John Irving - Until I Find You

She also arranged for his first meeting, later that afternoon, with a team of doctors at the Sanatorium Kilchberg; there were five doctors and one professor, in all. Heather gave Jack a brochure of the buildings and grounds of the clinic, which overlooked Lake Zurich. Kilchberg was on the western shore of the lake—in Zurich, they called it the left shore—about fifteen minutes by car from the center of the city.

So Jack was leaving for Switzerland as soon as they finished their breakfast; Heather had reserved a room for him at the Hotel zum Storchen in Zurich.

“You might like the Baur au Lac better,” she told him, “but the Storchen is nice, and it’s on the river.”

“I’m sure it will be fine,” he said.

“The doctors are excellent—I think you’ll like them,” Heather said. She had stopped looking at him. They were in the breakfast café at the Balmoral—a few tired tourists, families with small children. Jack could tell that Heather was nervous again, as they both had been when they’d first met. Jack tried to hold her hand, but she wouldn’t let him.

“People will think we’re sleeping together—I mean really sleeping together,” she told him. “Being with you in public takes a little getting used to, you know.”

“You’ll get used to it,” he said.

“Just don’t let anything happen to you—don’t do anything stupid, ” Heather blurted out.

“Can you read lips?” Jack asked her.

“Jack, please don’t do anything stupid,” Heather said. She looked cross, in no mood to play games.

Jack moved his lips without making a sound, forming the words as slowly and clearly as he could. “I have a sister, and I love her,” he told her, without actually saying it out loud.

“You want everything to happen too fast,” Heather said again, but Jack could tell that she’d understood him. “We should go to the airport now,” she announced, looking at her watch.

In the taxi, she seemed distracted—lost in thought. She was once again not looking at him when she said: “When you’ve seen him, I mean after you’ve spent a little time together, please call me.”

“Of course,” Jack said.

“All you have to say is, ‘I love him.’ You don’t have to say anything more, but don’t you dare say anything less,” his sister said. Her fingers were playing Boellmann’s Toccata, or something equally strident, on her tensed thighs.

“You can relax about me, Heather,” he told her.

“Can you read lips?” she asked, still not looking at him.

“All actors can read lips,” Jack said. But Heather just stared out the window, not saying anything—her lips as tightly closed as when she’d given him his first kiss as a brother.

It was still early in the morning when they got to the airport. Jack hadn’t expected Heather to come to the airport with him, much less accompany him inside; now she led him to the check-in counter. Obviously, it was a trip she was familiar with.

“I hope you like Switzerland,” Heather said, scuffing her feet.

She was wearing blue jeans and a darker-colored T-shirt than she’d worn the day before; with the backpack and her cropped hair, she looked more like a university student than a junior lecturer. If you didn’t notice her constantly moving fingers, you could discern nothing musical about her. She was simply a small, pretty girl—made more serious-looking by her glasses and the determined way in which she walked.

Near the metal-detection equipment, where a security guard had a look at Jack’s passport and examined his carry-on bag, there was a Plexiglas barrier that kept Heather from accompanying her brother to his gate. Jack wanted to kiss her, but she kept her face turned away from him.

“I’m not saying good-bye to you, Jack. Don’t you dare say good-bye to me,” she said, still scuffing her feet.

“Okay,” he said.

With the Plexiglas barrier between them, Jack could still see her as he started walking toward his gate. He kept turning to look at her; Jack stopped walking away from her when he saw she was finally looking at him. Heather was pointing to her heart, and her lips were moving—slowly, without uttering a word.

“I have a brother, and I love him,” Jack’s sister was saying, although he couldn’t hear a syllable.

“I have a sister, and I love her,” he said back to her, not making a sound.

Other people were getting between them. Jack had momentarily lost sight of Heather when two young women stepped up close to him, and the black girl with the diamond nose-stud said, “You aren’t Jack Burns, are you? You simply can’t be, right?”

“I’ll bet you anything he isn’t,” her companion said. She was a white girl with sunburned shoulders in a tank top; her nose was peeling a little.

They were Americans, college kids on their way home from a summer trip to Europe—or so Jack guessed. When he looked for his sister, she was gone.

“Yes, I’m Jack Burns,” he said to the girls. (Jack couldn’t have explained it, but he felt that—for the first time in his life—he really was Jack Burns!) “You’re right—it’s me. I actually am Jack Burns.”

For some reason, he was delighted that they’d recognized him. But the young women’s expressions radiated disbelief; they were as suddenly indifferent to Jack as they had at first seemed curious about him.

“Good try,” the white girl told him sarcastically. “You’re not going to fool anyone into thinking you’re Jack Burns—not that way.”

“Not what way?” he asked her.

“Not by being so normal, ” the young white woman said.

“Not by looking like you’re happy or something,” the young black woman said.

“But I am Jack Burns,” he told them unconvincingly.

“Let me tell you—you’re awful at this,” the white girl said. “And you’re too old to get away with it.”

“Since when was Jack Burns so sincere or something?” the black girl asked him.

“Let me hear you do noir, ” the white girl said.

“Let me hear you say one thing Jack Burns ever said,” the black girl challenged him.

Where was Heather when he needed her? Jack was thinking. Where was his dad, who allegedly had Jack Burns down pat?

The girls were walking away. Jack untucked his T-shirt and held the bottom hem up to his chest, as if he were holding up a dress on a hanger. “Boy, I’ll bet this looks great on you,” he said, in no way resembling the thief whom Jessica Lee caught messing around in her closet.

“Give it up!” the young white woman called to him.

“You know what?” the black girl asked Jack, her diamond nose-stud winking in the bright airport light. “If the real Jack Burns ever saw you, he wouldn’t look twice!”

“It’s a good job to lose!” Jack called after them, but they kept walking. He was so bad as Melody, even Wild Bill Vanvleck would have made him repeat the line.

The point was—he wasn’t acting. It was as if he’d forgotten how! Jack still knew his lines, but he was out of character. He had a sister, and he loved her; she’d said she loved him, too. Jack had stopped acting. He was just Jack Burns—the real Jack Burns at last.

When that last unmarked area of skin has been tattooed and their bodies become a completed notebook, full-body types don’t all react the same way.

Alice had maintained that some full-bodies simply started tattooing over their old tattoos. But if you keep doing that, the skin eventually turns as dark as night—the designs become indiscernible. Jack once saw a client of his mother’s whose arms, from his wrists to his armpits, were an unvarying black; it was as if he’d been burned. In less radical instances, twice-tattooed skin appears to be covered with curved, abstract figures—the body wrapped in a skin-tight paisley shawl.