Anne Tyler - Noah's Compass

“A visitor could have ordered it,” she said after another pause.

“I didn’t have any visitors.”

“How do you know that, if you were unconscious?”

This last remark came lickety-split, no pause at all, triumphantly. He sighed. He said, “I don’t think I had even made it into my room on the tenth. I think I was still in emergency. And meanwhile my family was completely in the dark, wondering what had become of me.”

It almost seemed like the truth. He imagined relatives all over town wringing their hands and calling around and checking with the police.

But the woman in Accounting was unimpressed. She told him they would get back to him later. Her tone of voice implied that it wasn’t going to be uppermost on anyone’s agenda.

At nighttime he slept poorly, no doubt because he wasn’t tired. He was bothered by the faint scent of Kitty’s shampoo even though he had changed the sheets, and a neighbor’s TV was so loud that percussive thumping noises vibrated one wall. When he did finally sleep, he dreamed dreams that exhausted him-complicated narratives that he had to work to keep track of. He dreamed he was a pharmacist advising a customer about her medications, but while he was talking he absentmindedly, unintentionally ate every one of her pills. He dreamed he was leading a policewoman through his apartment-not the woman who had visited in real life but another one, old and crabby-and while they were in the bedroom they heard a sound from the window. “There!” Liam said. “Didn’t I tell you?” He was pleased, because in the dream there seemed to be some suspicion that he had made the intruder up. Then he woke, and for an instant he thought that the sound from the window had been real. His heart seemed to stop; he felt suddenly cold, although it was a warm night. But almost immediately, he understood that he had imagined it. The only sounds were the meep-meep of tree frogs, the neighbor’s TV, the distant rush of traffic on the Beltway. He was surprised that he’d felt such terror. Why should he be afraid? Everybody dies sometime. In fact he was almost waiting to die. But evidently his body had other ideas.

His heartbeat returned to normal and the chill faded, and he was left with a feeling of disappointment. Wouldn’t you think that that flash of alarm could have jogged his memory?

He had no idea when Cope Development opened for business each day, and so he drove downtown extra early-shortly after eight o’clock. A panel truck occupied the space where he’d parked the last time. He drew up directly behind it, in front of the Mission for Indigent Men. He cut the engine and rolled down his window and prepared himself for a wait.

Within minutes, a woman approached from the other direction, hunting through a red tote as she walked. She brought forth a bunch of keys and climbed the front steps, unlocked the door, and disappeared inside. But no others followed. Maybe this woman was the office manager, or opener, or whatever the term was. The sidewalk remained empty. Liam began to feel deeply, maddeningly bored. His throat developed a hollow ache from holding back his yawns. His face grew sticky with perspiration.

Then around nine o’clock, people started arriving-young men in suits, and women of all ages strolling in twos and threes, talking as they entered the building, laughing and nudging each other. Liam felt a pang of nostalgia for the easy camaraderie of people who worked together.

A man in coveralls walked past Liam’s car, climbed into the parked panel truck, and drove away. Immediately afterward, as if by prearrangement, a dingy green Corolla pulled into the vacant space. A woman stepped out from the driver’s side: the rememberer. She was wearing another big, folksy skirt, or perhaps the same one, for all Liam knew, and her ringlets were wet-looking now from the heat. She circled behind her car, so close that he could hear the slogging sound of her sandals on the pavement. She opened the front passenger door, and Mr. Cope unfolded himself from his seat and stood upright. He had that old-person knack of remaining cool in sweltering weather. His hatchet face was dry and chalky; his high white collar and close-fitting suit were still crisp.

The rememberer, on the other hand, looked rumpled and uncomfortable. Under the glaring sunlight she was not quite so young as Liam had first assumed. Nor did she seem so professional. She somehow got her purse strap entangled when she tried to close the car door, and as she was guiding Mr. Cope up the front steps she managed to trample on the hem of her own skirt. The elastic waist slid perilously low on one side; she yanked it up again and gave a quick glance around her, luckily not appearing to notice Liam in his car. Then she cupped a hand under Mr. Cope’s elbow and shepherded him into the building. The door swung shut behind them.

It wasn’t clear to Liam what he had hoped to gain from this sighting. He started his engine and rolled up his window and drove home.

Toward the end of June he phoned Bundy and invited him to supper on a night when Bundy’s fiancée had yoga class. He planned a real menu; it gave him something to do. He went to the supermarket for groceries, and he roasted a chicken. It was way too hot for roast chicken, but he didn’t know how to cook much of anything else. And Bundy was appreciative, since his fiancée fed him a steady diet of Lean Cuisines.

Liam couldn’t quite explain why he and Bundy were friends. It was surely none of his doing. But from the day they’d met, at a St. Dyfrig teachers’ meeting one September, Bundy had seemed to view Liam with a mixture of fascination and… well, glee would have to be the word for it. And Liam, almost against his will, found himself playing into that view. Leading Bundy through the apartment this evening, for instance, he flung open the closet door to show off his new tie rack. “A separate little spoke for each tie! And see how it revolves for easy access.” Bundy rocked back on his heels, grinning.

When it grew apparent that the apartment’s air conditioning couldn’t handle the heat of the oven, they moved their meal to the patio. They sat out on the tiny square of concrete in two rotting canvas butterfly chairs left behind by the previous tenant, and they ate from makeshift trays formed by several folded newspaper sections laid across their knees.

Bundy shook his head when he heard about the intruder. He said, “Ah, man. And you’re in the county now!” But he showed less sympathy for Liam’s memory lapse. “Shoot,” he said, “that happens to me just about every weekend. No big deal about that.”

Then he drifted into St. Dyfrig gossip-the headmaster’s latest cockamamie piece of foolishness, the latest dispute with some pigheaded parent. He knew all of Liam’s old students and could tell him what most were up to, since he was in charge of athletics for St. Dyfrig’s summer program. Brucie Winston had been caught selling drugs, which was something of a dilemma since Brucie’s parents had just single-handedly funded the new auditorium. Lewis Bent was failing his make-up math course and there was talk of holding him back next year. Liam had never much liked Brucie Winston, but Lewis was a whole other story. He tsk-ed and said, “Well, that’s a shame.” He wondered if there were something he should have done differently while Lewis was in his class.

When they’d polished off the dessert (a pint of pistachio ice cream) and it was time for Bundy to go, Liam led him back through the apartment, carelessly leaving the patio door unlocked behind them. Even as he was telling Bundy good night he had an edgy awareness of that unlocked door at his rear. “Sure, you’re welcome; any time,” he said, almost pushing Bundy out. But it wasn’t anxiety that made him hurry back to the patio; it was a sort of magnetic pull, a half-guilty, compelling attraction. All for nothing, as it happened. No one was trying to get in.