The Man Who Walked Away A Novel

by Maud Casey

  He is twenty. He is twenty. He is twenty.

  “We will watch over you.” In the Doctor’s voice when he is with him, he hears the watching; he hears it enough to rest. “We won’t send you away,” the Doctor says, his watch ticking Albert back into time. The Doctor said they would talk more tomorrow (tomorrow, which is Tuesday). We’ll give you time to remember and then we will talk more again? Tick, tick, tick, he will bring him back.

  But there are so many questions Albert can’t answer. What if there isn’t enough time in the world for him to remember? How long have you been traveling? When was the last time you saw your family? Where have you been? Why do you go? Why can’t you stop? What causes you to stop when you do stop? Albert cannot smooth the lines on the Doctor’s face if he cannot answer the questions. Who are you, Albert? This is the question that swims beneath the other questions. Who are you?

  Ring (shadow ring). It is time for dinner. In the park outside the Palace of Justice, the trees are on fire with the brilliant colors of the setting sun. Albert wishes they would light his mind on fire so he could see from here to there and there to here.

  “You need to eat your beautiful dinner in order to continue to make your beautiful music,” Albert hears Claude say to Rachel, trying to entice her away from the piano as he does every night. “You can leave the coat on but roll up the sleeves,” Henri says to Samuel, who is lurking in a corner. “Look what a mess . . .” It is time for dinner, but what if the fleeting illuminations continue to be fleeting, if the setting sun doesn’t light his mind on fire long enough for him to see his life? It is right in front of him, somewhere in the shadows of this map, if he could only see.

  His finger moves over Mont-de-Marsan and there is the flicker he offered to the Doctor: discovering himself there and not knowing what else to do, he enlisted voluntarily in the 127th Infantry Regiment at Valenciennes, though there was a letter at home declaring him unfit for service by the review board.

  What was the rest of the story? Something terrible happened. On the road in Mont-de-Marsan, marching with the other conscripts. And then, there he was, his friend Baptiste! Albert discovered himself and then he discovered Baptiste. Here is love, this shrunken man who was once a boy who smelled of apples and dirt. Together, they deserted the infantry and crossed the Belgian frontier, trading weapons and uniforms for laborers’ clothes and three francs each. Baptiste marched with him through Tournai, Ostend, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels. He was thinner than a rail. Unable to find work, they begged until they were run out of every town. Albert tries to catch the memory by the tail before it trails off into darkness. He touches Angoulême on the map and out of the darkness comes the grape harvest; he touches Aix, and there is a hayfield; he traces the Rhine, and there is the sound of the thin lightning-bolt crack that chased him across the surface to the other bank. As much as Albert yearns for the crack to split him open, to split him open and send him crashing into the water, it never happens.

  “In Saint-Étienne, I remember lying in a hospital with a cold compress on my head, given quinine sulfate to cure a toothache,” Albert offered yesterday as it rose up into the light of his memory—the cold compress, the quinine, the toothache, and Saint-Étienne disappeared. Through Lyon he walked, past the funicular railroad, through Grenoble, on the promenades along the Isère River; through a town whose name he never learned, filled with the delicate fragrance of the rosewater manufactured there, walking until the earth’s tremor rumbled through his feet and up his shins, until his bones expanded, until his blood circulated astonishment, until, finally, there it was, the urge to walk, and he was lifted into oblivion.

  “The leaves of the trees in the public garden were gold that time,” he said yesterday, but the memory escaped him before he was able to speak it. Now he looks at his home, Bordeaux, on the map, and remembers the leaves of the trees in the public garden sparkling gold through the green from the lights of the gas lamps his father had helped install and Albert, a boy, walking past them; the lights glittered and filled his eyes. The chestnuts rained down when he looked up at the tree’s spindly arms, and he imagined that if he settled on a sturdy branch he could see out over the slated rooftops of the city and the church steeples. From that perch, he could see the flickering lights of hundreds of gas lamps illuminate the city—the giant clock of St. Eloi, and the church of Saint-Paul, and Saint-Michel, and Sainte-Croix; the Pont de Pierre, the grand theater, the ancient gate to the city, the ancient amphitheater where the gladiators once fought. He might reach up like the arches and buttresses of the nearby cathedral, up and up and up all the way to the heavens, but then the memory went up and up all the way to the heavens. It too was gone, back into darkness.

  “There is time,” the Doctor reassured him today. “You will remember. You are not to worry.” He smiled and nodded, but Albert is sure the Doctor smells it on him—the stench of not remembering. How could he not? It fills the room; it smells of wet, dead leaves, of dying and rot. It lingers even after the Doctor is gone; it fills Albert’s nostrils now. It has driven people away, causing them to leave him by the side of the road, as if he were contagious. To be a man is to be forged out of days, adding up to something with weight and heft; to be able to look back and say, I was here and then here and then there and then there and then here. He has heard people say, I’ve lost these days. They might be gone but the people do not mean they are lost entirely. It was the difference between growing older and oblivion. “There is time,” the Doctor has said, and Albert wants more than anything for this to be true, but he is not so sure.

  When there is a knock at the door, Albert thinks it is the Doctor, come to say they will try again today after all. Or perhaps he is making sure that Albert is all right, that he is coming to dinner. Dinner cannot go on without him. But when he opens the door, it is the veteran with his fuck-you-too face.

  “I have found you out,” the veteran says. “I know who you are.” He is a much taller man than Albert realized; the only other time he has been this close to him was when he first arrived and the veteran had been busy throwing billiard balls and retrieving them. He shoulders his way in to the room, pushing Albert so he stumbles backward. “Going from town to town. Claiming not to remember. And then I heard you say it to the Doctor. I listen in for places where the darkness might get in. I listened in, and I heard it. At first I told myself not to think at all. Not to think about the fact that MaryfuckingMagdalene washes your feet. Let her, I said. I am not thinking of her.”

  The veteran is looming over Albert, but large men have loomed over him before. They have dragged him off to jail; they have caught him playing his beautiful instrument behind their stables and run him off their property with pitchforks; they have accused him of vagrancy, of theft, of not being a man. The only thing he ever feared was that he would disappear again. The veteran looms over him, on the verge of an accusation but this is not the first time Albert has been accused of something—

  “I thought you were the Doctor,” he says. More than anything, he is disappointed. Unless the veteran can really tell him who he is—and Albert is fairly certain that isn’t what the veteran is here for—he doesn’t care to hear the rest.

  But the veteran is determined to tell him. “You enlisted at Mont-de-Marsan. I heard you. I heard you tell the Doctor. You are a deserter. I knew there was something peculiar. You were peculiar from the beginning.”

  “I am not sure what you want,” Albert manages to say, sitting down on his bed as the veteran pushes him forward with his chest. Let the man loom if he wants. They always did.

  “You are an outrage to our nation, but I’m not thinking that, I’m just trying to prevent further outrage,” the veteran is saying.

  A fleeting illumination, and there is Albert’s childhood friend Baptiste, no longer boyishly round but sickly thin, his army clothes in tatters, staggering along a road behind Albert, but he can’t remember why this is his fault. He can’t remember why this causes him such pain.

  “Why are yo
u smelling me?” the veteran asks. “Back away.”

  “I am not,” Albert says, though he is, inhaling deeply the glorious smell of the veteran in order to bring himself back to the room. It is the smell of remembering—dirt, sweat, and a loyal body that is not a deserter; it is the very opposite of dying and rot. It is the smell of a life. This man, with his hand on Albert’s collar, remembers all his days all day long.

  “I would like to put you in a hole and cover you up until your chirping mouth is full of dirt,” the veteran is saying, but Albert isn’t listening. All he can think is, Teach me then. Teach me how to remember. Teach me how to be a man.

  Claude’s body fills the doorway and then the veteran is being dragged out, protesting—“This man should be arrested”—and Nurse Anne is scolding Claude—“You should have your eye on him. Always”—and then she is telling Albert it is time for dinner. “We’ve been waiting for you,” she says, and when he begins to cry, she thinks it is because the veteran scared him, but how could Albert explain to her that these are tears of joy at being expected at dinner?

  “Why don’t you lie down for a little while and then come to dinner?” she says. “We will save you a plate. The veteran will not bother you again. It is not you he is angry with.”

  Albert waits for her to close the door. Instead of lying down, he moves around the room, touching the chair and his shoes and the basin and the bedside table and the pitcher with the cracking ice and the bed. He is here. He is here. He is here.

  Only after he has touched every object—here, here, here—in the room does he lie down on the bed. For so long, it has seemed to Albert that the surface of the earth would never be unfrozen again, not even in spring. But when the Doctor said today at lunch, “You look well, Albert,” it created gaseous ejections in Albert’s deepest heart. How can he explain to Nurse Anne that, for years, his greatest fear was that he would disappear, and now he wonders what will happen if he doesn’t? Before, he expected nothing; now he is poised for more. All those years of yearning to be still and now that he is still, what is he expected to do? He pictures the still, frozen surface, the way the gas is invisible but the aqueous vapors from the geysers hang silently in the air, the gas cultivating the vegetation and slowly the forests rising up to provide the animals and humans, when they arrive, with great sources of minerals. Underneath the earth, the collision of the gas and fissures forms volcanoes that spew hot mud and throw fragments of rock that form mountains. There were flames that blazed for as far as the eye could see, said his father when he told him the story of gas. Fires that burned and burned. Fires that burn still.

  How could Albert possibly explain that there are geysers taking shape inside of him? How can he explain that this moment, this exquisite now, will soon become something glimpsed only occasionally in fleeting illuminations from the pitch-dark road of an unhappy story?

  Thousands of centuries ago, his father said, there were gaseous ejections in the deepest heart of the world. There were geysers formed by gas colliding with fissures and crevices. In the very veins of the earth there were explosions. The surface of the earth was still. For so long, it was frozen. It seemed it would never be unfrozen again, not even in spring.

  He is twenty. He is twenty. He is twenty.

  Albert’s surface has started to thaw in the spring of the Doctor’s attentions. The gentle growth of scrubby vegetation might someday give rise to forests.

  Here, Albert, a story just for you.

  For him and no one else, the sound of this voice he thought had been lost forever. which wasn’t lost at all.

  Listen.

  The prince with one swan wing who wanted to see the world woke to discover himself in the midst of a family of geese.

  “You look strangely familiar,” said the father goose, eyeing the prince’s swan wing. “Anyway, we need your help. We are fewer than we were. You see, each night, a fox comes around and takes another of us off for his dinner. Some nights he takes two: one for dinner, one for dessert.”

  The rest of the geese gathered around. In one voice they told the prince: “Each night for a week, the fox has come; each night, there is one, sometimes two, fewer geese.” The goose family was dwindling. “We used to be many,” the father goose said, and he began to weep.

  “I have an idea!” the prince said. He whispered his idea to the father goose, who whispered it to the rest of the goose family. As night fell, the prince began to disappear limb by limb into the dark and he found a tree and clung to it, hoping that, finally, he might stay up long enough to watch night turn into day. Meanwhile, the geese prepared for the fox’s arrival.

  When night covered the land, the fox arrived, his red face like a demon’s.

  “Wait!” the father goose shouted as the fox prepared to pounce on the mother goose. “If we poor geese are to yield up our lives,” he said, according to the prince’s instructions, “grant us one favor. Let us pray so that we may not die in sin.”

  The fox sat back, eyeing the prince clinging to the tree doing his best to remain invisible. “Oh, why not?” the fox said. “Go ahead. Have your prayer.”

  And so the geese began.

  “Ga! Ga!” said the father goose. Then the mother goose chimed in, “Ga! Ga! Ga!” And then a third goose. And then a fourth. “Ga! Ga! Ga!” And a fifth. And then the sixth and final goose. “Ga! Ga! Ga! Ga! Ga! Ga!” This was their prayer, and they prayed and prayed and prayed until their prayer was a song.

  “When they are done praying,” Albert’s father would say, “the story will end.”

  “Why?” Albert always asked, though he had heard the story before and knew what his father’s answer would be.

  “Because when they are done praying, the fox will eat them.”

  “But instead . . .” Albert prompted his father.

  “Instead, they pray unceasingly and the story continues.”

  “Ga! Ga! Ga!” his father would say to him, instead of good night, keeping the prayer of the story alive. We will always be together, you and I, is what Albert heard. In the flickering light, his father’s face took this shape and then that—a goose, a fox, a king waiting for his son to return home. His father’s face could take any shape it wanted, Albert knew; it could be things that it wasn’t, not only the things that it was.

  There is his father about to blow out the gas lamp, the story still shimmering all around them. Ring (shadow ring), the sharp, quick sound of love in Albert’s ears.

  What time is it? It is time to lie still.

  He lies in his bed and time doesn’t pound him into nothing as he listens to the rain wash clean the piss-drenched streets. He listens as a soaking wet horse clop-clops its way along the slick cobblestones. It is beautiful: the sound of something washed clean; the sound of the horse’s efforts as it makes its way from here to there. There is the clanking of the dinner dishes being cleared; Rachel playing Chopin’s C sharp minor prelude, “Not the Funeral March,” she tells Marian, “the ghostly one,” to which Marian responds, “What a relief, a ghost galloping away from death,” before returning to the sweet murmur of Walter. “Good night!” says the Director. “Listen to Nurse Anne. Tomorrow will bring a new day.”

  Ga! Ga! Ga! Never mind tomorrow. Albert wants nothing more than to keep this moment—there it went—alive.

  Chapter 13

  It is the time of the year when the sulfurous smell from the gasworks rides the wind up the hill from the river and hangs heavy in the air. Despite the smell, despite the dust his bicycle spins up that sticks to his face, the Doctor is eager to go to work each day. Ever since Albert’s arrival, the Doctor has looked forward to the moment he slides off his bicycle and walks through the iron gates under the gentle arch of the asylum entrance. Every day our traveler, as Nurse Anne has taken to calling him, offers a new detail, a gift—his dear childhood friend Baptiste, the woman he met on the bridge who asked him to marry her, the story his father told him of the ancient magic of gas, that his father was a pipe fitter for the gas comp
any; every day, there he is at meals with his large, funny ears, sitting contentedly between Marian and Walter at meals—“My pet,” Marian calls him, and Walter no longer squeezes him because he believes in his reality completely; every day, Albert’s large sad eyes glisten with gratitude when he sees the Doctor.

  Since Albert arrived, only a small corner of the Doctor’s mind has remained tethered to the daily life to which he had grown accustomed—cutting the ends off the mouse-nibbled bread to eat the softer center for his breakfast, waving to the bartender downstairs as he calls out, “Don’t be a stranger,” remaining a stranger. He still spends time with the other patients—walking Walter to the window to remind him the people are not invented each day only to be invented all over again tomorrow, pulling Rachel’s hair from her face and consoling her when she cries over Chopin’s sister walking her brother’s heart to Warsaw, reminding Marian that she has all of her organs even when she tells him he is a know-nothing wretch. Still, the before is fading. A small corner of the Doctor’s mind remains tethered to his daily life before, but here in the after, the rest has been given over to the question of our traveler, his traveler. Someone comes. And you are changed.

  This morning, the Doctor must perform his usual navigation as he pedals through the tangle of schoolchildren, government officials, the occasional drunk staggering over from the café in front of the cathedral to collide with a government official. There was a time when officials used to drop the drunks off at the asylum; this was before the Director made it clear that his asylum wasn’t a catchall. The Director has worked hard to distinguish the asylum as a place where people might not be treated as criminals, where they might be treated without the presence of criminals. “This is not a prison,” he would say when people arrived with the drunks, and then he would provide directions to the jail.