Noah’s Compass: A Novel Page 4

  “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.

  “We rented one of those carpet shampooers from the supermarket,” Barbara said. “But the carpet’s not completely dry yet; you’ll have to walk on the paper a while. And your sheets and blanket were, well, I’m sorry; we put them in the trash. I didn’t know where you kept your extras.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I see.”

  He stood there in a daze, looking slowly from bed to window to closet. Everything seemed benign and ordinary and somehow not quite his own. But maybe that was because it wasn’t quite his own; he had so recently moved in.

  “Was anything taken?” he asked.

  “We don’t think so, but you’re the only one who’ll be able to say for sure. The police are going to come back and interview you later. We did see that the drawer was yanked out in that table between the armchairs, and there wasn’t anything in it but we didn’t know if that meant something was missing or you just hadn’t filled it yet.”

  “No, it was empty,” he said.

  He walked into the room, his shoes scuffing across the brown paper, and sat on the edge of the bed and continued gazing around him. Barbara watched from the doorway. “Are you all right?” she asked him.

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Really the police made more mess than the burglar, I think. And the ambulance people.”

  “Well, it was nice of you to clean up,” he said. His lips moved woodenly, as if they too were not quite his own.

  “Louise was the one who rented the carpet shampooer; Louise and Dougall. You might want to offer to pay them back; you know they’re not rolling in money.”

  “Yes, certainly,” Liam said.

  “Are you sure you’re all right, Liam?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’d be happy to get you something before I go.”

  She was going?

  “A cup of coffee, or tea,” she said. “Or maybe a bowl of soup.”

  “No, thanks,” he said. The thought of food made him want to gag.

  “Okay, then. I’ll put your insurance card here on the bureau. Don’t forget to take your pills.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  She hesitated. Then she said, “Well, so, Kitty should be here around six. And meanwhile you have my number in case anything goes wrong.”

  “Thank you, Barbara.”

  She left.

  He sat motionless until he heard the front door shut, and then he lifted his feet onto the bed and lay back. His pillowcase smelled of some unfamiliar detergent. And the pillow inside was unfamiliar as well—filled with feathers or goose down, something that sank in and stayed there.

  He knew that he should be thankful to Barbara for even this much. It wasn’t as if she were responsible for him any longer.

  But hadn’t she promised to check the lock on the patio door?

  Outside his window he saw pine boughs, almost black even in daylight, and a sky as blue as bottle glass. No stars, of course. Nothing connected with that night.

  He must get up. He had things to do. He would fix himself a nice lunch and force himself to eat it. He would find out which box his linens were in and set them out on the daybed for Kitty. Maybe finish his unpacking, too. Break down the last of the cartons for the recycling bin.

  But he went on lying there, looking not at the window now but at the bedroom door, and summoning up the image of a hulking figure emerging from darkness. Or a small, slight, sneaky figure. Or maybe two figures; why only one?

  Nothing came. His mind was a blank. He had heard that expression a thousand times, mind was a blank, but only now did he understand that a mind really could be as blank and white and textureless as a sheet of unused paper.

  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, aft
er 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.”