The Man Who Walked Away A Novel (19 page)

He is twenty. He is twenty. He is twenty.

Albert’s surface has started to thaw in the spring of the Doctor’s attentions. The gentle growth of scrubby vegetation might someday give rise to forests.

Here, Albert, a story just for you.

For him and no one else, the sound of this voice he thought had been lost forever. which wasn’t lost at all.

Listen.

The prince with one swan wing who wanted to see the world woke to discover himself in the midst of a family of geese.

“You look strangely familiar,” said the father goose, eyeing the prince’s swan wing. “Anyway, we need your help. We are fewer than we were. You see, each night, a fox comes around and takes another of us off for his dinner. Some nights he takes two: one for dinner, one for dessert.”

The rest of the geese gathered around. In one voice they told the prince: “Each night for a week, the fox has come; each night, there is one, sometimes two, fewer geese.” The goose family was dwindling. “We used to be many,” the father goose said, and he began to weep.

“I have an idea!” the prince said. He whispered his idea to the father goose, who whispered it to the rest of the goose family. As night fell, the prince began to disappear limb by limb into the dark and he found a tree and clung to it, hoping that, finally, he might stay up long enough to watch night turn into day. Meanwhile, the geese prepared for the fox’s arrival.

When night covered the land, the fox arrived, his red face like a demon’s.

“Wait!” the father goose shouted as the fox prepared to pounce on the mother goose. “If we poor geese are to yield up our lives,” he said, according to the prince’s instructions, “grant us one favor. Let us pray so that we may not die in sin.”

The fox sat back, eyeing the prince clinging to the tree doing his best to remain invisible. “Oh, why not?” the fox said. “Go ahead. Have your prayer.”

And so the geese began.

“Ga! Ga!” said the father goose. Then the mother goose chimed in, “Ga! Ga! Ga!” And then a third goose. And then a fourth. “Ga! Ga! Ga!” And a fifth. And then the sixth and final goose. “Ga! Ga! Ga! Ga! Ga! Ga!” This was their prayer, and they prayed and prayed and prayed until their prayer was a song.

“When they are done praying,” Albert’s father would say, “the story will end.”

“Why?” Albert always asked, though he had heard the story before and knew what his father’s answer would be.

“Because when they are done praying, the fox will eat them.”

“But instead . . .” Albert prompted his father.

“Instead, they pray unceasingly and the story continues.”

“Ga! Ga! Ga!” his father would say to him, instead of good night, keeping the prayer of the story alive.
We will always be
together, you and I
, is what Albert heard. In the flickering light, his father’s face took this shape and then that—a goose, a fox, a king waiting for his son to return home. His father’s face could take any shape it wanted, Albert knew; it could be things that it wasn’t, not only the things that it was.

There is his father about to blow out the gas lamp, the story still shimmering all around them.
Ring
(
shadow ring
), the sharp, quick sound of love in Albert’s ears.

What time is it? It is time to lie still.

He lies in his bed and time doesn’t pound him into nothing as he listens to the rain wash clean the piss-drenched streets. He listens as a soaking wet horse clop-clops its way along the slick cobblestones. It is beautiful: the sound of something washed clean; the sound of the horse’s efforts as it makes its way from here to there. There is the clanking of the dinner dishes being cleared; Rachel playing Chopin’s C sharp minor prelude,
“Not
the Funeral March,” she tells Marian, “the ghostly one,” to which Marian responds, “What a relief, a ghost galloping away from death,” before returning to the sweet murmur of Walter. “Good night!” says the Director. “Listen to Nurse Anne. Tomorrow will bring a new day.”

Ga! Ga! Ga! Never mind tomorrow. Albert wants nothing more than to keep this moment—there it went—alive.

Chapter 13

It is the time of the year when the sulfurous smell from the gasworks rides the wind up the hill from the river and hangs heavy in the air. Despite the smell, despite the dust his bicycle spins up that sticks to his face, the Doctor is eager to go to work each day. Ever since Albert’s arrival, the Doctor has looked forward to the moment he slides off his bicycle and walks through the iron gates under the gentle arch of the asylum entrance. Every day our traveler, as Nurse Anne has taken to calling him, offers a new detail, a gift—his dear childhood friend Baptiste, the woman he met on the bridge who asked him to marry her, the story his father told him of the ancient magic of gas, that his father was a pipe fitter for the gas company; every day, there he is at meals with his large, funny ears, sitting contentedly between Marian and Walter at meals—“My pet,” Marian calls him, and Walter no longer squeezes him because he believes in his reality completely; every day, Albert’s large sad eyes glisten with gratitude when he sees the Doctor.

Since Albert arrived, only a small corner of the Doctor’s mind has remained tethered to the daily life to which he had grown accustomed—cutting the ends off the mouse-nibbled bread to eat the softer center for his breakfast, waving to the bartender downstairs as he calls out, “Don’t be a stranger,” remaining a stranger. He still spends time with the other patients—walking Walter to the window to remind him the people are not invented each day only to be invented all over again tomorrow, pulling Rachel’s hair from her face and consoling her when she cries over Chopin’s sister walking her brother’s heart to Warsaw, reminding Marian that she has all of her organs even when she tells him he is a know-nothing wretch. Still, the
before
is fading. A small corner of the Doctor’s mind remains tethered to his daily life
before
, but here in the
after
, the rest has been given over to the question of our traveler,
his
traveler.
Someone comes
. And you are changed.

This morning, the Doctor must perform his usual navigation as he pedals through the tangle of schoolchildren, government officials, the occasional drunk staggering over from the café in front of the cathedral to collide with a government official. There was a time when officials used to drop the drunks off at the asylum; this was before the Director made it clear that his asylum wasn’t a catchall. The Director has worked hard to distinguish the asylum as a place where people might not be treated as criminals, where they might be treated without the presence of criminals. “This is not a prison,” he would say when people arrived with the drunks, and then he would provide directions to the jail.

The Doctor swerves to avoid the end of a government official’s walking stick as he uses it to nudge a drunk man away before returning to his conversation. “They. Must. Do,” punctuating each word with a tap of his stick against the ground, “Something. About. That. Smell.”

“Aren’t you
they
?” the drunk man says, suddenly suspiciously lucid, but the official chooses not to hear him.

The Doctor hopes never to grow so deaf. Click-clickety-click—he delights in the rhythm of the bicycle propelling the great weight of his body. His teeth gritty with dust, there is still pleasure in
his
system, still system in
his
pleasure. Despite the sulfurous smell, people are sitting at the outside tables at the café on the corner of the square where just last night the Doctor found himself dining, tempted out of his usual routine of eating at home alone by the thought that sometimes the answer to complicated questions such as Albert’s are to be found in unlikely places. Sitting next to him was a man reading
Journey to the Center of the Earth
. How would someone who hadn’t read the book, as the Doctor has, have any idea that it involved, say, volcanic tubes? And yet, how alluring, how inviting, that title.

A life exceeds our ability to describe it, he found himself thinking; names alone do not suffice.
Hysteria
, for example. The word should not be expected to carry the entire life of that fierce girl in the great doctor’s amphitheater on its back—how could it? A name becomes fixed, but the story underneath a name is ever shifting. And still, there is something in a name, akin to the title of a book.

The dignified trees, the hornbeams that line the public square outside the Palace of Justice, shiver in the wind.
Hornbeams.
Before they were called hornbeams, they were only
trees
; before they were
trees
, before they were given a name, weren’t they still noble, still beautiful, as they sought the sun? They existed though they had no name, but then someone called them
trees
and their silhouettes grew sharper, and when someone called them
hornbeams
, their silhouettes grew sharper still. There are lavender bushes between each of the hornbeams; delicate and lovely even before they were called
lavender
, but then someone called them
lavender
and the soft outline of their purple spray became visible to men who cannot see things that have no name. For the same reason, the Doctor realizes, Albert’s condition needs a name.

He is almost to the gentle arch of the asylum when the sky thickens with dark clouds and the rain starts to fall. People squeal and scatter, tenting newspapers over their heads, huddling under the umbrellas of those lucky enough to remember theirs during this season of unexpected showers. The Doctor gets off his bicycle, hopping from one cobblestone to the next to avoid the water rushing between them. All around him, rain batters the roofs, its roar an enormous waterfall threatening to drown the city. The answers often lurk in unlikely places and so he turns left instead of right, into the small stone church across from the asylum.

Cavelike, the cool darkness inside of the church is like being inside a mind, and that is where the Doctor wants to be, inside Albert’s mind, inside the mysterious realm of his experience. He trails his fingers through the holy water in the cold marble font, then shakes the water from his hand and wipes it on his trousers.

Tsk-tsk.

Thick incense burns on the altar as he reads the tiles covering the walls:
Merci à Saint Jacques, merci à Jésus, merci à Dieu
. Placing his hand on each cool tile, he wishes fleetingly he were a man of the church and not a man of medicine so that the answer to Albert would simply be God.

“
Tsk-tsk
. You are disturbing our prayers,” a familiar voice says, and there is the witchy woman, emerging from the shadows.

“There is no one else in here.”

“Do you think I pray only for myself?” The witchy woman is less witchy in the shadow of the prayer candles’ guttering flames. In the near dark, there is evidence of a more malleable creature, soft and fluid as the wax dripping from the candles. The Doctor thinks he almost detects sweetness. Almost.

“Is this where I put money for a candle?” he asks her.

She nods suspiciously as his coins clink against the other coins already in the box and he retrieves a thin white stick of tallow.

“All right, then,” she says.

He lights the candle with another candle already lit, then waits for the wax to pool, tilting it so the wax falls into the empty metal cup in the candelabra. He fixes his candle there and holds it steady while the blinking eyes of the woman float in the dark, watching him.

“Amen,” she says.

“For a friend,” he says. He has never lit a candle in a church in his life, but the answers often lurk in unlikely places.

“We all need the light of God. No need to run from it. We can all use more light.” She holds out her hand.

He puts a few coins in her palm, but when he turns to go, she follows him down the aisle.

“You can’t hide,” she says. “There is no fleeing . . .”

“I have no more change,” he says, putting his hand in his pocket to show how empty it is.

“We can all say no,” she says. “It means nothing. No, no, no.”

When he pushes the door open to go, a river runs over the cobblestones. The rain pummels him as he tries to step outside.

“You will be washed away if you go out there,” she says. There is a question underneath her words:
Will you stay?

He takes a seat in a pew near the back and the woman takes a seat a few rows away.

“There is no escape,” she says. “Why do you flee?”

“I’m not fleeing,” he says. “I’m right here.” He lays an arm across the cool wood of the pew, resting his head for a moment there, and closes his eyes. Behind his eyelids, the word remains:
flee
. One usually flees
from
something, but might one also, contemporaneously, flee
toward
something? Astonishment?
Flee
, the word, echoes in the cave of his own mind: flight from and toward.
Fugue
means flight. Originally from the Latin
fuga
,
an odd combination of
fugere,
to flee, and
fugare
, to chase. Or maybe not so odd.
Fugueur
.