The Man Who Walked Away A Novel (30 page)

But as often as he implored them to, they would not oblige.

There is only silence now. The door no longer bangs open and shut, open and shut, and the shouting has stopped, but Albert has lost his place in time. It doesn’t care for him, a citizen of nowhere, of nothing. He is a shadow.
Shadow ring, shadow ring.
It is all shadow.

“Albert?” A voice begins to take shape in the darkness. “Albert?”

The sheet he has used to fasten his arm to the leg of the bed still holds.

“Albert, what have you done?” Albert inhales the Doctor’s warm breath as he sighs. “Oh, Albert,” bending town to untie his arm, his one swan wing.

“You are still here,” the Doctor whispers.

For a moment it seems possible that Albert never left. Perhaps when he reached the Pont de Pierre he didn’t cross it. Perhaps he didn’t walk into the countryside until he woke to discover himself standing in the river wishing to disappear. Maybe he turned back. Maybe he walked the winding streets back to the cottage and lifted his father’s body from the floor the way his father had lifted Albert’s body, bringing him back again and again and again and again. Maybe he carried his father’s body to his bed and laid him down as any grateful son would. This is the lost life he wishes for most of all, the one in which he never walked away.

Chapter 20

A fox scampers along the rough-hewn path to the creek, veering off into the blackberry bushes at the sound of a snapping twig; once it is quiet, the fox returns to the path, padding down to the creek to drink, its red-brown coat dappled by the light through the trees. It is unaware that it is of its hour or that up the hill, across from the small stone church, in the long shadow of the cathedral, the careful balance of the asylum had gone awry and is now being restored.

“We will get you a much better coat,” Henri says to Samuel, who is wrapped in a blanket. Claude used Samuel’s coat to stanch the veteran’s bleeding. “That coat was much too big anyway.”

The Director, having tended to the veteran’s wound, having given him a bromide, having asked Claude to put him to bed and watch over him, has shut himself in a linen closet to weep for his fellow veteran, who will recover from this wound, which was not grave, but who will never recover from the war. The Director takes this moment but then he will pull himself back together, in order to lead the patients to the creek for the quiet contemplation of nature and beauty, because that is still the point, isn’t it? Perhaps they will see the fox again, he thinks, but the fox is long gone.

Marian has become convinced that it is not Albert but the veteran who contains the thieving sun; she perches on her bench in the courtyard to see what the flowers might tell her. Walter stands nearby, having decided he doesn’t care if Marian is real or not. She is real enough.

“Your hovering exhausts me,” Marian says, grateful for the way he exhausts her. “Would you get me my hat?”

In the common room, Elizabeth has moved on to a different puzzle; the funicular in Lyon may have brought on the violence of the morning. The new puzzle is quite simple, a picture of people drinking in a café—how dangerous can it be? She will begin to put it together soon; for now, she is content to listen to Rachel, who, having announced that her frog is dying, is playing a piece from Chabrier’s Pièces Pittoresques, to bid it a bittersweet goodbye.

Soon the frog will be gone, Rachel thinks. “I am tired of this argument anyway,” she says. Nurse Anne, setting the table for breakfast, now lunch, may have been partly right after all—no one wants to argue with a frog. But what will be left when the frog leaves Rachel? What will be left when it dies? As Nurse Anne would also say, tomorrow will bring a new day. And so Rachel continued to play.

There is no argument in Albert’s room. There is only this: Albert lying on his bed and the Doctor sitting in the chair, which he has pulled up next to the bed in order to lay a hand on Albert’s shoulder. The only sound is the tick, tick, tick of the Doctor’s pocket watch, keeping track of the minutes, which seem beside the point, and so the Doctor slips the watch out of his pocket and puts it on the bedside table next to the water pitcher.

“My father only struck me once,” Albert says, sitting up.

“Shh, Albert. Lie back. You are safe now.”

“Because I wandered off. The next morning I pretended to be sleeping when he came into my room. I wanted him to touch my shoulder to wake me.”

“Albert.” Gently, the Doctor pushes him back.

“He took me down to the river to admire the gas lamps,” Albert continues. “‘Pay attention,’” he said, because I almost walked into a lamppost. I was still only half awake. He pinched my ear, not hard but firm, as my mother used to. He must have remembered it was something she used to do, because he said, ‘She only needed to look at me to untwist me.’”

It’s all any of us want
, the Doctor thinks.
Mother, I am frightened
. Untwisted and buckled.
You are better now.

“He started to tie me to make me stay, to keep me from going.”

“He wanted to keep his boy safe,” the Doctor says. He closes his eyes; there, the faint outline of a ship rocking on a turbulent sea. On the ship, a different boy dreams of safety.

“The night he died, I broke free, but it was too late.”

“Shh, Albert, shh.”

“I couldn’t stay. I left him there.”

The Doctor hadn’t looked back after he escaped the flapping unbuttoned cuffs of the incompetent country doctor. Not until he was in the Toulouse railway station, but even then he didn’t look back for long, because he was on a mission to—to what? He’s not even sure; it was so long ago. By the time he hopped on board the
Niger
, there were nights he thought he would hurl himself into the ocean, until the ship’s doctor told him what to do.

“Is Marian angry?” Albert says.

“No,” the Doctor says. “She was just frightened. Frightened as you were frightened. She’s not angry at you.”

Albert sits up. “But I came back,” he says, as if something has just occurred to him.

“Yes,” the Doctor says. “You were right here when I came in.”

“No,” Albert says. “I came back. I came back, to lay my father in his bed after he died.”

“You should sleep now,” the Doctor says. He isn’t sure if Albert is telling the truth, but the truth seems as relevant right now as his ticking watch. Was Albert returning any more unlikely than walking seventy kilometers in a day? Was it any more unlikely than wandering from country to country? Why not help him tell his story? “You were a good son,” the Doctor says.

“Yes,” Albert says, lying back. “I wanted to be.” He closes his eyes.

The Doctor stays with Albert until he falls asleep, watching his face as he moves through the depths of his own mysterious solitude. What does he dream of? the Doctor wonders. Does he dream of walking? The tight, winding streets pressing in on him until he passed through the ancient gate of the city, the arch underneath the giant clock of the church of St. Eloi tolling all the hours—
les armes, les jours, les heures, l’orage, les fêtes, l’incendie.
Does he dream of walking through orchards with shapely pears that offered themselves to him; apple orchards with knotty branches hanging low; plum trees with fruit so vibrantly blue they are almost black? Does the rhythm of his walking fill his head underneath a sky so blue it swallowed the earth? In his dreams, does he taste the sweetness of the world? The Doctor hopes that in his dreams Albert is astonished by how much more to the world there is than the houses built to keep it out.

As Albert begins to snore, the Doctor’s own dream from the night before returns to him—he is in Paris, jostled by crowds of people as he wanders aimlessly down streets that smell of horses and sweat. Where is he going? He walks to the Place de la Concorde, enters a restaurant, and orders a beefsteak, the most delicious beefsteak. Afterward, he walks to the Seine, where somehow he knows he is meant to dive in, but it looks so cold. He does not want to, but the riverbanks are crowded with people whispering, waiting. Are they waiting for him? Through their murmuring runs the gurgle of the river. He is the spectacle they’ve come to see. And then, the whisper of a familiar voice. He turns, and there is Albert. “Wait,” the Doctor says, but his voice is a frustrating dream whisper. “What did you say?” He pushes through the crowd, but Albert is gone.

He puts a blanket over Albert, stepping lightly so as not to wake him as he gathers his father’s watch from the bedside table. There is something he needs to do. “I will be right back,” he tells Nurse Anne on his way out, and this time he means it.

Click-clickety-click, the Doctor pedals all the way down to the river, where the ships’ sails snap and the boats creak as the current pulls and pushes. Tick, tick, tick—was it now? Did his father die now? The Doctor can never go back; he isn’t sure if Albert did either. Did it matter? For once, the uncertainty doesn’t bother him. He is not a careless man. He rides beside the river’s current, his lungs scraped by the air. He imagines his elegant clavicle and scapula; his vertebrae—the subtle curve of the cervical, thoracic, and lumbar; the delicate birdlike bones of his feet—the tarsals and metatarsals; the coral bone of his femur, all of them snapping in two, then four, then eight and on and on, until he is a pile of tiny bones that one of the horses clip-clopping down the street crushes underneath its hooves, grinding him to dust.

But there again is Albert’s face, falling away from the world into sleep, into his own peculiar and wondrous mind. The thrillful boy the Doctor once was, his father on one side, his mother on the other, waiting eagerly for the great Léotard to come riding over the horizon; Albert has brought this boy back. The Doctor reaches into his pocket for the warm ticking smoothness. He wraps his hand around it—now, now, now? He will never know, but something has shifted. The restlessness that ached for the precision of the tumbler lock clicking into place has subsided; now he longs to be astonished like that thrillful boy, like Albert. Now? Now? When did his father die? It’s the wrong question altogether. As he pedals beside the river, the question blows away, and the Doctor throws the watch as hard and as far as he can. The current is swift and the watch is gone just as swiftly, riding along just underneath the surface of the current and then sinking to the bottom of the river, where it lodges in the silt and is buried.

Chapter 21

What will the world teach you that you cannot learn at home?

“More,” said the prince with one swan wing.

“More?” the king said. He was a generous man who wanted nothing more than the happiness of his boy. “If you want to see the world, you should see the world.”

Albert’s legs are strong and solid and his heart brims with the world. He will walk out into the hills and dales, and more hills and more dales. He will stuff his shoes with soft blue moss; he will eat berries; he will befriend the squirrels, who will share their nuts with him; he will find trees for shelter and secret animal dens.

Night had not yet sucked the shape out of the earth when, his heart poised for
more
, he set out. He followed his father’s voice into the courtyard, into the winding streets, and through the ancient gate of the city.
Walking over hill, over dale, the prince’s feet were cushioned by moss and leaves. What would happen now? What next? He can’t be sure, but his eyes are filled with something extraordinary, something he never knew before he became a citizen held by the days: the future.
He followed his father’s voice over the Pont de Pierre into the countryside, where the sky grew dark and darker, where there were stars and more stars as his beautiful feet kept a steady pace. In the woods, he became indistinguishable from the inky blackness, as though he were moving through his own mind. Now the rough bark of the tree he clings to helps him to distinguish his body from the dark.

He is not vanishing. He is not disappearing. He is not nothing. He is a man.

Beneath his feet, the gaseous ejections, the ancient magic of gas, are deep in the earth’s heart. The rumble through his feet and up his shins, expanding his bones, causing his blood to circulate astonishment, but even as his feet grow warm, he remains still. The fires blaze forever, but he no longer wishes for them to rise up and burn him to ash.

He will wait for dawn, here on the forest fringe. He will wait for the sun to burn a crisp edge along the horizon, the night rustling all around him—the snap of twigs, the swish of a tail through the forest. He will wait for night to turn into day.

When he left the city the wind blew across the river, stirring up frothy eddies. It pushed at his back; it pushed him along. On the other side of the bridge, he stopped to look back at the gas lamps illuminating the edges of the slate roofs; when he began to walk again the city disappeared behind him in glimpses over his shoulder—the size of his forearm, the size of his finger, the size of his fingernail, and then gone, never more his home than right then.

The darting bats keep him company now as he waits for dawn. That darting bat and that one and that one too. That one there is the Doctor watching over him.

In a nearby town, the night watchman walks up one hundred and fifty-three stairs to the top of a cathedral tower.
C’est le guet
, he cries. Every hour, to the north, to the south, to the east, and to the west:
Il a sonné l’heure.