The Man Who Walked Away A Novel

by Maud Casey

  The Doctor may not agree with everything the great doctor is up to, but he has inspired him to deeper thinking about the intimate lives that exist underneath the great doctor’s diagnosis. The intimate, invisible life in addition to the invisible lesion. This is why the Doctor is here. The great doctor has never suggested anything he has not also attempted to demonstrate, so let him make his case.

  The great doctor’s monkey squeals again. “That poor beast, locked up somewhere,” says the high forehead sitting in front of the Doctor, a man whose back has been suffering from the Doctor’s own eager knees.

  Why is the great doctor not here already, making his case?

  The monkey squeals again and, as if it is his cue, in walks the man himself, the great doctor.

  “There he is,” Monsieur Eager announces, as though no one else can see. Everyone leans forward, an amphitheater of knees digging into an amphitheater of backs.

  There he is, the humble son of a wagon maker, now the great doctor. The man who has been endlessly discussed and dissected, who has refashioned an ancient word until it is as exquisite and ornate as one of his father’s decorated carriages.

  He is rotund. Stumpy. Tiny, really. The cast of the woman’s body is enormous next to him. It could swallow him whole. So this is all, thinks the Doctor. Even as he feels a small zing of satisfaction, he is disappointed.

  But then the great doctor speaks.

  “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting long.” His voice is a sturdy house into which he invites each one of them. Come in. Wander around. Take a look in my secret closets.

  The audience laughs nervously, as though it is they who have kept him waiting.

  “What, then, is hysteria? What is its nature? We know nothing about its nature. Nor about the lesions that produce it. We know it only through its manifestations. Be forewarned: I will not lead you down a well-delineated path.”

  Dense and muscular, each word adds a centimeter to his height and removes one from his sizable girth. A grandeur hovers around him, a gentle Parisian mist. The Doctor feels the dewy wonder of it on his face; it washes away the smirks from the faces of any detractors.

  “I have not pushed aside the thorny bushes that make this journey difficult,” the great doctor says. “This lecture is for the benefit of those among you who have not already completed your medical training. I have no embarrassment in finding my way in front of the rest of you.”

  “He has the head of Napoleon,” Monsieur Eager whispers to his neighbor.

  The comparison is apt but the Doctor knows, even as the spell is being cast, the close resemblance, that fierce elegance, is carefully cultivated.

  “The girl we will examine today suffers from intermittent cramps, trembling, convulsive attacks, and the paralysis of her right leg,” the great doctor says. “For the past several days we have waited and watched. We have not interfered.”

  “She is very fond of ether, I hear,” Monsieur Eager whispers.

  “Is she clairvoyant?” whispers his companion with his aquiline nose. “I’ve heard some of them are clairvoyant.”

  Shhh.

  “You cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it,” the great doctor says, gesturing to a tall, skinny man hovering in the corner, a pair of spectacles perched precariously on the top of his pointy head.

  The tall, skinny man, in the midst of unfolding a tripod, appears to have been magically transported from the grand photography annex the Doctor has read about—a glass-walled studio, dark and light laboratories, a wealth of equipment. Platforms, beds, screens, backdrops in all colors, headrests that serve as vises for those patients who can’t hold still to allow a photographer to capture a close-up of ears, eyes, nose. There are rumored to be gallows from which to suspend those patients too distressed to hold themselves upright, which fold up tidily along the wall of the studio at the end of the day.

  “I am nothing more than a photographer,” says the great doctor, “inscribing what I see.”

  But the great doctor is nothing like this photographer. Everyone in the amphitheater can see that. Beneath the camera’s black tenting, the photographer’s thin legs are indistinguishable from the thin legs of the tripod; from time to time mistaken for the spindly wooden legs of an inanimate object—a piano, for example. His shins are bruised because just the other night, in a restaurant where he’d gone with his wife, someone distractedly and repeatedly swung a foot under a table, mistaking his legs for those of a chair.

  “Why you say nothing,” his wife said when he showed his bruised shins to her later, “is the bigger question.”

  The bigger question is easily answered. The photographer prides himself on his talent for fading into the background. It is an art, blending into a room until he is a small flake of paint on the wall, a splinter of wood in the floor, a dust mote in the air. The great doctor wants him to find proof of what he is looking for but the photographer isn’t after proof, he is after the question of the spirit enacted in the anatomy, that smoky ghost caught just for a moment in flesh and bone. Before the photographer became a photographer, he had gone to medical school. He had been on his way to becoming a man of science, though, contrary to what his teachers thought, he did not take up photography because of his mediocre grades in anatomy or because he couldn’t stomach the sight of blood. He keeps it to himself but what he truly believes is that there is something else to taking pictures beyond recording the facts. Every photograph captures an irretrievable moment. Photography’s precision, its science, is what has made it so appealing to men of medicine. Still, in every photograph there is also the mystery of a life moving through time; in every face the photographer captures on a photographic plate, a flicker of something. A life force? A spirit? He doesn’t know, but in the corner of an eye, in the twist of a mouth, in the blur of a head turning or an arm flailing, there is something that cannot be contained. This is what photography can do. This is what photography is meant to do. It eludes him, as art should.

  There is something in the photographer’s face when the great doctor says, I am nothing more than a photographer, that catches the Doctor’s attention, a look that says back, If only you were a photographer. The Doctor recalls a recent article accompanied by the photographer’s portraits of the great doctor’s women. There was a portrait of a young woman, writhing so parts of her were blurred yet she still looked directly at the camera. The Doctor found himself looking into those eyes, far more composed than her body. The difficulty of portraying the expressions of the passions in the face and body. This is how the great painter Charles Le Brun had described the classic problem in painting. But there, in the photograph of the young girl, the photographer had captured the movement of the soul on the body. This tall, skinny fellow lurking in the corner, looking as though he might at any moment become entangled in his equipment, was the man who had done that. He had made the girl’s illness visible.

  The photographer may pride himself on his ability to disappear but his equipment is very much in evidence. There is a great deal of clunk-clunking as he unwraps another plate from its cotton swathing. The great doctor clears his throat in his direction. From the scowl on his face, it is clear this is not the first time he has cleared his throat in the photographer’s direction. The Doctor hears the message too: Too much clunk-clunking and you will be banished.

  “The reason we have not interfered for these past few days,” the great doctor is saying in that sturdy house of a voice, “is that with cases such as this, it is possible to provoke a second attack. Why provoke such an attack? you might ask. In order to observe whether a symptom that at first seems fixed—cramping, trembling, paralysis—might be changed. Hysteria has its laws. I am merely here to observe them.” He looks from eager face to eager face to eager face, and anyone who wasn’t a believer is now.

  As much as he hates to admit it, the Doctor feels his sharp edges dissolving, becoming part of the great body of eagerness as it waits for whatever the great doctor is about to
offer. Then, as if Monsieur Eager has conjured the dust from the tattered gothic tapestries in the great doctor’s house, there is a tickle in the Doctor’s nose. What can he do? There is nothing to stop it: He sneezes violently.

  Shhh! The entire amphitheater turns on him.

  The great doctor scans the crowd slowly, an owl—has his head turned all the way around? The Doctor is sure it has. His father’s watch tick-tocks in his pocket so loudly that everyone in the amphitheater must hear it ticking off the excruciating seconds as the great doctor locates—hoo-hoo!—his face in the crowd. When he has, he stops and simply looks. And looks. And looks. A photographer after all, inscribing what he sees.

  What does he see?

  “I’m very . . . sorry,” the Doctor stammers into the silence. Monsieur Eager’s gloat penetrates the back of his head. It is so much worse than his bony knees. See? it says. You never belonged here.

  Why should he be sorry? Why should he be afraid? Has he come all this way to perch on a sliver of hard bench, jabbed by pointy knees and suffocated by hot, aristocratic bodies, in order to be afraid? He has never been afraid. He has never had the time. His parents never dreamed he would become a doctor. After they died, there were the long nights in the Toulouse railway station as a bookkeeper’s clerk and then there were the longer days as a deliveryman—shouldering heavy chandeliers through streets jammed with kitchen maids carrying baskets, and merchants with their unwieldy carts—while he went to school at night. Finally, he hopped aboard the Niger to become a cargo clerk on the Bordeaux-Senegal run. It was the ship’s doctor who saw in him what he couldn’t yet see in himself: the Doctor. He hadn’t received that sort of attention since his parents were alive, attention that said decisively, “You look tired. You must go to bed.” Or “Come eat. It’s dinnertime.” The ship’s doctor was so certain: You have a gift, and so he quickly returned home and took a job as an underlibrarian for the medical faculty while completing his baccalaureate in the sciences. He has worked at the asylum for nearly a year, and only now is he anywhere near becoming the Doctor the ship’s doctor predicted he might be.

  He will not be afraid. And he will definitely not be sorry. He is not sorry at all. He stares right back. Here I am. I am what you see. (What did he see?) Another tremendous clearing of the great doctor’s throat—You too (hoo-hoo) will be banished—and then, as if the Doctor and his sneeze did not exist at all, he turns away.

  “Is there something immoral about provoking such an attack?” he asks the crowd. There is general nodding and muttering and a wrinkling of brows.

  “After I observed many patients suffering from the same symptoms, I thought, how can it be that such events are not described in the textbooks? Then one day I was struck with a sort of intuition about them: They are all the same. What you are about to see is not a series of individual small attacks, but a single event comprised of phases that will unfold sequentially. I will identify each phase, provoked by applying pressure to the hysterogenic points, as it occurs.”

  An attendant hairy as a bear enters the amphitheater, wheeling a girl on a stretcher through the thin layer of sawdust. She is small and translucent, weak and fading. She seems, in fact, to be shrinking. But when she arrives in the center, she sits up. The air, hot and heavy and thick before, shimmers; it is electric. Was it the Doctor’s imagination, or has the entire audience leaned forward at once? And then he is leaning forward. The girl is a magnet and all of them little pieces of metal drawn up.

  “And now,” the great doctor says, “I will give you firsthand experience of this pain.”

  The girl slides off the stretcher, landing firmly on her feet. She pulls a plump hand through her braids to free her thick tresses. She shakes the waves out of her hair as if she is shaking everyone out of the room. She caresses her hair, fingers her thin nightgown. All these women: The great doctor has cultivated a veritable stable. There has been talk.

  “The neurologic tree has many branches,” the great doctor says, “and each one bears a different fruit. You may not be able to see the tremor from where you sit, but it is there.”

  “One thinks,” says the girl, looking in the great doctor’s direction though he does not look back, “one has dreamed something but it wasn’t a dream at all.”

  The great doctor turns away from her, looking out at the crowd, but it is as though he were alone in his grand home with its dark alcoves trying to remember where he misplaced one of his thirteenth century prayer stools. Finally he turns back to her. She is small but fierce. They are well matched. For a moment it looks as though they might wrestle.

  The photographer waits to press the stereoscopic bulb. Photography requires exquisite patience. The heavy wet collodion plates take time to prepare. Only after the photographer has situated the plate; only after he has framed the shot; only after he has looked again; only after he has focused, and focused again; only after he has adjusted the light and then adjusted it again; only then does he squeeze the bulb.

  “Look at that profile,” Monsieur Eager says. “That spectacular nose.”

  A spectacular nose? As if a nose were any indication of greatness, the Doctor thinks, still furious at his own for betraying him. Still, there it is, that spectacular nose. It is as though the great doctor has had a hand in its shaping, in the same way the Doctor has often felt that his own crowded features are some fault of his own character. As much as he wants the photographer to drop one of those large glass plates on the great doctor’s Napoleonic head, it is undeniable. The spell has been cast. What will he do next? There is a reason the great doctor is the great doctor.

  This time the monkey’s squeal is followed by a resounding thump, as though he is hurling himself against one of the amphitheater’s stout oak doors.

  “What do you know?” the girl asks.

  In the girl’s round face there is heat and anger, and a question the Doctor can’t quite name. He is reminded of a demonstration he went to recently, given by the disciple of a man who was famous for his experiments on the facial muscles of rabbits. That night, he used a volta-faradaic apparatus to charge the skin of a woman with electricity. “A veritable living anatomy,” the scientist had said, isolating the muscles in the woman’s face: there, the muscle for bliss; there, the muscle for fear; there, the muscle for sadness. And then there were the moments in between the grand emotions: between bliss and fear, fear and sadness. It was that in-between look on the woman’s face that fascinated the Doctor. There it is—that strange, searching look—on the fierce girl’s face too.

  Clunk go the photographer’s plates as he changes one for the other, and then another flash of light illuminates the amphitheater: the mysterious question on the girl’s face inscribed for eternity.

  “Her world is without color,” the great doctor says, nodding to the hairy-bear attendant, who brings out a wooden chair and presses the girl down into it. “But hysteria has the regularity of a mechanism. There is a choreography, like a dance.”

  The great doctor holds a hand up to the rustling audience—silence—nodding to the hairy bear. The only noise is the thump of the monkey hurling itself against the door.

  If the Doctor squints, the girl’s face is the face of any girl in the street, a sweet, pretty face that would make him look again. The question written there is not familiar, but it too would make him look twice. It reminds him of Marian when she was carried into the asylum after she woke to discover herself paralyzed from the waist down. She clutched her throat and described a great ball rising in it, choking her, but as he began to ask her even the simplest questions—How are you feeling now? May I plump your pillow? Would you like a glass of water?—her hands fell to her lap. As though he were holding up a mirror and in her reflection she saw for the first time her own exhaustion. The great ball in her throat subsided and she began to breathe normally again. She looked at him in the same way the fierce girl looks at the great doctor now. It isn’t a question after all but a look of gratitude that might be mistaken for love.

/>   “The first hysterogenic point,” the great doctor says, nodding to the hairy bear, who places his hand under the girl’s left breast. When the great doctor nods, the hairy bear presses.

  The girl rises from the chair, twisting in one direction, wrapping both arms around one side of her waist; abruptly, she swings herself in the other direction, wrapping her arms around the other side of her waist. Then her muscles go limp and she falls to the floor, writhing in the sawdust shavings.

  “First, the epileptoid phase marked by contractures and spasms.”

  The amphitheater is illuminated by another flash. The photographer exists only for the photographs themselves, the pictures that arrive years later, like a star’s light; like a star’s light, dark around the edges, its miraculous image shining in the center. Here, the squirming figure—had she held still, mid-squirm, for one, two, three seconds?—captured.

  As quickly as she fell to the floor, the girl freezes; her legs go stiff and her mouth opens, sawdust shavings speckling her hair. Flash: an image of her stiff arms by her side, her entire body gone rigid.

  A few eager men clap politely.

  Shhh! say the same men who knew about the monkey, those who want everyone to know they know better.

  “Tonic immobility. And now, the second hysterogenic point,” the great doctor says. The hairy bear bends over, pressing the girl just below her ribs.

  “Remember,” the great doctor says, “we are not dealing here with simulation.”

  The girl has rolled onto her stomach, reaching behind her for her feet. Her face, a contorted mask that is no longer gratitude or love. The in-between, this is where the Doctor would like to pause; this is what he is interested in. He would like to ask the girl why she is wearing that contorted mask and what it means but stillness is not the point here. The girl has taken hold of her ankles; pulling, she becomes a bow, rocking. Then, just as quickly, the rocking stops.