Maud Casey - The Man Who Walked Away

“A miracle!” Albert said, sharing his father’s pride.

“The chaos of gas needs to be contained in a perfectly fitted pipe,” his father corrected him.

That his father’s familiar scars have returned to Albert is a miracle. Their colors changing with the lamplight’s flicker: a sky infused with red dusk, then sun-bright again, as constant and beautiful as the sun moving through the sky each day. How Albert had longed to run his hand over the waxy swirls. How he longs to run his hands over them now.

Where had he been? Why had he left him alone for so long? It didn’t matter. He was here.

Shhh. Lie still. I will tell you a story.

Listen , his father began as he had each night. Each night, his father untwisting him with a story.

Listen , and Albert was stilled.

His father spun a world into existence and Albert would think, I’m still here . His body hadn’t been consumed by meningitis like his brothers’, who died in infancy before their faces had even taken shape; he hadn’t disappeared into pneumonia like his mother. He had lived. Puff, puff went his father’s pipe; puff, puff went the cottage that contained their lives, lives that had taken a shape as familiar as the tobacco packed into the pipe. Puff, puff went the cottage and the little lives of a man and his son alone in the world — gas fitting, meals, sleep, gas fitting, meals, sleep — disappeared.

His father’s voice has returned and with it the story of a magic ball of yarn, an evil stepmother, a good king, and his six children, five sons and one daughter. One day the evil stepmother transformed the boys into swans, but the girl, being quite clever, escaped. In order to break the curse, the girl had to remain silent for six years; if she wanted to save her brothers, she could not make one sound. She couldn’t even laugh. For six years. A king from a neighboring land asked her to marry him. How could she refuse? If she spoke, her brothers would remain swans forever. She literally couldn’t say no. She spent her days using the ball of magic yarn to sew magic shirts for her brothers. She sewed in a hurry because she wanted them back so badly. Still, these magic shirts were complicated; they took a long time. Six years passed, and though she hadn’t quite finished the fifth shirt, she had grown unbearably lonely after so many years. So, without having finished the last shirt — she would finish it on the way, she thought — she escaped the king’s castle in order to track her swan brothers down. Sisters have a way of finding their brothers, even brothers who have been turned into birds.

When she found them, she gave each of them a magic shirt. Four of the brothers put on the magic shirts and became men (six years later they were no longer boys) — their feathers turned back into skin, their wings back into arms. But when the fifth brother put on the half-finished shirt — still missing one arm — one swan wing remained, its beautiful feathers rippling uselessly.

Oh, darling boy, don’t cry.

That brother with one swan wing? He made a life for himself. More than that, he was the only one of the brothers who remembered that he had once been a bird. For the rest of his life, he was the only one who remembered what it was like to be something else entirely.

A great cloud of damselflies hovers just outside Albert’s window, on the cusp of movement, and Albert hovers with them. And then the cloud of damselflies is in motion. They fly back and forth, back and forth. They go nowhere, and yet what an exquisite show of spindly legs and blurred wings!

What will you do? Stay.

Where is relief? Here.

What is the question?

Ring ( shadow ring ).

What time is it? That is the question.

It is time for breakfast.

“But how did Chopin’s sister travel all that way without dropping it?” Rachel asks. “Carrying his heart all the way to the cathedral in Warsaw?”

The Doctor — at Marian’s request (“Unrelenting sadness is not good for us,” she said, and he had to admit she had a point) — has been trying to convince Rachel to play something other than Chopin’s Funeral March, which she has been playing all morning in honor of the dead bee. “Very carefully, I’m sure,” the Doctor says, “but even Chopin’s sister would surely have liked a break now and then from thinking about death.” He pulls Rachel’s hair off of her face and reaches in his pocket for some string with which to tie it back. It is then he rediscovers the worn scrap of paper Nurse Anne gave him yesterday.

In neat, careful handwriting, someone has written: He is off his rocker .

“Everyone’s a doctor,” Nurse Anne said. “It was pinned to Albert’s waistcoat when he arrived.”

“But how? She had to travel so far ,” Rachel is saying.

“It is a question for another time,” the Doctor says. All morning he has been meaning to speak to the new patient. Since he first met him yesterday morning, but then the man nearly fell onto the billiard table with exhaustion and Nurse Anne very rightly suggested he should go immediately to bed where he slept right through until this morning. He had caught a glimpse of him, sitting contentedly at breakfast with Marian and Walter, but then he’d had to convince the veteran to tuck his imaginary gun back into his trousers. “I can’t tell if I’m thinking a million things or if I’m thinking nothing,” the veteran said, and the Doctor futilely suggested to him, “How about no more thinking for now?” before he’d had to give Walter a bromide once breakfast was done, then walk him to the window to show him the people buzzing around the square and up and down the stairs of the Palace of Justice, assuring him the people were as real as Walter and himself, until the stern statues on the roof of the palace glaring down at the Doctor from their perch— And? So? — reminded him of the new patient and he asked Claude to take over. The predictable unpredictability of life in the asylum has caused the great doctor’s fierce girl to fade, and forced the Doctor’s mind to shrink to the problems immediately in front of him.

But now he will leave Rachel to think of Chopin’s poor sister bringing a small piece of her brother home, his life over and done too soon, before he was through, before he had achieved all he could. He doesn’t want to think about all of the cemeteries full of the hearts of people not yet finished with their lives. It is not a happy story . But he has a different unhappy story to attend to, so he heads out into the courtyard, carefully avoiding the bench Marian has declared hers, in order to clear his head to make room for the new patient.

There is a slight chill in the air and he feels the cold stone through his pants. Good, he thinks, the chill will wake him up. When Nurse Anne put the man to bed yesterday, she learned that he had come from a long journey on foot and was exhausted, but that that was not the cause of his tears. He wept because he could not prevent himself from departing on a trip when the need overtook him. Provins, Vitry-le-François. Châlons-sur-Marne, Chaumont, Vesoul, Mâcon, Budweis, Prague, Leipzig, Berlin, Tournai, Bruges, Ostend, Ghent, Liège, Nuremberg, Stuttgart. . It was here Nurse Anne stopped him.

“We both would have been up all night if I hadn’t,” she said.

Nurse Anne told him that the man is not a vagrant. “He is insistent on that fact,” she said. He grew up in this city, in his father’s cottage by the river, but often wandered away for long stretches of time and — she learned this from the man who dropped him off (“He couldn’t get away fast enough. I was lucky he told me anything at all”) — the cottage had been destroyed in a fire in his most recent absence.