Maud Casey - The Man Who Walked Away

“That,” says the great doctor, “is the monkey. He does that every time.”

But the Doctor will remember it as the sound of the girl. On his way home, as the train pulls in and out of stations with its giant’s puff and shhh , its mighty exhalation of warm, wet steam rushing through him like breath, the squealing of its brakes will echo that keening.

Later still, when he has arrived home, restlessness will drive him down to the brothels by the river, to the woman with the pretty tousled hair. The tick of his father’s watch will disappear as the woman’s dress swishes to the floor. “That does it,” he will hear a man wandering the docks say, followed by the smash of a glass bottle. “It would be tragic if it weren’t so funny,” the man’s companion will say. The woman will use her pinkie to trace a circle on the back of the Doctor’s thigh. “There,” she will say, and trace another circle. “And there.” There, there , as if he were her child.

In the silence that follows, he will hear the girl: Mother, I am frightened .

The path is rough-hewn, a suggestion: Follow me! Stray tree branches reach across; the blackberry bushes grow thick on either side; and the vast webs spun by resilient spiders are invisible except just after it rains when drops of water dotting the webs glitter with sunlight. Still, while the Doctor rides the train back from the City of Lights to the Port of the Moon, the Director prepares to lead the patients down this path from the asylum to the creek in order to contemplate nature. Today, there is no sun. There is no sun and so Marian, who would not be willing to risk the loss of yet another organ to her great glowing enemy, is, to everyone’s relief, very willing. The Director will lead the way as he always does, snapping off the stray branches, clearing the sticky strands of spiderweb with whatever garden tool he happens to be carrying.

The walk to the creek is always an adventure, but the Director feels his efforts are worthwhile. It is worth the scratches from stray branches to have glimpsed a fox slipping through the woods, hiding itself in a blackberry bush to boldly watch the group of humans make their way. It is worth Rachel’s complaints about her muddied clothes to discover a bird’s wing in the middle of the path in the midst of loose feathers, an idea of a bird. Much to Nurse Anne’s dismay, the Director allowed Elizabeth, who likes a project, to carry the wing and the feathers back to the asylum on that particular trip. She likes a project but has never finished a single one; she has been fiddling with the wing and the feathers ever since.

More than anything, the Director likes to remind them, these trips are occasions for beauty. “The Koine Greek word for beauty contained the word for hour ,” the Director says, and most in the assembled group don’t remember this isn’t the first time he’s enlightened them with this fact. Each time, a revelation. They are so often off in other worlds, complex systems of their own making. The first time he explained that beauty means being of one’s hour , the bells of St. Eloi rang as if on cue and he watched their faces as the information became part of the larger scheme of signs and symbols. The constellations in each patient’s mysterious night sky made it necessary for one of the attendants to accompany them — last night Marian had to be slung over Claude’s shoulder and carried to her room because her left side went numb and she could not get up from the dinner table; the day before yesterday, Samuel required both Claude, whose enormous potato-shaped body contains surprisingly agile strength, and his son Henri, a man of less bulk but greater speed, to restrain him. But today he announced he wants to go outside. The Director knows that more often than not the complex systems win, and so he has asked Henri to accompany them on their walk to the creek.

The veteran’s complex system is winning now, just when the Director thinks he has successfully gathered everyone to head out the door. “Fuck!” the veteran shouts again.

“His nerves,” Walter says, nodding sympathetically. His own nerves, and the nerves of other morally deprived men such as himself, the veteran, for instance, often vibrated; sometimes they became blackened from too much vibrating and surely the others could smell the burning? But he has other concerns, such as distinguishing between the fleetingly improvised concoctions and those among them who are real.

“It’s not the veteran’s nerves I mind,” Nurse Anne says. She nods to Claude, who takes the veteran’s arm and pulls him close to his bulk.

The veteran prefers the veteran to his name, which no one is sure he remembers after watching two of his brothers die on the battlefield where he continued to fight only to return home to find his mother had died waiting for her sons to return home. Unless he tells people he is a veteran, who will care, who will even know , about the only thing he has done of which he is proud? Even if that thing meant leaving one of his brothers to die alone because he did not want to die too because he could not watch one more brother die. One was enough; one was more than he could bear, and why was he allowed to bear it? He has nightmares that cause him to twitch and fill him with a constant, relentless rage from which there is no relief, which is what he deserves, and why wouldn’t his nerves be angry too? The name he insists on is reminder and punishment.

“Fucking fuck!”

The Director looks at Nurse Anne. Let him be , he tries to say with his look, let him come outside and experience the beauty of his hour , but she is stricter than the Director and doesn’t believe the beauty of someone’s hour is more important than learning self-control. “This cannot continue,” she says. “Besides, he claims to have told Rachel he was going to shoot her in the face.”

“Rachel doesn’t mind,” says Marian, peering suspiciously up at the cloudy sky. The sun often takes her by surprise.

She is right. Rachel has been occupied with the problem of her mother’s hands. “Come, darling,” Henri says to her. Darling. It’s what the creature calls her too — the creature she calls the frog . That’s as close as she can get to naming the thing inside of her. “Stay, darling,” it whispers, wanting her to stay here, to sit at the piano and solve the problem of her mother’s hands, to ignore Henri. Whose side is he on as he takes her away from the beloved piano and moves her forward so there is room for Samuel to stand closer to the group? She swats him away with her hand, and when she does she sees her mother’s hands but they weren’t moving; they were motionless in her lap as they sat in the matinee of The Flying Dutchman . They didn’t move at all, even when Senna fell in love with the portrait of the phantom captain whose plight it was to sail around the world until he found a love so absolute it would break the curse. Like Senna, Rachel had fallen for the phantom captain too that day. She was always falling for the ghost. Had it started then or long before — the ghost inside of her, taking shape? If only her mother had lifted her hands from her lap, reached over, and — what? Rachel imagines sticking a fork in one of her mother’s hands. They would not be so still then. The music filled Rachel that afternoon until she wanted to bite something. She wills her own hands to move now, but they are still too and her mother goes blurry. That other life seems like a dream. It might very well have been.

Like the dream of Claude using his bulk to nudge the veteran down the hall.

“I hate shit-licking nature,” the veteran says, his mouth twitching.