Thomas Trofimuk - Waiting for Columbus

Emile makes a little whistling sound. Well, that’s a long shot, he thinks. But at least it’s a place to start. Two years of being away, two years of therapy, and now he’s thrown right back into the mix.

Emile scrolls to the top of the file. Who the hell is this guy?

Sometimes the map will not do. The map will never be the territory. One must get out in the field in order to understand. While Emile can make telephone calls and send e-mails and look at maps from the comfort of his flat, it’s not the same as going out into the world and having a look-see. He’s never found anyone by just looking at a map. He’ll rent a car in Madrid, interview the people who may have seen this man, and follow any leads.

Soon he’ll be working the same hours he was logging before the incident. Admittedly, he was one of the busier agents. He was always trying to find someone. Even when he wasn’t on the job, he drifted easily to the missing people to whom he was assigned. He’d been away from work for a long time, and now the cases had already started arriving and his bosses in Lyon would be relying on his unique talents. Yes, he was going to get busy again.

“If I leave you clues, could you find me?” his wife had asked him before it went to pieces. “I want to be one of the people you find.”

Emile smiles. She does not.

Emile was baffled. What the hell did she want from me? he thinks.

She’d complained that he obsessed over his work. “These people you’re assigned to find-you make it so personal.”

“Focus. I focus,” Emile says to himself, trying to shake away the cobwebs of his past.

He takes his laptop to the roof terrace with a thermos of coffee. He places the computer on the small wooden table and pours coffee into his mug. He turns the knob on the little propane heater. It clicks to life with a small flicker, then slowly, as Emile turns it on high, the flame glows a bright hissing orange. He finds comfort in this sound. He does not open the computer. He drifts to the suspicious man in Madrid. Emile does not think he is dead. If he is as hot as the two alerts suggest, this man is likely holed up somewhere licking his wounds like a big cat or a bear. He’s found a cave. Maybe he’s damaged in some way and he needs to stay off the grid-he’s going to wait it out. Emile can relate to this-he understands this. He’s had experience with holing up. He worries, though, that this guy is just an innocent who needs help. Emile has read and reread the interviews with the witnesses, looking for that snippet of information that will point in the right direction. One of these witnesses says the man he saw was Chinese, or Japanese, or Korean. Another witness swears she saw him crying, sobbing uncontrollably. Another says he was Arabic-looking, he was holding some sort of bag under his arm, and he was most certainly not weeping. He’s gone over the file a dozen times. He knows everything there is to know. If there’s an oblique connection to be made, he’s not seeing it. There is one thing he knows about this man that was not written in the file: not one of the witnesses reacted out of fear. They all seemed to be concerned about his well-being. This man may be suspicious but he is not frightening.

Emile will begin in Madrid. Then he’ll go to Valdepeñas and talk to the people who fed and gave directions to the apparently lost man. The likelihood this is the same guy is remote but it’s all he’s got.

Emile closes his eyes to the gray city. The hazy sky. The diffused lights. He can feel warmth from the heater on his cheeks. In two hours he’ll be on the train to Madrid.

“Oh, there’s land out there all right. I know there’s landfall out there in the Western Sea.” He’s pacing Dr. Fuentes’s office. Back and forth, frenetic energy barely contained.

Dr. Fuentes motions for him to come and sit. An open-handed gesture toward the offered seat, which is a low, flat-armed, dark-brown leather chair directly across from the chair-and-a-half monster in which the doctor sits. Columbus sits, interlaces his fingers, and looks up at the doctor.

“What happened to you?” the doctor says. “Do you know why you’re here? Do you have any idea, Bolivar?” He scribbles in his notebook. His therapy consists of long conversations and interactions in which he uses the patient’s first name, his real name. No assumed names, ever. He has never called Columbus by his assumed name.

“Bolivar?” Columbus is smiling, playing with the doctor.

“Yes. You are Bolivar.”

“How can I be this Bolivar when my name is Columbus?”

Fuentes’s voice becomes a silken rope. “I’ve told you this before, but repetition is fine. We think something happened to you and the defensive part of you has conceived this alternate persona.”

“You think this Bolivar is inside me?”

“Yes, that’s our theory.”

“A theory?”

“Yes, we don’t know for sure.”

“How long have I been here? And all you have is a theory? Should I look for a new doctor? Someone more competent?”

“Three other doctors have consulted on your case, Bolivar. All we have are theories right now.”

Columbus has his hands clasped tightly. Everything in him wants to punch Dr. Fuentes in the face. “And?”

“And they concur-”

“They agree . They don’t teach you how to talk like a human being at doctor school, do they?”

“They all agree that you have this disorder. Yes.”

“Nonsense. I am only me. Have been only me since I got here, and before this I was also me. For instance, I was Christopher Columbus in the spring of seventy-eight when we came across Vikings. You see, I, Cristóbal Colón, had the most extraordinary meeting with a Norseman. He was a big man and we had an amazing conversation… I found out a few things about the world that are not taught in the universities… Things that would astound even you, Fuentes, Mr. Smarty-pants.”

“The fact you seem annoyed-your anger-is an indication that there’s some truth in what I’m saying.”

“You’ll have to try your first-year psychology tricks on somebody else, Fuentes. I’m not buying it.”

“And the fact you are just now changing the subject is also indicative. I want to talk about your disorder and you change the subject to Vikings. You want to tell stories about Vikings. You’re avoiding the subject by telling made-up stories.”

“All stories are true, Fuentes.”

Columbus is sitting on the end of his bed, rocking, looking directly out the window into a narrow gathering of palm trees. “Fuentes is an idiot,” he says to Consuela as she gathers a pile of laundry and pushes it into a cloth sack. “Are you sure he’s a doctor?”

“I think he’s under a lot of stress,” she says. She pulls hard on the rope and ties a knot, then tosses the bag into the hallway. “I gather your session was less than satisfactory?”

“Isn’t this the work of orderlies? Or nursing assistants?”

“I don’t mind helping out where I can.”

“Alternate persona, my ass,” he mutters. “Never heard of such a thing. I do know about Vikings, though. Everyone’s heard about Vikings.”

Fourteen years before Columbus came to Palos with three ships in the harbor; fourteen years before he was to embark on an incredible, unprecedented, and courageous journey; fourteen years before all of this, he was on the open ocean near Iceland and had a chance meeting that connected the dots-sparked his obsession into a full-fledged fire.

It’s a shouted conversation above howling wind and rain across the bows of two ships bobbing in the ocean off the coast of Iceland. Three men from three different lands who speak three different languages shout back and forth. The two vessels are loosely lashed together. Crew members from each craft keep a distance with their oars-pushing and giving way in order to maintain a half stability. This is a full-time fight against crashing together. Eight-foot swells don’t help. These rising and falling motions, and the blustering wind, are proving to be great inconveniences to conversation. The man from Britain, called Hardy, barely translates between Columbus and the big Norseman.