John Irving - Until I Find You

But for other full-bodies, the completed notebook amounts to a sacred text; it is unthinkable to tattoo over a single tattoo, or even part of one. Most of William’s tattoos had been done by accomplished tattoo artists, but even his bad or clumsy tattoos were of music that mattered to him. Both the music and the words had marked more than his skin for life.

Heather had told Jack that their father had no gaps of bare skin between his tattoos. The toccatas and hymns, the preludes and fugues, overlapped one another like loose pages of music on a cluttered desk; every inch of the desk itself was covered.

On William’s back, Heather said, where he would have had to make a considerable effort to see it, was a sailing ship—a distant view of the stern. The ship was pulling away from shore, parting the waves of music that all but engulfed it. The full sails were also marked with music, but the ship was so far from shore that the notes were unreadable. It was their father’s Herbert Hoffmann, but Heather said it was “almost lost on a vast horizon of music”—a Sailor’s Grave or a Last Port tattoo, but smaller than Jack had imagined and completely surrounded by sound.

The piece from his dad’s favorite Easter hymn, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” was partially covered by Walther’s “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme”—the top two staffs beginning where the alleluia chorus to “Christ the Lord” should have been. Elsewhere, Bach’s mystical adoration for Christmas (“Jesu, meine Freude”) was overlapped by Balbastre’s “Joseph est bien marié”; the word Largo, above the top staff of the Bach, was half hidden.

Both the familiar words and music in the soprano aria (“For Unto Us a Child Is Born”) from Handel’s Messiah ran into Widor’s Toccata—from the Fifth Symphony, Op. 42 — with even the Op. 42 being part of the tattoo, which included the composer’s full name. It surprised Jack to hear that the composers’ names were always tattooed in full—not Bach and Widor, but Johann Sebastian Bach and Charles-Marie Widor— and the names were tattooed not in cursive but in an italic font, which (over time, and subject to fading) was increasingly hard to read.

Time and fading had taken their toll on some of William’s other tattoos as well—among them John Stanley’s Trumpet Voluntary, his Trumpet Tune in D, which marked Jack’s father’s chest in the area of his right lung, where the bottom or pedal staff (indicating the notes you played with your feet) had faded almost entirely from view, as had the word Vivo above the first staff of Alain’s “Litanies,” but not the quotation from Alain on William’s buttocks. The French was tattooed in cursive on the left cheek of his bum, the English translation on the right; they would fade from Jack’s father’s skin more slowly than youth itself.

Reason has reached its limit. Only belief keeps rising.

Reason had reached its limit in William Burns, too. Evidently that was what Jack’s sister had been saying. Every inch of their dad’s body was a statement; each of his tattoos existed for a reason. But now there was no room left, except for belief.

“You’ll know what I mean when you see him naked, and you will,” Heather had told Jack.

“I will ?”

His sister wouldn’t elaborate. To say that Jack was apprehensive when his plane landed in Zurich would be an understatement.

The Swiss, Heather had forewarned him, made a point of remembering your name; they expected you to remember theirs. As an actor, Jack had confidence in his memorization skills—but his abilities, not only as an actor, were severely tested by the task at hand. The cast of characters he would be meeting at the Sanatorium Kilchberg had daunting names, and their specific roles (like his father’s tattoos) were interconnected—at times overlapping.

With Heather’s help, Jack had studied these five doctors and one professor; he’d tried to imagine them, as best he could, before their first meeting. But he was not acting in this performance —they were. They were in charge of his dad; it was Jack’s job to learn from them.

The head of the clinic, Professor Lionel Ritter, was German. His English was good, Heather had told Jack, and the professor took such pains to be diplomatic that one forgave him for being a bit repetitious. He was always neatly but casually dressed—a trim, fit-looking man who took pride in the Sanatorium Kilchberg’s 136-year history as a private psychiatric clinic. (Jack had envisioned Professor Ritter as looking a little like David Niven dressed for tennis.)

The deputy medical director, Dr. Klaus Horvath, was Austrian. Heather had described him as a handsome, hearty-looking man—an athlete, most notably a skier. William enjoyed talking about skiing with Dr. Horvath, who had great faith in the psychological benefits of the Sanatorium Kilchberg’s jogging program—in which William Burns, at sixty-four, was an enthusiastic participant. Jack had some difficulty seeing his dad as a fully tattooed jogger, and he could imagine Dr. Horvath only with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s accent—possibly in combination with Arnold’s cheerful, optimistic disposition, which was best on display in that comedy where the former bodybuilder is supposed to be Danny DeVito’s twin.

The second German, Dr. Manfred Berger, was a neurologist and psychiatrist; he was head of gerontopsychiatry at the clinic. According to Jack’s sister, their dad was a youthful- looking sixty-four-year-old—not yet a candidate for Dr. Berger’s principal area of expertise. Dr. Berger, in Heather’s view, was “a fact man”—little was given to speculation.

Upon his arrival in Kilchberg, William Burns had exhibited the kind of mood swings common to a bipolar disorder. (Euphoric moments, which crashed in anger; he would be high for a whole week, with no apparent need of sleep, but this would end in a stuporous depression.) As it turned out, William was not bipolar. But before this diagnosis could be made, Dr. Berger had insisted on a neurological examination.

Dr. Berger, Heather had informed Jack, was a man who liked to rule things out. Did William have a brain tumor? Dr. Berger doubted that William did, but what was most dire simply had to be ruled out. Something called temporal lobe epilepsy could also present itself with mood swings not unlike William’s—in particular, his flights of euphoria and his clamorous episodes of anger. But William Burns was not afflicted with temporal lobe epilepsy, nor was he bipolar.

There was no aura of discouragement about Dr. Berger; it was as if he expected to be proved wrong, but he was not one to be deterred by failure.

Jack refrained from jumping to the conclusion that the most interesting psychiatric ailments were not easily diagnosed or cured. After all, upon seeing his dad’s full-body tattoos, who wouldn’t have guessed that William Burns was obsessive-compulsive? And that it physically hurt him to play the organ, yet it drove him completely insane not to play—well, who wouldn’t have been depressed and subject to mood swings about that?

But Dr. Berger was “a fact man”; his role was ruling things out, not zeroing in. He was an essential member of the team, Jack’s sister said—if not the easiest of the doctors to like. Although a German, he had adopted the Swiss habit of shaking hands zealously for prolonged periods of time, which Dr. Berger did with what Heather called “a competitive vengeance.”

This guy confused Jack in advance; someone vaguely resembling Gene Hackman or Tommy Lee Jones came to mind. (As it would turn out, Jack couldn’t have been more wrong.)