Noah’s Compass: A Novel Read online

  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.”

  “Tomorrow!” Xanthe said. “Are you serious? Look at him! He’s weak as a kitten! He looks like death warmed over!”

  “Oh, that will change,” the doctor said offhandedly. He told Liam, “Nothing to eat today but liquids, I’m afraid, in case we have to take you very suddenly to the OR.” Then he nodded in Xanthe’s direction and left the room.

  “Typical,” Xanthe muttered when he’d gone. “First he says they’re booting you out and then in the same breath he says you may need emergency brain surgery.”

  She spun away with a flounce of her skirt. Liam feared for a moment that she was leaving too, but she was only going over to the corner for a green vinyl chair. She dragged it closer to his bed and plunked herself down in it. “I hope you’re satisfied,” she told Liam.

  “Well, not completely,” he said drily.

  “I knew you shouldn’t have moved to that place. Didn’t I tell you when you signed the lease? A sixty-year-old man in a rinky-dink starter apartment directly across from a shopping mall! And then to leave your door wide open! What did you expect?”

  He hadn’t left his door wide open. And he hadn’t meant to leave it unlocked. He hadn’t known it was unlocked. But it was his policy not to argue. (An infuriating policy, his daughters always claimed.) Arguing got you nowhere. He smoothed down his bedclothes with his good hand, accidentally tugging the tube that ran from his arm to the IV pole.

  “A sixty-year-old man,” Xanthe said, “who can still move all his belongings in the very smallest size U-Haul.”

  “Next smallest,” he murmured.

  “Whose so-called car is a Geo Prizm. A used Geo Prizm. And who, when he gets hit on the head, nobody knows where his people are.”

  “How did they know?” he asked. It only now occurred to him to wonder. “Who calle
d you?”

  “The police called. They’ll be in to question you later, they said. They got my number from your address book; I was the only entry with the same last name as yours. I had to hear it over the phone! At two o’clock in the morning! If you don’t think that’s an experience …”

  He was accustomed to Xanthe’s rants. They were sort of a hobby of hers. Funny: she was so completely different from her mother, his first wife—a waifish, fragile musician with a veil of transparent hair. Millie had taken too many pills when Xanthe was not yet two. It was his second wife who’d ended up raising Xanthe, and his second wife whom she resembled—brown haired and sturdy and normal-looking, pleasantly unexceptional-looking. He wondered sometimes if genetic traits could be altered by osmosis.

  “And here’s the worst of it,” Xanthe was saying. “You invite a known drug addict into your home and give him total access.”

  “Excuse me?” he said. He was startled. Had there been some whole other episode he had lost to his amnesia?

  “Damian O’Donovan. What were you thinking?”

  “Damian … Kitty’s Damian? Kitty’s boyfriend?”

  “Kitty’s drug-addict, slacker boyfriend whom none of us trust for an instant. Mom won’t even let them be alone in the house together.”

  “Well, of course she won’t,” Liam said. “They’re seventeen years old. But Damian’s not a drug addict.”

  “Dad. How can these things slip your mind? He was suspended last year for smoking pot backstage in the school auditorium.”

  “That doesn’t make him an addict.”

  “He was suspended for a week! But you: you’re such a patsy. You choose to forget all about it. You say, ‘Oh, here, Damian, let me show you where I live. Let me point out my flimsy patio door that I plan to leave unlocked.’ In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he unlocked that door himself while he was there, just so he could get back in and mug you.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Liam said. “He’s a perfectly harmless kid. A little … vacant, maybe, but he would never—”

  “I don’t want to say you had it coming,” Xanthe said, “but mark my words, Dad: ‘Those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it.’ Harry Truman.”

  “The past,” Liam said reflexively.

  “What?”

  “‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ And it’s George Santayana.”

  Xanthe gazed at him stonily, her eyes the same opaque dark brown as her stepmother’s. “I’m going to find someplace where my cell phone works and let the others know how you’re doing,” she said.

  Even though she could be a bit wearing, he was sorry to see her leave.

  His head was pounding so hard that it made a sound inside his ears like approaching footsteps. His injured palm was stinging, and something seemed to be wrong with his neck. A twisty pain ran down the left side.

  He had fought with someone? Physically struggled?

  Let’s try this again: he had gone to bed in his new bedroom. He had felt grateful for his firm mattress, his resilient pillow, his tightly tucked top sheet. He had looked out the window and seen the stars sprinkled above the pine boughs.

  Then what? Then what? Then what?

  His lost memory was like a physical object just beyond his grasp. He could feel the strain in his head. It made the throbbing even worse.

  Okay, just let it go. It would come to him in good time.

  He closed his eyes and slid toward sleep, almost all the way but not quite. Part of him was listening for Xanthe. What was she telling her sisters? It would be nice if she were saying, “Such a scare; we almost lost him. I’ve been out of my mind with worry.” Although more likely it was “Can you believe what he’s done this time?”

  But it wasn’t his fault! he wanted to say. For once, he wasn’t to blame!

  He knew his daughters thought he was hopeless. They said he didn’t pay attention. They claimed he was obtuse. They rolled their eyes at each other when he made the most innocent remark. They called him Mr. Magoo.

  At St. Dyfrig once, invited to view a poem on the English department’s computer, he had clicked on How to listen and been disappointed to find mere technical instructions for playing the audio version. What he had been hoping for was advice on how to listen to poetry—and, by extension, how to listen, really listen, to what was being said all around him. It seemed he lacked some basic skill for that.

  He was hopeless. His daughters were right.

  He reached for sleep as if it were a blanket that he could hide underneath, and finally he managed to catch hold of it.

  When he opened his eyes, a policeman was standing at his bedside—a muscular young man in full uniform. “Mr. Pennywell?” he was saying. He already had his ID card in hand, not that one was needed. Nobody would mistake him for anything but a cop. His white shirt was so crisp that it hurt to look at it, and the weight of his gun and his radio and his massive black leather belt would have sunk him like a stone if he had fallen into any water. “Like to ask a few questions,” he said.

  Liam struggled to sit up, and something like a brick slammed into his left temple. He groaned and eased himself back against his pillow.

  The policeman, oblivious, was tucking away his ID. (If he had given his name, he must have done so before Liam woke up.) He took a small notebook from his breast pocket, along with a ballpoint pen, and said, “I understand you left your back door unlocked.”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  “Pardon?”

  “That’s what they tell me, I said!”

  He had thought he was speaking quite loudly, but it was hard to know for sure inside all that gauze.

  “And when did you retire?” the man asked, writing something down.

  “I’m not exactly calling it retirement yet.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m not exactly calling it retirement yet! I’ll have to see how my money holds out.”

  “When did you go to bed, Mr. Pennywell. On the night of the incident.”

  “Oh.” Liam reflected for a moment. “Wasn’t that last night?”

  The policeman consulted his notebook. “Last night, yes,” he said. “Saturday, June tenth.”

  “You called it ‘the night of the incident.’”

  “Right,” the man said, looking puzzled.

  “It was your wording, you see, that caused me to wonder.”

  “Caused you to wonder what, Mr. Pennywell?”

  “I meant …”

  Liam gave up. “I don’t know when I went to bed,” he said. “Early, though.”

  “Early. Say eight?”

  “Eight!” Liam was scandalized.

  The policeman made another notation. “Eight o’clock. And how soon after that would you guess you fell asleep?” he asked.

  “I would never go to bed at eight!”

  “You just said—”

  “I said ‘early,’ but I didn’t mean that early.”

  “Well, when, then?”

  “Nine, maybe,” Liam told him. “Or, I don’t know. What: you want me to make something up? I don’t know what time! I’m completely at a loss here, don’t you see? I don’t remember a thing!”

  The policeman crossed out his last notation. He closed his notebook in an ostentatiously patient and deliberate way and slid it into his pocket. “Tell you what,” he said. “We’ll check with you in a few days. Oftentimes a thing like this comes back to folks by and by.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Liam said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Let’s hope it comes back!”

  The policeman made a sort of gesture, half wave and half salute, and left.

  Let’s hope so, dear Lord in heaven. Even if it were some violent, upsetting scene (well, of course it would be violent and upsetting), he needed to retrieve it.

  He thought of those slapstick comedies where a character is beaned and conks out and forgets his own name; then he’s somehow beaned again and mag
ically he remembers.

  Although even the thought of another blow to his head caused Liam to wince.

  Too late, he realized that he should have asked the policeman some questions of his own. Had any of his belongings been stolen? Damaged? What state was his apartment in? Maybe Xanthe would know. He turned cautiously onto his side so that he was facing the doorway, watching for her return. Where was the girl? And how about her sisters? Weren’t they going to visit? He seemed to be all alone, here.

  But the next steps he heard were the squeegee soles of a tall skinny aide with a tray. “Supper,” she told him.

  “What time is it?” he asked. (The sky outside his window was still bright.)

  She threw a glance at a giant wall clock that he somehow hadn’t noticed before. Five twenty-five, she did not bother saying. She set his tray on a wheeled table and rolled it toward him. Jell-O, a steel pot dangling a tea-bag tab, and a plastic cup of apple juice. She left without another word. Inch by inch he hauled himself up and reached for the juice. It was sealed with a tight foil lid that turned out to be beyond him. Pulling it completely off took more strength than he could muster just now, and the harder he tried the more mess he made, because he had to squeeze the cup with his bandaged hand and the plastic kept squashing inward and spilling. Finally he lay back, exhausted. He wasn’t hungry, anyhow.

  The distressing thing about losing a memory, he thought, was that it felt like losing control. Something had happened, something significant, and he couldn’t say how he’d comported himself. He didn’t know if he had been calm, or terrified, or angry. He didn’t know if he’d acted cowardly or heroic.

  And here he’d always taken such pride in his total recall! He could quote entire passages from the Stoics—in the original Greek, if need be. Although remembering a personal event, he supposed, was somewhat different. He had never been the type who dwelt on bygones. He believed in moving on. (He used to tell his daughters, any time they threw one of those tiresome blame-the-parents fits, that people who are true adults do not keep rehashing their childhoods.) Still, this was the first time he had experienced an actual gap. A hole, it felt like. A hole in his mind, full of empty blue rushing air.