Maud Casey - The Man Who Walked Away

“I have found you out,” the veteran says. “I know who you are.” He is a much taller man than Albert realized; the only other time he has been this close to him was when he first arrived and the veteran had been busy throwing billiard balls and retrieving them. He shoulders his way in to the room, pushing Albert so he stumbles backward. “Going from town to town. Claiming not to remember. And then I heard you say it to the Doctor. I listen in for places where the darkness might get in. I listened in, and I heard it. At first I told myself not to think at all. Not to think about the fact that MaryfuckingMagdalene washes your feet. Let her, I said. I am not thinking of her.”

The veteran is looming over Albert, but large men have loomed over him before. They have dragged him off to jail; they have caught him playing his beautiful instrument behind their stables and run him off their property with pitchforks; they have accused him of vagrancy, of theft, of not being a man. The only thing he ever feared was that he would disappear again. The veteran looms over him, on the verge of an accusation but this is not the first time Albert has been accused of something—

“I thought you were the Doctor,” he says. More than anything, he is disappointed. Unless the veteran can really tell him who he is — and Albert is fairly certain that isn’t what the veteran is here for — he doesn’t care to hear the rest.

But the veteran is determined to tell him. “You enlisted at Mont-de-Marsan. I heard you. I heard you tell the Doctor. You are a deserter. I knew there was something peculiar. You were peculiar from the beginning.”

“I am not sure what you want,” Albert manages to say, sitting down on his bed as the veteran pushes him forward with his chest. Let the man loom if he wants . They always did.

“You are an outrage to our nation, but I’m not thinking that, I’m just trying to prevent further outrage,” the veteran is saying.

A fleeting illumination, and there is Albert’s childhood friend Baptiste, no longer boyishly round but sickly thin, his army clothes in tatters, staggering along a road behind Albert, but he can’t remember why this is his fault. He can’t remember why this causes him such pain.

“Why are you smelling me?” the veteran asks. “Back away.”

“I am not,” Albert says, though he is, inhaling deeply the glorious smell of the veteran in order to bring himself back to the room. It is the smell of remembering — dirt, sweat, and a loyal body that is not a deserter; it is the very opposite of dying and rot. It is the smell of a life. This man, with his hand on Albert’s collar, remembers all his days all day long.

“I would like to put you in a hole and cover you up until your chirping mouth is full of dirt,” the veteran is saying, but Albert isn’t listening. All he can think is, Teach me then. Teach me how to remember. Teach me how to be a man.

Claude’s body fills the doorway and then the veteran is being dragged out, protesting—“This man should be arrested”—and Nurse Anne is scolding Claude—“You should have your eye on him. Always”—and then she is telling Albert it is time for dinner. “We’ve been waiting for you,” she says, and when he begins to cry, she thinks it is because the veteran scared him, but how could Albert explain to her that these are tears of joy at being expected at dinner?

“Why don’t you lie down for a little while and then come to dinner?” she says. “We will save you a plate. The veteran will not bother you again. It is not you he is angry with.”

Albert waits for her to close the door. Instead of lying down, he moves around the room, touching the chair and his shoes and the basin and the bedside table and the pitcher with the cracking ice and the bed. He is here. He is here. He is here.

Only after he has touched every object — here, here, here — in the room does he lie down on the bed. For so long, it has seemed to Albert that the surface of the earth would never be unfrozen again, not even in spring. But when the Doctor said today at lunch, “You look well, Albert,” it created gaseous ejections in Albert’s deepest heart. How can he explain to Nurse Anne that, for years, his greatest fear was that he would disappear, and now he wonders what will happen if he doesn’t? Before, he expected nothing; now he is poised for more . All those years of yearning to be still and now that he is still, what is he expected to do? He pictures the still, frozen surface, the way the gas is invisible but the aqueous vapors from the geysers hang silently in the air, the gas cultivating the vegetation and slowly the forests rising up to provide the animals and humans, when they arrive, with great sources of minerals. Underneath the earth, the collision of the gas and fissures forms volcanoes that spew hot mud and throw fragments of rock that form mountains. There were flames that blazed for as far as the eye could see , said his father when he told him the story of gas. Fires that burned and burned. Fires that burn still .

How could Albert possibly explain that there are geysers taking shape inside of him? How can he explain that this moment, this exquisite now , will soon become something glimpsed only occasionally in fleeting illuminations from the pitch-dark road of an unhappy story?

Thousands of centuries ago , his father said, there were gaseous ejections in the deepest heart of the world. There were geysers formed by gas colliding with fissures and crevices. In the very veins of the earth there were explosions. The surface of the earth was still. For so long, it was frozen. It seemed it would never be unfrozen again, not even in spring.

He is twenty. He is twenty. He is twenty.

Albert’s surface has started to thaw in the spring of the Doctor’s attentions. The gentle growth of scrubby vegetation might someday give rise to forests.

Here, Albert, a story just for you.

For him and no one else, the sound of this voice he thought had been lost forever. which wasn’t lost at all.

Listen.

The prince with one swan wing who wanted to see the world woke to discover himself in the midst of a family of geese.

“You look strangely familiar,” said the father goose, eyeing the prince’s swan wing. “Anyway, we need your help. We are fewer than we were. You see, each night, a fox comes around and takes another of us off for his dinner. Some nights he takes two: one for dinner, one for dessert.”

The rest of the geese gathered around. In one voice they told the prince: “Each night for a week, the fox has come; each night, there is one, sometimes two, fewer geese.” The goose family was dwindling. “We used to be many,” the father goose said, and he began to weep.

“I have an idea!” the prince said. He whispered his idea to the father goose, who whispered it to the rest of the goose family. As night fell, the prince began to disappear limb by limb into the dark and he found a tree and clung to it, hoping that, finally, he might stay up long enough to watch night turn into day. Meanwhile, the geese prepared for the fox’s arrival.

When night covered the land, the fox arrived, his red face like a demon’s.

“Wait!” the father goose shouted as the fox prepared to pounce on the mother goose. “If we poor geese are to yield up our lives,” he said, according to the prince’s instructions, “grant us one favor. Let us pray so that we may not die in sin.”

The fox sat back, eyeing the prince clinging to the tree doing his best to remain invisible. “Oh, why not?” the fox said. “Go ahead. Have your prayer.”

And so the geese began.