Noah's Compass

by Anne Tyler

  His head was pounding so hard that it made a sound inside his ears like approaching footsteps. His injured palm was stinging, and something seemed to be wrong with his neck. A twisty pain ran down the left side.

  He had fought with someone? Physically struggled?

  Let’s try this again: he had gone to bed in his new bedroom. He had felt grateful for his firm mattress, his resilient pillow, his tightly tucked top sheet. He had looked out the window and seen the stars sprinkled above the pine boughs.

  Then what? Then what? Then what?

  His lost memory was like a physical object just beyond his grasp. He could feel the strain in his head. It made the throbbing even worse.

  Okay, just let it go. It would come to him in good time.

  He closed his eyes and slid toward sleep, almost all the way but not quite. Part of him was listening for Xanthe. What was she telling her sisters? It would be nice if she were saying, “Such a scare; we almost lost him. I’ve been out of my mind with worry.” Although more likely it was “Can you believe what he’s done this time?”

  But it wasn’t his fault! he wanted to say. For once, he wasn’t to blame!

  He knew his daughters thought he was hopeless. They said he didn’t pay attention. They claimed he was obtuse. They rolled their eyes at each other when he made the most innocent remark. They called him Mr. Magoo.

  At St. Dyfrig once, invited to view a poem on the English department’s computer, he had clicked on How to listen and been disappointed to find mere technical instructions for playing the audio version. What he had been hoping for was advice on how to listen to poetry—and, by extension, how to listen, really listen, to what was being said all around him. It seemed he lacked some basic skill for that.

  He was hopeless. His daughters were right.

  He reached for sleep as if it were a blanket that he could hide underneath, and finally he managed to catch hold of it.

  When he opened his eyes, a policeman was standing at his bedside—a muscular young man in full uniform. “Mr. Pennywell?” he was saying. He already had his ID card in hand, not that one was needed. Nobody would mistake him for anything but a cop. His white shirt was so crisp that it hurt to look at it, and the weight of his gun and his radio and his massive black leather belt would have sunk him like a stone if he had fallen into any water. “Like to ask a few questions,” he said.

  Liam struggled to sit up, and something like a brick slammed into his left temple. He groaned and eased himself back against his pillow.

  The policeman, oblivious, was tucking away his ID. (If he had given his name, he must have done so before Liam woke up.) He took a small notebook from his breast pocket, along with a ballpoint pen, and said, “I understand you left your back door unlocked.”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  “Pardon?”

  “That’s what they tell me, I said!”

  He had thought he was speaking quite loudly, but it was hard to know for sure inside all that gauze.

  “And when did you retire?” the man asked, writing something down.

  “I’m not exactly calling it retirement yet.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m not exactly calling it retirement yet! I’ll have to see how my money holds out.”

  “When did you go to bed, Mr. Pennywell. On the night of the incident.”

  “Oh.” Liam reflected for a moment. “Wasn’t that last night?”

  The policeman consulted his notebook. “Last night, yes,” he said. “Saturday, June tenth.”

  “You called it ‘the night of the incident.’ ”

  “Right,” the man said, looking puzzled.

  “It was your wording, you see, that caused me to wonder.”

  “Caused you to wonder what, Mr. Pennywell?”

  “I meant …”

  Liam gave up. “I don’t know when I went to bed,” he said. “Early, though.”

  “Early. Say eight?”

  “Eight!” Liam was scandalized.

  The policeman made another notation. “Eight o’clock. And how soon after that would you guess you fell asleep?” he asked.

  “I would never go to bed at eight!”

  “You just said—”

  “I said ‘early,’ but I didn’t mean that early.”

  “Well, when, then?”

  “Nine, maybe,” Liam told him. “Or, I don’t know. What: you want me to make something up? I don’t know what time! I’m completely at a loss here, don’t you see? I don’t remember a thing!”

  The policeman crossed out his last notation. He closed his notebook in an ostentatiously patient and deliberate way and slid it into his pocket. “Tell you what,” he said. “We’ll check with you in a few days. Oftentimes a thing like this comes back to folks by and by.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Liam said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Let’s hope it comes back!”

  The policeman made a sort of gesture, half wave and half salute, and left.

  Let’s hope so, dear Lord in heaven. Even if it were some violent, upsetting scene (well, of course it would be violent and upsetting), he needed to retrieve it.

  He thought of those slapstick comedies where a character is beaned and conks out and forgets his own name; then he’s somehow beaned again and magically he remembers.

  Although even the thought of another blow to his head caused Liam to wince.

  Too late, he realized that he should have asked the policeman some questions of his own. Had any of his belongings been stolen? Damaged? What state was his apartment in? Maybe Xanthe would know. He turned cautiously onto his side so that he was facing the doorway, watching for her return. Where was the girl? And how about her sisters? Weren’t they going to visit? He seemed to be all alone, here.

  But the next steps he heard were the squeegee soles of a tall skinny aide with a tray. “Supper,” she told him.

  “What time is it?” he asked. (The sky outside his window was still bright.)

  She threw a glance at a giant wall clock that he somehow hadn’t noticed before. Five twenty-five, she did not bother saying. She set his tray on a wheeled table and rolled it toward him. Jell-O, a steel pot dangling a tea-bag tab, and a plastic cup of apple juice. She left without another word. Inch by inch he hauled himself up and reached for the juice. It was sealed with a tight foil lid that turned out to be beyond him. Pulling it completely off took more strength than he could muster just now, and the harder he tried the more mess he made, because he had to squeeze the cup with his bandaged hand and the plastic kept squashing inward and spilling. Finally he lay back, exhausted. He wasn’t hungry, anyhow.

  The distressing thing about losing a memory, he thought, was that it felt like losing control. Something had happened, something significant, and he couldn’t say how he’d comported himself. He didn’t know if he had been calm, or terrified, or angry. He didn’t know if he’d acted cowardly or heroic.

  And here he’d always taken such pride in his total recall! He could quote entire passages from the Stoics—in the original Greek, if need be. Although remembering a personal event, he supposed, was somewhat different. He had never been the type who dwelt on bygones. He believed in moving on. (He used to tell his daughters, any time they threw one of those tiresome blame-the-parents fits, that people who are true adults do not keep rehashing their childhoods.) Still, this was the first time he had experienced an actual gap. A hole, it felt like. A hole in his mind, full of empty blue rushing air.

  He had lain down in his new bedroom. He had felt grateful for his firm mattress and his bouncy foam-rubber pillow. His tucked-in top sheet, the open window, the stars beyond the pines …

  By morning, the ache in his head had grown more localized. It was specific to his left temple. He believed he could detect a goose egg there, not from the contour of it, since his bandage was so thick, but from the way a certain spot leapt into full-blown pain before the surrounding area when he pressed tentatively with his fingers. />
  There was still no sign of Xanthe. Had she come and gone again while he was sleeping? A stream of other people passed through, though. A woman took his vital signs; another brought him breakfast. (Toast and eggs and cornflakes; he must have graduated to solids.) A third woman freed him of his IV tube and his catheter, after which he tottered into the bathroom on his own. In the mirror, he looked like a derelict. The white gauze helmet gave his skin a yellowish cast, and he had a stubble of gray whiskers on his cheeks and bags under his eyes.

  Of course his scalp wound was impossible to see, but once he was safely in bed again he set to work unwinding the adhesive tape from his hand. Underneath he found blood-spotted gauze. Under that, two inches of coarse black stitches curved across his swollen and discolored palm. He was sorry now that he’d looked. He replaced the tape as best he could and lay back and stared at the ceiling.

  If his attacker had knocked him out while he slept, the knot on his head would have been his only injury. It was clear, then, that he must have been awake. Either that, or he had awakened as soon as he heard a noise. He must have raised a hand to protect himself.

  The woman who’d brought his breakfast tray returned for it and tut-tutted. “Now, how you going to get your strength back, not eating more than this?” she asked him.

  “I did drink the coffee.”

  “Right; that’s a big help.”

  Encouraged, he said, “I wonder if I could have a phone in my room.”

  “You don’t have no phone?”

  “No, and I need to call my daughter.”

  “I’ll tell them at the desk,” she said.

  But the next woman who entered carried a compartmented box of medical supplies. “I’m Dr. Rodriguez,” she told him. “I’m going to change your dressings before we send you home.”

  “Well, but my daughter’s not here,” he said.

  “Your daughter.”

  “How will I get home on my own?”

  “You won’t. You’re not allowed. Somebody has to drive you. And somebody has to keep an eye on you for the next forty-eight hours.”

  She set her supplies on his table and selected a pair of scissors sealed in cellophane. Liam doubted that she was past thirty. Her glowing olive skin lacked the slightest wrinkle, and her hair was inky black. Maybe you needed to be older to realize that it wasn’t always easy to find someone who would stick around for forty-eight hours at a stretch.

  He closed his eyes while she snipped at the gauze around his head, and then he felt a coolness and lightness as she pried it away. “Hmm,” she said, once it was off. She peered closely, pursing her lips.

  “What’s it look like?”

  She slid a drawer from beneath his table. For a moment he thought she was leaving his question unanswered, but it turned out she wanted to show him his reflection in a little pop-up mirror. He saw first a flash of his neck (old!) and then the side of his head, his short gray hair shaved away to reveal a purple swelling on his scalp and a shallow V of black threads dotted with dried blood.

  “Fairly clean edges,” the doctor said, folding away the mirror. “That’s good.” She unwrapped a square of gauze and stuck it in place with adhesive tape—no more helmet. “Your primary-care physician can take the stitches out. We’ll give you written instructions when you leave. Now let me see your hand.”

  He held it up, and she unwound the tape without much interest and applied a fresh strip. “I’ll write a prescription for pain pills too,” she said, “just in case you need them.”

  She dumped the old dressings, the paper wrappers, and even the scissors into a red plastic bin. The scissors clattered so loudly that they hurt his head. Such wastefulness! Not even recycled! But he had more important things to discuss. “Is it all right to go home in a taxi?” he asked.

  “Absolutely not. Somebody should be with you. Do you not have anybody? Should we be getting in touch with the social worker?”

  For a minute he thought she was referring to Xanthe, who happened to be a social worker herself. When he realized his mistake, he flushed and said, “Oh, no, that won’t be necessary.”

  “Well, good luck,” she told him. She picked up her box of supplies and walked out.

  As soon as she was gone, he pressed the call button on his bed rail.

  “Yes?” a voice crackled from some invisible spot.

  “Could I have a telephone, please?”

  “I’ll ask.”

  He sank back on his pillow and closed his eyes.

  How could he have ended up so alone?

  Two failed marriages (for he had to count Millie’s death as a failure), three daughters who led their own lives, and a sister he seldom spoke to. The merest handful of friends—more like acquaintances, really. A promising youth that had somehow trailed off in a series of low-paying jobs far beneath his qualifications. Why, that last job had used about ten percent of his brain!

  And he should have stood up for himself when they fired him. He should have pointed out that if they really needed to reduce the two fifth-grade classes to one, he ought to be the teacher they kept. He was way, way senior to Brian Medley. Brian was hired just two years ago! But instead he’d tried to put a good face on it. He’d tried to make Mr. Fairborn feel less guilty for letting him go. “Certainly,” he had said. “I understand completely.” And he had packed up his desk drawers when no one else was around to feel discomfited by the sight. Why make a scene? he had asked when Bundy voiced his outrage. “No sense clinging to resentments,” he’d said.

  He must not even have clothes to go home in. Not day clothes, at least; just pajamas. He was naked and alone and unprotected and unloved.

  Well, this was just a mood he was in, created by current circumstances. He knew it wouldn’t last.

  Before they could bring him a telephone—if they ever planned to—his ex-wife arrived. Cheery and purposeful, hugging a paper grocery bag from which his favorite blue shirt poked forth, she breezed in already talking. “My goodness, what it takes to track a person down in this place! The switchboard said one room, the reception desk said another …”

  Liam felt so relieved he was speechless. He stared round-eyed from his bed, clinging to the sight of her.

  She was a medium sort of woman, medium in every way. Medium-length curly brown hair finely threaded with gray, medium-weight figure, and that lipstick-only makeup style that’s meant not to draw attention to itself. Her clothes always looked slightly unkempt—the belt of her shirtwaist dress, today, rode inches above her waistline—but she would have gone unremarked in almost any gathering. He used to have trouble recalling her face when they were dating. This had seemed a plus, he remembered. Enough of those lovely, poetic, ethereal women who haunted a person’s dreams!

  “It’s good to see you, Barbara,” he told her finally. Then he had to clear his throat.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Awful experience,” she said blithely. “I can’t imagine what the world is coming to.” She sat down on the green vinyl chair and started rummaging through her bag, producing first the blue shirt and then a pair of over-the-calf black silk socks, not what he would have chosen to wear with the khakis she drew out next. “If you can’t sleep safely in your own bed—”

  Liam cleared his throat again. He said, “I don’t think it was Damian, though.”

  “Damian?”

  “Xanthe believes Damian was the one who clobbered me.”

  Barbara waved a hand and then bent to set his black dress shoes on the floor beside the bed. “I’m sure I brought underpants,” she murmured, peering into the bag. “Ah. Here they are. Well, you know Xanthe. She thinks pot’s the first step to perdition.”

  Barbara used to smoke a bit of pot herself, Liam recalled. She could surprise you sometimes. For all her medium looks and her stodgy school-librarian job, she’d had a fondness for rock music and she used to dance to it like a woman possessed, pumping the air with her soft white fists and sending her bo
bby pins flying in every direction. This was back in the days when they were still together, before she gave up on him and filed for divorce. Strange how distinctly, though, that image all at once presented itself. Maybe it was a side effect of the concussion.

  “Do you still like Crack the Sky?” Liam asked her.

  “What?” she said. “Oh, mercy, I haven’t listened to Crack the Sky in ages! I’m sixty-two years old. Put your clothes on, will you? Heaven only knows when they’ll spring you, but you might as well be ready once they do.”

  From the way she held out his underpants, stretching the waistband invitingly and cocking both her pinkies, it seemed she might be expecting him to step into them then and there. But he took them from her and gathered the rest of his clothes and padded off to the bathroom, clutching his hospital gown shut behind him with his free hand.

  “After we get you settled at home,” she called from her chair, “the girls and I will keep in touch by telephone to see that you’re okay.”

  “Just by telephone?” he asked.

  “Well, and Kitty’s going to come spend the night with you as soon as she gets off work. She’s found herself a summer job filing charts in our dentist’s office.”

  “Your dentist’s open on Sunday?”

  “It’s Monday.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’ll phone and ask if you know your name, just to make sure you’re compos mentis. Or where you live, or what day it is …” There was a sudden pause. Then she said, “You thought it was Sunday?”

  “That could happen to anyone! I just lost track, is all.”

  He had to sit on the toilet lid to put his socks on; his balance seemed a bit off. And bending down made his head throb.

  “They told us you should be under constant observation, but this is the best we can manage,” he heard through the slit in the door. “Xanthe works such impossible hours, and Louise of course has Jonah.”

  She didn’t say why she couldn’t do it, with her luxurious summer schedule, but Liam didn’t point that out. He shuffled from the bathroom in his stocking feet, holding up his trousers. (Barbara seemed to have forgotten his belt.) “Could you hand me my shoes, please?” he said as he sat on the edge of the bed.