Noah's Compass

3

Kitty arrived with a duffel bag almost bigger than she was. She carried it slung over her shoulder, and the weight forced her to stand at a steep slant in the doorway-a tiny person in a halter top and minuscule denim shorts, with chopped-looking, sand-colored hair and a quick, alert little face. “Poppy!” she said. (She was the only daughter who called him that.) “You look like you’ve been run over!”

Even so, she shucked off her bag and heaved it into his arms. His knees buckled as he received it. “What’s in here, the kitchen sink?” he asked, but secretly, he was pleased. She must be planning to stay a while.

He stood still for a fleeting kiss on the cheek and then followed her into the living room, where she threw herself into an armchair. “I am so, so tired of old ladies,” she said. “There’s not a patient in that office who’s under ninety, I swear.”

“Oh, and, ah, is that how you dress for work?” he asked.

“Huh? No, I changed before I left. You would not believe my uniform. It’s polyester! And pink!”

He set her bag on the floor beside her. (In his current condition, he couldn’t imagine lugging it all the way to the den.) Then he lowered himself into the other armchair. “What do you think of my apartment?” he asked.

“Your old one had a fireplace.”

“I never used it, though.”

“And your old one didn’t have homicidal maniacs climbing through the window.”

“Door,” he said. He pressed his hands between his knees. “But one assumes that won’t be an everyday occurrence.”

Kitty didn’t look convinced. “Anyway,” she said. “Let’s see: what am I supposed to ask. Do you know what year this is? Can you tell me your last name?”

“Yes, yes…”

“And you don’t feel dizzy or sleepy?”

“Certainly not,” he said.

In fact, he had slept for most of the afternoon, waking only for check-up calls from Louise, Louise again, and his sister. He had been troubled by strange, vivid dreams and some sort of olfactory hallucination-a smell of vinegar-but he had answered each of the calls in his brightest voice. “Yes, fine, thanks! Thank you for calling!” Louise had seemed reassured, but his sister, who knew him better, was harder to deceive. “Are you positive you’re all right?” she had asked. “Do you think I ought to come over?”

“That would be a waste of your time. I’m fine. And Kitty’s due here shortly,” he’d said.

“Oh. Well, okay.”

She was glad to be let off the hook, he could tell. (He knew her pretty well, too.) They didn’t actually set eyes on each other more than once or twice a year.

Kitty was examining the lamp table next to her chair. She pulled out the drawer and peered inside. “What was in here?” she asked Liam. “Any valuables?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“It’s usually got, you know, pens and pencils and memo pads, but I hadn’t unpacked them yet. In fact, as far as I can tell, I’m not missing a single thing. My wallet was still on the bureau, even-the first place you’d think a burglar would look. I guess he just didn’t have time.”

“Lucky,” Kitty said.

“Lucky, right. Except…”

Kitty was bending over now to rummage in the outside pocket of her duffel bag. She drew forth a flat, silvery computer of the type that Liam believed was called a “notebook,” a rather attractive pink iPod, and finally a cell phone no bigger than a fun-size candy bar. (So much equipment, these young people seemed to need!) She flipped the phone open and put it to her ear and said, “Hello?” And then, after a moment, “Well, sorry! I had it on Vibrate. Yes, of course I’m here. Where else would I be? Yes. He’s fine. You want to talk to him?”

Liam sat forward expectantly, but Kitty said, “Oh. Okay. Bye.” She snapped the phone shut and told Liam, “Mom.”

“She didn’t want to talk to me?”

“Nope. That woman is eternally checking up on me. She thinks I might be with Damian.”

“Ah.”

“This business about me staying with you? It’s just an excuse. Really she wants to make sure I’m properly chaperoned every everlasting minute, and now that she’s got a boyfriend she’s too busy to do it herself, so she ships me off to you.”

“Your mom has a boyfriend?” Liam asked.

“Or something like that.”

“I didn’t realize.”

But Kitty was punching phone keys. “Hey,” she said. “What’s up.”

Liam collected himself with some effort and rose to see about supper.

The smell of vinegar persisted. It seemed to emanate from his own skin. He asked Kitty over supper (canned asparagus soup and saltines), “Do I smell like vinegar to you?”

“Huh?”

“I keep thinking I smell like vinegar.”

She fixed him with a suspicious stare and said, “Do you know what year this is?”

“Stop asking me that!”

“Mom told me to. It’s not my idea.”

“Half the time I don’t know what year it is anyhow,” he said, “unless I take a minute to think. The years have started flying past so fast that I can’t keep track. You’ll see that for yourself, by and by.”

But Kitty appeared to have lost interest in the subject. She was crushing saltines into her soup with the back of her spoon. Her fingers were long and flexible, ending in nail-bitten nubbins-lemur fingers, Liam thought. He wasn’t sure she had taken so much as a mouthful of soup yet. When she felt his eyes on her, she looked up. “I’m going to have to sleep in the room he broke into, aren’t I,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“The room where the burglar came in. I saw that door! That’s the one he entered through, isn’t it.”

“Well, but then it wasn’t locked. Now it is,” Liam said. He had checked the lock himself, earlier. It was a little up-and-down lever arrangement, not complicated at all. “If you like, though,” he said, “I can sleep there.”

So much for letting his memory come back to him in the dark. But already he had begun to admit that that wasn’t likely to happen.

“Seems to me you’d be scared too,” Kitty told him. “I would think you’d have the heebie-jeebies forever after! Living in the place where you were attacked.”

“Now that I have been attacked, though, I somehow feel that means I won’t be attacked again,” he said. “As if a quota has been reached, so to speak. I realize that’s not logical.”

“Durn right it’s not logical. Guy breaks in, sees all the loot, doesn’t have time to grab it… More logical is, he decides to come back for it later.”

“What loot?” Liam asked. “I don’t have any jewels, or silver, or electronics. What would he come back for, except that wallet with seven dollars in it?”

“He doesn’t know it’s seven dollars.”

“Well, I hardly think-”

“Is seven dollars it?”

“What?”

“Is that all you’ve got in the world?”

Liam began to laugh. “You’ve heard of banks, I trust,” he said.

“How much do you have in the bank?”

“Really, Kitty!”

“Mom says you’re a pauper.”

“Your mother doesn’t know everything,” he said. And then, “Who is this so-called boyfriend of hers?”

Kitty batted the question away with a flick of her hand. “She’s worried you’ll end up on the streets, what with getting fired and all.”

“I wasn’t fired, I was… downsized. And I have a perfectly adequate savings account. You tell her that. Besides which,” he said, “I did turn sixty in January.” He let a significant pause develop.

The pause was for Kitty to realize that she had forgotten his birthday. His whole family had forgotten, with the exception of his sister, who always sent a Hallmark card. But Kitty just said, “What’s that got to do with it?”

“After fifty-nine and a half, I’m allowed to draw on my pension.”

“Right; I bet that’s a fortune.”

“Well, it’s not as if I need very much. I’ve never been an acquirer.”

Kitty dropped another saltine in her soup and said, “I’ll say you’re not an acquirer. When I went into the den I was like, ‘Whoa! Oh, my God! The burglar guy stole the TV!’ Then I remembered you don’t even own a TV. I mean, I knew that before but I just never put it all together. I’m going to miss all my shows while I’m here! There isn’t a single TV anywhere in this apartment!”

“I don’t know how you’re going to survive,” Liam said.

“I’ll bet the burglar looked around and thought, Great; someone’s beaten me to it. Everything’s already been ripped off, he thought.”

“Funny how people always assume a burglar’s a he,” Liam said. “Aren’t there any women burglars? Somehow you never hear of them.”

Kitty tipped part of her milk into her soup. Then she started stirring her soup around and around, dreamily.

“I keep trying to put a face on him. Or her,” Liam said. “I’m sure it must be somewhere in my subconscious, don’t you think? You can’t imagine how it feels to know you’ve been through something so catastrophic and yet there’s no trace of it in your mind. I almost wish you all hadn’t cleared away the evidence. Not that I don’t appreciate it; I don’t mean that. But it’s as if I’ve been excluded from my own experience. Other people know more about it than I do. For instance, how bad were my bed sheets? Were they soaked with blood, solid red? Or just spattered here and there.”

“Yuck,” Kitty said.

“Well, sorry, but-”

A throaty rasp started up, like the sound a toad or a frog would make. Kitty lunged out of her chair and grabbed her cell phone from the coffee table. “Hello?” she said. And then, “Hey.”

Liam sighed and set his spoon down. He hadn’t made much headway with his soup, and Kitty’s bowl was fuller than when she had started-a disgusting mush of crackers and swirled milk. Maybe tomorrow they should eat out someplace.

“Oh…” she was saying. “Oh, um… you know”-clearly responding in code.

Liam’s hands had a parched look that he had never noticed before, and his fingers trembled slightly when he held them up. Also, the vinegar smell was still bothering him. He was sure it must be obvious to other people.

This was not his true self, he wanted to say. This was not who he really was. His true self had gone away from him and had a crucial experience without him and failed to come back afterward.

He knew he was making too much of this.

Liam had once had a pupil named Buddy Morrow who suffered from various learning issues. This was back in the days when Liam taught ancient history, and he had been paid an arm and a leg to come to Buddy’s house twice a week and drill him on his reading about the Spartans and the Macedonians. Anyone could have done it, of course. It didn’t require special knowledge. But the parents were quite well off, and they believed in hiring experts. The father was a neurologist. A very successful neurologist. A world-renowned authority on insults to the brain.

Liam liked the phrase “insults to the brain.” In fact it might not be a phrase that Dr. Morrow himself had used; he might have said “injuries to the brain.” He’d said neither one to Liam, in any case. They’d talked only about Buddy’s progress, on the few occasions they’d spoken.

Still, on Tuesday morning at 8:25 Liam telephoned Dr. Morrow’s office. He chose the time deliberately, having given it a good deal of thought in the middle of the night when Dr. Morrow’s name first occurred to him. He reasoned that there must be a patients’ call-in hour, and that probably this was either prior to nine a.m. or at midday. Eight a.m. until nine, he was betting. But he had to wait till after Kitty left for work, because he didn’t want her overhearing. She left at 8:23, walking to the bus stop beside the mall. He was on the phone two minutes later.

He told the receptionist the truth: he was Dr. Morrow’s son’s ex-teacher, not an official patient, but he was hoping the doctor might be able to answer a quick question about some aftereffects of a blow to his head. The receptionist-who sounded more like a middle-aged waitress than the icy young twit he’d expected-clucked and said, “Well, hold on, hon; let me check.”

The next voice he heard was Dr. Morrow’s own, tired and surprisingly elderly. “Yes?” he said. “This is Dr. Morrow.”

“Dr. Morrow, this is Liam Pennywell. I don’t know if you remember me.”

“Ah, yes! The philosopher.”

Liam felt gratified, even though he thought he detected an undertone of amusement. He said, “I’m sorry to phone you out of the blue, but I was recently knocked unconscious and I’ve been experiencing some very troubling symptoms.”

“What sort of symptoms?” the doctor asked.

“Well, memory loss.”

“Short-term memory?”

“Not short, exactly. But not long-term either. More like… intermediate.”

“Intermediate memory?”

“I can’t remember being hit.”

“Oh, that’s very common,” Dr. Morrow said. “Very much to be expected. Are you currently under medical care?”

“Yes, but… In the hospital I was, but… Dr. Morrow, I hate to presume, but could I come in and talk to you?”

“Talk,” the doctor said thoughtfully.

“Just for a couple of minutes? Oh, I do have insurance. I have health insurance. I mean, this would be a purely professional consultation.”

“What are you doing right now?” the doctor asked.

“Now?”

“Could you make it here before nine fifteen?”

“Certainly!” Liam said.

He had no idea if he could make it; the phone book had listed a downtown address and he was way, way up near… oh, Lord, he should never have moved. He was way up near the Beltway! But he said, “I’ll be there in half a second. Thank you, Dr. Morrow. I can’t tell you how I appreciate this.”

“Half a second exactly,” the doctor said, and the undertone of amusement seemed to have returned to his voice.

Liam had on a more casual outfit than he would normally wear in public: a stretched-out polo shirt and khakis with one torn belt loop. No time to change, though. All he did was switch his slippers for sneakers. Bending down to tie them made his head throb, which he welcomed. He wanted as many symptoms as possible if he was presenting his case to a doctor.

In the parking lot, the throbbing in his head was bothersome enough to make him try to slide straight-backed into his car, bending only at the knees. He had just made it onto the seat when a woman shrieked, “What are you doing?”

He turned to find an aged blue sedan pulled up behind him. His middle daughter was glaring at him through her open side window, and his grandson sat in the back. “Why, Louise,” Liam said. “Good to see you! Sorry, but I’m in a bit of a-”

“You know you’re not supposed to be driving!”

“Oh.”

“They told you at the hospital! I came all the way over here in case you needed some errands run.”

“Well, isn’t that nice of you,” he said. “Maybe you could take me to the neurologist’s office.”

“Where’s that?”

“Down on St. Paul,” he said. He was climbing out of his car now, trying once again not to lower his head by so much as an inch. It was lucky Louise had happened along; he hadn’t realized how woozy he felt. He shuffled around the hood of her car to the passenger side and got in.

“It’s going to pull like anything when you yank that bandage off,” Louise said, peering at his scalp.

She had Barbara’s dark coloring but not her softness; there was always a sort of edge to her, especially when she squinted like this. Liam shrank away from her gaze and said, “Yes, well.” He began fumbling through his pockets. “Now, somewhere or other-” he muttered. “Aha.” He held up a torn-off corner from a Chinese menu. “Dr. Morrow’s address.”

Louise glanced at it briefly before putting her car in gear. Liam turned to look at his grandson. “Jonah!” he said. “Hey, there!”

“Hi.”

“What’ve you been up to?”

“Nothing.”

In Liam’s opinion, the child lacked verve. He was… what, three years old? No, four; four and a half, but he still sat in one of those booster seats, docile as a little blond puppet, with a teddy bear clutched to his chest. Liam considered starting on a whole new subject but it didn’t seem worth the effort, and eventually he faced forward again.

Louise said, “I was thinking you might need groceries brought, or a prescription filled. Nobody mentioned a doctor’s appointment.”

“This was sort of last-minute,” Liam told her.

“Is something wrong?”

“No, no.”

Louise made a wide U-turn and headed out the entrance-way ignoring several arrows pointing in the opposite direction. Liam gripped the dashboard but made no attempt to set her straight.

“Although I do, ah, seem to be having a little trouble with my memory,” he said finally.

He was hoping they might get into a discussion about it, but instead she said, “I guess it was pretty creepy staying in the apartment last night.”

“Not at all,” he said. “Kitty was a bit nervous, though. I had to give her the bedroom.”

This reminded him; he said, “I believe I owe you some money for the rug shampooer.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Louise said.

“No, I insist,” he said. “How much was it?”

“You can pay me back when you get a job,” she told him.

“A job. Well…”

“Have you filled out any applications yet?”

“I’m not sure I even want to,” he said. “It’s possible I’ll retire.”

“Retire! You’re sixty years old!”

“Exactly.”

“What would you do with yourself?”

“Why, there’s plenty I could do,” he said. “I could read, I could think… I’m not a man without resources, you know.”

“You’re going to sit all day and just think?”

“Or also… I have options! I have lots of possibilities. In fact,” he said spontaneously, “I might become a zayda.”

“A what?”

“It’s an adjunct position at a preschool out on Reisters-town Road,” he said. He was proud of himself for coming up with this; he hadn’t thought of it in weeks. “One of the parents at St. Dyfrig mentioned there was an opening. They use senior citizens as, so to speak, grandparent figures in the younger children’s classrooms. Zayda is the Jewish word for grandfather.”

“You aren’t Jewish, though.”

“No, but the preschool is.”

“And you aren’t a senior citizen, either. Besides, this sounds to me like a volunteer position. Are you sure it’s not volunteer?”

“No, no, I would be paid.”

“How much?”

“Oh…” he said. Then he said, “What is it with you girls? All of a sudden you seem to think you have a right to pry into my finances.”

“For good reason,” Louise told him. She slowed for a light. She said, “And don’t even get me started on the obvious irony, here.”

“What’s that?”

“Grandfather!” she said. “You, of all people!”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Do you even like small children?” she asked.

“Of course I like them!”

“Huh,” she said.

Liam turned once more to look at Jonah. Jonah sent back a milky blue gaze that gave no indication what he was thinking.

They entered the city limits and traveled through Liam’s old neighborhood-dignified, elderly buildings grouped around the Hopkins campus. Liam felt a pang of homesickness. Resolutely, he steered his thoughts toward the new place: its purity, its stripped-down angularity. Louise (a mind reader, like both of her sisters) said, “You could always move back.”

“Move back! Why would I want to do that?”

“I doubt your old apartment’s been rented yet, has it?”

“I’m very content where I am,” he said. “I have a refrigerator now that dispenses water through the door.”

Louise just flicked her turn signal on. Behind her, Jonah started singing his ABCs in a thin, flat, tuneless voice. Liam turned to flash what he hoped was an appreciative smile, but Jonah was looking out his side window and didn’t notice.

Imagine naming a child Jonah. That was surely Dougall’s doing-Louise’s husband. Dougall was some kind of fundamentalist Christian. He and Louise had dated all through high school and married right after graduation, over everyone’s objections, and then Dougall went into his family’s plumbing business while Louise, a straight-A student, abandoned any thought of college and gave birth in short order to Jonah. “Why Jonah?” Liam had asked. “What’s next: Judas? Herod? Cain?” Louise had looked puzzled. “I mean, Jonah’s was not a very happy story, was it?” Liam asked.

All Louise said was, “I do know someone named Cain, in fact.”

“Does he happen to have a brother?” Liam asked.

“Not that I ever heard of.”

“Inn-teresting,” Liam said.

“Hmm?”

Joining the Book of Life Tabernacle had done nothing for her sense of humor.

Dr. Morrow’s office turned out to be just below Fender Street, in an ornate old building squeezed between a dry cleaner’s and a pawnshop. Parking, of course, was impossible. Louise said, “You hop on out and I’ll find a space around the block.” Liam didn’t argue. According to his watch, it was 9:10. He wondered if Dr. Morrow would restrict him to a mere five minutes.

The lobby had a high, sculptured ceiling and a marble floor gridded with seams of brass. An actual person-an ancient black man in full uniform-operated the elevator, sitting on a wooden stool and sliding the accordion door shut with a white-gloved hand. Liam was amazed. When the only other passenger, a woman in a silk dress, said, “Three, please,” he felt he had been transported back to his childhood, to one of the old downtown department stores where his mother could spend hours fingering bolts of fabric. “Sir?” the operator asked him.

“Oh. Four, please,” Liam said.

Four was jarringly modern, carpeted wall to wall in businesslike gray and lined overhead with acoustical tiles. A disappointment, but also a relief. (You wouldn’t want your neurologist to be too old-fashioned.)

An entire column of doctors’ names marched down the plate-glass door of Suite 401, beneath larger lettering that read ST. PAUL NEUROLOGY ASSOCIATES. Even at this early hour, there were quite a few patients in the waiting room. They sat on molded plastic chairs under the bank of receptionists’ windows-a separate window for each doctor. Dr. Morrow’s receptionist had dyed black hair that made her look less cozy than she had sounded on the phone. The minute Liam gave her his name, she handed him a clipboard with a form to fill out. “I’ll need to make a copy of your insurance card, too, and your driver’s license,” she said. Liam had been sincere when he told Dr. Morrow he intended to pay, but somehow he still felt taken aback by the woman’s crass commercialism.

The other patients were in terrible shape. Good Lord, neurology was a distressing specialty! One man shook so violently that his cane kept falling to the floor. A woman held an oversized child who seemed boneless. Another woman kept wiping her blank-faced husband’s mouth with a tissue. Oh, Liam should not be here. He had no business frittering away the doctor’s time on such a trivial complaint. But even so, he continued printing out his new address in large, distinct block letters.

Louise and Jonah came in and settled across from him, although there were seats free on either side of him. Nobody would have guessed they had anything to do with him. They didn’t look his way, and Louise immediately started searching through the magazines on the table to her left. Eventually she came up with a children’s magazine. “Look!” she told Jonah. “Baby rabbits! You love baby rabbits!” Jonah clutched his teddy bear tightly and followed her pointing finger.

To be honest, Liam thought, the Pennywells were a rather homely family. (Himself included.) Louise’s hair was too short and her face too angular. She had on boxy red pedal pushers, not a flattering style for anyone, and flip-flops that showed her long white bony feet. Jonah was breathing through his mouth and he wore a slack, stunned expression as he gazed down at the page.

In a low, clear voice just inches from Liam’s right ear, a woman said, “Verity.”

Liam started and turned.

This was someone young and plump and ringleted, wearing a voluminous Indian-print skirt and cloddish, handmade-looking sandals. One hand was linked through the arm of an old man in a suit.

Liam said, “What?”

But she had already passed him by. She and the old man-her father?-were approaching Dr. Morrow’s receptionist. When they reached the window, she dropped the old man’s arm and stepped back. The old man told the receptionist, “Why, Verity! Good morning! Don’t you look gorgeous today!”

The receptionist said, “Thank you, Mr. Cope,” and she lifted a hand to her dyed hair. “Just have a seat and Dr. Morrow will see you shortly.”

When the couple turned from the window, Liam lowered his eyes so they wouldn’t know he’d been watching them. They took the two chairs next to Jonah. Louise was saying, “Just then, a big, big lion came out from behind the tree,” and neither she nor Jonah glanced in their direction.

“Mr. Pennywell?” a nurse called from the far end of the room.

Liam rose and went over to where she stood waiting. “How are you today?” she asked him.

“Fine, thanks,” he said. “Or, I mean, sort of fine…” but she had already turned to lead him down a corridor.

At the end of the corridor, in a tiny office, Dr. Morrow sat writing something behind an enormous desk. Liam would not have known him. The man had aged past recognition-his red hair a tarnished pink now, and his many freckles faded into wide beige splotches across his face. He wore a sports jacket rather than a white coat, and the only sign of his profession was the plaster model of a brain on the bookcase behind him. “Ah,” he said, setting down his pen. “Mr. Pennywell,” and he half rose in a creaky, stiff way to shake hands.

“It’s good of you to make time for me,” Liam said.

“No trouble at all; no trouble at all. Yes, you do have a bit of a nick there.”

Liam turned the wounded side of his head toward the doctor, in case he might like to examine it more closely, but Dr. Morrow sank back onto his chair and laced his fingers across his shirtfront. “Let’s see: how long has it been?” he asked Liam. “Nineteen eighty, eighty-one…”

“Eighty-two,” Liam told him. He was able to say for sure because it had been his last year at the Fremont School.

“Twenty-some years! Twenty-four; good God. And you’re still teaching?”

“Oh, yes,” Liam said. (No sense getting sidetracked by any long involved explanations.)

“Still hoping to stuff a little history into those rascally Fremont boys,” Dr. Morrow said, chuckling in his new elderly way.

“Well, ah, actually it’s St. Dyfrig boys now,” Liam admitted.

“Oh?” Dr. Morrow frowned.

“And, um, fifth grade.”

“Fifth grade!”

“But anyway,” Liam said hastily. “Tell me how Buddy’s doing.”

“Well, these days we call him Haddon, of course.”

“Why, would you do that?”

“Well, Haddon is his name.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, Haddon’s all grown up now-turned forty back in April, would you believe it? Has his own trucking company. Statewide. Very successful, considering.”

“I’m delighted to hear it.”

“You were awfully kind to him,” Dr. Morrow said, and all at once his voice sounded different-not so bluff and pompous. “I haven’t forgotten the patience you showed.”

“Oh, well,” Liam said, shifting in his seat.

“Yours was about the only course he managed to get fired up about, as I recall. Seneca! Wasn’t that who he wrote his paper on? Yes, we used to hear quite a lot about Seneca at the dinner table. Seneca’s suicide! Big news, as if it happened yesterday.”

Liam gave a little laugh that came out sounding oddly like Dr. Morrow’s chuckle.

“I’ll have to tell him I saw you,” Dr. Morrow said. “Haddon will get a kick out of that. But enough chitchat; let’s hear about your injury.”

“Oh yes,” Liam said, as if that had not been uppermost on his mind the whole time. “Well, evidently I was struck on the head and knocked unconscious.”

“Is that so! By someone you knew?”

“Why no,” Liam said.

“Lord, Lord, what’s the world coming to?” Dr. Morrow asked. “Have they caught the assailant?”

“Uh, not that I’ve heard,” Liam said.

The word assailant momentarily derailed him. It was one of those words you saw only in print, like apparel. Or slain. Or… what was that other word he’d noticed?

“And yet they claim they’re working to make this city safer,” Dr. Morrow said.

“Actually, I live in the county,” Liam told him.

“Oh, really.”

Exclaimed. That was another word you saw only in print.

“But the point is,” Liam said, “I was hit and knocked unconscious, and I don’t remember anything more till I woke up in a hospital bed.”

“They did a CT scan, I assume.”

“That’s what I’m told.”

“And they found no sign of intracranial bleeding.”

“No, but…”

Barbara used to say that he didn’t phrase things strongly enough when he visited his doctor. She’d ask, “Did you tell him about your back? Did you tell him you were in agony?” and Liam would say, “Well, I mentioned I was experiencing some discomfort.” Barbara would roll her eyes. So now he leaned forward in his chair. “I have a very, very serious concern,” he said. “I really need to talk about this. I feel I’m going crazy.”

“Crazy! You told me memory loss.”

“I’m going crazy over my memory loss.”

“What is it you don’t remember, exactly?”

“Anything whatsoever involving the attack,” Liam said. “All I know is, I went to bed, I slid under my covers, I looked out the window… and pouf! There I am in a hospital room. A whole chunk of time has vanished. Someone broke into my apartment and I must have woken up, because they say I got this hand injury fighting off the… assailant. Then a neighbor called 911, and the police came and the ambulance, but every bit of that is absent from my mind.”

“You do remember other things, though,” Dr. Morrow said. “The time before you went to bed. The time after you woke in the hospital.”

“Yes, all of that. Just not the attack.”

“Nor will you ever, I venture to say. People always hope for some soap-opera moment where everything comes back to them. But the memories surrounding a head trauma are gone forever, in most cases. As a matter of fact, you’re fairly unusual in recalling as much as you do. Some victims forget days and days leading up to the event, and they have only spotty recollections of the days afterward. Consider yourself fortunate.”

“Fortunate,” Liam said, with a twist of his mouth.

“And why would you even want to remember such an experience?”

“You don’t understand,” Liam said.

He knew he had used up his time. A new tension had crept into the room’s atmosphere; the doctor’s posture had grown more erect. But this was important. Liam gripped his knees. “I feel I’ve lost something,” he said. “A part of my life has been stolen from me. I don’t care if it was unpleasant; I need to know what it was. I want it back. I’d give anything to get it back! I wish I had someone like the… rememberer out in your waiting room.”

Dr. Morrow said, “The what?”

“The young woman who’s bringing in her, I don’t know, her father, I guess, to see you. He seems to need reminding of names and such and she’s right there at his elbow, feeding him clues.”

“Ah, yes,” Dr. Morrow said, and his expression cleared. “Yes, couldn’t we all use a rememberer, as you call her, after a certain age. And wouldn’t we all like to have Mr. Cope’s money to pay her with.”

“He pays her?”

“She’s a hired assistant, I believe,” the doctor said. But then he must have worried that he had committed an indiscretion, because he rose abruptly and came around to the front of his desk. “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful, Mr. Pennywell. There’s really nothing I can do. But I think you’ll find that over time, this issue will seem less important. Face it: we forget things every day of our lives. You’re missing lots of chunks! But you don’t dwell on those, now, do you?”

Liam rose too, but he couldn’t give up so easily. He said, “You don’t think I could maybe, for instance, get hypnotized or some such?”

“I wouldn’t advise it,” the doctor said.

“Or how about drugs? Some sort of pill, or truth serum?”

Dr. Morrow had a firm clasp on Liam’s upper arm now. He was guiding him toward the door. “Trust me: this whole concern will fade away in no time,” he said, and his voice had taken on the soothing tone of someone dealing with a minor pest. “See Melanie at the cashier’s window on your way out, will you?”

Liam allowed himself to be ejected. He mumbled something or other, something about thank you, appreciate your time, say hello to Buddy, or Haddon… Then he went to the cashier’s window and wrote a check for more than he normally spent on a month’s groceries.

In the waiting room, Louise was nodding and tsk-tsking as she listened to a sallow girl in overalls-a new arrival who had taken Liam’s old seat. “I’m just watering the perennials,” the girl was saying. “I work at the Happy Trowel Nursery, out on York Road; know where that is? And all at once I start hearing this song playing way too fast. It doesn’t sound real, though. It sounds like… tin. All tinny and high-speed. So I say to this guy Earl, who’s hauling in the petunias, I say, ‘Do you hear Pavement singing?’ Earl says, ‘Come again?’ I say, ‘It seems to me I hear Pavement singing “Spit on a Stranger.” ’ Earl looks at me like I’m nuts. Well, especially since it turns out he had no i-dea Pavement was a musical group. He figured I meant York Road was singing.”

“Where has he been all this time?” Louise asked. “Everyone knows who Pavement is.”

“But he’d have thought I was nuts anyhow, because there wasn’t no music of any kind playing. It was all in my brain. This big old tangled clump of blood vessels in my brain.”

Liam jingled the coins in his pocket, but Louise didn’t look up. “That must feel so weird,” she said.

“Dr. Meecham thinks they can, like, zap it with a beam of something.”

“Well, you know I’m going to be praying for you.”

Liam said, “I’m ready to go, Louise.”

“Right; okay. This is my father,” Louise told the girl. “He got hit on the head by a burglar.”

“He didn’t!”

Louise told Liam, “Tiffany here has a tangled clump of-”

“Yes, I heard,” Liam said.

But he wasn’t looking at the girl; he was looking at the old man sitting next to Jonah, the one with the hired rememberer. You couldn’t tell, at the moment, that anything was wrong with him. He was reading a New Yorker, turning the pages thoughtfully and studying the cartoons. His assistant was gazing down at her lap. She seemed out of place next to the old man, with his well-cut suit and starched collar. Her face was round and shiny, her horn-rimmed spectacles smudged with fingerprints, her clothes hopelessly dowdy. Liam wondered how he could ever have taken her for the old man’s daughter.

Well, but consider his own daughter, rising now to grasp both of the overalled girl’s hands. “Just keep in your heart the Gospel of Mark,” she was saying. “Thy faith hath made thee whole. Go in peace and be whole of thy plague.”

“I hear you, sister,” the girl told her.

Liam said, “Could we please leave now?”

“Sure, Dad. Come along, Jonah.”

They passed between the two facing rows of patients, all of whom (Liam was convinced) were giving off waves of avid curiosity, although nobody looked up.

“Must you?” Liam asked Louise the minute they reached the hall.

Louise said, “Hmm?” and pressed the call button for the elevator.

“Do you have to air your religion everywhere you go?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. She turned to Jonah. “You were such a good boy, Jonah! Maybe we can get you an ice cream on the way home.”

“Mint chocolate chip?” Jonah said.

“We could get mint chocolate chip. What did the doctor have to say?” she asked Liam.

But he refused to be diverted. He said, “Suppose that girl happened to be an atheist? Or a Buddhist?”

The elevator door clanked open and Louise stepped smartly inside, one arm around Jonah’s shoulders. She told the operator, “No way am I going to apologize for my beliefs.”

The operator blinked. The other two passengers-an older couple-looked equally surprised.

“Let your light so shine before men,” Louise said, “that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

“Amen,” the operator said.

“Matthew five, sixteen.”

Liam faced front and stared fixedly at the brass dial above the door as they rode down.

As soon as they were out of the elevator, Louise said, “I don’t expect much of you, Dad. I’ve learned not to. But I do request that you refrain from denigrating my religion.”

“I’m not denigrating your-”

“You’re dismissive and sarcastic and contemptuous,” Louise said. (Anger seemed to broaden her vocabulary-a trait that Liam had noticed in her mother as well.) “You seize every opportunity to point out how wrongheaded true Christians are. When I am trying to raise a child, here! How can I expect him to lead any kind of moral life with you as an example?”

“Oh, for God’s sake; I mean, for heaven’s sake,” Liam said, trotting after her through the revolving door. Out on the sidewalk, the sudden sunlight jarred his head. “I lead a perfectly moral life!”

Louise sniffed and drew Jonah closer, as if she felt he needed protecting.

She didn’t speak again until they reached the car. Even then, she was all motherly fuss and bustle. “Climb into your seat, Jonah; don’t dawdle. Here, let me straighten that strap.”

Liam settled himself in front with a sigh. He was forcing himself to say no more, although it always annoyed him when people implied you had to have a religion in order to hold to any standards of behavior.

And then out of nowhere, as Louise was flinging herself into her seat with an indignant little bounce, it came to him who that old man in the waiting room was. Why, of course: Mr. Cope. Ishmael Cope, of Cope Development-the billionaire whose office buildings and luxury condominiums and oversized shopping malls despoiled the entire area. His picture popped up in the paper almost weekly, his heron-like figure bending forward to shake hands with some accomplice over his latest environmentally ruinous project.

Billionaires could buy anything, evidently, including better memories. Liam saw Mr. Cope’s assistant once again in his mind-her owlish glasses and earnest, slightly sweaty face. What a notion: paying someone else to experience your life for you! Because that was what she’d been hired for, really.

A new ache shot through his left temple as Louise gunned the engine, and he closed his eyes and rested his head against the side window.