The Man Who Walked Away A Novel

by Maud Casey

  “You,” the woman in front of him says, brushing strands of hair from her face and the face inside her face. “I won’t pretend to guess. You are Albert.”

  The black sky has a mineral smell, threatening rain, and the wind rattles the branches of the birch trees and shivers the fir trees. The way this woman looks him over, that she knows his name—what might he have done while time was hiding? The problem with oblivion, Albert has learned, is that your life goes on without you, making a fool of you. “Have we met before?” Albert asks, though, really, he would rather not know.

  “Come sit, silly man,” the woman says. “Nurse Anne told me who you are.” She pats the empty slab of bench next to her. “You have been sleeping forever. I was beginning to think you would never wake up.”

  “I . . .” he begins. He wants to argue with her, but he is too tired. “For how long?”

  “You slept through all of yesterday,” she says indignantly.

  “Was I supposed to meet you?”

  “No,” she says sternly. “I was just eager to make your acquaintance. Now, please, sit.”

  There were rare moments on the road when Albert stood still for so long that deer gathered in the shadows around him, when he stood still for so long a wildflower bloomed in front of him. In those rare, still moments he dared to imagine he was not the only one; that there were others like him walking astonished too, just around the next corner. For this reason—because she is here instead of just up ahead—he does as he is told. He sits and he is grateful.

  “There have been too many substitutions,” she says. “I am exhausted.”

  “Yes.” He isn’t sure what she’s talking about, but it doesn’t matter; he knows what it is to be exhausted.

  When he sits, the woman nods, and the tightness of her older face relaxes; there again is the face inside her face. Its dimple returns.

  Ring (shadow ring).

  “Those bells will ring you into next year if you let them,” the woman says. “I’m not going anywhere. Sit with me a while longer.”

  “I’d like that.” A drop of rain falls on Albert’s cheek; so clear and bright on his skin it hurts. “I don’t mind the rain.”

  A man as old as the lamplighter but not so grizzled appears in the doorway and walks toward them cautiously, as if they were on fire. “There you are, Marian, my dearest one,” he says to the woman. He puts a tentative hand that smells like pudding on Albert’s shoulder. “I wanted to see for myself. It’s hard to tell. The concocted ones are very lifelike.”

  “We’re enjoying the weather, Walter,” the woman says.

  “It’s starting to rain,” Walter says.

  “We were sitting peacefully.” She sighs, her eyes gray as the sky.

  Those eyes are strangely familiar to Albert, like the clean, bright rain on his tongue—but then everything is strangely familiar. Once, when he stopped, he curled up in a hollow log rotting from the inside out. He had hoped to rot away too, but instead he woke to lightning splitting a tree nearby. Why had he not chosen to sleep near that tree? He huddled with sheep and a lone cow in a pasture, hoping to wake up transformed into a sheep or a cow, as dumb as that. When he heard laughter he thought, Maybe they are not so dumb, these sheep and this cow, maybe they’re laughing at me, but it was a group of men and women huddled together farther down the field, whispering and laughing around a fire. His heart beat faster, hoping these were his people.

  “Join us,” one of them said.

  “We’ll teach you all the tricks,” another said.

  “No one needs to learn your dirty tricks,” said a third.

  These whispering, laughing men and women moved only when they had to, they told him, only to avoid arrest. They spoke to one another the same way this woman and Walter did, confident the other wouldn’t disappear; it wasn’t even a question, and Albert thought for a moment he could join their group. Then one of the men huddled around the fire touched Albert’s shoulder with a hand as cold as glass and Albert felt himself on the verge of shattering so he walked away into the night.

  Though Walter’s hand is warm, his touch is like the rain, painful in its clarity. Still, Albert lets Walter squeeze his shoulder as he looks up at the dark sky, considering. “Masterful,” he says. “Masterful.”

  “At what?” Albert asks. Though the man’s touch on his shoulder hurts, he doesn’t feel afraid. This seems less like a trick than like a secret language.

  Walter squeezes Albert’s other arm—“Quite real, I believe”—then one leg. He is about to squeeze the other leg when an enormous potato-faced man appears and takes him gently by the arm.

  “Walter,” the large man says.

  “Yes, Claude?” Walter says to the man. “Not one of the real,” he whispers to Albert.

  “It is nearly time to come to the table,” Claude says, giving Walter a stern look.

  “May I squeeze you, darling Marian?” Walter asks when Claude and his stern look leave.

  Marian laughs.

  Ring (shadow ring). “It is time for breakfast,” she says, pulling her shawl around her as she stands. It has started to rain in earnest.

  Ring (shadow ring). Is it time for breakfast? Is it time for lunch? Is it time for dinner? Entering into time is like squeezing through a too-small door. Still, Albert wants these to be his questions now.

  “Just one arm?” Walter asks. “I’ll squeeze it quickly so you won’t even notice.”

  “What is wrong with you?” Marian says.

  “You are crueler than you know,” Walter says.

  “I know precisely how cruel I am,” Marian says.

  It is a murmur with no words at first, and then a windy whisper. Il revient, il revient. It calls Albert back—he returns, he returns—but he doesn’t want to return. He wants to follow Marian and Walter inside as they argue their way toward breakfast.

  But the whisper insists. This is not what Albert has been listening for. This is the same old life calling him back. He was a fool to think it had gone away. Perhaps if he goes to his room—Here is your room, here you are, yes, right here—and lies down he can make it go away. “Please excuse me,” he says to Marian and Walter as they walk back inside and begin down the hallway. He will take care of this in private and then he will return to become a normal man tick-tocking his way through the day. Why can’t he be? “Please excuse me,” he says again, and Walter and Marian turn. “I will be there soon.”

  “You are excused,” Marian says.

  “I’ll be there soon,” Albert says.

  “Well, go, then,” Marian says sharply. “No one’s keeping you.”

  “Breakfast will expect you,” Walter calls over his shoulder. “And so will we.”

  Albert wants nothing more than to keep an appointment with these people rather than to, for example, wake up on an unfamiliar narrow street, with an ache in his bones, surrounded by sheep.

  Il revient, il revient, sing the River Garonne, the Tarn, the Aude, the Orb, the Têt, the Rhône, the Nive, the Adour, the Weisse Elster, the Meuse, but he will not. He will deafen himself to their call. He returns. He returns. What rivers? What il revient?

  He will not. He is not. He is not. Il ne revient pas.

  In his room, he lies on his bed. He unzips his trousers and cradles his beautiful instrument, holding its velvety wrinkles until the wrinkles disappear and grow smooth in his hand. There is no urgency, he thinks, stroking it. There is no trembling in the arch of his foot. Here is his soft bed. Here is his room. His beautiful instrument nods in agreement. It nods and nods, rising as it crescendos, but its song does not leave him somewhere else altogether. It sings to him, and then lies still, sleeping in the sticky puddle of his palm. He washes himself in the basin by the bed, and then tucks his beautiful instrument away.

  There are bells and then shadow bells singing in Albert’s ear: Does this ring a bell? Outside, the rain has cleared completely and the sky is pink where the sun shines through.

  There again, the sharp, quick sound of
love: Listen.

  The hovering thing is a voice and the voice takes shape. The voice that Albert thought had gone forever silent. The voice he thought was lost to him. And there, the face he thought was lost too, illuminated—the waxy swirl of scars on the left cheek and the ropy cords of skin edging the collar of his shirt and coat sleeves. Il revient. Il revient. His father’s beloved face, the story of which his father told only once.

  Listen. Il revient. Il revient. The story returns. His father had been working underneath the opera house, mending the connection between the flaking pipes of the old building and a main pipe in the street. As the matinee performance of Zampa began and the theater filled with two hundred theatergoers, he and another gas fitter continued working silently underground. When his father first noticed the crack in the pipe, he instinctively wrapped it with his coat. He nodded to his partner to light a match to make sure the invisible gas was contained; he was sure it was.

  Even when the fire peeled the skin from his hands and neck and face, even when it burned the hair from his head, he continued to hold his jacket there. He didn’t let go. “The opera was never interrupted,” he told Albert, “and only those theatergoers who read the article in the back section of the newspaper the next day ever knew their lives had been in danger.”

  “A miracle!” Albert said, sharing his father’s pride.

  “The chaos of gas needs to be contained in a perfectly fitted pipe,” his father corrected him.

  That his father’s familiar scars have returned to Albert is a miracle. Their colors changing with the lamplight’s flicker: a sky infused with red dusk, then sun-bright again, as constant and beautiful as the sun moving through the sky each day. How Albert had longed to run his hand over the waxy swirls. How he longs to run his hands over them now.

  Where had he been? Why had he left him alone for so long? It didn’t matter. He was here.

  Shhh. Lie still. I will tell you a story.

  Listen, his father began as he had each night. Each night, his father untwisting him with a story.

  Listen, and Albert was stilled.

  His father spun a world into existence and Albert would think, I’m still here. His body hadn’t been consumed by meningitis like his brothers’, who died in infancy before their faces had even taken shape; he hadn’t disappeared into pneumonia like his mother. He had lived. Puff, puff went his father’s pipe; puff, puff went the cottage that contained their lives, lives that had taken a shape as familiar as the tobacco packed into the pipe. Puff, puff went the cottage and the little lives of a man and his son alone in the world—gas fitting, meals, sleep, gas fitting, meals, sleep—disappeared.

  His father’s voice has returned and with it the story of a magic ball of yarn, an evil stepmother, a good king, and his six children, five sons and one daughter. One day the evil stepmother transformed the boys into swans, but the girl, being quite clever, escaped. In order to break the curse, the girl had to remain silent for six years; if she wanted to save her brothers, she could not make one sound. She couldn’t even laugh. For six years. A king from a neighboring land asked her to marry him. How could she refuse? If she spoke, her brothers would remain swans forever. She literally couldn’t say no. She spent her days using the ball of magic yarn to sew magic shirts for her brothers. She sewed in a hurry because she wanted them back so badly. Still, these magic shirts were complicated; they took a long time. Six years passed, and though she hadn’t quite finished the fifth shirt, she had grown unbearably lonely after so many years. So, without having finished the last shirt—she would finish it on the way, she thought—she escaped the king’s castle in order to track her swan brothers down. Sisters have a way of finding their brothers, even brothers who have been turned into birds.

  When she found them, she gave each of them a magic shirt. Four of the brothers put on the magic shirts and became men (six years later they were no longer boys)—their feathers turned back into skin, their wings back into arms. But when the fifth brother put on the half-finished shirt—still missing one arm—one swan wing remained, its beautiful feathers rippling uselessly.

  Oh, darling boy, don’t cry.

  That brother with one swan wing? He made a life for himself. More than that, he was the only one of the brothers who remembered that he had once been a bird. For the rest of his life, he was the only one who remembered what it was like to be something else entirely.

  A great cloud of damselflies hovers just outside Albert’s window, on the cusp of movement, and Albert hovers with them. And then the cloud of damselflies is in motion. They fly back and forth, back and forth. They go nowhere, and yet what an exquisite show of spindly legs and blurred wings!

  What will you do? Stay.

  Where is relief? Here.

  What is the question?

  Ring (shadow ring).

  What time is it? That is the question.

  It is time for breakfast.

  Chapter 9

  “But how did Chopin’s sister travel all that way without dropping it?” Rachel asks. “Carrying his heart all the way to the cathedral in Warsaw?”

  The Doctor—at Marian’s request (“Unrelenting sadness is not good for us,” she said, and he had to admit she had a point)—has been trying to convince Rachel to play something other than Chopin’s Funeral March, which she has been playing all morning in honor of the dead bee. “Very carefully, I’m sure,” the Doctor says, “but even Chopin’s sister would surely have liked a break now and then from thinking about death.” He pulls Rachel’s hair off of her face and reaches in his pocket for some string with which to tie it back. It is then he rediscovers the worn scrap of paper Nurse Anne gave him yesterday.

  In neat, careful handwriting, someone has written: He is off his rocker.

  “Everyone’s a doctor,” Nurse Anne said. “It was pinned to Albert’s waistcoat when he arrived.”

  “But how? She had to travel so far,” Rachel is saying.

  “It is a question for another time,” the Doctor says. All morning he has been meaning to speak to the new patient. Since he first met him yesterday morning, but then the man nearly fell onto the billiard table with exhaustion and Nurse Anne very rightly suggested he should go immediately to bed where he slept right through until this morning. He had caught a glimpse of him, sitting contentedly at breakfast with Marian and Walter, but then he’d had to convince the veteran to tuck his imaginary gun back into his trousers. “I can’t tell if I’m thinking a million things or if I’m thinking nothing,” the veteran said, and the Doctor futilely suggested to him, “How about no more thinking for now?” before he’d had to give Walter a bromide once breakfast was done, then walk him to the window to show him the people buzzing around the square and up and down the stairs of the Palace of Justice, assuring him the people were as real as Walter and himself, until the stern statues on the roof of the palace glaring down at the Doctor from their perch—And? So?—reminded him of the new patient and he asked Claude to take over. The predictable unpredictability of life in the asylum has caused the great doctor’s fierce girl to fade, and forced the Doctor’s mind to shrink to the problems immediately in front of him.

  But now he will leave Rachel to think of Chopin’s poor sister bringing a small piece of her brother home, his life over and done too soon, before he was through, before he had achieved all he could. He doesn’t want to think about all of the cemeteries full of the hearts of people not yet finished with their lives. It is not a happy story. But he has a different unhappy story to attend to, so he heads out into the courtyard, carefully avoiding the bench Marian has declared hers, in order to clear his head to make room for the new patient.

  There is a slight chill in the air and he feels the cold stone through his pants. Good, he thinks, the chill will wake him up. When Nurse Anne put the man to bed yesterday, she learned that he had come from a long journey on foot and was exhausted, but that that was not the cause of his tears. He wept because he could not prevent himself from departing on a trip when
the need overtook him. Provins, Vitry-le-François. Châlons-sur-Marne, Chaumont, Vesoul, Mâcon, Budweis, Prague, Leipzig, Berlin, Tournai, Bruges, Ostend, Ghent, Liège, Nuremberg, Stuttgart . . . It was here Nurse Anne stopped him.

  “We both would have been up all night if I hadn’t,” she said.

  Nurse Anne told him that the man is not a vagrant. “He is insistent on that fact,” she said. He grew up in this city, in his father’s cottage by the river, but often wandered away for long stretches of time and—she learned this from the man who dropped him off (“He couldn’t get away fast enough. I was lucky he told me anything at all”)—the cottage had been destroyed in a fire in his most recent absence.

  The Doctor’s leg has gone numb from the cold stone and he stands to shake it, then brushes the dirt from the seat of his pants. “Not there,” a voice beyond the walls of the asylum cries. “No, here. Here.” There are deliveries not far from the asylum gates at this hour. Something thuds against the cobblestones and two men curse at once. Otherwise, the noise of regular life in the city is faint. He barely hears it when he is here; the patients aren’t the only ones who find protection from the noise of life in here. In his pocket, his father’s watch ticks into his palm. He never knew the precise moment of his father’s death and it has always bothered him. The hands of the watch moving so fluently through the minutes: Was this it? The hour of his father’s death? Was this? But the hands never stopped to tell him. Tick. Now? Tick. Now? Tick.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, where are you now?” A woman’s voice rises up out of the murmur on the other side of the wall.

  Where am I? the Doctor’s father asked, batting away the incompetent doctor’s flapping cuffs. You are right here, said the incompetent doctor, in a rare moment of competence, and his father became still again. The only sound was the leeches doing their work. You are right here. On the mat on the floor beside the bed where he slept each night, the boy Doctor listened to the ticking of his father’s watch until they both fell asleep.