The Man Who Walked Away A Novel (12 page)

“I am ready to go inside,” he says.
Please
, he thinks,
someone say my name
.
Someone say my name before I am whistled away.

“A fine idea, Walter,” says the Director, in the nick of time.

“He has great enthusiasms,” says the veteran, meaning the peculiar man, though Marian has already gone inside. But it is not working. He cannot distract the darkness any longer. It wants what it wants.
Okay
, he thinks.
Fine, then.
Come in.

Chapter 8

Listen
.

Had he dreamed it? He has been in and out of dreams. It hovers in the background, a possibility rather than a sound, coming closer, on the verge of taking shape.

“Come here, darling.”

A woman’s voice drifts through the window.

“Darling, darling . . .” Pat-pat-pat, a child’s running footsteps. “And which of us . . . ?” Two men whisper, biding their time as they wait for the theater of night. The clip-clop, clip-clop of horses and the rattling of a fire brigade’s light carriage.

Every sound is a jewel to be weighed and considered. A pocket of space unfolded inside of Albert; a hole through which he fell and fell, but then he woke up in this bed,
his
bed, so he was told, and he is still here. He lies very still (that he is still!), listening.

A door opens somewhere down the hallway and heavy footsteps interrupt the plaintive notes of a piano.

“Such wit,” a man’s voice says.

“It is not my wit,” a woman replies. “It is a divine miracle . . .”

Hiccups become a wave of weeping.

The wave becomes part of the wave of voices breaking gently on this strange beach where Albert has washed ashore.

“How is your bee sting, Rachel? I’ve never been stung. What is it like to be stung? Does it hurt?”

“Must you?” says another woman’s voice.

The piano stops altogether. “I am so nearly finished. Why must you bother me for no reason at all?”

“But you are never finished. Where is that peculiar fellow?” says the voice of the man Albert met in the billiard room where the glittering Jesus walked, astonished but adored.

“Leave her,” says a different man’s voice.

“I mean you.
You
.”

“Would you like a puzzle of your own?” It is the same voice that took Albert by the hand when he arrived.
Nurse Anne
.
I am Nurse Anne
, it said, as if it were that simple to be someone. “Or would you like to go to your room?” Nurse Anne says to the other voices. That each voice has a room of its own!

“I am going outside.”

“I will come too.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“You are tired, Rachel,” says Nurse Anne.
You are tired
, she said when she took Albert’s arm, leading him from the billiard room.
The Doctor will see you after you’ve rested. This room
, she explained to Albert, leading him to the room where he lies now.
This room
is yours
. He could not believe it was his. How long has it been since he slept in a bed?
You are here. You’ve come home and you are here.
He could not believe he was here, and though he understands he is in the city he is forever leaving, the city that was once his home, this place is entirely unfamiliar.

The look on the lamplighter’s face as he let go of Albert’s arm at the iron gate returns to him, the pitying look of all of the other faces that could not bear him. He tries to forget as he has managed to forget everything else, but the shadow of guilt darkens his feelings; it will not leave him. Still, the lamplighter brought him here, to this bed, to this room, to this place where there are voices just down the hall. The shadow of guilt is long, but the sound of other voices helps to push it back.

“Listen, you,” says a voice inside the courtyard.

Bells and then shadow bells sing in Albert’s ear:
Does this ring a bell?
There is the sharp, quick sound of love:
Listen.

He listens. He hears nothing more, but the hovering thing comes closer. Even now that he is still, there is the feeling he had when he was on the road, of something up ahead, always up ahead, if he could only get there faster. But it was always disappearing. It is still disappearing. Just around the bend. Just out of reach.

When he stretches his arms, he nearly pushes the pitcher of water off the edge of the bedside table and he leaps to his feet to catch it.

The room is beautiful in its simplicity—a table and a bed and a chair, and laid over the chair a fresh set of trousers, a shirt, and a waistcoat. Underneath the chair: a new pair of shoes. Nurse Anne’s laugh, soft as the blue moss he puts in his shoes to keep his feet from blistering.
Here is your room
,
here you are, yes, right here
. Time does not hide here. It doesn’t vanish into the woods or splash into the deep black water or flitter away into the sky. It doesn’t duck behind this monument to such-and-such a general or that one. Time is all around him and he is moving through it
,
sliding through it and it through him as he slips cautiously out of bed. He will ask someone here,
What day
? And that will be the day he is in. He walks carefully, softly, fearing he might—why should he believe any differently?—suddenly wake up to find himself somewhere else altogether. Until that happens he will pretend he is a man like any other, waking up and dressing himself for the day. He picks up one of the shoes and brings it to his face, inhaling the rich smell of the oil; he rubs its soft leather against his cheek. The shoes are so new and clean he is afraid to put them on; instead he pads down the hall in his bare, callused feet, and then out to the courtyard, in search of the voice he heard earlier.

Ring
(
shadow ring
). Bells and then a shadow bell.

A woman wearing a hat and a veil is perched on a bench. Even folded into herself as she is, Albert can tell she is tall, with lovely curves. “The church bells, the asylum bells, more church bells, more asylum bells,” she is saying. “I am talking to you,” and she looks straight at Albert. “There’s no end to these bells.”

Inside her suspicious face is a younger face, sweet and inviting—a dimple revealing itself before a tightness around her eyes grabs it away. She reminds Albert of a frantic woman who grabbed his arm when he discovered himself admiring the tomb of a general at Andernach. “You were nearly crushed by an avalanche,” the woman said, offering him a glass of wine, which she drank herself. She wanted to lie down with him but then he walked from April into May and discovered himself in a hotel room in Le Buisson with an empty envelope from the French consul in his pocket.

“You,” the woman in front of him says, brushing strands of hair from her face and the face inside her face. “I won’t pretend to guess. You are Albert.”

The black sky has a mineral smell, threatening rain, and the wind rattles the branches of the birch trees and shivers the fir trees. The way this woman looks him over, that she knows his name—what might he have done while time was hiding? The problem with oblivion, Albert has learned, is that your life goes on without you, making a fool of you. “Have we met before?” Albert asks, though, really, he would rather not know.

“Come sit, silly man,” the woman says. “Nurse Anne told me who you are.” She pats the empty slab of bench next to her. “You have been sleeping forever. I was beginning to think you would never wake up.”

“I . . .” he begins. He wants to argue with her, but he is too tired. “For how long?”

“You slept through all of yesterday,” she says indignantly.

“Was I supposed to meet you?”

“No,” she says sternly. “I was just eager to make your acquaintance. Now, please, sit.”

There were rare moments on the road when Albert stood still for so long that deer gathered in the shadows around him, when he stood still for so long a wildflower bloomed in front of him. In those rare, still moments he dared to imagine he was not the only one; that there were others like him walking astonished too, just around the next corner. For this reason—because she is here instead of just up ahead—he does as he is told. He sits and he is grateful.

“There have been too many substitutions,” she says. “I am exhausted.”

“Yes.” He isn’t sure what she’s talking about, but it doesn’t matter; he knows what it is to be exhausted.

When he sits, the woman nods, and the tightness of her older face relaxes; there again is the face inside her face. Its dimple returns.

Ring
(
shadow ring
).

“Those bells will ring you into next year if you let them,” the woman says. “I’m not going anywhere. Sit with me a while longer.”

“I’d like that.” A drop of rain falls on Albert’s cheek; so clear and bright on his skin it hurts. “I don’t mind the rain.”

A man as old as the lamplighter but not so grizzled appears in the doorway and walks toward them cautiously, as if they were on fire. “There you are, Marian, my dearest one,” he says to the woman. He puts a tentative hand that smells like pudding on Albert’s shoulder. “I wanted to see for myself. It’s hard to tell. The concocted ones are very lifelike.”

“We’re enjoying the weather, Walter,” the woman says.

“It’s starting to rain,” Walter says.

“We
were
sitting peacefully.” She sighs, her eyes gray as the sky.

Those eyes are strangely familiar to Albert, like the clean, bright rain on his tongue—but then everything is strangely familiar. Once, when he stopped, he curled up in a hollow log rotting from the inside out. He had hoped to rot away too, but instead he woke to lightning splitting a tree nearby. Why had he not chosen to sleep near that
tree? He huddled with sheep and a lone cow in a pasture, hoping to wake up transformed into a sheep or a cow, as dumb as that. When he heard laughter he thought,
Maybe they are not so dumb, these sheep and this cow, maybe they’re laughing at me
, but it was a group of men and women huddled together farther down the field, whispering and laughing around a fire. His heart beat faster, hoping these were his people.

“Join us,” one of them said.

“We’ll teach you all the tricks,” another said.

“No one needs to learn
your
dirty tricks,” said a third.

These whispering, laughing men and women moved only when they had to, they told him, only to avoid arrest. They spoke to one another the same way this woman and Walter did, confident the other wouldn’t disappear; it wasn’t even a question, and Albert thought for a moment he could join their group. Then one of the men huddled around the fire touched Albert’s shoulder with a hand as cold as glass and Albert felt himself on the verge of shattering so he walked away into the night.

Though Walter’s hand is warm, his touch is like the rain, painful in its clarity. Still, Albert lets Walter squeeze his shoulder as he looks up at the dark sky, considering. “Masterful,” he says. “Masterful.”

“At what?” Albert asks. Though the man’s touch on his shoulder hurts, he doesn’t feel afraid. This seems less like a trick than like a secret language.

Walter squeezes Albert’s other arm—“Quite real, I believe”—then one leg. He is about to squeeze the other leg when an enormous potato-faced man appears and takes him gently by the arm.

“Walter,” the large man says.

“Yes, Claude?” Walter says to the man. “Not one of the real,” he whispers to Albert.

“It is nearly time to come to the table,” Claude says, giving Walter a stern look.

“May I squeeze you, darling Marian?” Walter asks when Claude and his stern look leave.

Marian laughs.

Ring
(
shadow ring
). “It is time for breakfast,” she says, pulling her shawl around her as she stands. It has started to rain in earnest.

Ring
(
shadow ring
).
Is it time for breakfast? Is it time for lunch
?
Is it time for dinner?
Entering into time is like squeezing through a too-small door. Still, Albert wants these to be his questions now.

“Just one arm?” Walter asks. “I’ll squeeze it quickly so you won’t even notice.”

“What is wrong with you?” Marian says.

“You are crueler than you know,” Walter says.

“I know precisely how cruel I am,” Marian says.

It is a murmur with no words at first, and then a windy whisper.
Il revient, il revient
. It calls Albert back—he returns, he returns—but he doesn’t want to return. He wants to follow Marian and Walter inside as they argue their way toward breakfast.