The Man Who Walked Away A Novel

by Maud Casey

  The girl does not look at the brain on the platter on the table, though it is close enough that she could reach out from the chair where she sits and touch it; instead, she opens her mouth. She puts her hand to her wide-open mouth; it looks as though she is pulling something from deep in her throat.

  The girl eyes whatever imaginary thing she has pulled from the depths of herself with scorn. “I don’t have the time,” she says.

  Flash goes the camera from the photographer’s corner, where his rail-thin legs stick out of the bottom of the camera’s tent: an image of the girl and whatever it is she’s dangling from her fingertips is illuminated, etched eternally onto a plate.

  At the sound of the clunk, clunk of the plates, the great doctor turns, fixing the photographer with his owly stare. “Everything I’m about to do is worth recording,” he says.

  “I do not have the time,” the girl says again.

  “She is capricious,” says the great doctor.

  The Doctor recognizes the sour look that crosses the great doctor’s face; he felt it in his own face as Albert told his story of being arrested as a nihilist assassin in Moscow, and shame burns through him.

  Out of his coat pocket the great doctor pulls an amulet on a string. “There will be three distinct stages.”

  Dangling the amulet before the girl’s eyes, he swings it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. “You are tired. So tired. You are sleeping and you are nothing.” The hairy bear steps back, arms folded, watching the amulet until his chin falls to his chest and he snaps to attention, looking out into the audience like a guilty child.

  It seems impossible to the Doctor that this same fierce girl could be tired, or sleeping, or nothing, but her eyes move back and forth, back and forth, and her lids grow heavy. Soon her head is nodding; soon it falls to her chest.

  “Here we have the lethargic state,” the great doctor says. “The appearance of a deep sleep. Suggestion is impossible. But a certain muscular hyperexcitability . . . pressure upon the facial nerve, for example . . .” He nods to the hairy bear, who presses a thick finger into the girl’s left cheek.

  Flash: an image of a spasm in the left side of her face, distorting itself into a grimace, while the right side remains utterly still.

  “The cataleptic condition,” the great doctor says. He lifts the girl’s face in his hand, almost tenderly, prying open one closed eyelid. Simultaneously, the hairy bear lifts the girl’s left arm, spreads her fingers, and puts them to her lips as if she is about to throw a kiss.

  Flash: an image of the girl smiling broadly, throwing a kiss to the audience.

  There is a smattering of polite applause.

  Shhhh!

  There is something missing, the Doctor thinks. What was he listening for? The thump thump of the monkey? No, it is the girl’s anguished keening he is waiting for.

  “You are very tired,” the great doctor says. “You are so tired. You are sleeping.” She begins to slide down the back of her chair as though she is being poured. “And now, somnambulism.” She is sinking to her knees, pressing her hands together in the semblance of prayer, when suddenly there is a great crash and the shattering of glass.

  The great doctor turns in the direction of the noise, slow and steady as the swing of the amulet, and the eyes of the entire amphitheater follow. The jagged pieces of a plate, slipped from his bony fingers, lie at the feet of the photographer.

  The Doctor’s stomach drops; he recalls his sneeze and the heat of the great doctor’s gaze. The photographer is no longer floating; he is no longer invisible. It is as if he had crashed to the floor along with the plate. It is hard to tell from here, but the Doctor swears he sees a tiny smile of satisfaction on the man’s face.

  “Did I hire an orchestra to take photographs?” the great doctor says as the photographer frantically picks up the shards of glass.

  “A stampeding herd of elephants?”

  The photographer’s thin legs become tangled until one of his feet slips out from underneath him and a poof of sawdust rises all around him. He puts his hand out to protect his face as he falls, and when he stands, blood runs down his long arm. There is their blood, the Doctor thinks.

  The great doctor is silent now. In the photographer’s hurry to get to his feet, he falls again. When the photographer drops the second plate, the shattering glass echoes through the quiet.

  This time he rises slowly to his feet. “No,” he says into the silence of the amphitheater. “No,” he says again. The word hangs in the air as he walks slowly, proudly, out of the amphitheater. But once the hairy bear sweeps away the glass and the blood-flecked sawdust, it is as if the photographer had never existed at all. What photographer?

  The great doctor turns back to the girl. “Our statue of living pain,” he says in the same steady, unwavering voice as before, and the Doctor feels it pulling the audience’s attention with it—Come into the great house of my voice, look into all the secret rooms—and his too.

  The statue of living pain is not where the great doctor had left her.

  When the glass shattered, the girl rose from her knees and began walking slowly toward the table with the platter. At first she appears to be reaching for the brain itself, and the Doctor thinks, She will eat it. But it isn’t the brain she wants. She picks up the straitjacket instead, slipping her arms expertly through the sleeves.

  “Please,” she says, turning her back to the hairy bear, lifting the hair from her neck. “Buckle me in.”

  It is not a happy story, Albert has said again and again. But an unhappy story doesn’t always begin unhappily. The Doctor imagines the girl as a child at the dinner table. Maybe there are two gangly older brothers who wrestle unless they are told not to, one writhing body with many limbs. Maybe there is a mother. She is not eating enough, the mother says, eyeing the stew her daughter has barely touched. Maybe there is a father. She never eats enough, the mother says to him. He recently moved his family to the city so he and his sons could work in the textile factory that has dyed their fingers an indelible blue. She is fine, he says, without looking up. The same conversation every night. He could speak any words as long as he uses the same reassuring tone: Rats ate mine. What a vine. There is time. The fact is the girl is fine, rosy and plump. She has always been this way. She is one of those children who brim with love. What does it matter if she eats less than her brothers, who eat and eat with their blue fingers unless reminded to use a fork? If she is healthy, if she shines with life, what does it matter? The Doctor will never know it, but he is partly right. There has been happiness for the girl; there has even been happiness for her here in the great doctor’s hospital. It is only once she is retired, only when she is no longer the great doctor’s best girl, that happiness disappears altogether. It is then she will lose track of the days, which seemed for a while to be adding up to something—those moments when the audience oooed and aaahed, all of those eyes on her as she moaned or dreamed up something lodged in her throat (let them use their imaginations), those moments when she was the doctor’s best girl. She was the doctor’s best girl even, perhaps especially, when she did something to cause a look of concern on his face. It is when she is removed from her private room to make room for the next best girl that she will understand he is done with her, and when she is returned to the general population of women in the large room, her strength will leave her altogether. Some of the women in the large room will look like her mother—that woman in the corner there, when she turns a certain way and remains enough in the shadows—but they are not her mother who died some months ago. The girl will grow smaller still. Eventually, she will lose track of herself altogether; there will be days when she can’t distinguish herself from the woman in the corner there or that one there or that one there. She will sleep as often as she can; in her dreams it isn’t dark. In the sunlight of her dreams, her mother’s face returns to her, a face that expected nothing of her, that was satisfied to watch her knead dough, content even to watch her shirk her dut
ies and gaze out the window on to a view the girl always complained about—why did they have to live in such a shabby place? In those dreams, her mother’s face says, you are my own girl. In the dark room though the girl will continue to fade until one day, when no one is watching, her light will go out completely.

  “Buckle me,” the girl says again, her back to the hairy bear, the pieces of her life that added up to this moment hovering all around her. What if things had gone differently? the Doctor wonders. What if the father the Doctor has imagined for her hadn’t died in a factory accident, if her brothers hadn’t run off to create trouble with their blue hands, if their mother hadn’t fallen into such despair that the asylum seemed like a place to rest and to find a meal? What if the rosy, plump girl hadn’t followed her mother, and there been discovered by the great doctor? What if instead she lived the kind of life in which she might be asking to be buttoned into a lovely dress? Button me.

  In the slow shuffle out of the amphitheater, the Doctor is surrounded by the cluck-clucking of the high foreheads and the aristocratic noses.

  “The girls will be running the place soon.”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing that.”

  “You just did.”

  “What about the photographer?”

  “What about him? He’s through.”

  What about the photographer? Those long thin legs, the outraged look on his face as though it were the great doctor who had interrupted him, as though it were he, the photographer, who held the secrets. When the Doctor stops in the shabby bar next door to his shabby hotel to escape the cluck-clucking of the high foreheads and aristocratic noses, the photographer is so present in the Doctor’s thoughts that when he sees him in the corner nursing a drink with his bandaged hand, it is as though the Doctor has caused him to appear.

  “May I join you?” the Doctor says.

  “Plenty of other seats,” the photographer says, gesturing to the rest of the bar, which is empty except for the bartender, a man reading at the bar, and two men playing cards in the corner. “But do whatever you like.”

  “I was just there,” says the Doctor, taking a seat. “At the amphitheater.”

  “So you’re a doctor, then?” The photographer slides the glasses perched on the top of his pointy dome down onto his nose and looks the Doctor up and down. “A man of mental medicine?”

  “I’ve seen your portraits in the journals.” The Doctor knows the way flattery can work on a man and he sees the way his words work on the photographer. He wants to win the man over, but he means it. In each of the portraits, there is a question on the girl’s face similar to the question on the girl’s face tonight, not unlike the question he has seen on Albert’s face. The look of a feral child subdued, as if someone has turned a crank at the back of the girl’s head one more notch and there it is, a different kind of smile. Not the smile of recognition—there I am in the mirror—so much as there someone is. Before one could mind manners, there had to be a lesson in what manners were. Here, try them on, like clothes. The smile is an offering and a question. Is this her, the girl you want? Careless man. The Doctor was a careless man. Albert’s story of being mistaken for a nihilist assassin of the czar? Is this him, the man you want?

  “Why take pictures of these people? Why not let them be? That’s what my wife says,” the photographer says. “It takes three seconds for me to switch the plates. What anyone might discover if they were paying attention is those girls hold their poses long enough for me to photograph them. They perform in sync with the speed of the shutter. They wait for me to press the bulb. It’s not proof of any invisible lesion I’m capturing. But you don’t want to know. Or you don’t care.”

  “They are not my theories,” the Doctor says. He hears his defensive tone and tries to soften his voice. “I do want to know. You cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it, he said. I’m interested to know what you think that means.”

  The photographer finishes his beer before he speaks. “I recently went to a demonstration,” he says finally. “A scientist used a volta-faradaic apparatus to isolate muscles in the woman’s face. The muscle for fear, the muscle for sadness, and so on.”

  “Yes,” the Doctor says, “I’ve seen that demonstration. The woman’s spirit, enacted in her anatomy, that’s how the scientist described it.”

  “That’s what photography can do,” the photographer says.

  “Yes,” the Doctor says. He thinks he understands. Isn’t this what he hopes to capture with Albert? Something elusive and ephemeral—call it his soul, or its approximation in words. Something whose essence is, This is me.

  The photographer rustles around in his bag and, clunk, clunk, pulls out one of his plates wrapped in cotton and puts it on the table between them. “When I have a girl in the studio, I sometimes put a mirror on the wall to catch her attention. She is like a child seeing himself for the first time. ‘Is that me?’ the girl asks when I show her the photographs. A statue of living pain? That fat little man. As if it were possible to make any less noise while changing plates the size of his head. Cough, cough, the photograph is the scientist’s true retina. He is right about that but only that.” Carefully, the photographer unwraps the plate from its cotton cocoon. “Even before it took shape, I knew this one was different.”

  He holds the plate up to the Doctor. There is the fierce girl standing in the sawdust of the amphitheater, looking as though she is about to wrestle the great doctor. Above her head, a shimmering black cloud. There are other explanations for it, the Doctor knows—a smudge, a blur—but the shimmering black cloud looks like time’s signature, a vibration in the girl that exceeds her body.

  “It is beautiful,” the Doctor says.

  “Yes,” the photographer says. “It eludes you, as art should.” He wraps it back into its layers of cotton, puts it in his bag, and slips on his coat, wanting suddenly only to get home to his wife where he can shake off the cloud of the day. It always takes him a little while to become real again, as though, over the course of a day’s work, he has become the person in the picture.

  “Is there something wrong with your cabbage?” his wife will ask.

  The photographer hates cabbage. For years, so how to explain it now? This too he’ll keep to himself.

  “Nothing’s wrong with it,” he will say, and he will eat his cabbage. “You’ve never liked cabbage, have you?” his wife might say tonight. “Tell me the truth, you never have,” and she’ll push him and his grasshopper-thin limbs onto the bed. He’ll watch her unpin her hair, marveling yet again at the way the very same things that cause him to grind his teeth—with a different lens, a tighter focus, better lighting——look like love. The photographer would shed his cloud entirely for this glimpse. “I never, ever have,” he will say as she lies down beside him.

  On the train home the next day, the Doctor wakes from dreams—the fierce girl buckled into her straitjacket, swallowing fire—to the rustling of a young woman’s skirts as she enters his compartment.

  “Let me help you,” and he and a porter lift her battered trunk onto the overhead rack.“Thank you,” the woman says. She looks anxiously out the window at an older woman being jostled by the crowd on the platform.

  “Is that your mother?” the Doctor asks as the train begins to move and the older woman and the jostling crowd grow smaller and smaller.

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  “I don’t want to trouble you,” the girl says, her eyes brimming.

  “No trouble,” he says.

  It is not a very happy story.

  Outside, the trees reach up and up into the sky streaked purple with evening. Look up, they say.

  The Doctor’s eyes make shapes and patterns out of the stars that appear in the sky. There is so much he will never know. Is that Orion? It frustrates his eyes, trying to make sense in the vastness of the sky, but he is intrigued too by the simple, human way his eyes try to discern the shap
es and the patterns automatically, to identify a few of the constellations.

  “She is my aunt,” the girl says, and she begins to tell him how her father ran off when she was young, how her mother died of cholera, how she went to live with this aunt whom she loves dearly, but then her aunt could no longer afford to keep her and now she is going to live with a wealthy distant relative who needs a house servant. “A fairy tale in reverse,” she says.

  And? So?

  She looks out the window. “Is that Orion?” she asks.

  “I think so,” the Doctor says. Then, wanting to give the if a more solid spine, “Yes, it is.”

  Buckle me.

  That’s all anyone ever wants, really, the Doctor thinks as the girl nods off to sleep. To be contained. To be given shape by the constraints of a narrative.

  Not much is required: one chair, one lamp, and a peaceful effect.

  An amulet like the great doctor’s, a letter, a telegram, but the Doctor doesn’t want to use props. There will be no need for props.

  It will be like dreaming. He will start simply.

  With two fingers he will make circles on the top of Albert’s large head. This is said to be one of the most effective methods. He will pause only to brush Albert’s eyes closed.

  It will be like dreaming together.

  Your eyelids are warm. They are getting warmer.

  Those rumors—this will not be that. It won’t be turning ink into beer or asking a man to cut off his own ten-year-old beard. It will not be slipping a tube filled with brandy down the neck of a lady’s dress and whispering into her ear, “Eau de vie,” causing the lady to shout, “I am drunk!” and then to stagger and fall on the floor. This will not be that. And it won’t be telling a man that when he wakes, he will be a little dog in a hospital full of big dogs, a big dog hospital, and then inviting his friends to watch as the man wakes yapping.

  It would be nothing like the competition he’d heard about in which two doctors challenged each other to see whose trance lasted the longest. One of them induced sleep in a former army sergeant and when the doctor snapped his fingers sixty days later, the sergeant believed the president of the republic was giving him a pension and a medal. The other doctor beat him—by three hundred and five days! He told a patient he would see him on the next New Year’s Day, that he would wish him a happy new year; on the New Year’s Day he watched from behind a tree as the patient hallucinated the doctor wishing him a happy new year. And it wouldn’t be the doctor who lulled a man with a gangrenous leg into a somnambulant state, first telling him he would be grateful for whatever was done while he slept, and when the man woke up, the doctor had sawed off his leg.