The Man Who Walked Away A Novel (7 page)

The Doctor thinks of Marian in the courtyard the other day, turning her attention to the single red flower triumphantly blooming among the green shoots in the asylum flower garden. The sun isn’t the only thing that speaks to her: there are the trees, the benches, the figures in the stained glass, the Virgin Mary who, it turns out, is very concerned the patients are not being fed properly, and the red flower too. The red flower frustrates her because it speaks a foreign language she has not yet learned. If she could only learn it, she said, and he’d had to call one of the attendants over to prevent her from banging her head against the wall in an effort to shake the language loose. The beautiful red flower isn’t beautiful to her; it is a red knot to be undone.

“I’m not sure what we have here,” the great doctor says, aiming the same stern owly look at the girl that he had aimed at the photographer and then at the Doctor.
You will be banished
. Still, for a moment the Doctor thinks he may have lost control; the girl may no longer be willing.

“You don’t want any more?” she shouts.

Flash: an image of her pausing as she begins to pull something from her open mouth, from somewhere deep in her throat. The Doctor believes her entirely capable of conjuring something; he is only waiting to see what that something will turn out to be.

“Darling,” the great doctor says, as if she is his wife with whom he is having a quarrel.

The great doctor nods to the hairy bear who steps forward and puts his hand on the right side of the girl’s waist and presses.

“Mother! I am frightened.” The fierceness gone; she is just someone’s lost daughter.

“Note the emotional outburst,” says the great doctor.

“Oh, Mother!” the girl cries.

“Not quite regular as a mechanism today,” the aristocratic nose in front of the Doctor whispers to the high forehead.

“The belt,” the great doctor says to the hairy bear, who leaves the amphitheater. To the audience he says, “This is no ordinary pain.”

It is hard to tell from this distance, but the Doctor believes he sees a smile pass over the girl’s face. Certainly the girl’s pain is anything but ordinary. There is that great distance between where she began and where she has arrived; underneath the surface pattern that allows for the great doctor’s diagnosis, the messier life.

“The ovary compressor,” the great doctor announces when the hairy bear returns with a device comprised of a leather strap and a screw. “It may be directed at a particular hysterogenic point, then loosened or tightened as needed.” The hairy bear secures the belt around the girl’s slender hips, pulling it tight, turning the screw to secure it, and slowly, very slowly, she begins to list from side to side, a metronome:
tock, tock, tock
. Slower and slower.
Tock. Tock. Tock.

“She may enter the withdrawal phase now. This phase can last for hours. Even days. The belt will give her a bit of peace.”

The girl’s movement has become so slow it is almost imperceptible.

“But she can’t wear it forever,” the great doctor says.

The hairy bear hoists her up on the stretcher, where she goes completely still. Her light has gone out. Once again, she appears to be sleeping; once again, she appears to be shrinking.

The monkey thumps against the door.

“The regularity of a mechanism,” the great doctor says.
The monkey or the girl?
the Doctor wants to ask.

“He is amazing,” Monsieur Eager whispers.

As much as he wishes for the girl to rise from the stretcher, as much as he is puzzled by what has just happened, the Doctor can’t deny it.

“Oh, Mother,” the girl says again, lifting her head, then laying it down again.

Flash: an image of the girl collapsed, arms hanging by her side, her eyes looking back over her shoulder. Then the hairy bear wheels her out of the amphitheater, the girl’s look still a dare:
Take a photograph. Here I am.

The keening that comes next fills the amphitheater. It might be a tree falling; it has that momentum, the sense of anticipation in advance of something inevitable and loud. It is the girl, the Doctor thinks. It is the sound of her very soul. The great doctor will be proven wrong—the soul does not have the regularity of a mechanism, it is not so easily described after all. Even as he thinks this, he realizes it is a childish wish.

“That,” says the great doctor, “is the monkey. He does that every time.”

But the Doctor will remember it as the sound of the girl. On his way home, as the train pulls in and out of stations with its giant’s puff and
shhh
, its mighty exhalation of warm, wet steam rushing through him like breath, the squealing of its brakes will echo that keening.

Later still, when he has arrived home, restlessness will drive him down to the brothels by the river, to the woman with the pretty tousled hair. The tick of his father’s watch will disappear as the woman’s dress swishes to the floor. “That does it,” he will hear a man wandering the docks say, followed by the smash of a glass bottle. “It would be tragic if it weren’t so funny,” the man’s companion will say. The woman will use her pinkie to trace a circle on the back of the Doctor’s thigh. “There,” she will say, and trace another circle. “And there.”
There, there
, as if he were her child.

In the silence that follows, he will hear the girl:
Mother, I am frightened
.

Chapter 4

The path is rough-hewn, a suggestion:
Follow me!
Stray tree branches reach across; the blackberry bushes grow thick on either side; and the vast webs spun by resilient spiders are invisible except just after it rains when drops of water dotting the webs glitter with sunlight. Still, while the Doctor rides the train back from the City of Lights to the Port of the Moon, the Director prepares to lead the patients down this path from the asylum to the creek in order to contemplate nature. Today, there is no sun. There is no sun and so Marian, who would not be willing to risk the loss of yet another organ to her great glowing enemy, is, to everyone’s relief, very willing. The Director will lead the way as he always does, snapping off the stray branches, clearing the sticky strands of spiderweb with whatever garden tool he happens to be carrying.

The walk to the creek is always an adventure, but the Director feels his efforts are worthwhile. It is worth the scratches from stray branches to have glimpsed a fox slipping through the woods, hiding itself in a blackberry bush to boldly watch the group of humans make their way. It is worth Rachel’s complaints about her muddied clothes to discover a bird’s wing in the middle of the path in the midst of loose feathers, an idea of a bird. Much to Nurse Anne’s dismay, the Director allowed Elizabeth, who likes a project, to carry the wing and the feathers back to the asylum on that particular trip. She likes a project but has never finished a single one; she has been fiddling with the wing and the feathers ever since.

More than anything, the Director likes to remind them, these trips are occasions for beauty. “The Koine Greek word for
beauty
contained the word for
hour
,” the Director says, and most in the assembled group don’t remember this isn’t the first time he’s enlightened them with this fact. Each time, a revelation. They are so often off in other worlds, complex systems of their own making. The first time he explained that beauty means
being of one’s hour
, the bells of St. Eloi rang as if on cue and he watched their faces as the information became part of the larger scheme of signs and symbols. The constellations in each patient’s mysterious night sky made it necessary for one of the attendants to accompany them—last night Marian had to be slung over Claude’s shoulder and carried to her room because her left side went numb and she could not get up from the dinner table; the day before yesterday, Samuel required both Claude, whose enormous potato-shaped body contains surprisingly agile strength, and his son Henri, a man of less bulk but greater speed, to restrain him. But today he announced he wants to go outside. The Director knows that more often than not the complex systems win, and so he has asked Henri to accompany them on their walk to the creek.

The veteran’s complex system is winning now, just when the Director thinks he has successfully gathered everyone to head out the door. “Fuck!” the veteran shouts again.

“His nerves,” Walter says, nodding sympathetically. His own nerves, and the nerves of other morally deprived men such as himself, the veteran, for instance, often vibrated; sometimes they became blackened from too much vibrating and surely the others could smell the burning? But he has other concerns, such as distinguishing between the fleetingly improvised concoctions and those among them who are real.

“It’s not the veteran’s nerves I mind,” Nurse Anne says. She nods to Claude, who takes the veteran’s arm and pulls him close to his bulk.

The veteran prefers
the veteran
to his name, which no one is sure he remembers after watching two of his brothers die on the battlefield where he continued to fight only to return home to find his mother had died waiting for her sons to return home. Unless he tells people he is a veteran, who will care, who will even
know
, about the only thing he has done of which he is proud? Even if that thing meant leaving one of his brothers to die alone because he did not want to die too because he could not watch one more brother die. One was enough; one was more than he could bear, and why was he allowed to bear it? He has nightmares that cause him to twitch and fill him with a constant, relentless rage from which there is no relief, which is what he deserves, and why wouldn’t his nerves be angry too? The name he insists on is reminder and punishment.

“Fucking fuck!”

The Director looks at Nurse Anne.
Let him be
, he tries to say with his look,
let him come outside and experience the beauty of his hour
, but she is stricter than the Director and doesn’t believe the beauty of someone’s hour is more important than learning self-control. “This cannot continue,” she says. “Besides, he claims to have told Rachel he was going to shoot her in the face.”

“Rachel doesn’t mind,” says Marian, peering suspiciously up at the cloudy sky. The sun often takes her by surprise.

She is right. Rachel has been occupied with the problem of her mother’s hands. “Come, darling,” Henri says to her. Darling. It’s what the creature calls her too—the creature she calls the
frog
. That’s as close as she can get to naming the thing inside of her. “Stay, darling,” it whispers, wanting her to stay here, to sit at the piano and solve the problem of her mother’s hands, to ignore Henri. Whose side is he on as he takes her away from the beloved piano and moves her forward so there is room for Samuel to stand closer to the group? She swats him away with her hand, and when she does she sees her mother’s hands but they weren’t moving; they were motionless in her lap as they sat in the matinee of
The Flying Dutchman
. They didn’t move at all, even when Senna fell in love with the portrait of the phantom captain whose plight it was to sail around the world until he found a love so absolute it would break the curse. Like Senna, Rachel had fallen for the phantom captain too that day. She was always falling for the ghost. Had it started then or long before—the ghost inside of her, taking shape? If only her mother had lifted her hands from her lap, reached over, and—what? Rachel imagines sticking a fork in one of her mother’s hands. They would not be so still then. The music filled Rachel that afternoon until she wanted to bite something. She wills her own hands to move now, but they are still too and her mother goes blurry. That other life seems like a dream. It might very well have been.

Like the dream of Claude using his bulk to nudge the veteran down the hall.

“I hate shit-licking nature,” the veteran says, his mouth twitching.

“Finally,” Nurse Anne whispers to the Director. “Some relief from all that
fucking
. Go now, while you can.”

And off they go, marching down the birch-lined path: the Director leading the way, bearing his trowel like a scepter; then Marian, her face hidden by a hat and veil; then Walter, a head shorter than Marian, his arm looped through hers, to console her, he claims, though everyone knows it is she who consoles him; then Elizabeth, quick green eyes fierce and vigilant, scanning the world for a miracle; then Rachel, her hands smoothing her stomach to settle the impatient frog; and finally Samuel, his knobby frame drowning in the enormous coat he wears no matter the weather, frightened eyes drowning in his face, accompanied by Henri, a hand hovering at Samuel’s back. The group makes its way down the hill to the break in the bushes that marks the beginning of the path where, with the grand gesture of a discoverer laying claim, the Director swipes away a magnificent spiderweb with his trowel.

Samuel yelps—the poor spiders, ruined. They will have to start over from nothing.

“Of course, this is simply intuition and conjecture,” Walter is saying to Marian as he knees a waist-high fern out of the way in order to sidle up to her.