Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass

He nodded, not bothering to argue, and raised his other foot.

Then there was a period of limbo while they waited for his paperwork. Barbara took a crossword puzzle from her grocery bag, and Liam lay back on the bed, shoes and all, and stared at the ceiling.

The few times he’d been hospitalized before, he could hardly wait to leave, he remembered. He’d pressed his call button repeatedly and kept sending whoever was with him out to the nurses’ station to see what the holdup was. But now he was grateful for the delay. At least here, he wasn’t alone. He felt lazy and content, and the sound of Barbara’s pencil whispering across the paper almost put him to sleep.

Imagine he was a man who lived in the hospital permanently. He’d been born here and he had somehow never left. His meals, his clothes, his activities-all taken care of. No wonder, therefore, he had forgotten how he had arrived! He had been here all along; this was the sum of his world. There was nothing more to remember.

Eventually, though, a nurse came with his prescriptions and instructions. She perched on the very edge of his bed, giving off a smell of mouthwash, and went over the doctor’s orders line by line. “You can’t be alone for the next two days, and you can’t drive your car for a week,” she said.

“A week!”

“Longer than that if you experience the slightest sense of vertigo.”

“You’re being unreasonable,” Liam told her.

“And it’s crucial to complete the full course of antibiotics. There is nothing on earth more septic than the bite of another human being.”

“A what?” he said. “A bite?”

“The bite on your hand.”

“I was bitten?”

A sickish zoom hit the bottom of his stomach, as if an elevator had dropped. Even Barbara looked taken aback.

“Well, not on purpose, maybe,” the nurse said. “But from the shape of the wound, they think you must have flailed out and made contact with the other guy’s teeth.”

She gave him a smile that was probably meant to be reassuring. “So it is very, very important to take these pills for the full ten days,” she said. “Not nine days, not eight days…”

Liam lay back and covered his eyes with his good hand. On purpose or not, there was something so… intimate about a stranger’s biting him.

After that they had the usual endless wait for a wheelchair, and Barbara used the time to go off to the hospital pharmacy and get his prescriptions filled. Liam picked up her crossword puzzle and studied it while she was gone. Famous WWII battlefield and Birthplace of FDR and Palindromic Ms. Gardner-she had known them all, good librarian that she was, and so did Liam, or at least he recognized her answers as correct once he saw them. But Stressful occupation? gave him an itch of anxiety deep inside his skull, the way riddles used to when he was a child. Poet, Barbara had answered, so confidently that the cross of the T flew tip-tilted across the upright. He felt overcome with discouragement, and he dropped the puzzle onto the bed.

It was nearly eleven a.m.-Barbara long back from the pharmacy and deep in a novel-before an orderly arrived with a wheelchair and they were free to go. Shifting from the bed to the wheelchair made Liam realize that he didn’t have his wallet. He missed the pressure of that slight bulge in his rear pocket when he sat. “How did they admit me?” he asked Barbara.

“What do you mean?” she said. She was trotting down the hall behind him, keeping pace with the orderly.

“I mean, without my insurance card and ID.”

“Oh, Xanthe gave them the information once she got here. I have your insurance card now in my purse; don’t let me forget to return it.”

He pictured how it must have been-his flaccid, unaware form heaved onto a stretcher, loaded into an ambulance, trundled through the emergency room. It was the most unsettling sensation. “Depending on the kindness of strangers,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.”

But as soon as they were alone-as soon as she’d brought her car around and the orderly had settled him inside it-he told her, “I hate, hate, hate not remembering how this happened.”

“It’s probably just as well,” she said.

She was fumbling in her pocketbook, and she sounded distracted. He waited until she’d paid at the parking booth before he spoke again. “It is not just as well,” he said. “I’m missing a piece of my life. I lie down one night; I go to sleep; I wake up in a hospital room. Can you imagine how that feels?”

“You don’t have any recollection whatsoever? Like, hearing a suspicious noise? Seeing somebody in the doorway?”

“Nothing.”

“Maybe it will come back to you when you get into bed tonight.”

“Ah,” he said. He thought about it. “Yes, that makes sense.”

“You know how sometimes you dream about someone, and you forget you dreamed at all but then you happen to see that person and this sort of inkling will flit across your mind…”

“Yes, it’s possible,” Liam said.

They stopped for a traffic light, and he suddenly felt impatient to be home. He would lie down on his bed immediately and see if the memory wafted up from his pillow the way his past dreams often did. Probably nothing would come until dark, but it wouldn’t hurt to try earlier.

“If it were me, though,” Barbara said, “I’d be happier not knowing.”

“You say that now. I bet you wouldn’t feel that way if it really happened.”

“And how about your nerves? Do you really think you’ll be able to sleep comfortably in that apartment again?”

“Of course,” he said.

She sent him such a long doubtful glance that the car behind them honked; the light had changed to green. “I’d be terrified, myself,” she said as she stepped on the gas.

“Well, I will lock the patio door from now on. Do you know how you would lock one of those plate-glass doors that slides sideways?”

“There’s a thingamajig, I believe. We’ll look.”

This implied that she would be coming in with him, and he was happy to hear it. It wasn’t fear of another break-in he felt so much as distrust of his own capabilities. He had lost his self-confidence. He wasn’t sure anymore that he was fully in charge. Intruders were the least of his worries.

Barbara parked in the proper lot without his directing her. Obviously she had grown familiar with his apartment. And she had his keys in her purse-his worn calfskin key case with his car key and his door key. She took them out as she was waiting for him to inch forth from the passenger seat. (Standing up too fast made his head go spacey.) “Want an arm?” she asked him, but he said, “I’m all right.” And he was, once he’d waited for the amoebas to clear from his vision.

The pine needles gave off a nice toasty scent in the sunshine, but the foyer smelled as cold and basement-like as ever. Barbara unlocked his front door and then stood back to let him go first. “Now, the girls and I did clean up a little,” she said.

“Did it need it?”

“Well, somewhat.”

He wasn’t sure what she meant when he first entered, because the living room looked just the way he’d left it: more or less in order if you didn’t count the few unpacked cartons lined up along one wall. He moved down the hall past the den, Barbara close on his heels, and saw nothing different there, either. But when he reached the bedroom, he found a runner of brown wrapping paper on the carpet leading toward the bed. And the bed was fitted with linens that he had never seen before-an anemic light-blue blanket, slightly pilled, and sheets sprinkled with flowers. He had avoided patterned sheets ever since a childhood fever in which the polka dots on his sheets had swarmed like insects.