Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass

He knew his head was bandaged even before he reached up a hand to touch it, because the gauze covered his ears and turned the chirping of the monitor into a distant peep. But not until he reached did he realize that his hand was bandaged also. A wide strip of adhesive tape encircled his left palm, and in fact his palm stung sharply across the padded part now that he thought about it. Exactly where his head was injured, though, he couldn’t tell. It ached uniformly all over, a relentless, dull throbbing that seemed connected to his vision, because looking at the blinking lights of the monitor made it worse.

He knew from the square of pearly white sky framed by the plate-glass window that it must be daytime. But which day? And what hour of the day?

Any second now an explanation would occur to him. There had to be one. He had fallen down some stairs or he’d been in a car wreck. But when he searched his mind for his last available memory (which took a distressingly long moment), all he could find was the image of going to sleep in his new apartment. His new apartment’s address was 102C Windy Pines Court; what a relief to be able to produce that. His new phone number was… oh, Lord. He couldn’t recall.

But that was understandable, wasn’t it? The number had been assigned to him only a week ago.

The exchange was 882. Or maybe 822. Or 828.

He gave up the search for his phone number and returned to the image of falling asleep. He tried to invent a next act. So: in the morning he had awakened, let’s say. He might have wondered where he was for an instant, but then he’d oriented himself, gotten out of bed, headed toward his new bathroom…

It didn’t work. He drew a blank. All he could remember was lying on his back in the dark, appreciating his sheets.

A nurse came in, or maybe an aide; hard to tell, these days. She was young and plump and freckled, and she wore baby-blue pants and a white smock printed with teddy bears. She punched a button on the monitor and it stopped chirping. Then she leaned over his face, too close. “Oh!” she said. “You’re awake.”

“What happened?” he asked her.

“I’ll tell them at the desk,” she said.

She went off again.

He could see now that a tube ran from the IV pole to his right arm. He sensed that he had a catheter, too. He was fastened down like Gulliver, trapped by cords and wires. A flutter of panic started rising in his chest, but he subdued it by gazing steadily out the open door, where a blond wooden handrail followed the corridor wall in a predictable and calming way.

Surgery. Maybe he’d had surgery. Anesthesia could do this to you-wipe out any sense that time had passed while you were unconscious. He remembered that from his tonsillectomy, fifty-odd years ago. But he had awakened from the tonsillectomy with a clear recall of going under, and of the hours leading up to it. It had been nothing like this.

Another nurse, or some such person, entered so swiftly that she set up a breeze. This was an older woman but her smock was equally ambiguous, patterned all over with smiley faces. “Good afternoon!” she said loudly. It turned out that hearing stabbed his head just as much as seeing. She took something from her pocket, a little penlight kind of thing, and shined it painfully into his eyes. He forced himself not to close them. He said, “It’s afternoon?”

“Mmhmm.”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“Concussion,” she said. She slipped the penlight back in her pocket and turned to check the monitor. “You got a little bump on the noggin.”

“I don’t remember anything about it,” he told her.

“Well, there you are, then. That’s what concussion does to people.”

“I mean I don’t remember being in a situation where I could get a concussion. All I remember is going to bed.”

“Did you maybe fall out of bed?” she asked him.

“Fall out of bed! At my age?”

“Well, I don’t know. I just came on duty. Let’s ask your daughter.”

“I have a daughter here? Which one?”

“Dark hair? A little bit curly? I think she went to the cafeteria. But I’ll try and track her down for you.”

She checked something at the side of the bed-his catheter bag, he supposed-and then left.

It was absurdly comforting to know that a daughter was here. The very word was comforting: daughter . Someone who was personally acquainted with him and cared about more than his blood pressure and his output of pee.

Even if she had absconded to the cafeteria without a backward glance.

He closed his eyes and fell off a cliff, into a sleep that felt like drowning in feathers.

When he woke up, a bearded man was prying open his eyelids. “There you are,” the man said, as if Liam had stepped out of the room for a moment. Liam’s oldest daughter was standing at the foot of the bed, her sensible, familiar face almost startling in these surroundings. She wore a sleeveless blouse that must not have been warm enough for this refrigerated air, because she’d wrapped her solid white arms around her rib cage.

“I’m Dr. Wood,” the bearded man told Liam. “The hospitalist.”

Hospitalist?

“Mr. Pennywell, do you know where you are?”

“I have no idea where I am,” Liam said.

“What day is it, then?”

“I don’t know that either,” Liam said. “I just woke up! You’re asking impossible questions.”

Xanthe said, “Dad, please cooperate,” but Dr. Wood raised a palm in her direction (never fear; he knew how to handle these old codgers) and said, “You’re quite right, of course, Mr. Pennywell,” in a soothing, condescending tone. “So,” he said. “The president. Can you tell me who our president is.”

Liam grimaced. “He’s not my president,” he said. “I refuse to acknowledge him.”

“Dad-”

Liam said, “Look here, Dr. Wood, I should be asking the questions. I’m completely in the dark! I went to bed last night-or some night; I wake up in a hospital room! What happened?”

Dr. Wood glanced at Xanthe. It was possible that he didn’t know himself what had happened-or had already forgotten, in the crush of his other patients. At any rate, Xanthe was the one who finally answered. “You were injured by an intruder,” she told Liam.

“An intruder?”

“He must have gotten in through the patio door, which, incidentally, you left unlocked for any passing Tom, Dick, or Harry to waltz through as the whim overtook him.”

“An intruder was in my bedroom?”

“I guess you struggled or shouted or something, because the neighbors heard a commotion, but by the time the police came the man had fled.”

“I was there for this? I was conscious? I was fighting off an attack?”

He felt a deep chill down the back of his neck, and it wasn’t from the air conditioning.

“They need to keep you here a while for observation,” Xanthe told him. “That’s why they’ve been waking you so often to ask you questions.”

It was news to Liam that he had been awakened often, but he didn’t want to admit to yet another failure of memory. “Have they caught the man?” he asked her.

“Not yet.”

“He’s still out there?”

Before she could answer, Dr. Wood said, “Sit up for me, please, Mr. Pennywell.” Then he led Liam through a series of exercises that made him feel foolish. Raise this arm; raise that arm; touch his own nose; follow Dr. Wood’s finger with his eyes. Xanthe stood to one side, narrowly watchful, as the soles of his bare feet were scraped with a pointed object. During the whole process, Dr. Wood remained expressionless. “How am I?” Liam was forced to ask finally.

Dr. Wood said, “We’ll need to keep you here another night just to be on the safe side. But if all goes well, we can release you tomorrow.”