The Man Who Walked Away A Novel Page 2

  Today, the glorious invitation tugs the Doctor all the way to the City of Lights to a hospital altogether different from the simple vase of the asylum. This ward for insane women that was once a gunpowder factory and before that a poorhouse is complete with the first chemical laboratory, rooms for electrotherapy and hydrotherapy, a photographic laboratory, and a lecture hall that holds an audience of six hundred. The Doctor will soon be one of those six hundred, including doctors from Berlin and Vienna and as far afield as Riga, all come to see the great doctor discuss one of his cases as part of a lecture about the disorder that has condensed centuries of medicine.

  “Hysteria,” the great doctor declared in a recent journal article, “will find its place in the sun.” The truth is it has already found its place. It has given a name to the young woman who collapses in fits, thrashing and grabbing at her throat as though she were being choked, and to the girl caught pleasuring herself in public, laughing uncontrollably though one side of her body has been struck with paralysis. It rolls along the new railway lines, its name whispered in café cars. At society parties, women play at having attacks—making faces, arms extended, rigid and strange, as if they were being crucified. A character in a recent novel even suffers from it.

  Those doctors from Berlin and Vienna and Riga? After hearing the great doctor’s earlier lectures, they returned home to their own hospitals and now there were patients in Berlin and Vienna and Riga performing beautiful arcs de cercle and falling into exquisite paralysis. The Great Neurosis, as the great doctor sometimes calls it, is contagious. It is impossible to ignore, this disorder whose origin, the great doctor claims, may be traced to a physical defect of the nervous system, the result of an injury or of neuropathic heredity but whose manifestation is a mysterious alteration of unknown nature or location in the central nervous system. Ingenious: a lesion that is invisible! How could the Doctor ignore it?

  The metal face of the train spews steam as it pulls in and out of stations. The light shines through the roofs of the stations, speckling the bodies of the bustling, pomaded men carrying suitcases and the perfumed women towing young children behind them. The Doctor watches as people walk out of the steam and then disappear back into it again. At the next station, a group of children run after the train as it pulls out, waving as it chugs away. “Wait for us!” they cry as if the train is something wondrous and magical, and it is. Progress is beautiful and the Doctor yearns to be part of it. The train makes its way north, connecting towns and villages not unlike the one where the Doctor lived with his parents—his parents who as children had drawn water from wells and lit their houses with tallow tapers, for whom sending a letter was a great luxury, who dreamed of Paris but never had the opportunity to visit. The train is an extraordinary vision they are all having together.

  It pulls into the next station and the next and the next with a great puff and shhhh, as though relieved to have finally arrived at its destination. The exhalation of warm, wet steam rushes through the Doctor and then it is gone, replaced by the squeal of the brakes, so loud that at first he doesn’t hear the man speaking to him. He is startled to find someone sharing his compartment at all, never mind this vision in Scotch tweed, wearing a wide-brimmed felt hat, double-soled shoes, and gaiters.

  “That’s a fine timepiece,” the red-cheeked man says again, pointing to the Doctor’s hand. His words rush out as though, finally, a great dam has broken.

  It is only then the Doctor realizes he has been clutching his father’s watch. He returns it quickly to his pocket.

  “The day of two noons,” the man says.

  The Doctor nods, though he has no idea what the man is talking about. He looks out the window, hoping this will convey the enormity of his desire to be left alone. He had hoped to spend some of the train ride thinking through the case of Rachel, an asylum patient who believes she has a frog living in her stomach who demands she play the piano. Out the window, there is a field full of cows, a river full of fishermen casting lines from small boats, a forest full of trees, a thick, dark tangle. He closes his eyes, pretending to sleep.

  “At midday, the clocks set back to coordinate the railroad schedules?” and the Doctor decides the man is not someone who might appear one day at the iron gates of his asylum after all, unless being boring were suddenly declared a pathology. He is just another person determined to give a lesson. “Twenty-four time zones? The day of two noons? The universal day was established, like the slicing of a pie.”

  The Doctor opens his eyes, looking at the man in a way he hopes conveys exactly how little he wants to engage in this conversation.

  “Owning such a fine timepiece, I assumed,” the man sniffs, “incorrectly that you would be interested.” He riffles through his bag as though searching for something.

  “Oh,” the Doctor says. “But of course I am.” He wants to be left alone, but he also doesn’t like other people’s sadness. He has been trained after all to fix it. Out the window, another dark tangle of trees, another open field.

  “There has been talk, you know,” the man says, his cheeks glowing just a bit redder. It doesn’t take much to renew his hope. “People dying of apoplexy caused by the rapidity of these newer, faster trains. I don’t usually ride the train.” He pulls a little green book from his satchel and holds it up—evidence! “A Baedeker’s,” he says, as if the name isn’t right there on the front cover for the Doctor to read.

  “Are you touring?” the Doctor asks, and the man smiles. There is a certain satisfaction in asking the right question.

  “I am,” says the man, as though he is saying, Finally. The Doctor sees in his eyes that the floodgates have opened and there is no closing them. “The roads are changing the world, my friend. If the whistle of the train engine is awakening us from slumber, then the road is a giant, wondrous hammer to the head!”

  “That sounds painful.”

  “For instance, the wonderful roads to Engstlenalp.”

  “I have no doubt.” The Doctor knows nothing about the roads to Engstlenalp, but he has done his conversational duty and he does not feel obliged to ask.

  “I’ve packed two sandwiches. Always travel prepared,” the man says. He offers the Doctor two thick slices of bread in between which is nestled a slab of mysterious meat.

  The Doctor, though somewhat afraid of the mysterious meat, is ravenous. “Thank you.” In his rush to get out the door after his late night, he didn’t pack much food for the train ride, which, with his new traveling companion, threatens to last forever. The mystery meat sandwich turns out to be delicious despite, or maybe because of, its mysteriousness.

  The man takes the Doctor’s appreciation of the sandwich as permission to regale him with his travels—there is a great deal more than the wrestling match not to be missed in Engstlenalp. The baths at Lamalou, the chateau on Lake Geneva, the opera house in Budapest. He is only getting started. After a while his voice is no longer a great rush bursting forth from a broken dam but a constant, steady stream swallowed by the rattle and sway of the train rumbling through the Doctor’s feet and shins, his calves and the base of his spine, up each vertebra, into his lungs, his heart, his head.

  Nestled in his pocket, his father’s watch ticks its own rhythm into the Doctor’s nesting palm. “There is time enough,” his father said after the great Léotard whirred by. The Doctor cried that night because there was no longer anything coming up over the horizon and around the corner into town. The moment had passed. His father returned from a long day of work at the dry goods store to find his son weeping into his mother’s lap. “There is time enough,” he said, though he never did say for what. “Here,” and, reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his pocket watch. “Take it. So you can see how much time there is left.” Its tick, tick, ticking, was meant to be a comfort and a reminder.

  But there hadn’t been enough time.

  It was ignorance that caused his mother to die from fever all those years ago, her bedroom filling with unimaginable heat. He hated that
his father didn’t understand the heat rising off her or how to cool it, and he hated himself for hating his father. Even when his father thrashed in the same hot bed a year later, there was lingering hatred in the boy as the smallpox blisters became sheets of their own, pulling the outer layers of skin from his father until he was no longer his father but any body unraveling.

  “ . . .And, of course, there is the funicular in Lyon not to be missed . . .”

  The world grows dark as the train hurtles along the iron tracks, continuing on its way north, and soon a gibbous moon illuminates the darkening world, casting shadows in the trees, dappling the lakes. The Doctor’s knees ache from sitting too long, but he is afraid to move for fear it will excite his traveling companion. Still, he cannot help but shift a little.

  The red-cheeked man startles awake and continues, “And the vineyards of . . .”

  The train pulls in and out of stations, puffing and shhhhing. In between, the trees of the forests blur together. The Doctor’s restlessness is stripped away with his fatigue, and there is the cold root of it. He doesn’t want to be one of those for whom more trees will be cleared in the cemetery too soon.

  “. . . And I’ve forgotten the Baths of Urhasch . . .”

  The light of the moon fills the compartment; it fills the Doctor until he feels he will burst.

  Chapter 2

  To keep from being afraid, Albert sometimes says to himself, Fascinating! Or, Magnificent! Or, Yet another escapade! Even when he is lost, he is not lost. No one fine day he found himself in a public square. No it seems or it appears or not able to say how he got here. He is, he is, he is. He is here: walking somewhere on the road to Poitiers and Longjumeau, Champigny and Meaux, Provins and Vitry-le-François, Châlons-sur-Marne, Chaumont, Vesoul, Mâcon.

  Years pass differently on the road. When Albert discovers himself walking, not knowing how he got there, through Budweis and Prague and Leipzig and Berlin, he is thirteen, selling umbrellas for the salesman in La Teste. He is seventeen, spending those first nights newly orphaned in the rotten hollow of a fallen tree, and then eighteen, nineteen, then twenty. He is all of those Alberts. He is himself and himself and himself again.

  “ . . . The biggest year for the construction of hotels in Switzerland . . .” At a nearby table in a tavern at the foot of the Cantabrian Mountains a man makes casual conversation, and “Berne” whispers its way into Albert’s head. Berne, Berne, Berne, the word as delicious as a cake, and soon he discovers himself, not knowing how he got there, in Berne. For no reason at all, he discovers himself walking through Tournai, through Ostend, through Bruges, through Ghent, through Liège, through Nuremberg, through Stuttgart, and Mulhouse. His blood circulates astonishment to the tips of his fingers and his long nose, throughout his large head and his absurdly large ears (he knows: They are absurd), through the curves of his shapely calves as he walks through Delft and Amsterdam and Zwolle.

  When Albert walks, people treat him like a prince; they are that kind. Even the men who put him in prison have been gentle. Your papers? He is always without papers. “Smell me,” he says, holding out a sleeve to a gendarme who arrests him, his face braced for the worst. “I am not a vagrant.” Surely, Albert thinks, a man as clean as he cannot be considered a vagrant. A man with a mustache as meticulously combed and trimmed as his, a vagrant? He is always very clean. Cleanliness is not easy when there is dust and, after it rains, mud to contend with. Even in fields of corn, of cotton, of olives, in the fields filled with sheep, cattle, and hogs (not all of them friendly), he manages. On the road, there are lakes and ponds and rivers. He has resorted to large puddles of rainwater, but he is always clean.

  The gentleman at the French consul in Düsseldorf gives him five marks; the consul in Budapest gives him a fourth-class ticket to Vienna; the one in Leipzig gives him seven florins and a lodging ticket; the French ambassador in Prague takes up a collection and buys him a pair of shoes. Yet another escapade and yet another escapade and yet another escapade! The mayor of somewhere else entirely puts his arm around Albert’s shoulder and says, “Now go home to Bordeaux. There’s nothing better than returning home.” But to Albert, kicking a fallen apple through the tall grass of another cemetery of toppled, crowded gravestones, home is never more home than when he is leaving, and he is always leaving, tugged like a balloon into the air.

  There are those, like the man in charge of the mud baths in Dax, who don’t believe Albert has a home even when he tells them again and again he is not a vagrant. Though he might be gone days or weeks or months, though the small cottage he once shared with his father is ramshackle, though its windows rattle in the wind off the harbor, though the bedclothes are tattered, though a mysterious mold grows in the kitchen, though the mice who dance in the pots are raising children in the stove, it is still his home. Once when he discovered himself there, his father’s old friend the lamplighter offered to help. He tied Albert to his bed with rope. “To keep you safe,” the lamplighter said, tightening the ropes around Albert’s wrists and his ankles with hands that smelled permanently of gas. “He would have wanted me to keep you safe,” the lamplighter said, and he began to cry. “I know,” Albert said. There was something comforting and familiar about the way the ropes held him, but then he woke up somewhere else into some other day, not knowing how he got there, the stray thread on his trousers and his chafed wrists the only sign of the heavy rope. He was not angry or surprised. There was no holding him. There was no keeping him safe.

  In Mont-de-Marsan there is a poster above the bar in a public house—a soldier and, trailing behind him, a corps of infantrymen on bicycles waiting to be led into battle. Cyclists are called les marcheurs qui roules. When Albert walks, he annihilates distance like a bicycle; he has no use for wheels but covers as much distance. Un marcheur qui roule tout seul, Albert doesn’t need a war; when he walks he is a hero who has performed deeds of improbable greatness, and though he can’t remember what they are, they are surely magnificent. When he walks, it doesn’t matter that he can’t remember what they are.

  When he walks, he is no longer only moving toward death; he is no longer only dying. The gift of life is in his bones. The birds in the sky above him are utterly bird, the shadows cast by leaves totally and completely shadow. Their beauty is indisputable. They are. They are here. He is. He is here. Ripe fruit falls to the ground at his feet, offering itself to him. From the riverbeds comes the song of frogs. When Albert walks, he has been kissed. When he walks, his existence is complete and his body is divine; he is elemental as the sky drenched with sun, then infused with red dusk, then night-dark, then sun-bright again.

  He walks for days without stopping, without eating, without sleeping, in order to feel the gift of astonishment.

  He drifts on the fringes of days where a fog mutes the tick-tock, tick-tock others adhere to so rigorously. Is it time to go? What time is it? Why is there never enough time? These are not his questions. When he walks, days and weeks and months are nothing but scurrilous rumor. He trammels winter, spring, summer, fall, as if they were idle gossip.

  Where does the time go? Vanished into the woods between Bordeaux and Toulouse? Splashed into the deep black water between Marseille and Blida? Flittered into the sky with the sparrows between Geneva and Strasbourg? Is it somewhere on the side of the road from Vienna to Budapest? It is such-and-such-a-day, people say to him. We are this day. We are here on the great clock of history. Albert, here you are, in this moment, right here, can’t you see?

  No, he cannot. The world is enamored of time—its shapely hours, its miraculous minutes, its svelte and speedy seconds. The entire world, that is, except for Albert.

  This is how it goes, how it has always gone: He begins to fade and then a terrible thirst comes upon him and his body is overcome with restlessness. He must drink water, lots of water. Six, maybe ten glasses of water in a row, and still he is thirsty. He sweats through his clothes and he trembles, filled with a terrible itch. There is a ringing in his ears and in his legs
, his hips and his groin; it crescendos, until it becomes a song. He’s crescendoed all over Europe: behind the black blots of fir woods near stone cattle tracks; enveloped in the smell of moss and damp stone behind a cathedral; in the dark marshy open, all of nature invaded by a fog.

  What will you do? The urge to walk is the answer to this question. It falls upon him and lifts him into heavenly oblivion until he disappears, and when he reappears he is walking again, somewhere else entirely, the sky darkening toward night when before the sun was just rising. The terrible itch gone.

  What terrible itch?

  Then there are the times when his body begins to fade and that terrible thirst comes upon him, when his body is overcome with restlessness and he is still thirsty even after he has drunk lots of water, and there is a ringing in his ears, and the terrible itch finds its way into his cock, which he prefers to refer to as his beautiful instrument. And so he plays his beautiful instrument. Always gently, as if he is greeting it—hello, yet another escapade! The buzz in his legs, his hips, and his groin, he achieves a steady cadence, holding the buzz inside, allowing the song to take shape. Always privately—he is a decent man! Behind this copse of trees or that one, and once or twice behind the cathedral, where it smelled of damp stone and moss. The song crescendos, an especially glorious crescendo, singing back the roots of his bristly hair, the slope of his long, strange nose, his thin mustache, his unusually large head, his absurdly large ears, his exquisitely muscular calves, his carefully trimmed toenails, and his beautiful feet. For these beautiful feet he seeks out clumps of the softest moss, luminous and blue, to pad his mended shoes.

  Somewhere outside of Limoges, a man gives him a pair of shoes and he puts his old shoes to rest, burying them under a tree. He bows his head. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” he says the way he dimly remembers his mother did long ago, before Albert was left all alone with only this silence waiting to be filled.