Noah’s Compass: A Novel Page 6

  “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.

  4

  Over the next few days, Liam often found his thoughts returning to the hired rememberer. It wasn’t that he wanted to hire her for himself, exactly. What good would that have done
? He had already lived through the one event he needed reminding of. No, it was just the concept that intrigued him. He wondered how it worked. He wondered if it worked.

  On Wednesday evening he asked Kitty if he could use her computer. She was using it herself at the time, sitting on the edge of his bed with the computer resting on her knees, and she shielded the screen in a paranoid way when he walked into the room. “I’m not looking!” he told her. “I just wanted to know if I might do a little research once you’re finished.”

  “Research … on my computer?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, sure, I guess so,” she said. But she looked dubious. His aversion to computers was common knowledge. There’d been numerous complaints from St. Dyfrig parents when they couldn’t reach him by e-mail.

  He retreated to the kitchen, where he was warming a pizza for his supper. (Kitty would be going out with Damian, she’d said.) A few minutes later, he heard her call, “It’s all yours.” When he walked into the bedroom, she was stepping into a pair of rhinestone-trimmed flip-flops. “Do you know how to log off when you’re done?” she asked him. “Do you know how to work this, even?”

  “Certainly I know how!”

  Her computer sat on the nightstand, attached to the phone line there. He assumed this meant that no one could call in, which didn’t trouble him as much as it might have. He settled on the edge of the bed and rubbed his hands together. Then he looked up at Kitty. “Did you want something?” he asked.

  “No, no,” she said, and she gave an airy wave. “I’m off,” she told him.

  “Okay.”

  She didn’t mention when she’d be back. Was she supposed to have a curfew?

  As of noon, they’d passed the forty-eight-hour mark since his release from the hospital, but she had said nothing about going home. Well, none of his affair.

  He waited until she had left the room, and then he typed Ishmael Cope in the Search window. It was true that he knew how to work a computer—he’d taken a mandatory teachers’ training course—but the smaller keyboard gave him some difficulty and he had to hit Delete several times.

  There were 4,300-some references to Ishmael Cope. Liam knew from experience that many of these would be false leads—whole paragraphs in which Ishmael and cope coincidentally appeared at widely separated points, or even (amazingly enough) other Ishmael Copes in other cities—but still, he was impressed.

  Ishmael Cope was buying up farmland in Howard County. Ishmael Cope and his wife had attended a gala for juvenile diabetes. Ishmael Cope’s plan to build a strip mall on the Eastern Shore was meeting with stiff opposition. Pass on, pass on. Aha: a newspaper profile, dating from just this past April. Mr. Cope had been born on Eutaw Street in 1930, which would make him … seventy-six. Younger than Liam’s father, although Liam had taken him for much older. He had only a high school diploma; he’d started his working life assisting in his parents’ bakery. His first million had come from the invention of an “edible staple” to fasten filled pastries and crepes. (Liam allowed himself a brief grin.) The rest of his career was fairly run-of-the-mill, though: the million parlayed into two million, four million, then a billion as he swept across his own personal Monopoly board. Married, divorced, married again; two sons in the business with him …

  Nothing about any memory problems.

  The next entry dealt with a question of sewage disposal for a golf community that Mr. Cope was proposing near the Pennsylvania border. In the next, he was merely a name on a list of donors to Gilman School. Liam signed off and closed the computer. He might have known he would come up empty. The whole point of hiring a rememberer, after all, was to conceal the fact that one was needed.

  And anyhow, what had he hoped to accomplish even if he had found what he was looking for?

  On Thursday morning he had another visit from the police. There were two of them, this time—a man and a woman. The woman did all of the questioning. She wanted to know if Liam recalled any recent conversations in which he had publicly mentioned some valuable possession. Liam said, “Absolutely not, since I have no valuable possessions.”

  She said, “Well, maybe not by your standards, but … a high-definition TV, say? For lots of folks, that’s a hot property.”

  “I don’t even have a low-definition TV,” Liam told her.

  She looked annoyed. She was an attractive young woman, petite and towheaded, but a little W of wrinkles between her eyebrows marred the overall impression. She said, “We’re just trying to figure out why your place would have been targeted, and on the very first night you lived here.”

  “Well, it wasn’t Damian, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Damian?”

  He regretted bringing the name to her attention. He said, “It wasn’t the guys who moved me in.”

  “No. Those were friends, as I understand.”

  “Right.”

  “How about the man’s voice? Did you hear him speak?”

  He felt a sudden sense of despair. He said, “Didn’t they tell you I don’t remember? I don’t remember a thing!”

  “Just checking.”

  “What: do you imagine you’ll trip me up?”

  “No need to get excited, sir.”

  He forced himself to take a deep breath. No need at all; she was right, but somehow he felt accused. To this woman he looked inattentive, sloppy, lax. He decided to go on the offensive. “So what will you do next?” he asked her.

  “Well, we have the case in our records now.”

  “Is that it?”

  She stared him down.

  “How about fingerprints? Did they find any fingerprints?” he asked.

  “Oh, well, fingerprints. Fingerprints are overrated,” she said.

  Then she told him to take care (an expression he hated; take care of what?), and she and her partner walked out.

  Back during Liam’s first marriage, when all their friends were having babies, he and Millie knew a woman who experienced some terrible complication during labor and lay in a coma for several weeks afterward. Gradually she returned to consciousness, but for a long time she had no recollection of the whole preceding year. She didn’t even remember being pregnant. Here was this infant boy, very sweet and all that but what did he have to do with her? Then one day, a neighbor climbed her porch steps and trilled out, “Yoo-hoo!” Evidently that was the neighbor’s trademark greeting, uttered in a high fluty voice with a Southern roundness to the vowels. The woman rose slowly from her chair. Her eyes widened; her lips parted. As she described it later, it was as if the neighbor’s “Yoo-hoo” had provided a string for her to grab hold of, and when she tugged it, other memories came trailing in besides—not just the previous “Yoo-hoos,” but how this neighbor brought homemade pies to people at the drop of a hat, and how she always labeled her pie tins with her name on a strip of masking tape, and how in fact she’d contributed a pie to the final, celebratory meeting of the childbirth class that they had both attended. Childbirth! And bit by bit, over the course of the next few days, more and more came back, until the woman remembered everything.

  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Liam could find such a string?

  “Good afternoon, Dr. Morrow’s office,” the voice on the telephone said.

  Liam said, “Ah, hello. Verity? I’m calling on behalf of Ishmael Cope. Mr. Cope has mislaid his appointment card, and he asked me to find out when he’s due in next.”

  “Cope,” the receptionist said. There was a series of clicking sounds. “Cope. Cope. Ishmael Cope. He’s not due in.”

  “He’s not?”

  “Did he say he was?”

  “Well, ah … yes, he seemed to believe so.”

  “But he was just here,” the receptionist said.

  “Was he? Oh, his mistake, then. Never mind.”

  “Ordinarily he waits till closer to the actual time to make the next appointment, since we see him just every three months is all, but if you’d prefer to set something up for him—”

&
nbsp; “I’ll find out and call you back. Thanks.”

  Liam replaced the receiver.

  That evening his sister arrived bearing a cast-iron pot. “Stew,” she announced, and she swept past him into the apartment and stopped short and looked around. “Goodness,” she said. Liam didn’t know why. All his boxes were unpacked now and he thought the place was looking fairly decent. But: “You know,” she said, “just because you live alone doesn’t mean you have to live miserably.”

  “I’m not living miserably!”

  She turned and skinned him with a glance. “And don’t think I can’t see what you’re up to,” she said. “You’re trying to come out even with your clothes.”

  “Come out …?”

  “You suppose if you play your cards right, you won’t have to buy more clothes before you die.”

  “I don’t suppose any such thing,” Liam said. Although it was true that the idea had crossed his mind once or twice, just as a theoretical possibility. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” he asked her.

  “Your pants are losing a belt loop and that shirt is so old it’s transparent.”

  He had hoped nobody would notice.

  Julia herself was, as always, impeccably put together. She wore what she must have worn to work that day: a tailored navy suit and matching pumps. It was obvious she and Liam were related—she had Liam’s stick-straight gray hair and brown eyes, and she was short like him although, of course, smaller boned—but she’d never allowed herself to put on so much as an extra ounce, and her face was still crisply defined while Liam’s had grown a bit pudgy. Also, she had a much more definite way of speaking. (This may have been due to her profession. She was a lawyer.) She said, for instance, “I’m going to stay and eat with you. I trust you have no plans,” and something in her tone suggested that if he did have plans, he would naturally be canceling them.

  She marched on into the kitchen, where she set the pot on the stove and slid a canvas grocery bag from her shoulder. “Where do you keep your silverware?” she asked.

  “Oh, um …”

  Just then Kitty sauntered down the hallway from the bedroom, clearly summoned by the sound of their voices. “Aunt Julia!” she said.