Noah's Compass

  In the living room he arranged the chairs in what he hoped was a friendly conversational grouping. He placed a lamp table between the two armchairs and the coffee table in front of them, and the other lamp table he set next to the rocker, which was where he imagined sitting to read at the end of every day. Or all day, for that matter. How else would he fill the hours?

  Even in the summers, he had been accustomed to working. St. Dyfrig students could be counted on to require an abundance of remedial courses. He had taken almost no vacation—just one week in early June and two in August.

  Well, think of this as one of those weeks. Just proceed a day at a time, is all.

  On the kitchen wall, the telephone rang. He had a new number but he had kept his existing plan, which included caller ID (one of the few modern inventions he approved of), and he checked the screen before he lifted the receiver. ROYALL J S. His sister. “Hello?” he said.

  “How’s it going, Liam?”

  “Oh, fine. I think I’m just about settled.”

  “Have you made up your bed yet?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Do it. Now. You should have done it first thing. Pretty soon you’re going to notice you’re exhausted, and you don’t want to be hunting for sheets then.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  Julia was four years his senior. He was used to receiving orders from her.

  “Later in the week I may stop by and visit. I’ll bring you a pot of beef stew,” she said.

  “Well, that’s very nice of you, Julia,” he said.

  He hadn’t eaten red meat in thirty-some years, but it would have been useless to remind her.

  After he hung up he obediently made his bed, which was easily navigated since Damian had positioned it so there was walking space on either side. Then he tackled the closet, where clothes had been dumped every which way. He nailed his shoe bag to the closet door and fitted in his shoes; he draped his ties on the tie rack that he found already installed. He’d never owned a tie rack before. Then, since he had the hammer out, he decided to go ahead and hang his pictures. Oh, he was way ahead of the game! Picture hanging was a finishing touch, something that took most people days. But he might as well see this through.

  His pictures were unexceptional—van Gogh prints, French bistro posters, whatever he’d chosen haphazardly years and years ago just to save his walls from total blankness. Even so, it took him a while to find the appropriate spot for each one and get it properly centered. By the time he’d finished it was after eight and he’d had to turn all the lights on. The ceiling globe in the living room had a burnt-out bulb, he discovered. Well, never mind; he’d see to that tomorrow. All at once, enough was enough.

  He wasn’t the slightest bit hungry, but he heated a bowl of vegetable soup in his miniature microwave and sat down at the table to eat it. First he sat facing the kitchen alcove, with his back to the living room. The view was uninspiring, though, so he switched to the end chair that faced the window. Not that he had much to see even there—just a sheet of glossy blackness and a vague, transparent reflection of his own round gray head—but it would be nice in the daytime. He would automatically settle in that chair from now on, he supposed. He had a fondness for routine.

  When he stood up to take his empty bowl to the kitchen, he was ambushed by sudden aches in several parts of his body. His shoulders hurt, and his lower back, and his calves and the soles of his feet. Early though it was, he locked his door and turned off the lights and went into the bedroom. His made-up bed was a welcome sight. As usual, Julia had known what she was talking about.

  He skipped his shower. Getting into his pajamas and brushing his teeth took his last ounce of energy. When he sank onto the bed, it was almost beyond his willpower to reach over and turn off the lamp, but he forced himself to do it. Then he slid down flat, with a long, deep, groaning sigh.

  His mattress was comfortably firm, and the top sheet was tucked in tightly on either side of him as he liked. His pillow had just enough bounce to it. The window, a couple of feet away, was cranked open to let the breeze blow in, and it offered a view of a pale night sky with a few stars visible behind the sparse black pine boughs—just a scattering of pinpricks. He was glad now that Damian had taken such trouble to situate the bed right.

  Most probably, he reflected, this would be the final dwelling place of his life. What reason would he have to move again? No new prospects were likely for him. He had accomplished all the conventional tasks—grown up, found work, gotten married, had children—and now he was winding down.

  This is it, he thought. The very end of the line. And he felt a mild stirring of curiosity.

  Then he woke up in a hospital room with a helmet of gauze on his head.

  2

  He knew it was a hospital room because of the medical apparatus crowded around his bed—the IV pole and the tubes and the blinking, chirping monitor—and because of the bed itself, which was cranked to a half-sitting position and had that uniquely uncomfortable, slick, hard hospital mattress. The ceiling could only be a hospital ceiling, with its white acoustic tiles pocked and cratered like the moon, and nowhere else would you find the same sterile taupe metal furniture.

  He knew his head was bandaged even before he reached up a hand to touch it, because the gauze covered his ears and turned the chirping of the monitor into a distant peep. But not until he reached did he realize that his hand was bandaged also. A wide strip of adhesive tape encircled his left palm, and in fact his palm stung sharply across the padded part now that he thought about it. Exactly where his head was injured, though, he couldn’t tell. It ached uniformly all over, a relentless, dull throbbing that seemed connected to his vision, because looking at the blinking lights of the monitor made it worse.

  He knew from the square of pearly white sky framed by the plate-glass window that it must be daytime. But which day? And what hour of the day?

  Any second now an explanation would occur to him. There had to be one. He had fallen down some stairs or he’d been in a car wreck. But when he searched his mind for his last available memory (which took a distressingly long moment), all he could find was the image of going to sleep in his new apartment. His new apartment’s address was 102C Windy Pines Court; what a relief to be able to produce that. His new phone number was … oh, Lord. He couldn’t recall.

  But that was understandable, wasn’t it? The number had been assigned to him only a week ago.

  The exchange was 882. Or maybe 822. Or 828.

  He gave up the search for his phone number and returned to the image of falling asleep. He tried to invent a next act. So: in the morning he had awakened, let’s say. He might have wondered where he was for an instant, but then he’d oriented himself, gotten out of bed, headed toward his new bathroom …

  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 lik
e 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 called 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 instan
t. 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.