With an unfamiliar sense of foreboding, Mauro tenses beneath the willow tree, feels the tufts of coarse white hair rising on his arms. The man is a minister—not an acrobat. What is he trying to prove?
Because the log slopes down into the water, Mauro cannot tell exactly where it ends. Two steps farther and the current is washing over Noah’s feet, so that although Mauro knows the minister is still standing on the rotten wood, he can no longer see it. Indeed, there is a fraction of a second before Mauro tears himself free of the tree branches and goes barreling down the bank, the peacocks shrieking at his back, when he believes that the minister is walking on the water, that unlike Mauro himself he has succeeded in going several steps beyond his human boundaries, that the God he has been looking for is right there hanging on to him, keeping his feet suspended just a hairsbreadth above the grasping silver waves. From the expression on Noah’s face—the sudden illumination, the flare of unsullied joy—Mauro is convinced that in that instant, he believes it, too.
And then he falls. He falls like a bird shot from the sky, like the rain in a town that he will have to leave behind. He falls like Mauro’s heart when the illusion crumbles to pieces before him, when the world reminds him once again—brutally, ruthlessly—that there is no one guiding his steps or holding him up; that when his foot strikes against a rock or his fingers slip one by one from his homemade trapeze, the only thing reaching out to catch him will be the earth itself, cold and hard and merciless.
twenty-five
Although Dr. Yu has been trained in the art of empathy, she does not find it very useful.
Once when she was in medical school, she was made to wear a pair of garden gloves and told to open a bottle of pills in order to simulate the trials of patients with arthritis. In the same class, she had to listen to her instructor while wearing earplugs (partial deafness), read magazines through goggles smeared in honey (deteriorating vision), and walk for half a day with handfuls of small stones in her shoes (diabetic neuropathy). She and her classmates rolled down hallways in wheelchairs and limped through stairwells with canes.
Dr. Yu found the whole experience to be highly ridiculous. How can anyone expect her to help patients if her hands are gloved and she cannot write out prescriptions? If she cannot see, cannot hear, cannot walk down the hallway from one waiting area to the next—how is she supposed to do her job? “This is not a literature class,” she was tempted to say to her professors. “This is medical school. If I wanted to learn how to feel pain, I would have gone someplace else. The reason why I’m here is because I’d rather learn to cure it.”
By the time she graduated from medical school, she was one of the top students in her class. She learned how to perform both the classic and the cutting-edge surgeries, and by the end of her training she was wielding the tools of the operating room with the same familiarity and aplomb with which she held her own toothbrush. With several years of practice now behind her, she feels that she has seen every possible kind of heart, every failure and weakness, and she knows how to deal with each one. She is an excellent doctor. There should be no doubt about that.
It is, in part, because she is an excellent doctor that she is not surprised to be woken an hour before dawn by an insistent pounding on her front door. Accustomed to late-night calls from the hospital, she is completely alert and on her feet within six seconds, and by the time six more have passed she is shrugging into her cotton robe and jogging down the stairs. This would not be the first time that one of her neighbors has come to the door in the middle of the night to complain of a slightly racing heartbeat or a touch of fever. Dr. Yu always brings them inside, sits them down, and dutifully checks them over. She is familiar with the sense of being needed.
But when she yanks open the door she does not find a neighbor; only a newer version of her best friend, with coal-black hair and half-moons carved out below her eyes, supporting an old man who is shivering uncontrollably. Under the slim beams of the porch light, the minister appears so much gaunter than he was when Dr. Yu last saw him, his face so sharp and so ashen that in the seconds before someone speaks, Dr. Yu does not recognize him.
“April,” says her best friend, her voice thick with exhaustion. “I didn’t have time to try and reach you before we left. Can we stay with you tonight?”
Tonight, Dr. Yu reflects, is nearly over. The sky in the east is already glowing pale and yellow, and the birds nesting below her mailbox are awake and singing in the dark.
“Of course you can,” she says brusquely, stepping out of the way. She is aware that now is not the time for questions. “Come on, then—let’s get the two of you inside.”
They follow her into the hallway, clinging to one another like survivors of a shipwreck, water dripping to the floor. Their clothes are so soaked through that it looks as though they have been wet for days, even though her best friend must have driven hours through a dry and cloudless night to get them here. Although Dr. Yu will toss everything in the dryer before going back to bed, after several rounds through it she will find that the clothes are still damp. She will examine them in the morning before she makes the coffee, holding them up to the light in irritated disbelief. It will be as if the cloth itself is demonstrating a kind of willful resistance; as if the fabric had forgotten how to be anything but wet.
For now she simply helps them peel their slickers from their skin, wondering how long it has been since she herself has worn a raincoat. Noah has so many goose bumps rising on his arms that his skin looks pockmarked, diseased. She wraps him tightly in a blanket and leads them both down to her best friend’s old room, which has not been touched by anyone but Dr. Yu’s cleaning woman in the years since her best friend moved out.
“Could you check him over?” her best friend asks, once Noah is sitting on the bed. “Just to make sure nothing is broken, and everything is normal?”
Dr. Yu obediently reaches for Noah’s clammy wrist in order to read his pulse. Her examination is brief but thorough, and she assures her best friend once they are back out in the hallway that his vital signs are all fine. She would not say, however, that everything is normal; the minister has the air of someone suffering a kind of posttraumatic shock. Dr. Yu has only ever witnessed Noah as being cheerful, passionate, aggressively attentive. When she spent time with her best friend after the marriage she would become cross with the way he intruded on their conversations, positioning himself in the center of the room, on his imagined soapbox, to offer up his unsolicited advice. She was most irritated when he critiqued her on her bedside manner, on the way in which she spoke about and interacted with her patients. She would never have expected him to offer his wrist, his ear, his bare chest to be examined with as little cognizance as he did just now. He did not even look to the door when she and her best friend retreated from the room.
In the kitchen, Dr. Yu puts a pot of milk on the stove, remembering her best friend’s routine indulgence of drinking milk steamed with honey before bedtime. Her best friend drops into a chair, and when the drink is prepared, Dr. Yu sends a mug skating across the table toward her. It is strange to have her best friend here, in this kitchen, after living apart for so long. The painted walls, the framed photographs, the colors of the towels and the dishes—none of these were Dr. Yu’s doing. Her best friend always possessed an instinctive, enviable sense of light and balance.
“All right,” says Dr. Yu, her tone clinical and probing. “What happened?”
Her best friend twines her fingers through the handle of her mug. “There was an accident,” she finally replies. Her words are heavy and slow. “Noah went down to the river, and he slipped and fell in.”
“Were you there, too?” asks Dr. Yu.
“No,” says her best friend. “Mauro was there. He pulled Noah out.”
“Mauro?”
“A friend of ours. He owns the general store,” she explains. “He’s been keeping some of the larger birds, like the wild turkeys and the peacocks.”
The larger birds? Dr. Yu
’s face registers her bafflement, which only increases as her best friend describes a situation that sounds like something out of a fable—a murky little town bedded down among the hills, beset by bad weather and capricious personalities. As her best friend speaks, Dr. Yu tries to imagine the vivid hues of the umbrellas, the puddles gleaming in the streets, the river rising up between the banks. Fine, fine. All of that, she can understand. It is when her best friend launches into the story of the zoo that Dr. Yu narrows her eyes, her forehead creasing in skepticism. Wild animals roaming free in the town? Pacing through empty storefronts, grazing in people’s backyards, swimming in bathtubs? She finds the whole thing as ridiculous as it is dangerous. It simply doesn’t make sense. If there was a problem with the rain, why didn’t they send the animals away much earlier? And if the situation now is truly so severe, why haven’t all of the townspeople evacuated?
Her best friend raises and lowers a shoulder when Dr. Yu demands a real explanation. “It’s complicated,” she says, as if that ought to answer every question.
Dr. Yu frowns. “I don’t understand.”
“Not everything can be explained.” Her best friend’s gaze is as solemn and reflective as Dr. Yu remembers it. “Anyway, it’s hard to describe it to someone who hasn’t seen it.”
Is it Dr. Yu’s imagination, or is there an edge to her best friend’s tone? She understands that she has been unavailable, that there were phone calls that went unanswered and a promise to come visit on which she never followed through. She is sorry to hear, of course, that things were so strange and so hard—and yet from hundreds of miles away, what help or solace could Dr. Yu have offered? It is difficult to heal a person one cannot touch and to fix a life one cannot witness. Besides: Doesn’t Dr. Yu have enough trouble of her own?
“Well, you’re here now,” she says with all the affirmation she can muster. She pats her best friend’s hand. “You made the right decision.”
Her best friend glances down the hallway. “I didn’t have much choice,” she replies. “He hasn’t been himself for weeks. If Mauro hadn’t been there—” She shudders. “I don’t want to think about what could have happened.” She pauses, then adds: “April, do you think that you could talk to him?”
“Talk to him?” Dr. Yu repeats. She shakes her head. “I’m a heart surgeon, not a psychiatrist. This is not my area of expertise.”
“Please,” her best friend persists. “There must be something you can do.”
Dr. Yu considers her best friend, whose hair is so black that it gleams almost blue in the strong white light of Dr. Yu’s kitchen. Is there something she can do? Dr. Yu asks herself. She treats the body, not the soul. What good would it do to take Noah in for a real examination? What use would she be if she tried to speak with him, she who—according to her father—so often fails in understanding the affairs of the heart?
The truth is that after her abysmal performance with her father, she does not trust herself with another man’s despair. She is tired—so tired. She does not mind that people come to her door day and night in the hope that she will cure what ails them—she only wishes that once in a while someone would ask what is ailing her, Dr. Yu, instead of assuming that a doctor would not need someone else to ease her pain. And how to explain that to her best friend, who has always been convinced that Dr. Yu has all the answers? That kind of blind adoration was something Dr. Yu once thrived on, but it is no longer what she needs.
Dr. Yu deliberates. “It sounds to me,” she says slowly, “as though there is something unfortunate about that place. Who stays in a town where it rains every day, especially after they have been warned that the weather will only get worse? What kind of people live with parrots and alligators and cheetahs in their houses, or with bongos in the backyard? No wonder Noah was losing his mind back there. He cannot be expected to reach people who are deliberately making themselves unreachable. Give him a few days here—back in his old city, his old routine. Soon he’ll be just fine.”
For a moment her best friend doesn’t answer. Finally she rises from her chair and sets her mug down in the sink. Dr. Yu hopes this is a good sign. A few hours’ sleep, she is convinced, will do all of them a world of good.
“Honestly, April,” says her best friend, pausing at the threshold of the hallway. From this angle Dr. Yu can see the slump of her shoulders, the disappointment coloring her face. “I think that you could try to be more understanding.”
The accusation, an echo of her father, strikes Dr. Yu harder than her best friend intended. She is trying to understand. The fact is, Dr. Yu would like to say to her best friend’s retreating shadow—the fact is that there is only so much suffering a person can reflect upon while still managing to function in the world every day. Compassion is all right in moderation, but an excess can knock you flat, leave you mournful and paralyzed, strip you of your usefulness. Perhaps it is true that she could be more empathetic, and less detached. Perhaps she ought to express more emotion and encourage her father, her patients, to express theirs.
Like everyone else in the world, she, too, has had her heart broken; she, too, has suffered grief. There have been days when the silence in her house has nearly bowled her over with sadness, and there have been mornings when she wakes to find that she does not have the will to rise, the energy to shower or to eat or to dress. This is the truth about sadness: sometimes the clouds can descend without warning.
twenty-six
In the hours following Noah’s fall into the river and his subsequent departure with his wife, the diner explodes with activity.
Granted, the town is a small one. But although busy days in the diner might not measure up to the kind of packed lunch crowds one would expect to find in a restaurant in the city, the McGinns are running low on both servers and supplies and so the rush is causing Mrs. McGinn, for one, to break out in hives. The zookeeper, noticing this as soon as he comes down the stairs into the dining room, offers her an ointment that he has been using on the wolves. He has told the townspeople time and again about the reaction the wolves will have to poultry, but some idiot or another persists in wedging chicken bones through a crack in the door to the storefront where they are kept. The zookeeper cannot tell if the action is benevolent or cruel: Does the anonymous chicken-donor only mean to feed them because they are looking lean and hungry, or is he (or she) hoping that in eating the bones, the wolves will die?
This was what he was pondering while brushing his teeth this morning. Then, after he had spat into the sink and turned off the faucet, he stared at his reflection in the mirror and he asked himself: When did my thoughts become so dark?
He will need to pull himself together over the next few months. This is not the kind of father (cynical, critical, impatient) that he had ever expected himself to be. As he informed his reflection this morning, he had better shape up. He had better make a concerted effort from now on to be more generous, more tolerant, slower to chastise and to judge.
And yet the townspeople are not making his resolution very easy. After he hands Mrs. McGinn the ointment, she grasps and pockets it. When the zookeeper tells her that he will be needing it back (unless the walking chicken-bone dispenser discontinues those toxic nightly visits), she only frowns and shoves it deeper into the front of her apron with the air of a magpie hoarding a gleaming shard of glass.
“We’ll see,” she snaps. “Are you going to help out down here or not?”
The zookeeper stares at her. No, he wants to say. Most likely not. Does she have any sense of how he is forced to spend his time? He is not sitting up there admiring the ugly beige walls of her guest bedroom, lounging on the threadbare sheets and reading fat Russian novels (his favorite kind of fiction, if anyone ever cared to know), while she sweats over platters of grilled cheese and five-gallon vats of tomato soup. No. He is marching the streets of this town at all hours of the day and night, tracking down tropical birds and snakes that have gone missing. He is treating the bites and scratches that the townspeople acquire when they cud
dle up too close to their charges. He is burying reptile carcasses and treating mammals for anxiety and he is doing it all on his own, now that the minister’s wife has abandoned the project and deserted her animals, as well. That red fox has been trotting up and down driveways for hours, peering into doorways and climbing onto windowsills in search of her.
Meanwhile the zookeeper is eating infrequently and sleeping fitfully and worrying about his wife-to-be and his unborn child on top of it all. He exhales and tries to calm himself, the thought of his fiancée reminding him of his resolution.
“I can give you an hour,” he tells Mrs. McGinn, making a concerted effort not to snarl. “What do you need me to do?”
She instructs him to take orders and bring out drinks while she goes back into the kitchen to see what kind of meals she can concoct out of the supplies in her dwindling stockroom. Deliveries have become more sporadic as the rain has worsened, and it has been several days now since anyone has seen a fresh fruit or vegetable. The zookeeper does not need to be reminded of the problem; he is already mulling over what sorts of canned foods he might be able to feed the primates if they run out of produce. The hoofstock still have plenty of tall grass and leaves and hay to go through, and right after the flood the zookeeper stocked the extra freezers in back of the diner with pounds upon pounds of meat for the carnivores. He is grateful now that he was able to do so, and that he did not have to resort to distributing the frozen meat for safekeeping among the townspeople. From what he has observed of their behavior lately, he doubts whether they would have been willing to return it to him.
Overnight, his neighbors have turned into hoarders. As he scratches their orders down on his fiancée’s notepad, he can see them shoveling sugar packets and ketchup and creamers into their purses, their trouser pockets, the folds of their slickers and the tops of their rain boots. Unaware that over so many years living among animals the zookeeper has honed his peripheral vision, they think that they are caching on the sly.
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