The Man Who Walked Away A Novel (25 page)

The photographer rustles around in his bag and, clunk, clunk, pulls out one of his plates wrapped in cotton and puts it on the table between them. “When I have a girl in the studio, I sometimes put a mirror on the wall to catch her attention. She is like a child seeing himself for the first time. ‘Is that me?’ the girl asks when I show her the photographs.
A statue of living pain?
That fat little man. As if it were possible to make any less noise while changing plates the size of his head.
Cough, cough, the photograph is the scientist’s true retina.
He is right about that but only that.” Carefully, the photographer unwraps the plate from its cotton cocoon. “Even before it took shape, I knew this one was different.”

He holds the plate up to the Doctor. There is the fierce girl standing in the sawdust of the amphitheater, looking as though she is about to wrestle the great doctor. Above her head, a shimmering black cloud. There are other explanations for it, the Doctor knows—a smudge, a blur—but the shimmering black cloud looks like time’s signature, a vibration in the girl that exceeds her body.

“It is beautiful,” the Doctor says.

“Yes,” the photographer says. “It eludes you, as art should.” He wraps it back into its layers of cotton, puts it in his bag, and slips on his coat, wanting suddenly only to get home to his wife where he can shake off the cloud of the day. It always takes him a little while to become real again, as though, over the course of a day’s work, he has become
the person in the picture.

“Is there something wrong with your cabbage?” his wife will ask.

The photographer hates cabbage. For years, so how to explain it now? This too he’ll keep to himself.

“Nothing’s wrong with it,” he will say, and he will eat his cabbage. “You’ve never liked cabbage, have you?” his wife might say tonight. “Tell me the truth, you never have,” and she’ll push him and his grasshopper-thin limbs onto the bed. He’ll watch her unpin her hair, marveling yet again at the way the very same things that cause him to grind his teeth—with a different lens, a tighter focus, better lighting——look like love. The photographer would shed his cloud entirely for this glimpse. “I never, ever have,” he will say as she lies down beside him.

On the train home the next day, the Doctor wakes from dreams—the fierce girl buckled into her straitjacket, swallowing fire—to the rustling of a young woman’s skirts as she enters his compartment.

“Let me help you,” and he and a porter lift her battered trunk onto the overhead rack.“Thank you,” the woman says. She looks anxiously out the window at an older woman being jostled by the crowd on the platform.

“Is that your mother?” the Doctor asks as the train begins to move and the older woman and the jostling crowd grow smaller and smaller.

“No.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

“I don’t want to trouble you,” the girl says, her eyes brimming.

“No trouble,” he says.

It is not a very happy story
.

Outside, the trees reach up and up into the sky streaked purple with evening.
Look up
, they say.

The Doctor’s eyes make shapes and patterns out of the stars that appear in the sky. There is so much he will never know. Is that Orion? It frustrates his eyes, trying to make sense in the vastness of the sky, but he is intrigued too by the simple, human way his eyes try to discern the shapes and the patterns automatically, to identify a few of the constellations.

“She is my aunt,” the girl says, and she begins to tell him how her father ran off when she was young, how her mother died of cholera, how she went to live with this aunt whom she loves dearly, but then her aunt could no longer afford to keep her and now she is going to live with a wealthy distant relative who needs a house servant. “A fairy tale in reverse,” she says.

And? So?

She looks out the window. “Is that Orion?” she asks.

“I think so,” the Doctor says. Then, wanting to give the
if
a more solid spine, “Yes, it is.”

Buckle me.

That’s all anyone ever wants, really, the Doctor thinks as the girl nods off to sleep. To be contained. To be given shape by the constraints of a narrative.

Not much is required: one chair, one lamp, and a peaceful effect.

An amulet like the great doctor’s, a letter, a telegram, but the Doctor doesn’t want to use props. There will be no need for props.

It will be like dreaming. He will start simply.

With two fingers he will make circles on the top of Albert’s large head. This is said to be one of the most effective methods. He will pause only to brush Albert’s eyes closed.

It will be like dreaming together.

Your eyelids are warm
.
They are getting warmer.

Those rumors—this will not be that. It won’t be turning ink into beer or asking a man to cut off his own ten-year-old beard. It will not be slipping a tube filled with brandy down the neck of a lady’s dress and whispering into her ear, “
Eau de vie
,” causing the lady to shout, “I am drunk!” and then to stagger and fall on the floor. This will not be that
.
And it won’t be telling a man that when he wakes, he will be a little dog in a hospital full of big dogs, a big dog hospital, and then inviting his friends to watch as the man wakes yapping.

It would be nothing like the competition he’d heard about in which two doctors challenged each other to see whose trance lasted the longest. One of them induced sleep in a former army sergeant and when the doctor snapped his fingers sixty days later, the sergeant believed the president of the republic was giving him a pension and a medal. The other doctor beat him—by three hundred and five days! He told a patient he would see him on the next New Year’s Day, that he would wish him a happy new year; on the New Year’s Day he watched from behind a tree as the patient hallucinated the doctor wishing him a happy new year. And it wouldn’t be the doctor who lulled a man with a gangrenous leg into a somnambulant state, first telling him he would be grateful for whatever was done while he slept, and when the man woke up, the doctor had sawed off his leg.

This will not be the debacle in the great doctor’s amphitheater. This will be something else entirely.

The Doctor is not entirely sure what it will
be. The girl across from him snores gently as the train rattles along.

Shh
,
Albert,
shh
.
You are sleeping. You are a good sleeper.
The Doctor’s voice sounds foolish, unrecognizable, as he rehearses, whispering into the compartment.
You don’t see anything. Your arms and legs are motionless.
Someone else’s foolish voice.
And now you are asleep,
he will say, and it will give the ethereal
if
a solid spine.
And, so, you are better now.

Outside, the darkness is thick—uniform and endless, except for the smattering of stars. The Doctor’s eyes continue their poignant effort to seek shapes. There, Albert’s silhouette. There, sharper than ever, walking astonished through the night sky.

He will blow on Albert’s eyelids to wake him. It is said to be the gentlest way.

And. So. We are better now
.

PART THREE

Dreaming Together

The violinist from Leipzig, the coal miner from Liège, the hotel maid in Mulhouse, the baker in Coblenz, they all came forward to say they had seen him. This was years after the Doctor published a paper on his
fugueur
, after people had started referring to the walking man as
le voyageur de Docteur
; this was after the small epidemic of
fugueurs
. Workingmen with homes and families who walked away, who traveled extraordinary distances with no memory of how they got there—the fisherman from Marseille who woke up in Bougie; the wheelwright in Nérac who woke up in Budweis; the blacksmith from Brive, say, who woke up in Danzig. Men who wandered away for reasons mysterious even—perhaps especially—to them.

When those others came forward, the woman in the lowlands, washing the limestone grit out of her brothers’ clothes, she came forward as well.
I saw him too.
It was the first time she spoke of him, but not the first time he had crossed her mind. Each year, she and her husband gathered with everyone else in their village to watch the storks fly away. For months the storks nested in the villagers’ chimneys, the clack-clacking of their bills as much a part of their lives as the weather. And then one day the storks unfurled themselves from their enormous nests. Awkward at first on their red stick-legs, they rose up with enormous black-tipped wings. Just when it seemed they might fall out of the sky, an air current lifted them up. It was at that moment that the woman remembered the walking man, his strange grace. How could the storks move her to tears every year? her husband always asked. It became a joke between them. Though she loved her husband dearly, she never explained. It was her secret, too delicate for translation.

Chapter 16

“As long as Henri accompanies you,” Nurse Anne says to Marian over the veteran’s shouting.

“Your secret is no secret. Deserter!” He has been shouting all morning. Even as Claude hauls him down the hall, his voice reaches them. “Shame. Shame.”

“It is your eavesdropping that is shameful,” Nurse Anne says. She knows he doesn’t hear her. Still, it must be said.

“Come,” Marian says to Albert and Walter, leading them in the direction of the rough-hewn path to the creek. That suggestion:
Follow me!
She will!

“Look,” Henri says, pointing a slender finger in the direction of the blackberry bushes. “I think I see a fox.”

“Henri,” Marian says, “tell us what you know about—”

“Marian,” Walter interrupts, “let’s not speak of the veteran and his vibrating, blackened nerves. It significantly decreases the voluptuousness of everything.”

Albert agrees. He might be a deserter—but what is he supposed to do about it? Anyway, Marian and Walter don’t care. They have not deserted him. The Doctor may be gone—yesterday, which was Friday; the day before, which was Thursday; the day before the day before, which was Wednesday—but Marian and Walter are not. This morning Albert only cares about the breeze, the faint, familiar pudding smell of Walter, the warmth of Walter’s arm and Marian’s arm on his as they keep a steady pace.

“There is no fox,” Marian says.

Henri holds back the tree branch that marks the entrance to the creek path, and though they are forced to walk single file now, though Nurse Anne has forbidden anymore walking around and around the courtyard together, the astonishment of walking with Marian and Walter lingers in Albert still. Maybe love didn’t have to be something from long ago. Love requires staying in one place. Love requires knowing where you were last night and last week and last year, where you would be tomorrow. And so far, Albert is; so far, he does.

When they reach the creek, they take off their boots—“Socks,” Henri says to Walter—and stand in the cool water under the shadow of the trees.

“This is quite pleasant,” says Walter. “Masterful, really.”

“Yes,” says Marian. “Don’t you think so, Albert?”

“Very,” Albert says.

“Very of our hour,” says Walter.

It is as if Albert’s whole lost life has led him here.
I am here, I am here, I am here
. He closes his eyes to make the moment—the sound of the creek, the birds, the breeze in the trees, the heavy quiet that is Walter, Marian, and Henri nearby—stay, but it is in motion even if he is not. Still, he keeps it in his mind when they walk back up the hill to where the Director demonstrates a series of exercises: windmilling his arms, marching in place, jumping up and down. “Like this!” Elizabeth watches with her vigilant green eyes on the lookout for a miracle, while nearby Rachel smooths and smooths her stomach. When Samuel sees Henri coming, he runs to embrace him.

“Oh, stop it,” Henri says, though he receives Samuel with open arms.

This is a life
, Albert thinks.
Here
. This is his life.

How could he know that what is about to happen would make him willing to give even this up? How could he know that what is about to happen would make him willing to give up all the things he hadn’t known he’d been yearning for—Nurse Anne’s hands pouring silky water over his beautiful feet, the ribbed backs of her seashells rubbed soft, the pleasure of dreams in which he walks with the earth rumbling through his heels but from which he always returns to wake in his bed, not lost at all.
His bed
.