The Man Who Walked Away A Novel

by Maud Casey

  The Doctor swerves to avoid the end of a government official’s walking stick as he uses it to nudge a drunk man away before returning to his conversation. “They. Must. Do,” punctuating each word with a tap of his stick against the ground, “Something. About. That. Smell.”

  “Aren’t you they?” the drunk man says, suddenly suspiciously lucid, but the official chooses not to hear him.

  The Doctor hopes never to grow so deaf. Click-clickety-click—he delights in the rhythm of the bicycle propelling the great weight of his body. His teeth gritty with dust, there is still pleasure in his system, still system in his pleasure. Despite the sulfurous smell, people are sitting at the outside tables at the café on the corner of the square where just last night the Doctor found himself dining, tempted out of his usual routine of eating at home alone by the thought that sometimes the answer to complicated questions such as Albert’s are to be found in unlikely places. Sitting next to him was a man reading Journey to the Center of the Earth. How would someone who hadn’t read the book, as the Doctor has, have any idea that it involved, say, volcanic tubes? And yet, how alluring, how inviting, that title.

  A life exceeds our ability to describe it, he found himself thinking; names alone do not suffice. Hysteria, for example. The word should not be expected to carry the entire life of that fierce girl in the great doctor’s amphitheater on its back—how could it? A name becomes fixed, but the story underneath a name is ever shifting. And still, there is something in a name, akin to the title of a book.

  The dignified trees, the hornbeams that line the public square outside the Palace of Justice, shiver in the wind. Hornbeams. Before they were called hornbeams, they were only trees; before they were trees, before they were given a name, weren’t they still noble, still beautiful, as they sought the sun? They existed though they had no name, but then someone called them trees and their silhouettes grew sharper, and when someone called them hornbeams, their silhouettes grew sharper still. There are lavender bushes between each of the hornbeams; delicate and lovely even before they were called lavender, but then someone called them lavender and the soft outline of their purple spray became visible to men who cannot see things that have no name. For the same reason, the Doctor realizes, Albert’s condition needs a name.

  He is almost to the gentle arch of the asylum when the sky thickens with dark clouds and the rain starts to fall. People squeal and scatter, tenting newspapers over their heads, huddling under the umbrellas of those lucky enough to remember theirs during this season of unexpected showers. The Doctor gets off his bicycle, hopping from one cobblestone to the next to avoid the water rushing between them. All around him, rain batters the roofs, its roar an enormous waterfall threatening to drown the city. The answers often lurk in unlikely places and so he turns left instead of right, into the small stone church across from the asylum.

  Cavelike, the cool darkness inside of the church is like being inside a mind, and that is where the Doctor wants to be, inside Albert’s mind, inside the mysterious realm of his experience. He trails his fingers through the holy water in the cold marble font, then shakes the water from his hand and wipes it on his trousers.

  Tsk-tsk.

  Thick incense burns on the altar as he reads the tiles covering the walls: Merci à Saint Jacques, merci à Jésus, merci à Dieu. Placing his hand on each cool tile, he wishes fleetingly he were a man of the church and not a man of medicine so that the answer to Albert would simply be God.

  “Tsk-tsk. You are disturbing our prayers,” a familiar voice says, and there is the witchy woman, emerging from the shadows.

  “There is no one else in here.”

  “Do you think I pray only for myself?” The witchy woman is less witchy in the shadow of the prayer candles’ guttering flames. In the near dark, there is evidence of a more malleable creature, soft and fluid as the wax dripping from the candles. The Doctor thinks he almost detects sweetness. Almost.

  “Is this where I put money for a candle?” he asks her.

  She nods suspiciously as his coins clink against the other coins already in the box and he retrieves a thin white stick of tallow.

  “All right, then,” she says.

  He lights the candle with another candle already lit, then waits for the wax to pool, tilting it so the wax falls into the empty metal cup in the candelabra. He fixes his candle there and holds it steady while the blinking eyes of the woman float in the dark, watching him.

  “Amen,” she says.

  “For a friend,” he says. He has never lit a candle in a church in his life, but the answers often lurk in unlikely places.

  “We all need the light of God. No need to run from it. We can all use more light.” She holds out her hand.

  He puts a few coins in her palm, but when he turns to go, she follows him down the aisle.

  “You can’t hide,” she says. “There is no fleeing . . .”

  “I have no more change,” he says, putting his hand in his pocket to show how empty it is.

  “We can all say no,” she says. “It means nothing. No, no, no.”

  When he pushes the door open to go, a river runs over the cobblestones. The rain pummels him as he tries to step outside.

  “You will be washed away if you go out there,” she says. There is a question underneath her words: Will you stay?

  He takes a seat in a pew near the back and the woman takes a seat a few rows away.

  “There is no escape,” she says. “Why do you flee?”

  “I’m not fleeing,” he says. “I’m right here.” He lays an arm across the cool wood of the pew, resting his head for a moment there, and closes his eyes. Behind his eyelids, the word remains: flee. One usually flees from something, but might one also, contemporaneously, flee toward something? Astonishment? Flee, the word, echoes in the cave of his own mind: flight from and toward. Fugue means flight. Originally from the Latin fuga, an odd combination of fugere, to flee, and fugare, to chase. Or maybe not so odd. Fugueur.

  And? So? Albert might be the first of his kind, similar to a musical fugue, a contrapuntal counterpoint, a style rather than a fixed structure. Together, the sounds Albert’s story makes create a new sound. Different than the recent case of the great doctor’s, in a journal the Director showed him just yesterday. The case involved a deliveryman, a collector of bills for clients to whom he delivered bronze artworks and chandeliers. The Doctor could imagine the deliveryman, blinking and blinking as the hairy bear led him into the amphitheater, coaxed by the great doctor into telling his story, which began with a headache as he took the Rue Amelot to Avenue de Villiers, where he stopped in front of number 178 Avenue de Villiers, the address to which he was meant to make a delivery. But he did not go in. When he woke up, fourteen hours later, he had no memory of where he’d been or how he’d gotten there. He said, I discovered myself in the Place de la Concorde. I was famished. Though it appears the delicate, blinking man wandered only once and never again, the great doctor chalked it up to a male form of the Great Neurosis probably caused by some kind of physical trauma, favoring a neurological explanation. “There may be something to this,” the great doctor is quoted as saying. The Doctor heard a claim being staked in the this that was the question of Albert. “This is not so rare,” the great doctor went on to say in the article. It was clear to the Doctor then—the great doctor would take Albert’s questions, as he had taken everything else, for his own. Why do you walk? Why can’t you stop? But there is more yet to find out about this man who escapes and escapes and escapes without success from a world he cannot seem to bear. The Doctor would draw his own conclusions about his patient, and besides, Albert does not belong to the Doctor. What he is after is a new diagnosis, and diagnoses are stories, and this would be Albert’s.

  “It is still raining,” the woman says. Stay a little while longer in the dark with me.

  She is lonely, and though he is eager to return to Albert, he is no stranger to the desire for company and he stays a little while longer in the dark
with this woman who has helped him, though she will never know why.

  The answers often lurk in unlikely places.

  “I’ll stay a little while longer,” he says. “Thank you.”

  When the rain lets up, the Doctor crosses the slick street, rolling his bicycle carefully through the asylum arch. There is Marian, perched on her bench, and Walter next to her, leaning in to whisper conspiratorially, something the Doctor can’t quite hear about a soul murder. “I can’t pay attention to you,” Marian says, grabbing Walter’s hand as though they were on one more sinking ship. Rachel huddles around the Director, examining something. “These worms help the soil. They are not disgusting,” he says, putting a worm in Rachel’s outstretched palm as she winces but not without fascination. Claude and Henri keep an eye on the veteran as he digs and digs, while Samuel trembles in his giant coat, looking on. “I’m not thinking about him,” the veteran is saying, “I’m not thinking about that deserter, his running away, running away. Fuck those chirping birds . . .”

  “And all is right with the world,” Nurse Anne says from the doorway as the Doctor approaches.

  “Amen,” he says.

  “The veteran is making trouble,” Nurse Anne whispers so that anyone paying attention—the Director is not—might hear, “He should be separated. The Director is too kind.”

  But the Doctor isn’t paying attention either. He is anticipating Albert’s glistening, eager eyes. Here you are at last, they say. Yes, the Doctor thinks, here I am at last.

  In the common room, Elizabeth is bent over her puzzle. “It is the funicular that requires my attention,” she says to no one in particular.

  “Those people won’t wait for that funicular forever,” the Doctor says, trying for lightness. He only means to joke with her the way he sometimes does, but he hears the prickle in his voice at that eternally unfinished puzzle and Elizabeth’s insistence that it will be finished tomorrow. There is time, his father said. But impatience with waiting for tomorrow is causing him to itch. “They’ll grow tired and they’ll walk up the hill,” he says.

  As Elizabeth tucks a strand of hair behind her ear to reveal her pointed chin, he already regrets his words. Her thin, thin face and the dark circles under her quick eyes that never fade no matter how much she sleeps; that puzzle that is her whole world for days on end. How could he be so callous?

  “Well,” she says. “That would be terribly disappointing.”

  “And what is your smart answer for that?” Nurse Anne says, appearing out of nowhere, as she so often does. She is right to scold him.

  “It will be all right,” he says, putting a hand on Elizabeth’s back and looking apologetically at Nurse Anne, but his mind is already with Albert.

  The bells of St. Eloi ring, and then the asylum bell.

  How can the Doctor not believe that his own ringing will ring Albert open too?

  “How are you this morning?” he asks as he walks into Albert’s room to find him waiting eagerly, as he does each day. The Doctor sits in the extra chair he had Nurse Anne bring in so that he and Albert can sit together, eye to eye. “You look well.”

  He does look well. Each day, there have been visible improvements. Because of Nurse Anne’s ministrations, Albert’s calluses have healed; the raw blisters, gone. Each day, he follows the bells to breakfast, to exercises, to lunch, to dinner; he follows the Director down to the creek; he pulls enthusiastically at the lettuce in the garden and tosses the manure until he is covered in it. (The Director asked him yesterday to toss “less vigorously.”) The Doctor has never seen a patient who has followed the regimen of the bells quite so strictly or with such apparent pleasure.

  “There is pleasure in a schedule,” the Director has said. “It calms the mind.”

  Certainly this is true, but it seems to the Doctor that Albert is less calmed by the bells than he is delighted. “I am delighted to hear that,” Albert says when the Doctor reminds him of his age. And the bells? The bells delight him endlessly. He anticipates them, listening into the silence just before they ring.

  “I am very well,” Albert says. “I feel sure I will remember more today.”

  Here in the nearly, the almost of Albert’s story, the Doctor feels himself sharpen to a point. Fugueur. There is a name for this man, and very soon there will be a story. “Let’s look once again at the map. You’ve studied it, I know.” He traces Albert’s route with a finger. “These are the towns from which you’ve disappeared; these are the towns in which you’ve appeared. This is where you’ve been, and now we need to learn more about what happened in between”—he points at the dots on the map—“here and here. Here. Here. Why you began to walk. Why you stopped.”

  So far Albert’s memory has been like a photographic plate of which some parts are blurred. It is not one episode of oblivion that has invaded his life but a series of episodes. “Give it time,” the Director has said to the Doctor. “It takes time. He has walked across most of Europe. The man is exhausted. He is not a toy to be shaken upside down until his soul falls out of his ears.” He is right; still, Albert’s answers to the Doctor’s questions are pebbles at the bottom of a vast and mysterious ocean.

  “I will remember more tomorrow,” Albert says, and the next day there will be another pebble: I was thrown in jail for vagrancy. Or, I had a childhood friend named Baptiste. Or, I had headaches before I walked and sometimes I fell down. Or, when I stopped everything became dark, as though I was disappearing.

  At first Albert offers answers, and then slowly he grows sleepy, promising he will remember more tomorrow. Something is happening in his effort to tell, the Doctor is sure. He is trying to make a life out of words, but perhaps there is something the Doctor might do to hasten the process.

  According to a recent article, the great doctor has been hypnotizing his hysterics. He believes that the ability to be hypnotized in and of itself is a sign of hysteria, that it can be used to create an artificial world in which hysterical symptoms can be reproduced and transformed, but surely it is a more malleable treatment than that, a purely psychological means of finding hidden truth. It is this invisible truth, or near approximation of truth, that intrigues the Doctor, that makes him think another trip to the amphitheater to watch the great doctor might be fruitful. Isn’t it enough if the mechanism unlocks a story? If it is a life that undoes a person, maybe it is a story forged from that unruly life that can do a person back up? What is your unhappy story? It begins with a question.

  “Are you ready to begin, Albert?”

  “I will remember more today,” Albert says. “I am certain.”

  How bright and shiny he looks this morning, as if the rain has washed him clean. The alertness in his eyes gives the Doctor hope that he may not need to subject himself again so soon to the amphitheater full of high foreheads and aristocratic noses, that the answer may be right here, with Albert.

  “You will write down what I say?” Albert asks.

  “Yes, yes,” says the Doctor. “What you have to say is very important.”

  How easy, how simple the dance is today! “Let’s return to your travels.”

  “Yes,” Albert says. “Yes.”

  The wind spins around the bell tower, shivering the bell from the inside out, and there is that weird, muted ringing. Albert’s large, sad eyes glisten and, for a moment, it seems as though he might cry. But there are no tears. There is no bemusement, either, at learning he has walked across great swaths of Europe. No How curious it is, this map of my travels. Instead, Albert pulls his knobby shoulders back and sits up straighter in the chair. He smooths his pants legs with his hands. He might be a man at a dinner party.

  “I remember a trip from Warsaw to Moscow,” Albert says.

  And for a moment the Doctor believes that the sparkle of the dust motes in the air is the sparkle of the future after all, that today will be the day he will look back on as the turning point.

  “One fine day I woke to discover myself in a cattle car.”

  The Doct
or’s desire for this to be Albert’s story is a veil, which transforms the shadows into whatever he wants them to be, but then—

  “The police wore strange pointed helmets,” Albert says, his voice gaining confidence. “They mistook me for a nihilist. For the assassin.”

  “Whose assassin?” The Doctor wants to be the very opposite of the people who pinned Albert with a note—He is off his rocker—and told him to go home or threw him in jail, but the velvet in his voice is slipping away. The rough, impatient texture that lies beneath is, he imagines, what these people felt.

  “‘Where are your papers?’ they demanded,” Albert is saying. “Being always without papers, I had none. ‘Finally we have got him,’ they said. ‘To prison with the nihilist!’”

  “Albert.” The story is familiar, too familiar.

  Shaved heads, he is saying, freezing cold that turns your fingers blue, bedbug-ridden blankets, fifty people called up to be sent to Siberia. The story is familiar, the Doctor realizes, because it is the story of the assassin of czar Alexander II, an event from some years back that has moved beyond story into history.

  “When I was not among them,” Albert is saying, “I thought, I will be hanged. But the Russian government must have learned of my taste for voyages! They decided to send me on a trip to Siberia after all! I thought to myself, Siberia, let’s go!”

  Later the Doctor will be able to admire this detail, the dash of truth in the midst of the lie.

  “The Russian government marched us to the Turkish border. This is how I arrived in Constantinople. Cossacks galloped alongside of us. If we didn’t move quickly enough, they would smack us on the legs with the flat side of their swords.”

  The Doctor stops writing as Albert uses his hand against his thigh to illustrate the Cossacks thwacking the prisoners with the flat of their swords.

  “That is enough, Albert.”

  The Doctor fiddles with the pin in his cravat. He cannot wait for tomorrow. He has been patient. They were moving in the right direction; piece by piece, they were recovering Albert’s life, and now this? Every day, he has been patient. He pulls the pin from his cravat and taps his wrist with it to calm himself. He imagines tapping the pin along the inside of Albert’s right arm. Tap, tap, tap along the bridge of his nose. He imagines plunging the pin through one of Albert’s ridiculous ears.