Please
—and they did.
Here’s a delicious apple
, he said, and offered them a potato from which each took a big bite. Every last one of them cooed over its crisp sweetness.
You will go rigid and stiff. You will lie down between two chairs, your feet on one chair, your head on the other, your body a stiff board suspended in between.
And they did and they did and they had. An outraged doctor in Breslau wrote an article declaring the entertainer a fraud (
Sir, you are not who you appear to be
); in response, the entertainer invited
all
of the local doctors to come see for themselves. The entertainer called them to the stage one by one. The outraged doctor who had written the article was the first to fall under the spell.
Clench your jaw.
He clenched.
Eat this apple
. He ate and cooed. “Delicious,” he said.
Lie stiff as a board between two chairs
and, having always been the sort of student who excelled in his studies, he became even stiffer than a board.

Near the end of the Danish entertainer’s Central European tour someone in the audience raised his hand and asked,
What really happened that evening you hypnotized the doctors
? Before the entertainer had a chance to answer, another audience member, a doctor, reportedly raised his hand. “What does it matter if we do not understand the exact mechanism of the phenomenon?” he asked.

Not much is required: one chair, one lamp, and a peaceful effect. An amulet, a letter, a telegram. These were said to be the best devices. The most effective method is the use of two fingers to make circles on the top of the patient’s head.

The Doctor has heard rumors, of course, of doctors using the treatment for their own entertainment—putting a man in a trance and asking him to drink a glass of ink and telling him it is beer; inducing a man into sleep, a man whose beard has been carefully cultivated for many years, and then giving him a pair of scissors in the midst of his dreaming and instructing him to cut it off . . .

Aaaah
, says the audience. And there he is, with his Napoleonic profile and his spectacular nose, walking slowly into the center of the amphitheater like a bullfighter. The Doctor wishes for a bull as the great doctor gestures to the platter.

“In the past,” the great doctor says in that voice that falls like a fantastic cloak over them all, “I have performed with you an anatomical-pathological study of the encephalon . . .”

And the Doctor realizes that the something on the platter is not lunch after all. It is a brain.

“ . . . notice the attractive exterior . . .”

The monkey, punished? Was this the brain of his beloved pet?

“. . . the white matter, the flattened portion of the crura . . . the gray layers of the island of Reil . . .”

The Doctor’s mind skips like a stone over logic into the frigid depths of panic. It is much worse than he had thought. It is not the monkey’s brain at all. He wiggles his knee into the back of the high forehead in front of him. “Where is the girl?” he whispers.

Shhh
, the forehead says.
Shhh,
says the audience.
Zzzzzz.
The Doctor finds himself wishing Monsieur Eager were here.
He
would know, or he would claim to know, what has happened to the girl. What has the great doctor done with the rest of her? Chopped her into pieces? The tall, skinny photographer lurking in the corner, adjusting his tripod, preparing his plates for the first photograph—he must know something. There is something about the man’s thin face that makes him seem as though he knows useful things, or maybe it is just his displeasure at the entrance of the great doctor that catches the Doctor’s attention.

The great doctor hoists the platter onto his shoulder and carries it around the room.

“. . . I wish to isolate the Great Neurosis as a purely nosological object,” the great doctor is saying, returning the platter to the table. “The etiological theory is clear. A pathophysiological alteration in the nervous system. But this alteration is of an unknown nature, in an unknown location.” He gestures to the brain. “A physiological phenomena, beginning in an elusive lesion.”

“Where is the girl?” the Doctor whispers.

“Quiet!” the high forehead hisses.

“The lesion itself?” the great doctor says. “Invisible.”

Invisible, and yet they were meant to believe it was there. Where is the girl? What has happened to her?

“Today, we will witness a treatment that is not blind to the invisible lesion. It sees it. It speaks to it.”

Aaaah,
says the audience, and the hairy bear appears from the wings with the girl. The Doctor’s mind skips back, an obedient stone, from panic to logic, and it is only then he realizes he has been on the verge of tears. It is not the girl’s brain on the platter. He needs more sleep; he will go to bed early, he will sleep on the train. But as the hairy bear coaxes the girl gently down into the wooden chair, as he pulls the straitjacket slung across his shoulder and lays it across the table next to the platter, the Doctor waits for whatever comes next. At least she is here; at least she is not in pieces. The silence in the amphitheater is thick; an enormous held breath. The pressure of the silence builds, rumbling through the benches, through the Doctor, connecting him and his low forehead, his close-together eyes, his lumpy nose, to the men all around him: something is about to happen. They all perch on the edge of the benches:
Make it happen
. Had the Danish entertainer called the Doctor to the stage right now, he thinks, he would have eaten the potato and tasted its secret apple sweetness.