The Man Who Walked Away A Novel
Page 8
“Do you think I worry about your lousy fiddle when the spirit moves me?” Beethoven once said to a violinist who complained of the difficulty of the final movement, the one he titled “The Difficult Decision.” Res severa est verum. True pleasure is serious business. Seneca’s words engraved in the Gewandhaus, the first concert hall in Leipzig. True pleasure has made the violinist’s fingers bleed; it has given him a permanent ache in his back; it has marked him with a raw spot under his chin that will never heal. What the violinist has learned is that true pleasure is always just up ahead on the horizon. He will never achieve his desire. The truth about true pleasure is that it’s not all that pleasurable. He doesn’t care. There is something in the effort—like the walking man, not quite there and yet still arriving—and so the violinist will keep trying.
Must it be? Must it be?
It must be!
Chapter 7
“But you were there,” Marian says, holding the metal watering can to her chest like a shield. “In the billiard room, with him. You have nothing to offer?”
It’s true, the veteran was there in the billiard room with the new patient, but now he is here, digging and digging and digging. He would prefer to be left alone where he is, in the present. He doesn’t like to live backward. He is trying to break that habit altogether; it leads him into deep holes, as deep as the one he is digging. He is a terrific digger. I am a terrific digger. He says this to himself, in his head, to fend off other thoughts. Digging is the task the Director has assigned him in this vegetable garden planted in the corner of the courtyard where it will get the proper sun, and digging is the task the veteran is keeping at the forefront of his mind. Since the Director entrusted him with the trowel, the veteran has not had one violent thought, not one moment of wanting to point the trowel at Marian, to poke at her watering can, to slip the trowel behind the watering can and cut her just a little because she will not stop asking him to think in the wrong direction. I am a terrific digger. I am a terrific digger. I am digging, I am digging. I am digging. Terrifically.
Thick clouds obliterate the sun, and Marian sheds her hat and veil. She feels not just optimistic but triumphant in the security of her organs, which, this morning at least, are all accounted for. “Mist,” Marian declares, “is my favorite weather.”
“Make sure to water evenly,” the Director calls over from where he squats to examine a carrot, sniffing the dirt-clumped roots. “Very good!” he calls to the veteran. “Very good.”
The veteran digs and digs and digs. It causes a steady ache in his arm that matches the one in his back as he bends. The aching helps him not to think about the fact that he is thinking. I am not thinking. I am digging. He is not thinking, for example: If I dug a hole deep enough I could crawl inside. I could tunnel into the earth. If only he could disappear along with the image that surges up in him when he is not not thinking hard enough of his brother’s chest rising and falling behind him on the battlefield as he ran until his brother’s chest didn’t rise and fall anymore, until his brother was swallowed by the earth. The veteran is not thinking, for example, Why am I here now and my brother is not? He is not thinking, My brother is in the ground where I am digging and digging. Three yellow birds hop along a nearby bench, chirping, Brother, brother, and he would like to shoot them with a gun that isn’t fucking imaginary.
“Step gently,” the Director cautions Marian as she weaves through the rows of kale and lettuce, dribbling water here and there as she approaches the veteran on his knees next to a row of triumphant beans. Even the beans are triumphant this morning!
The small vegetable garden has been a success this year. “Amazing,” the Director says, “that it dies and then comes alive again. Over and over.” He said this last year too, and last year it hadn’t come alive at all. But this year the garden pushes up out of the rich horse manure delivered by the owner of a nearby stable, a man whose brother was once a patient at the asylum.
“Well?” says Marian, standing next to the veteran. With her toe she nudges dirt back into the hole he has made.
“Marian,” the Director says sternly, “leave it alone.” Thinking the Director means him, Walter stops squeezing a not-quite-ripe tomato on the trellis.
The veteran looks up at Marian but—Brother, brother, chirp the demon birds done up in bright yellow as if nothing is wrong. He must return to his digging.
Marian is only trying to get the veteran to help the expectant shimmer, in the air since the new patient’s arrival last night, to take shape. Nurse Anne claims the man is sleeping, that he needs his rest, but this morning Marian saw it. A phantom figure out of the corner of her eye as she sat on her bench underneath the stained-glass Jesus glittering red, blue, and yellow. She has lived for too long surrounded by the unknown—room after room of it; there is no more room for it in her world. There is such a thing as too much unknown. That someone is here among them, unknown to her, makes her restless.
Since the arrival of the new patient, the universe has shifted slightly. The simple vase of the asylum is not so simple after all. The arrival of someone new, and suddenly everyone is sloshing over its edges.
Even his footfall is unfamiliar. It is not Walter’s shuffle, or Rachel’s skitter-step. It is certainly not the whoosh of Nurse Anne. This strange new footfall—deliberate, even—walking through the world of their familiar asylum is a reminder of another faraway life, a life whose loss at first was an unbearable sadness—how were they expected to survive such sadness?—but which they have not only managed but had succeeded in forgetting until the unfamiliar came along to remind them of that other world. The new patient’s footsteps cause an excruciating loneliness; as if someone is walking across a wound they forgot was ever there. Elizabeth swore she heard the new patient’s voice in the night though the common room separates the women’s ward from the men’s ward. Marian is so desperate for information she even let Elizabeth get to the end of her sentence before interrupting. “His voice is like your brother’s? How would any of us know your brother’s voice?”
In fact, Elizabeth’s brother has been dead for years but maybe this new patient is the divine miracle of him, maybe her brother has been returned to her the way her mother said would happen when they all went to heaven. But Elizabeth doesn’t want to wait that long. Besides, her mother was a wretched liar who left Elizabeth here all alone, who went to be with her brother in heaven, so who cares about her anyway? She plucks all the feathers she’s just finished pasting onto the wing the Director allowed her to bring back from the creek path; when she looks up, she is surrounded by forlorn feathers.
These feathers, in combination with the earlier event—Rachel taking off her shoes and promptly stepping on a bee—and the veteran understands he has willed some dark thing up from the bowels of the earth with all his digging. He realizes it is his fault and that the dark thing might claim him too. I am only digging, he thinks, so as not to think about the impending disaster he has surely caused.
Rachel went inside after she was stung by the bee and now Brahms’s—The buzz of the bee is in his name, darling, the frog explains—G minor rhapsody swirls out into the courtyard, the restless motion of the music making Marian dizzy, even dizzier than when the sun scrapes away her insides, even dizzier than the prospect of a stranger somewhere inside the asylum, plotting with the sun to steal her sense of triumph.
Watching Marian begin to sway, the veteran worries that the dark thing he has dug up from the earth has set its sights on her too, so he sits back on his heels and stops digging. This is his battle. No one else should be sacrificed. I am not digging. The demon birds have flown away—Brother, brother—with the sound of Samuel’s humming. I am not thinking of my brother’s rising and falling chest, and he resolves to be vigilant because the darkness is surely on its way to him. “He is a peculiar fellow,” he says to distract the darkness. I am not thinking of myself; I am answering Marian’s question. “The new man.”
“Peculiar?” Marian stops swaying.
“Shh,” Marian says. “She is probably looking in on the new man who does nothing but sleep. The veteran is going to finally tell us one thing about him.” She stamps her foot at the veteran’s vagueness. Peculiar how? Peculiar what? But he has gone silent again.
“I’d like to give her some of the vegetables to take home to where she lives,” Samuel says. He likes to imagine Nurse Anne, who frightens him with her stern floating. He likes to imagine her on her way home, floating sternly down the street, but that’s as far as he gets in his imaginings because he is afraid. He dares only look through the window, where he sees a blurry man and the blurry children he once heard Nurse Anne speak of to the Doctor when Samuel was standing so quietly nearby he feared it had finally come true, he had vanished from the earth. He imagines the blurry man and the blurry children wait for her with a pot of hot tea. “How nice!” he says, remembering the tea.
“What is nice?” Elizabeth says, looking up from where she squats over her wing, which is now a bone wishing for feathers.
“Nothing,” Marian says. “Go on,” she says to the veteran.
“He has an enormous fucking head,” the veteran says. It is not working. It doesn’t matter how much he digs. Brother, brother, oh, my brother.
The Director looks over.
“He does,” says the veteran.
“I cannot allow such language,” the Director says apologetically. Discipline is not his strong suit; it is not his suit at all. “Once more, and . . .”
“An enormous head and what else?” Marian asks. She doesn’t like the shape the shimmer is taking and now the sun is poking through the clouds. She retrieves her hat and veil from the bench, securing them once again to her head. She pulls the watering can close, exhausted by her own fear. “Never mind. I’m going inside.”
“He is a man like any other,” the veteran says, trying to concentrate on the hole. Come here, he thinks. I will lure the darkness back into the hole. He never wanted it to hurt anyone else. “What else do you need to know? He is a man like any other, thinking things he wishes he weren’t thinking.”
The whistle of a train in the distance collides with the notes of the piano; it whistles Marian right out of the courtyard. Samuel gathers his coat around him to keep from dissolving into the sound; it whistles through Elizabeth, who hears in it her brother’s whistle and so digs her hands more deeply into the earth to take hold of the sound and keep it near. It whistles through Walter, dislodging from the sedimentary layer of that faraway life a fragment he had been grateful to forget but there it is, a trip, touring with his wife who no longer visits. He stands at the edge of the garden, helpless and rearranged. Flung into the past, he is in a museum with his wife looking at a portrait she loves by a Dutch artist. They have searched the museum and they have found it at last. The woman in the painting looks suspiciously like Walter’s wife and he begins to wonder if this is why his wife likes the painting and then he begins to suspect, looking from the woman in the painting to his wife and then back again, that both of these women are seeing inside him to his confusion. Each set of eyes looks with such intensity, filling him with something like immortality, and yet he is confused. Is the painting more real than the woman standing beside him? And then his wife takes his hand and leads him back into the world and he cannot explain though the feeling lingers of a world wholly concocted; it has lingered ever since. And then the train is whistling his wife away, his wife who has not visited in a year, who told the Director she would not be returning, but how could that be true?
“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.