by John Farris
Near Barry the man who had asked the question about toilet training studied John Doe's photo and said to a colleague, "Kid looks good enough to be an actor. Maybe he'll suddenly get his memory back when his new picture's about to come out." Barry could have strangled him.
"What are the chances he's suffering from a mental disorder?"
Barry pricked her ears at this question; she had often asked herself, and Edwards, the same thing, and she knew what he would reply.
"It's one explanation, but it seems more unlikely with each passing day."
"Why?" asked The Christian Science Monitor.
"In treating John Doe we've been guided by some of the research conducted with severe amnesiacs. We've given him vasopressin and amphetamines without eliciting helpful results. In the future sodium amytal might prove beneficial, but for now he exhibits none of the syndrome of abnormal mentation, mood, or behavior. Our problem is almost entirely communication on an elementary level. The patient has adjusted well to his environment; he's alert and well motivated. He quickly learns and retains complex physical skills, which is an indication of above-average intelligence. We believe he has no past memories; this is typical of global amnesia. But other important indicators are asymptomatic."
A reporter who was trying to get all this down in writing groaned. Edwards smiled thinly and apologized for the involved explanation.
"Again I'd like to stress that this is a most complicated case. There are no easy answers."
"Could you give us an example of a complex physical skill?" Paris-Match asked.
"Well . . . juggling. He watches television avidly, and he must have seen it done. There were some oranges in a bowl in his room, and one morning about a week ago a nurse walked in and found him juggling four oranges, as if he'd been doing it all of his life."
"Maybe he was with a circus," Newsday suggested.
Edwards smiled. "We're looking into that."
Barry gathered up the bags from a morning's belated Christmas shopping and left the cafeteria as unobtrusively as she'd come. It was almost noon and the young man would be returning after a lengthy EEG to his room for lunch.
Alexandra Chatellaine was standing near the nurses' station on the second floor. She was in conversation with a gout patient named Simmons but nodded pleasantly to Barry over the elderly man's shoulder. Alexandra had come to the hospital ten days ago for treatment of complications arising from a foot injury suffered in a moped accident. She had been confined to bed until a blood clot could be dissolved, but now she was ambulatory with the aid of a strong and intriguingly crooked black cane. There was nothing remarkable about her accident, except for the fact that she had been on a moped in the first place: Alexandra was nearly eighty years old.
Barry had never met anyone like. Alexandra. She could have passed for fifty-five. She was a rigorously erect woman with a level to her shoulders that was both bones and breeding, a good square up-thrust chin, skin like fine old porcelain wearing down to a tracery of veins thinner than thread, and more good bones, cheeky and broad, above which her eyes shone as if the pupils were lacquered. She had her own teeth. Her hair was abundant, gathered and pinned in a hard hay-looking tussock on the back of her head. In her room she did complicated yoga exercises that did not involve the injured leg, would not touch hospital food, and had accepted only the medication that was required to dissolve the clot.
Alexandra had shown a great deal of interest in both Barry and the young man, although she and Barry hadn't spoken much to this point: Alexandra was neither obtrusive nor talkative. Her manner was unpretentious, yet something about her could be unnerving: she had a quality of stillness that went beyond ordinary calm and self-possession. Her curiosity, her searching intelligence, was like a big weightless hovering thing: a fog bank, an Olympic cloud.
Barry acknowledged her with a quick smile and went on to John Doe's room. His lunch had been delivered and was waiting beneath a plastic tray cover. She tore into a shopping bag, came up with a conical artificial Christmas tree already decorated and wired with Lilliputian lights. She placed the tree on the deep window ledge and plugged it in. On one melon-orange wall she taped a cutout Santa Claus, Three Wise Men, and Norman Rockwell's Christmas Trio, reproduced from a long-ago Saturday Evening Post cover.
Two unwrapped presents came from another shopping bag: a poplin storm coat with diagonal zippered pockets on the sleeves and a big metal zipper toggle, and a pair of Wellington boots with cleats.
Nurse Mayo arrived at the door, pushing the wheelchair that hospital regulations made him ride in, although he could easily have walked wherever they wanted him to go.
"Oh, look! Surprise! Merry Christmas! And there's a tree too."
As soon as they were in the room John Doe got up out of the wheelchair, which he hated. He was wearing the clothes Barry had brought him, the staff having decided it best for him to be out of his hospital garb: Top-Siders and vanilla corduroys and a rust-colored knit shirt with long sleeves. He looked first at everything Barry had added to the room, then, inquisitively, at her. He smiled slowly. He had a disconcertingly beautiful smile, at odds with his normally placid lack of expression. She had slaved for that smile—downed, babbled—but still she saw it rarely.
"Where've you been all morning?" Barry asked him.
For several seconds he was motionless, watching her. The smile, having dazzled, now faded like fireworks into the spacey black of his eyes. Then he raised a hand to his forehead, where white electrode paste slicked the dark hair at his temples. He extended the hand to Barry. "They put the wires on your head again?"
Mayo said, "It's amazing how he responds to you, Barry. He's beginning to understand you."
Barry soared; the press conference, with its squabbling journalists and stink of cynicism as sharp as over-boiled coffee, had turned her stomach, but the day was looking better already. She turned to the bed and held up the new storm coat for his approval.
"I talked to Dr. Edwards. He thinks you should start going out every day. How about it? Would you like to go for a walk after lunch?"
As always she had his rapt attention, but there was no response. Barry pointed to the window. She said 'slowly and distinctly, "Outside. We'll go together."
Without hesitation he walked to the window, glanced at the tree on the sill, the tiny winking lights. He touched one with a fingertip, then lifted his eyes to the smoggy radiance of noon, the hospital grounds, a walking flock of pink and gray pigeons. He looked back at Barry with what she interpreted as interest.
First, he needed to eat. Lunch was a sandwich, soup, crackers, fruit cup, chocolate milk. Like all hospital meals this one was superficially attractive but as flavorless as week-old chewing gum. John Doe ate every bite, still a little awkward with a spoon in his hand. He used the left and the right hand indiscriminately. He had had to relearn eating, dressing, brushing his teeth, going to the bathroom: it was as if the part of the brain responsible for retaining these basic patterns of childhood achievements had gone out of business. But once he was shown how to do something, he repeated the action with little difficulty. His imitations were unerring, to the smallest detail. If Mayo pursed her lips while tying his shoes, he also pursed his lips.
Barry wished she had stopped at Wachter's for brownies; she just hadn't had time lately to bake for him herself. The first two weeks she'd overdone the treats, milkshakes and popovers, and he'd taken on a tummy. Dr. Edwards had asked her to use better judgment about what she stuffed him with.
John Doe watched TV while he ate. He wanted it on constantly when he was in the room. Now Days of Our Lives played out a segment of its slow-moving Byzantine drama. There was nothing he could understand of the characters but their emotions: heartbreak, despair, malice. He seemed so frequently on the brink of the unfathomable—silent, sometimes apprehensive, at other times with a flicker of aspiration.
The press conference was long over by the time they rode downstairs in the elevator and went outside, but a hospital guard
accompanied them in case a reporter or two might be hanging around waiting for a break. Their walk was confined to a broad quadrangle with a parking lot on one side. The sun was a heatless flare, the spoiled snow like mildew.
"Dr. Edwards gave out pictures of you at the press conference," Barry said. Sometimes it was hard to know what to say to him, to keep on talking when the words obviously slid off his mind like rain on a piece of slate. But he was so clever and observant and willing; already he was understanding her a little, as Mrs. Mayo had pointed out. None of her effort was wasted effort, and the day would come when he would not only smile but speak to her. She felt a childish ache, as if she were anticipating a birthday that seemed suspended, shimmering, in time, unreachable. "You'll be on the network news shows tonight, and in the papers tomorrow. It's been almost three weeks. That's a long time to be missing. You're bound to be recognized—you didn't just pop up out of nowhere."
Then what? she thought drearily. Someone would turn up to claim him—parents, girl friend, perhaps even a wife. Her fingers curled, claw-like, as if she were afraid of sliding precipitously into the background of his unknown life.
"More than anything else, I just want to know your name. Because I'm positive that eventually you'll be a hundred percent okay. I feel it in my bones."
Barry also felt that he was missing from her side, and she looked around quickly. He had stopped walking ten paces behind her. He was watching a group of boys having a snowball fight in the parking lot. It was one of the few times she'd ever lost his attention. She sensed he was intrigued by the aggression they displayed. On impulse she packed a handful of the sparse mushy snow, took aim, and drilled him high on the right arm with it.
John Doe studied her, surprised. Barry put her hands on her hips.
"The least you can do is hang around me when I'm talking to myself."
He brushed at the snow clinging to his coat, looked at the boys again, then bent and dug a double handful of snow out of a pile of scrapings. He packed it as he had seen Barry do and fired the snowball at her. She laughed and ducked, barely in time. He could throw hard and accurately. He was poker-faced, but she was certain she'd seen a gleam of mischief in his eyes.
"You want to play, huh?"
Barry started making another snowball, but he was faster. She darted behind the rim of a dormant fountain, took aim, hit him in the center of his forehead. John Doe looked startled.
"Oh, lucky shot!" Barry called out, but she held her breath, wondering how he was going to take it.
There was something in his lack of expression more threatening than anger. He bent down for more ammunition. But instead of a handful of snow he came up with a rock big enough to crush her skull, uncovering, magically, a flattened but pretty little blue flower.
Barry backed up instinctively, unable to speak. He took a step toward her, holding the rock higher.
"Hey—no—"
Barry tripped and fell backward, sprawled with her nose pink and the snow cold beneath her legs, her heart trying to tear free of its moorings. His indistinct shadow blotted her. Her stomach gathered in a tuck. She raised her hands, flinching, but there was a smile on his face, the rock held high, dripping in his hands.
She got up slowly. He didn't move. She smiled too, uneasily, put out her hands, took the rock away.
"No fair."
She pitched the rock a dozen feet away. It sank into the snow. His hands had been cold and wet, but when she touched them again they were suffused with blood and heat; they dried almost instantly. She looked at his face in astonishment and at once felt, for the first time, the hard impress of his mind, communication without words—a question that only confounded her.
I am I; you are you. Who are we?
Chapter 13
Alexandra Chatellaine turned away from the window at which she had been observing Barry and the young man with bare-faced enthusiasm. She had fastened herself to the periphery of their lives like a great green-eyed moth, invisibly palpitating. The fact of age, the accretion of wisdom had done nothing to still her curiosity, which had, seemingly forever, leapt over mountains, forded torrents, charmed moguls, viziers, and aloof mystics, the scoundrel and the ascetic, the wild and the tame. She was an old beauty and no longer, as in her youth, daft with wanderlust, half crazed by the limitations of mind and body. But Alexandra could never resist the suggestion of a mystery.
Bored with the enforced waiting to see if a blood clot below one knee might tear away before it could be dissolved, drift undetected through channels to the brain or heart, and put an abrupt stoppered end to her life, Alexandra had turned her attention to Barry—the girl had been spending hours a day, and many nights, on the second floor, which was, as a rule, only for very sick or imminently threatened patients. Alexandra saw herself in this vivid girl; Barry, unaware of the attention, was absorbed in her self-appointed duties as mentor to the young man so stripped of human apperceptions he had needed help buttoning his shirt and, according to one of the nurses on the floor, had seemed to be unacquainted with the usage of toilet tissue,
What most attracted Alexandra to the two of them was the possibility that something even rarer than amnesia was responsible for the young man's condition.
Musing on the evidence, or lack of it, Alexandra poured herself tea made from rose hips and herbs and flavored with a little butter and salt. She ate half of a barley and oat cake. Someone much less her age would have cracked a tooth—it was like a hockey puck—but she chewed effortlessly. She had turned the hospital room, which was already austere—one wall an unfortunate avocado shade, the others white—into a chamber suitable for her lengthy meditations, her spare, structured, rhythmic life. She had had brought to her by her late husband's niece a simple mat for the floor and a little folding table about sixteen inches high, carved all over with a floral and vine pattern so painstaking the artistry could be fully revealed only with the use of a powerful magnifying glass. The table was made equally of ebony, ivory, and rosewood. On it she had placed a small delicate bowl of Chinese porcelain for her tea, a silver saucer with a cover shaped like a pagoda roof, studded with polished rose coral and turquoise. There was an incense burner, the fumes from which obscured the institutional odors she detested.
Beside the table was her prayer wheel and some of her Tibetan books, made of detached oblong sheets of rice paper and wrapped in silk cloths. She never turned on the television. A cassette recorder not much larger than her hand played religious music, lamentations of Tibetan trumpets, hautboys, kettledrums. She wore, in her room, the ecclesiastical robe of a lama; she was one of a handful of women in history entitled to the honor.
Alexandra's father had been a British Colonial officer posted to India. She had been always less than he required in a daughter and quite unmanageable when he asserted himself on behalf of the traditional role for a woman in society. She was, from an early age, obsessed with geography and fascinated with the machineries of life—the ordinary, the superhuman. A summer's holiday in Sikkim when she was fifteen fueled her fascination with the mysteries of thought and perception. Two years later, with only the jewels left by her mother to provide for the necessities of arduous travel, Alexandra bravely set out for the top of the world.
For the next thirty-one years, with excursions to Nepal, Burma, and China, she devoted herself to the study of Lamaism in Lhasa and at such monasteries as Tashilunpo. She had lived, for two years, as a hermit in a cave in order to be near, and study with, a renowned thaumaturge. Alexandra had decided, once she knew the extent of her ambitions and what was required to achieve them, to resist the dangerous beehive of man's sexual nature and remain a virgin. She was attractive despite the rigorous life she led and thus had her fair share of narrow escapes from assaults on her virtue—from libidinous monks, merchant traders, and princes; during the siege of Shensi; and again after a bandit's attack on a caravan crossing into Nepal by the Jongsong Pass.
Ultimately she married, late in life, a French scholar and devotee of Buddhism
who had some very rich cousins across the Atlantic. And so she came to be in America.
Her physician, a young harried man named Bovard, came to see her at two o'clock. The clot was a thing of the past, she could get around with the aid of her cane, it was time to be discharged; but he had been concerned by a persistent anemia and had urged her to reorder her diet.
"Can you eat meat?" he asked her.
"Yes." Alexandra smiled. "But only after reflection on the nature of the animal from which it comes and after I understand how the psychic elements of what I am eating will be of benefit to me."
"Lean beef and calves' liver," he prescribed. "Don't overcook it."
The nurse had taken Alexandra's temperature. It had been normal for days; now it was 101. Bovard couldn't believe his eyes. He touched her forehead. She was hot.
"Now where did that come from?"
"Does this mean I can't be discharged?"
"Not with that fever. Sorry, Alexandra." He looked at her, puzzled. "You've been champing at the bit for days to get out of here. Aren't you going to give me a fight?"
"I'm disappointed, of course," Alexandra said serenely. She had decided, moments before her doctor's visit, that a mysterious fever was the best means of prolonging her hospital stay. She had produced the rise in temperature with ease, by means of a discipline that enables adepts to sleep outdoors in freezing weather and even snow without clothing.
"We'd better take some more blood and put her on Tylenol every four hours," Bovard advised the nurse. To Alexandra he said sternly, "No more prowling around. Into bed."
"Yes, doctor." The stratagem would be good for three or four more days, and she knew she was not taking up a bed needed by a genuinely ill patient: with the holidays on hand several rooms on the floor already were vacant. Her extended stay would give her ample time to become acquainted with the young people who had caught her fancy.