The Man Who Walked Away A Novel

by Maud Casey

  He is glad. He is. These memories are beads strung on a fragile thread that has lasted from then until now. At last, he is here, he is here, he is here. I am so glad. He is that I. He is an I that has lasted from then until now.

  The Doctor blows on Albert’s eyelids.

  “My life was not always without love,” Albert says, opening his eyes. What he means is, Here is love.

  And here: green leaves of the Spanish chestnut trees in the public garden sparkling gold, illuminated by the gas lamps his father installed in the park. Come climb, they said to thirteen-year-old Albert, restless in the days before his mother died; so restless he walked over to the cathedral to look up at its soaring arches and buttresses. Looking up at them caused a fire in his chest that felt like the kind of strength that might save a dying mother.

  “Tell me about the rats again,” he would say to her, because he knew the rats secretly gave his mother pleasure. Sometimes, if he was very lucky, she would describe how much she detested those rats in the public garden, nesting in the soft ground under the Spanish chestnut trees, scrambling and screeching over every fallen chestnut. That rodents had overrun the fancy trees planted by the city at great expense delighted her, a woman who took in knitting for extra money. “We are not a family getting fat off the triangular trade,” she would remind Albert whenever he asked for things.

  But there were those leaves sparkling gold behind his eyelids. Why couldn’t he stop himself? When his mother, so sick in her bed, said, “Don’t,” why did he hear: Why not?

  There are some things he cannot tell the Doctor. He doesn’t have the words.

  Those leaves sparkled gold: an invitation. Come climb.

  The chestnuts rained down from the spindly branches of the tree. They rained down onto the filthy rats as he climbed, sending them scrambling, but they rushed right back to fight over the soft meat of the nuts. Then he was out on a sturdier branch, clinging to it, and the view was as grand as the one his father once showed him from the top of the Pey-Berland Tower. All of it laid out before him: the slated rooftops of the city, the church steeples, the flickering lights of hundreds of gas lamps illuminating the giant clock of St. Eloi, the ancient gate, the ancient amphitheater where the gladiators once fought.

  He clung to the branch as it grew dark, staring into the sky without end, and his life seemed so small. How could it be that his small life could deserve so much love? There was so much love, but since his mother’s illness the love was so fragile. In the tree, his body pulsed with that fragile love. He opened his mouth and the fragile love grew strong. He imagined it shooting like flames out over the city, over the countryside, to places he’d never been before. It was so exhausting, this love, and he fell asleep; he dreamed he was a glittering leaf blown by the wind off the branch, tossed and twirled, floating up and up and up. In his dream, he never fell.

  When he hit the ground, the filthy rats did not bite him as his mother had feared; they must have run away. Or so he thought. He couldn’t be sure. When he woke, he discovered himself sometime later, not knowing how he got there, on a bench somewhere else in the city with chestnut-sized bruises down one side of his body. The bruises lingered after his mother’s death; he had wanted them to stay forever, a remnant of the time before, but each night the bruises turned a different, lighter color, black then blue then green then yellow. Each night his father sponged the bruises, too tender at first for Albert to touch. “You’re scrubbing too hard,” he said, worried his father would wash them away. And then one day they were gone.

  It was a few weeks after the bruises faded that his father began to tell him stories of the prince with one swan wing who wanted to see the world. After he wandered away the fourth time, they both knew the stories weren’t enough. Listen. When Albert trembled and shook, when he fell on his way to bed because he was that dizzy, when he was overcome by that urge that he could not find the words for, his father would take him to bed, first swaddling Albert’s wrists and his ankles in cloth to prevent the rope from burning. He was always gentle. He always asked, “Is the rope too tight?” The other question was written on his father’s face: What will become of you, Albert? The same question is there on the Doctor’s face when Albert’s eyes flutter open.

  What will happen when I’m gone? his father’s face said. Who will bring you back? Albert thrashed in his bed for hours; he tried not to but the urge was so strong. His father’s weeping filled the cottage.

  Just beyond the weeping, there is another room with another door, one the Doctor hasn’t discovered, but Albert keeps this door locked.

  “Everything is right here. This is what my father told me,” Albert tells the Doctor. “Each night, ‘Stay, Albert, stay here with me.’”

  Chapter 19

  Is it possible for the Doctor to feel even more keenly the pleasure in his system and the system in his pleasure? Since he and Albert began dreaming together, he does; riding around the lake, he feels it in the depths of his beautiful coral bones. Click-clickety-click, ankles rotating steadily with the pedals, he waves hello to the rag merchant and the bicycle doesn’t so much as quiver. The ducks quack ridiculously on the shore but the geese sleep on.

  Propelling himself above the earth on this simple, true invention—odd wooden hobbyhorse turned gravity-defying machine—makes him feel close to Albert’s own willful passage through space and time. The earth trembling in him. Time passes differently. He is himself and himself. He is no longer only moving toward death; he is no longer only dying. The whole world and the heavens and the angels are in his head, his mother and father too. Click-clickety-click. Riding his bicycle, the Doctor feels close to understanding the astonishment Albert describes, the astonishment he felt when he walked. There must have been a kind of pleasure in Albert’s system too. Why pursue it if it were only pain? If not pleasure, relief. And now. And now. And now. Each step taking him farther into relief but only if he didn’t stop moving. Click-clickety-click.

  Day by day, the years of appearing and disappearing are adding up to something, swirling into existence underneath the Doctor’s fingers: Pneumonia takes Albert’s mother and soon after Albert becomes his father’s strange boy; the first time he wanders, when he is thirteen, his father miraculously tracks him down in La Teste with the umbrella salesman; not long after, Albert discovers himself slung over his father’s back, heading back through the ancient gate of the city; the third time, he wakes to discover himself being dragged through the streets, his father’s arms wrapped around him from behind; the fourth time, his father finds him pleasuring himself behind the cathedral, where they had not been since his mother died; and then he didn’t walk again for four years until he was seventeen—Albert has not yet said what happened next. The Doctor imagines the fluttering unbuttoned cuffs of the country doctor driving him from his own home when he was a boy. What happens next is death, the Doctor is certain. My life was not always without love, but then it was gone.

  Click-clickety-click. There are questions that remain to be answered—those four years, how did his father keep him from wandering? There is time enough, his own father said, and now the Director reminds him too. There is no rush, and there has been progress. “Look at him,” Nurse Anne said yesterday. There was Albert explaining to Elizabeth how he almost rode the funicular in Lyon. “I always wanted to be that sort of man,” he was saying. He is no longer a man comprised only of questions and blanks. Something in Albert’s face has changed—no longer always a question. Am I this man? Occasionally, there was a flicker of conviction. I am this man.

  The sun is up, time for the Doctor to go to work. Click-clickety-click. He pedals faster, eager to return to Albert, to continue with the case study he has been fiddling with in his notebook.

  It all began one morning when a young man of twenty came from a long journey on foot and was exhausted, but that was not the cause of his tears. He wept because he could not prevent himself from departing on a trip when the need took him; he deserted work, and daily life, to wal
k as fast as he could, straight ahead, sometimes doing 70 kilometers a day on foot, until in the end he would be arrested for vagrancy and thrown in prison. According to the patient’s accounts, the spells of wandering began seven years ago. The patient’s father managed to prevent the wandering for four years, but the spells resumed when the patient was seventeen. When he wanders, he is not entirely awake, and when he arrives in another city or another country altogether, he isn’t sure where he is or how he got there . . .

  The Doctor’s bicycle wobbles; he is much improved, but he will never be a great Léotard. The chaos of gas contained in a perfectly fitted pipe. Something Albert’s father said to Albert when he told him the story of the accident that scarred his face. This is what the Doctor is trying to do—diagnoses are the fitted pipes that contained the unruly, combustible lives, the chaos between the there of before and the here of after. But it doesn’t end with the diagnosis. Fugueur. It is helpful, but it can’t hold an entire life. Albert’s father taught his son well. A diagnosis is a story like any other, an effort to explain. There is no rush.

  And why not slow down? The Doctor still needs to look ten meters in front of him—and never at the road—to keep himself steady. Why not slow down and appreciate the beauty of this morning—the rag merchant waving goodbye, the sleeping geese, the quacking ducks? The trees, they took fantastic shapes. To be astonished by the world—Albert’s walking has come at a cost, but there is pleasure in his system.

  Click-clickety-click, the Doctor pedals past the rows of silent houses shuttered to the wind carrying the eggy smell up from the smoke-spewing gasworks, past the statue of Diana still dragging the fallen stag, past the statue dedicated to the soldiers who die and die and die for their country, through the pushing morning crowd, the merchants and their carts, the narrow streets, past the stony justices who continue to glare, but so what? The Doctor is a man of blood and muscle, miraculously moving through these unchanging edifices. And? He is movement. So? He is progress. Now and now and click-clickety-click.

  Once he is through the iron gates, the rushing world will fall away, as if it were the fleetingly improvised concoction Walter believes it to be—a scuffle in the public square as a man seeking justice for his nephew grabs the collar of a lawyer, threatening him with a different kind of justice; a woman calling after her friend, “Wait, there is one last thing . . .”; a near-collision of two carriages in the narrow streets, the shrill whinny of a horse and a driver’s cursing.

  Outside the small stone church, the witchy woman has resumed her watch. “See?” she says, shaking her head, as he rolls his bicycle through the iron gates. “Always on the run.”

  “Good morning,” he says. He will not defend himself. He is fleeing to not fleeing from.

  In the common room, there is the little world to which he has grown accustomed—Walter standing near Marian curled into an armchair, once again exhausted by her vigilance; Samuel, who has shed his large coat, as he has started to do recently with the encouragement of Henri, sits by the fire the Director is stoking. “The fire has nice, sharp edges,” Samuel says, though he trembles.

  “I realize now what’s happened,” Walter is saying. “There’s been a mistake in the calculation.”

  “Darling,” Marian says, “I am too hungry to listen to your calculations.”

  “A mistake in the calculation is exactly why we have not eaten our breakfast.”

  There is Albert speaking quietly to Elizabeth about a town he passed through as if he were a flâneur recounting his travels, “a town whose fragrance I never forgot. They manufactured rosewater there.”

  “Water made of roses,” Elizabeth says, considering.

  “Good morning, Elizabeth,” the Doctor says, putting a hand on Albert’s shoulder. “Good morning, Albert, you look well.” He does—so neatly dressed, with his mustache trimmed, and that look of gratitude the Doctor has been anticipating all morning.

  It is only when Samuel says, “In death too, no music,” that the Doctor realizes what is missing. There is no music. Rachel is not at her usual place at the piano.

  “No one has died,” says the Director, standing to examine the fire. “We are simply waiting for breakfast to begin. Look how lovely this fire is.”

  Before the Doctor has a chance to inquire about Rachel, about the breakfast that has not yet been served, or to wonder where the veteran is, or Nurse Anne, or Henri and Claude, for that matter, there is a sound starker than the muted ringing of the bell when the wind is trapped in the tower. Howling, wild, it isn’t the wind.

  A cry traveling up from the muddy, cold depths of the earth, it is the sound a man makes when the dead brother he abandoned on the battlefield returns to demand retribution. Only the veteran understands the force he has summoned. Standing in the billiard room, he beckons the darkness out of the pockets in the table: Brother, oh, my brother, there is a deserter among us, but it is not the man I accused. It is me. Only he understands he is to blame. For the others, the sound coming unwittingly out of the veteran’s mouth is the sound of their own singular terror.

  “He is here!” Marian shouts, leaping from her chair, pushing Walter aside. “He is inside. It was him all along, the thief. Do you finally see?” She does. The tightness around her eyes is not the usual tightness of something missing; instead, it tugs like a question. Hadn’t she known this day would come? Hadn’t she sensed a shimmer taking shape after Albert arrived? But how could she know the sun would tuck itself inside him? “It is in him,” she says, pointing at Albert.

  But Walter thinks she means him. Or is, and this is far worse, Marian not real? After all this. It would be just like him to have attached himself to the least real of all. Once again, to have mistaken the portrait for the real woman. His dream of the other night was true after all, a world in which there were only reflections and he was the man walking away from a mirror, or was the reflection walking away from the man?

  Down the hall in the women’s ward, the wind bangs a door, open and shut, open and shut, open and shut. Rachel lies in her bed, listening to the wind and the shapeless sound of anguish. It is the sound of her frog; he is finally dying. He was sick this morning. He did not want her to get out of bed and Nurse Anne finally threw up her hands. “I’m not spending my morning arguing with a frog.” How would she feel if her life was arguing with a frog? How would she feel if that argument that was her life was now draining from her? Tomorrow will bring a new day. Nurse Anne’s words linger, a mockery, as Rachel’s frog, the fiery braveness in her belly, goes as still as her mother’s hands when the music should have filled her. Why hadn’t it filled her? Why wasn’t the music filling Rachel now? Tomorrow will bring a new day. Tomorrow will bring a new day. Must there be a new day? Why not let her become the ghost she’s always known herself to be?

  Samuel would be relieved to be something as solid as a ghost. He shivers by the fire because this is his fault for taking off the coat that holds everything together. The shadows have come, and the Director and the Doctor and Nurse Anne and Henri and Claude, running around the common room, try to gather the shadows before they swallow everyone whole, but they are too late. Samuel will dissolve into that awful sound that is strangely familiar, and then that awful, familiar sound is in front of him, taking the shape of the veteran, and it is reaching for the trowel the Director laid down by the hearth in order to stoke the fire.

  If only the veteran could not think about what he is thinking, but he is beyond thinking or not thinking. If only he could dig a hole deep enough and crawl inside, tunnel into it, but there is no hole that is not filled with his decaying brother. The veteran is dead too but not dead enough. He only wants to feel something else; he only wants to feel nothing. When he drives the trowel in, it works as he hoped it might. He does not think, at last he does not think. He does not think, for example, Am I dying? He does not think, Is this all? After all of that terrible life? Is this it?

  After it is over, Henri and Claude will mop up the blood and all that wil
l remain to remind them of this day will be three stubborn coin-sized stains. That, and the Director’s hand, the one that laid the trowel down on the hearth, which will develop a small but permanent tremor. The Director, who had always been so careful, but he ignored Nurse Anne’s counsel to keep a stricter eye on the veteran. Beauty is an answer to anguish, and years later he will still believe this to be true, but it was he who left the trowel unattended—how could he have left the trowel unattended? No one ever will ever ask him, not directly (Nurse Anne’s pitying silence is far worse), but he will never stop asking himself; no answer will satisfy.

  And the door continues to bang open and shut, open and shut, open and shut with the wind, keeping time with the weeping and the shouting as the veteran topples over, the trowel embedded in his thigh. Open and shut, open and shut, Albert listens from his room, where he fled as soon as Marian turned on him, pointing, blaming him for the sound he hoped never to hear again, a sound that causes him to sweat and tremble, to feel so dizzy he might fall down, filling him with that urge to walk, so powerful he is afraid he will disappear and wake up in some other place, in some other time. So powerful he will disappear and never wake up at all. He pulls the sheet from his bed and begins to twist it into a makeshift rope.

  That night began like any other. The story of the prince who wanted to see the world hovered in the cottage’s living room as his father carried him, his sweating and trembling son, to the bed, swaddling his wrists in strips of cotton cloth before binding them with rope. “Is it too tight?” as he tied him to the bed. The same unspoken questions in the worried lines on his face. What will become of you, Albert? What will happen when I’m gone? Who will bring you back? Albert thrashed in his bed, as he did each night. But then, instead of his father’s weeping, there was a terrible sound that had nothing to do with Albert at all. He wanted so badly for it to be the wind, but it was an animal sound, a roar of protest. Only later would he understand the roar was his father’s. He writhed and writhed against the bindings, weakened from all the nights of thrashing, until they frayed enough for him to break loose, but by then it was too late. By the time he reached the living room, the protest was over. His father’s pipe lay on the floor near the chairs where Albert and his father sat each night, the tobacco fallen out in the shape of the bowl. Next to it, the beautiful waxy swirls of his father’s cheek turned up to the early light.