Galore - Michael Crummey [157]
A doctor flashed by the door and backed up the hall to look in. —You know this man?
The young nurse stood up. —I was at the field hospital in Rouen. Does he still not remember who he is?
—Hopeless case, I’m afraid. Have you seen any of that crazy writing he does?
—A little, she said uncertainly, turning to look at the patient.
—We’re trying to figure out how to send him home.
The girl from Belleoram imagined it must be a ring of Dante’s Hell to remember not the barest scrap of the place you came from. As if all you loved, the world itself, had forgotten you existed. She turned back to the doctor. —You know I’m a nurse, she said.
He was booked on the steamer departing at the end of the month. The days were frigid and inclement but the girl wheeled him around the deck morning and afternoon. —Lots of fresh air for you, she said. —Doctor’s orders. He seemed impervious to the cold and wet, preferring to sit outside in the foulest weather, and he spent most of April month near the stern wearing a hospital johnny under an overcoat. She sat with him as long as she could stand the chill, talking about her family and her trip to New York on the way overseas and a man at home with such a sore throat the wine ran out his nose when he took Holy Communion. Something in it might stick, she thought, some meaningless detail could tip him into his life. She threw random questions at him, as if she might trick him into remembering himself. Do you have brothers or sisters? Do you know the words to “Whispering Hope”? Have you ever been to Port Union? Are you Catholic or Protestant?
The day before they were scheduled to reach St. John’s she said, Is there a girl waiting for you at home? He turned to her with a tortured look that she misread completely. —You remember her? she said. —You know her name?
But he only stared, as if pleading with her to stop.
He had no idea if there was a girl waiting at home and she could almost feel that absence yawing beneath him, the shadows flickering across blank space, nameless and unidentifiable. —I’ll tell you what I think, she said. —Something will come to you. You’ll see a face or a boat or hear someone’s voice and that one thing will bring it all back to you.
He stared blankly out at the water and she patted his hand. —I’m freezing, she said. She stood up and wrapped her arms tight about herself. —Are you all right here awhile?
He nodded.
—Tomorrow’s the Feast of St. Mark, she said. —Mean anything to you?
He smiled at her useless little ploy, shaking his white head. His life like something important he’d meant to tell someone and he couldn’t recall now what he intended to say or to whom. He watched her skitter along the deck toward steerage and disappear inside, relieved to be left to himself. The nurse’s endless questions served only to add depth and definition to what it was he lacked. Alone he could turn his back on the absence, look at the world as if there was nothing to it but surface, the endless present moment. A trick of shadow and light.
There wasn’t another soul out in the drizzle and bitter wind when he spotted the whale steaming clear of the ship’s wake, so close he could see the markings under its flukes, the white of them glowing a pale apple-green through seawater. The massive fan of the tail tipped high and disappeared as the whale sounded and he leaned forward in his wheelchair, expectant, as if he’d been told the humpback would breach, rising nose first and almost clear of the water, kicking up a wreath of foam as it fell back into the sea. The whale came full into the open air a second time and a third, it almost seemed to be calling his attention. And something in that detail turned like a key in a lock, a story spiraling out of the ocean’s endless green and black to claim him.
The face of a girl waiting at home flashed below the surface and he pushed himself onto the deck, dragging his dead legs to the rail. He shed his clothes as he went, returning to himself naked as a fish. Even as he fell he pictured her watching from across the room the next time he opened