John Irving - Until I Find You

The driver was Middle Eastern, or possibly Turkish. (He’d mentioned “Europeans” with evident distaste.) His English was much better than his German, which was as clumsy and halting as Jack’s. When they’d first tried to speak German together, Jack’s driver had quickly switched to English instead. Jack wondered why he’d been mistaken for a patient at the clinic; the taxi driver was not much of a moviegoer, maybe.

Not so the preternaturally thin young woman in running shoes and a jogging suit who greeted Jack in what he thought was the main entrance to the hospital part of the clinic. There was a waiting room and a reception desk, where the young woman was pacing back and forth when Jack came in. A fitness expert, he assumed—perhaps she was the nurse in charge of physical therapy, or a kind of personal trainer to the patients. She should put on a little weight, Jack was thinking; one can take the athletic-looking thing too far.

“Stop!” she said, in English—pointing to him. (There was no one else in the entranceway or the waiting room; there was no one behind the reception desk, either.) Jack stopped.

A nurse appeared, emerging hurriedly from a corridor. “Pamela, er ist harmlos, ” the nurse said.

“Of course he’s harmless—he’s not real,” Pamela said. “The medication is working. You don’t have to worry about that. I know he’s harmless—I know he’s not real.”

She sounded American, yet the nurse had spoken to her in German and she’d understood the nurse. Maybe the thin young woman had been a patient in the clinic for a long time—long enough to learn German, Jack speculated.

“ Es tut mir leid, ” the nurse said to Jack, leading the young American woman away. (“I’m sorry,” she said.)

“You should speak English to him,” Pamela said. “If he were real, he would speak English—like in his movies.”

“I have an appointment with Professor Ritter!” Jack called after the nurse.

“ Ich bin gleich wieder da! ” the nurse called back to him. (“I’m coming right back!”)

They had disappeared down the corridor, but Jack could still hear the too-thin patient—her voice rising. It registered as a kind of insanity on his part that he’d mistaken her for someone who worked at the place.

“They don’t usually say anything,” Pamela was telling the nurse. “Normally they just appear— they don’t talk, too. God, maybe the medication isn’t working!”

“ Das macht nichts, ” the nurse told her, gently. (“It doesn’t matter,” she said.)

Jack Burns was a movie star in a psychiatric clinic; not surprisingly, the first patient who saw him thought he was a talking hallucination. (Not a bad definition for an actor, Dr. García might have said.)

When the nurse came back, she was shaking her head and talking to herself—almost inaudibly and in German. Were it not for her uniform, and if he hadn’t seen her before, Jack would have believed that her self-absorbed muttering marked her as a patient. She was a short woman in her fifties, stout and brusque with curly gray hair—a former blonde, Jack guessed.

“It’s funny that the first person you, of all people, should meet here is our only American,” the nurse said. “Bleibel,” she added, vigorously shaking Jack’s hand.

“Excuse me?”

“Waltraut Bleibel—I’m telling you my name !”

“Oh. Jack Burns.”

“I know. Professor Ritter is expecting you. We’ve all been expecting you, except for poor Pamela.”

They went outside the building and walked across a patio; there was a sculpture garden and a shallow pond with lily pads. ( Nothing anyone can drown in, Jack was thinking.) Most of the buildings had big windows, some of them with those black silhouettes of birds painted on the glass. “Our anti-bird birds,” Nurse Bleibel said, with a wave of her hand. “You must have them in America.”

“I guess I went to the wrong building,” Jack told her.

“A women’s ward wouldn’t be my first choice for you,” Nurse Bleibel said.

The grounds were beautifully maintained. There were a dozen or more people walking on the paths; others sat on benches, facing the lake. (No one looked insane.) There must have been a hundred sailboats on the lake.

“I take William shopping for clothes, on occasion,” the nurse informed Jack. “I’ve never known a man who likes shopping for clothes as much as your father does. When he has to try things on, he can be difficult. Mirrors are a challenge —triggers, Dr. von Rohr would call them. But William is very well behaved with me. No fooling around, generally speaking.”

They went into what appeared to be an office building, although there were cooking smells; maybe a cafeteria, or the clinic’s dining hall, was in the building. Jack followed the nurse upstairs, noting that she took two steps at a time; for a short woman in a skirt, this required robust determination. (He could easily imagine his dad not being inclined to fool around with Waltraut Bleibel.)

They found Professor Ritter in a conference room; he was sitting all alone, at the head of a long table, making notes on a pad of paper. He jumped to his feet when Nurse Bleibel brought Jack into the room. A wiry man with a strong handshake, he looked a little like David Niven, but he wasn’t dressed for tennis. His pleated khaki trousers had sharply pressed pant legs; his tan loafers looked newly shined; he wore a dark-green short-sleeved shirt.

“Ah, you found us!” the professor cried.

“ Er hat zuerst Pamela gefunden, ” Nurse Bleibel said. (“He found Pamela first,” she told him.)

“Poor Pamela,” Professor Ritter replied.

“ Das macht nichts. Pamela just thinks it’s her medication again,” the nurse said as she was leaving.

“ Merci vielmal, Waltraut!” Prof. Ritter called after her—a bilingual “Many thanks!” in French and Swiss German.

“ Bitte, bitte, ” Nurse Bleibel said, waving her hand as she had at the anti-bird birds on the big windows.

“Waltraut has a brother, Hugo, who takes your father to town—on occasion,” Professor Ritter told Jack. “But Hugo doesn’t take William shopping for clothes. Waltraut does a better job of that.”

“She mentioned something about mirrors,” Jack said. “She called them triggers, or she said one of the doctors did.”

“Ah, yes—we’ll get to that!” Professor Ritter said. He was a man used to running a meeting. He was friendly but precise; he left no doubt about who was in charge.

When the others filed into the conference room, Jack wondered where they’d been waiting. On what signal, which he hadn’t detected, had they been summoned forth? They even seemed to know where to sit—as if there were place cards on the bare table, where they put their almost identical pads of paper. They’d come prepared; they looked positively poised to take notes. But first Jack had to endure the obligatory handshakes—which, in each case, went on a shake or two too long. And each doctor, as if their meeting had been rehearsed, had a characteristic little something to say.

“ Grüss Gott! ” Dr. Horvath, the hearty Austrian, cried—pumping Jack’s hand up and down.

“Your on-screen persona may precede you, Mr. Burns,” Dr. Berger (the neurologist and fact man) said, “but when I look at you, I see a young William first of all!”

“On the other hand,” Dr. von Rohr said, in her head-of-department way, “should we presume that we know Jack Burns because of our familiarity with William? I’m just asking.”