The Man Who Walked Away A Novel (24 page)

The girl does not look at the brain on the platter on the table, though it is close enough that she could reach out from the chair where she sits and touch it; instead, she opens her mouth. She puts her hand to her wide-open mouth; it looks as though she is pulling something from deep in her throat.

The girl eyes whatever imaginary thing she has pulled from the depths of herself with scorn. “I don’t have the time,” she says.

Flash goes the camera from the photographer’s corner, where his rail-thin legs stick out of the bottom of the camera’s tent: an image of the girl and whatever it is she’s dangling from her fingertips is illuminated, etched eternally onto a plate.

At the sound of the clunk, clunk of the plates, the great doctor turns, fixing the photographer with his owly stare. “
Everything
I’m about to do is worth recording,” he says.

“I do not have the time,” the girl says again.

“She is capricious,” says the great doctor.

The Doctor recognizes the sour look that crosses the great doctor’s face; he felt it in his own face as Albert told his story of being arrested as a nihilist assassin in Moscow, and shame burns through him.

Out of his coat pocket the great doctor pulls an amulet on a string. “There will be three distinct stages.”

Dangling the amulet before the girl’s eyes, he swings it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. “You are tired. So tired. You are sleeping and you are nothing.” The hairy bear steps back, arms folded, watching the amulet until his chin falls to his chest and he snaps to attention, looking out into the audience like a guilty child.

It seems impossible to the Doctor that this same fierce girl could be tired, or sleeping, or nothing, but her eyes move back and forth, back and forth, and her lids grow heavy. Soon her head is nodding; soon it falls to her chest.

“Here we have the lethargic state,” the great doctor says. “The appearance of a deep sleep. Suggestion is impossible. But a certain muscular hyperexcitability . . . pressure upon the facial nerve, for example . . .” He nods to the hairy bear, who presses a thick finger into the girl’s left cheek.

Flash: an image of a spasm in the left side of her face, distorting itself into a grimace, while the right side remains utterly still.

“The cataleptic condition,” the great doctor says. He lifts the girl’s face in his hand, almost tenderly, prying open one closed eyelid. Simultaneously, the hairy bear lifts the girl’s left arm, spreads her fingers, and puts them to her lips as if she is about to throw a kiss.

Flash: an image of the girl smiling broadly, throwing a kiss to the audience.

There is a smattering of polite applause.

Shhhh!

There is something missing, the Doctor thinks. What was he listening for? The
thump thump
of the monkey? No, it is the girl’s anguished keening he is waiting for.

“You are very tired,” the great doctor says. “You are so tired. You are sleeping.” She begins to slide down the back of her chair as though she is being poured. “And now, somnambulism.” She is sinking to her knees, pressing her hands together in the semblance of prayer, when suddenly there is a great crash and the shattering of glass.

The great doctor turns in the direction of the noise, slow and steady as the swing of the amulet, and the eyes of the entire amphitheater follow. The jagged pieces of a plate, slipped from his bony fingers, lie at the feet of the photographer.

The Doctor’s stomach drops; he recalls his sneeze and the heat of the great doctor’s gaze. The photographer is no longer floating; he is no longer invisible. It is as if he had crashed to the floor along with the plate. It is hard to tell from here, but the Doctor swears he sees a tiny smile of satisfaction on the man’s face.

“Did I hire an orchestra to take photographs?” the great doctor says as the photographer frantically picks up the shards of glass.

“A stampeding herd of elephants?”

The photographer’s thin legs become tangled until one of his feet slips out from underneath him and a poof of sawdust rises all around him. He puts his hand out to protect his face as he falls, and when he stands, blood runs down his long arm.
There
is their blood, the Doctor thinks.

The great doctor is silent now. In the photographer’s hurry to get to his feet, he falls again. When the photographer drops the second plate, the shattering glass echoes through the quiet.

This time he rises slowly to his feet. “No,” he says into the silence of the amphitheater. “No,” he says again. The word hangs in the air as he walks slowly, proudly, out of the amphitheater. But once the hairy bear sweeps away the glass and the blood-flecked sawdust, it is as if the photographer had never existed at all. What photographer?

The great doctor turns back to the girl. “Our statue of living pain,” he says in the same steady, unwavering voice as before, and the Doctor feels it pulling the audience’s attention with it—
Come into the great house of my voice, look into all the secret rooms—
and his too.

The statue of living pain is not where the great doctor had left her.

When the glass shattered, the girl rose from her knees and began walking slowly toward the table with the platter. At first she appears to be reaching for the brain itself, and the Doctor thinks,
She will eat it.
But it isn’t the brain she wants. She picks up the straitjacket instead, slipping her arms expertly through the sleeves.

“Please,” she says, turning her back to the hairy bear, lifting the hair from her neck. “Buckle me in.”

It is not a happy story
, Albert has said again and again. But an unhappy story doesn’t always begin unhappily. The Doctor imagines the girl as a child at the dinner table. Maybe there are two gangly older brothers who wrestle unless they are told not to, one writhing body with many limbs. Maybe there is a mother.
She is not eating enough
, the mother says, eyeing the stew her daughter has barely touched. Maybe there is a father.
She never eats enough
, the mother says to him. He recently moved his family to the city so he and his sons could work in the textile factory that has dyed their fingers an indelible blue.
She is fine
, he says, without looking up. The same conversation every night. He could speak any words as long as he uses the same reassuring tone:
Rats ate mine.
What a vine
.
There is time
. The fact is the girl
is
fine, rosy and plump. She has always been this way. She is one of those children who brim with love. What does it matter if she eats less than her brothers, who eat and eat with their blue fingers unless reminded to use a fork? If she is healthy, if she shines with life, what does it matter? The Doctor will never know it, but he is partly right. There has been happiness for the girl; there has even been happiness for her here in the great doctor’s hospital. It is only once she is retired, only when she is no longer the great doctor’s best girl, that happiness disappears altogether. It is then she will lose track of the days, which seemed for a while to be adding up to something—those moments when the audience
oooed
and
aaahed
, all of those eyes on her as she moaned or dreamed up something lodged in her throat (let them use their imaginations), those moments when she was the doctor’s best girl. She was the doctor’s best girl even, perhaps especially, when she did something to cause a look of concern on his face. It is when she is removed from her private room to make room for the next best girl that she will understand he is done with her, and when she is returned to the general population of women in the large room, her strength will leave her altogether. Some of the women in the large room will look like her mother—that woman in the corner there, when she turns a certain way and remains enough in the shadows—but they are not her mother who died some months ago. The girl will grow smaller still. Eventually, she will lose track of herself altogether; there will be days when she can’t distinguish herself from the woman in the corner there or that one there or that one there. She will sleep as often as she can; in her dreams it isn’t dark. In the sunlight of her dreams, her mother’s face returns to her, a face that expected nothing of her, that was satisfied to watch her knead dough, content even to watch her shirk her duties and gaze out the window on to a view the girl always complained about—why did they have to live in such a shabby place? In those dreams, her mother’s face says, you are my own girl. In the dark room though the girl will continue to fade until one day, when no one is watching, her light will go out completely.

“Buckle me,” the girl says again, her back to the hairy bear, the pieces of her life that added up to this moment hovering all around her. What if things had gone differently? the Doctor wonders. What if the father the Doctor has imagined for her hadn’t died in a factory accident, if her brothers hadn’t run off to create trouble with their blue hands, if their mother hadn’t fallen into such despair that the asylum seemed like a place to rest and to find a meal? What if the rosy, plump girl hadn’t followed her mother, and there been discovered by the great doctor? What if instead she lived the kind of life in which she might be asking to be buttoned into a lovely dress?
Button me.

In the slow shuffle out of the amphitheater, the Doctor is surrounded by the cluck-clucking of the high foreheads and the aristocratic noses.

“The girls will be running the place soon.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing that.”

“You just did.”

“What about the photographer?”

“What about him? He’s through.”

What about the photographer? Those long thin legs, the outraged look on his face as though it were the great doctor who had interrupted
him
, as though it were he, the photographer, who held the secrets. When the Doctor stops in the shabby bar next door to his shabby hotel to escape the cluck-clucking of the high foreheads and aristocratic noses, the photographer is so present in the Doctor’s thoughts that when he sees him in the corner nursing a drink with his bandaged hand, it is as though the Doctor has caused him to appear.

“May I join you?” the Doctor says.

“Plenty of other seats,” the photographer says, gesturing to the rest of the bar, which is empty except for the bartender, a man reading at the bar, and two men playing cards in the corner. “But do whatever you like.”

“I was just there,” says the Doctor, taking a seat. “At the amphitheater.”

“So you’re a doctor, then?” The photographer slides the glasses perched on the top of his pointy dome down onto his nose and looks the Doctor up and down. “A man of mental medicine?”

“I’ve seen your portraits in the journals.” The Doctor knows the way flattery can work on a man and he sees the way his words work on the photographer. He wants to win the man over, but he means it. In each of the portraits, there is a question on the girl’s face similar to the question on the girl’s face tonight, not unlike the question he has seen on Albert’s face. The look of a feral child subdued, as if someone has turned a crank at the back of the girl’s head one more notch and there it is, a different kind of smile. Not the smile of recognition—there
I
am in the mirror—so much as there
someone
is. Before one could mind manners, there had to be a lesson in what manners were. Here, try them on, like clothes. The smile is an offering and a question.
Is this her, the girl you want
? Careless man. The Doctor
was
a careless man. Albert’s story of being mistaken for a nihilist assassin of the czar?
Is this him, the man you want
?

“Why take pictures of these people? Why not let them be? That’s what my wife says,” the photographer says. “It takes three seconds for me to switch the plates. What anyone might discover if they were paying attention is those girls hold their poses long enough for me to photograph them. They perform in sync with the speed of the shutter. They wait for me to press the bulb. It’s not proof of any invisible lesion I’m capturing. But you don’t want to know. Or you don’t care.”

“They are not my theories,” the Doctor says. He hears his defensive tone and tries to soften his voice. “I do want to know. You cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it, he said. I’m interested to know what you think that means.”

The photographer finishes his beer before he speaks. “I recently went to a demonstration,” he says finally. “A scientist used a volta-faradaic apparatus to isolate muscles in the woman’s face. The muscle for fear, the muscle for sadness, and so on.”

“Yes,” the Doctor says, “I’ve seen that demonstration. The woman’s spirit, enacted in her anatomy, that’s how the scientist described it.”

“
That’s
what photography can do,” the photographer says.

“Yes,” the Doctor says. He thinks he understands. Isn’t this what he hopes to capture with Albert? Something elusive and ephemeral—call it his soul, or its approximation in words. Something whose essence is,
This is me
.