by John Farris
When she had the strength, she stripped off her flannel nightshirt and crept into the tub, pulled the shower curtain all around. Shivering, she subjected herself to a tepid needle shower.
The tale is in the tail of the salamander—
"Oh, God!" Barry said through gritted teeth. "I'm fine, nothing's wrong, give me some peace!"
She was drying herself when the other door to the bathroom opened and the young man came at her with his shapely black eyes and flare of mouth, scaring her witless.
"Barry! Barry!"
"What is it? Why are you coming in here—I'm taking a bath!"
He seized her high on one arm with a keening, pleasurable sound; she lost her grip on the towel and flashed naked before him for several moments before groping, retrieving the damp towel, and muffling herself, now livid with the shock of his presence.
"Come and see!" he cried, only glancing at the upstart pinkness of a breast. "It's my name!"
"What?"
"My name," he said joyously, trying to drag her from the bathroom; Barry's heels skidded on the mat by the tub. She unlocked her knees and stumbled after him, heart thudding, in a wild disorder of sagging towel and half-wet hair.
"Oh, God! You remembered?"
"Yes! Yes! Let me show you!"
"Show me?" Barry put on the brakes again. "Yes, okay—wait—I don't—I need a—just wait here while I go to my room for a second. I'm coming!"
He let her go and she turned, flung the towel, darted through the doorway into her own bedroom, and came back moments later wearing her bathrobe.
He led the way downstairs to the family room, fairly running, while Meanness rose in the, kitchen with a croupy belling at all the commotion. When Barry caught up to the young man, he was hovering over the game table, breathless with passion.
"There it is! My name!"
She moved closer, almost reluctantly, eyes going from his face to the lineup of black-and-white tiles, the trump of identity he had played.
"Mark . . . Draven," she said softly, pronouncing it with the A long.
"Yes." He was at her shoulder, his breath on her cheek. "That is. Me. Barry. I have. A name."
She turned to him covetously, all but weeping, crooking an arm around his neck.
"I can't believe it."
"I am. I know. Mark." He spoke stiltedly, as if he were losing the power of speech even as his vision, the possibilities of his life expanded.
"Hello, Mark." A tear got away, then another. "I'm so happy to know you." She blinked and squinched and was aroused by the sensual liquid, the heated salty flow on her cheeks, lubricity, closeness. He was tense as well but from actuality, a newfound sense of permanence. Overcome with happiness, he could only nod ecstatically.
They had hot chocolate and sugar doughnuts and sat knee to knee talking for two hours in the family room, until the fire she had built up dwindled to a few pale flames. The clock struck three. He nodded off shortly after, and Barry covered him with a blanket, left him sleeping in the wing chair.
Her father showed up at three thirty; he was bleary-eyed and slow afoot, but he responded to her enthusiasm. He was both delighted and relieved by this breakthrough of identity. She made coffee for him in the kitchen. He added hair of the dog.
"Nothing else surfaced?" Tom asked her. "Where he's from, what he was doing there in the park?"
"No.
He scratched a stubbly chin. "Well, now that we know his name, it shouldn't take the police long to find out more about him."
"They won't," Barry said.
"How can you be so sure?"
"Dad. They've been working on it for six weeks. Mark's picture has been everywhere. And they haven't come up with a thing."
"His parents might have been abroad. There are a thousand other possibilities."
"Nobody's missed him—nobody cares," Barry said. She drew a finger evenly across the tabletop, as if she were signing a disenfranchisement.
Tom poured a little more whiskey into his pitch-black coffee. He felt cross with her for reasons difficult to define. But his strict artist's eye, blurred by memory, was fond and forgiving: she looked very young at this hour, in this light. The tip of her nose had taken on a shine from her habit of rubbing it with a sleeve of the nappy robe. The legend of her growing life was readable by him in almost forgotten nicks and scars, the spot where a bee had stung her when she was six; the stubborn swelling gradually had hardened into a wen. It was a strong face, spade shaped. She was long from the base of her throat to the outcurve of chin, long again in a line from the outer corner of each eye across the bridge of the nose; this line imparted a wonderful balance to a chin that was a shade small, indecisive. Some things in her face worked perfectly—the tip of her nose, standing aloof from the pretty yoke of her upper lip. Other details were awry. She had batty ears—they seemed too large and at odds with the rest of her head. It was a face he loved too severely to dwell on for long without retreating to the perspective of his art. Tonight her eyes shocked him. In the mists of those blue eyes he sensed an obsession soulless in its intensity.
"There are times," he said, looking away, "when I think you want him to be an orphan."
She raised one shoulder, defensively. "He's not an orphan. He has us."
Tom struggled with a fit of yawning and ordered his thoughts.
"He also has a history. Obscure, maybe. But it'll come together, piece by piece. Barry, I just don't want—"
He heard Meanness at the kitchen door, whining; they had let him out earlier to do his business. Tom got up to bring his hound in and turned to find Barry's eyes on him.
"What is it, Dad?" she asked quietly.
"I think you know. I couldn't stand to see you head over heels again and then get torn apart." Barry shook her head silently, warming to a smile: his concern she took as an absurdity. She was like a born-again believer, drenched with the blood of suffering Jesus, cloaked in the innocent faith and courage of the newly converted. Tom wondered why he couldn't be thankful.
"One thing is inevitable. Either Mark will be found or he'll find himself. And he'll leave."
"No, he won't! He's mine. And he's never going to leave me."
"Oh, Barry."
"I don't care if you don't believe that. I can't help how I feel."
"You make it sound as if I'm condemning you, but—"
She smiled forgivingly.
"Of course you're not."
She came to him and kissed him; for a few moments her hand stayed on his arm. Her serene smile lingered long after she'd murmured a good night and left the kitchen.
Tom went into his studio for a few minutes, for nothing much except to indulge an idea that had been kicking around. He laid it out with brush and India ink on paper, no thought of accuracy, of trying to refine the emotion behind the idea; then, calmed, drowsy, he closed his book and shut the lights.
On his way to bed he looked into the family room. Mark slept there in the light of the sizzling fire with his face to one side in a hard, handsome profile, breath sighing between his lips. And Barry was at his feet, in sharper relief, her head back against his knee but with a certain prowess, not relaxed; she gazed profoundly, guardedly, at Tom, an impulse in the depths of her eyes like the sprinting of quicksilver.
He nodded but couldn't speak. The clock struck—it was four, the last hour of full dark. The primal hour of reconciliation and leave-taking. As he climbed slowly to his room the old staircase's slight off-plumb seemed magnified into an unsteadiness of shadow and light and then of vital angles above and below: walls, floors, and eaves. He felt threatened, as if the house might suddenly fold up on him, like a carpenter's hinged rule. A trivial hallucination, although it left a long-lasting resonance of terror. He was half drunk still and heartsore for his child, the love-galled virgin, vanished now so hugely from the center of his own life.
Chapter 22
On the second Tuesday in May Dr. James Edwards got away from the office early and drove out to Tuatha de Dannan
in his Porsche. The forsythia had peaked, but dogwood and azalea were taking over, forming estuaries of pink and white and vibrant red in the country along the road. Above the covered bridge, which had received a new coat of paint, the long waterfall brimmed silver. Glimpsed in passing, it seemed motionless but thrilling, like a long-held inexhaustible note of music.
The gates to Tuatha de Dannan were open when he arrived; he drove up to the house and parked behind a Chevy Blazer. Persistent ringing brought Mrs. Aldrich to the front door. The housekeeper was a woman of beak and sinew; she wore an apron. There was about her—although she didn't unlatch the screen door and spoke to him from a few feet back in the foyer—an aroma of cooking fat. She had a high, hoarse voice.
"Barry's not here—she's at the Shopwell in town. Tom is upstairs resting. What did you say your name was?"
"Dr. James Edwards. I took care of Mark. I just wanted to see him for a few minutes."
"I guess it must be all right then. Last time I saw him he was around in back, working in the garden. You go that way." Mrs. Aldrich made a sweeping motion with one arm, pointed, then faded out of view toward the kitchen, where the theme music of a soap opera was playing loudly.
Edwards walked around the house, paused to admire the severely sectioned, mirrored north wall in which the serenity of landscape, blue sky, and becalmed cloud was duplicated surrealistically. Edwards, an art lover, thought of Magritte.
The knoll on which the house and barn were built fell away to rough fields and willows, a pond. Near the house there was an open expanse, a gentle hillside, part of which lay tilled beneath a benign cloud mass; it was fenced squarely with new chicken wire that glittered in the sun. A cassette player dangled from a fence post, trumpeting Vivaldi.
Meanness rose galumphing at Edwards's approach. Mark, wearing tattered denim shorts, was bending to the task of setting out several flats of tomato plants; he looked around more slowly. His back was a sweaty red, his hair long at the nape.
"Mark? Jim Edwards."
The young man got lithely to his feet, and Edwards, who had not seen him since the last week in February, experienced a jumpiness, a tilt of perspective, a sense of being out of focus in the sharp daylight. He was amazed by Mark's physique. Mark had been well built before, like a high school athlete. Now he had acquired both bulk and definition in the major muscle groups while trimming his waist to a band of iron. Obviously he'd been working out with weights. He seemed taller, although he wasn't wearing shoes—perhaps three or four inches taller.
When Mark was closer, Edwards realized he hadn't been wrong—the boy was taller. He felt confused again, as if he'd been confined too long to four walls, the sight of the unwell. The spacious day, the advent of spring, the turned odorous earth—all had a drowsing effect. The doctor shook his head slightly, as if something sticky had enveloped it. Mark no longer looked like a boy to him. His face was fully ten years older, wearing a little in a good, masculine way, acquiring character lines. He might have been his own older brother—infinitely more seasoned, the steady black eyes emblematic of the deepest mines of experience and perception a man can explore.
"Dr. Edwards? Something wrong?"
The smile, as always, was a dazzler. Edwards recovered his equilibrium.
"No. You look—very well."
"I feel great." Mark held up his loamy hands. "Can't shake—I've been grubbing in the garden all day. Could you hand me the hose?"
Edwards picked up the garden hose strung from a spigot in the barnyard and Mark turned the spray on himself, washing hands, legs, and feet. He stepped into a pair of Topsiders and peeled back a section of the fence wire through which he and Meanness passed.
"How are you?" he asked the doctor, with a side glance and an easy familiarity; he had still, on their last meeting, occasionally picked over his words, phrased carefully as someone mastering a new language. But there was still a hint of reserve on Mark's part—wariness, perhaps. It had been his wish to discontinue visits to the hospital, not to participate in medical tests that might have facilitated recall of the past. Edwards had acceded grudgingly, hoping his patient would soon change his mind.
"Couldn't be better. Well, I was out this way and I wanted to stay in touch. How's your reading program coming along?"
Mark took the cassette player from the iron fence post and shut it off."'A weather in the flesh and bone/Is damp and dry; the quick and dead/Move like two ghosts before the eye.'"
"Sounds like Dylan Thomas."
"Yes."
"There's not much wrong with your memory right now. Up to a point, that is."
"Up to a point," Mark agreed, sounding unconcerned. "Come on to the house—we'll have a cold beer. Barry ought to be back soon. I know she'd love to see you."
Mark left Edwards and the hound in the family room, called to Mrs. Aldrich, then went whistling up the steps and reappeared a few minutes later with his hair brushed.
He had pulled on a striped knit shirt. He immediately challenged the doctor to a darts match. He seemed barely in control of his store of vitality. With fluid, unstudied moves he threw four bull's-eyes and fell back, gratified, into a chair beside a reading table that overflowed with books. The windows were open to a breeze, the lushness of the May afternoon. Meanness padded over to slump at Mark's feet. Mark rubbed the tawny dog behind his great fraying ears. Meanness contentedly cut the cheese.
"Oh, that dog," Mark said good-naturedly.
"Anything you want to tell your doctor about?" Edwards asked him. "How's your appetite? Are you sleeping okay?"
"Sure. I get a couple of hours a night."
"Two hours' sleep?"
"That's all I need anymore. The last time I saw you I was sleeping half my life away. And there's so much I want to do, I don't have enough time."
Mrs. Aldrich brought in a tray with frosted mugs and two of the big bottles of Grolsch beer, the ones with the hinged tops.
Edwards was surprised to see her crack a smile. "Mark, I'll batter some mushrooms and fry them if you're hungry."
"That'd be great." He rolled his eyes and then his head toward her, a thoroughbred's playful mannerism, but there was something else too—a wily kind of offhand sexiness she clearly doted on. "Thanks, Mrs. Aldrich."
"If you need anything else," she said, opening a bottle and pouring for them both, "you just let me know."
Edwards stood up against the mantel and raised his glass to Mark, who acknowledged him and then drank deeply.
"Shows how wrong I can be," the doctor said. "I was afraid I might find you a little depressed."
"How do you mean?"
"Amnesiacs frequently undergo a secondary trauma called depersonalization." Mark frowned. "That's a sense of unreality, a feeling of not belonging to the world."
"Oh." Mark got up and stepped over the dog; restlessly picked up the darts, and began sinking them on target again. "It never bothers me," he said after a short silence. "I mean, not knowing who I was, or where I'm from. I know where I am now."
Having rid himself of the darts, he leaned over the reading table and pawed through books liberally stuffed with torn strips of paper to mark pages or passages. He found the volume he wanted, opened it, skipped to the lines he liked, and read one of them aloud.
'"I live not in myself, but I become/A portion of that around me." He put the book down and smiled at Edwards. "Barry and I were reading Byron a couple of nights ago. Great stuff. Do you like the Romantic poets?"
"Sure. Haven't had much time for them lately. Well, there's a new procedure I've heard about involving brain protein synthesis that might be applicable in your case—"
Mark shook his head. "That's over with. I don't want to do any more tests. I'm not sick—why should I?"
"We know almost nothing about your kind of amnesia, where there's no discernible brain damage. We really don't know much about the human brain, either. I hate to miss an opportunity to add to that small store of knowledge. You might be able to provide medical science with a clue to
a rather engrossing question."
"What is that?"
"Is mind a function of the brain, or is it something quite different, like the soul? Your recovery has been phenomenal. You speak well, you read, you have some understanding of the philosophical complexities of life. Yet at one point five months ago your brain was not functioning at all; it was necrotic."
Mark said ironically, "I came from nowhere. I was nothing."
"That isn't true. Some physiological mechanism of which we're ignorant has suppressed your entire past life. I'd like to know what it was. And you—you're curious about everything else. Why don't you want to know?"
Mark drank deeply from his mug of beer, followed swallows with a sigh, a hint of perplexity in his brows.
"You have a name," the doctor persisted, "but where did it come from? How can you be certain that 'Mark Draven' isn't just something you accidentally hit on while you were playing with the Scrabble tiles?"
"It suits me. I like it." He stared at Edwards. "What difference does it make if I just want to enjoy life? Barry understands."
"Thought I heard voices," Tom Brennan said from the doorway.
Edwards turned. He had talked to Tom on the telephone, but they had never met. The painter looked ill, older than he'd imagined. His hair was unkempt, he wore a sagging cable-knit cardigan, house slippers, un pressed chinos.
"Have a good nap, Tom?" Mark asked him.
"Slept too long," Tom complained, rubbing the back of his head "What time is it?"
"About three. Tom, this is Dr. Edwards."
Tom nodded. Edwards shook his hand, which was dry and cold and claw-like. The painter's cheeks were sunken, there was a golf ball-size notch in his throat below the Adam's apple.
"Pleased to meet you," Tom said, and subsided into a rasping cough.
"Little under the weather?"' the doctor asked him.
"I caught the—the damn flu at the end of winter," Tom explained. "And I haven't been able to lick it." He glanced at his dog. "There you are, Meanness. Where've you been all day? Come here."
He snapped his fingers; the bloodhound had lifted his head, but he didn't budge from his place at Mark's feet. Tom looked bewildered.