Noah's Compass

  Liam started and turned.

  This was someone young and plump and ringleted, wearing a voluminous Indian-print skirt and cloddish, handmade-looking sandals. One hand was linked through the arm of an old man in a suit.

  Liam said, “What?”

  But she had already passed him by. She and the old man—her father?—were approaching Dr. Morrow’s receptionist. When they reached the window, she dropped the old man’s arm and stepped back. The old man told the receptionist, “Why, Verity! Good morning! Don’t you look gorgeous today!”

  The receptionist said, “Thank you, Mr. Cope,” and she lifted a hand to her dyed hair. “Just have a seat and Dr. Morrow will see you shortly.”

  When the couple turned from the window, Liam lowered his eyes so they wouldn’t know he’d been watching them. They took the two chairs next to Jonah. Louise was saying, “Just then, a big, big lion came out from behind the tree,” and neither she nor Jonah glanced in their direction.

  “Mr. Pennywell?” a nurse called from the far end of the room.

  Liam rose and went over to where she stood waiting. “How are you today?” she asked him.

  “Fine, thanks,” he said. “Or, I mean, sort of fine …” but she had already turned to lead him down a corridor.

  At the end of the corridor, in a tiny office, Dr. Morrow sat writing something behind an enormous desk. Liam would not have known him. The man had aged past recognition—his red hair a tarnished pink now, and his many freckles faded into wide beige splotches across his face. He wore a sports jacket rather than a white coat, and the only sign of his profession was the plaster model of a brain on the bookcase behind him. “Ah,” he said, setting down his pen. “Mr. Pennywell,” and he half rose in a creaky, stiff way to shake hands.

  “It’s good of you to make time for me,” Liam said.

  “No trouble at all; no trouble at all. Yes, you do have a bit of a nick there.”

  Liam turned the wounded side of his head toward the doctor, in case he might like to examine it more closely, but Dr. Morrow sank back onto his chair and laced his fingers across his shirtfront. “Let’s see: how long has it been?” he asked Liam. “Nineteen eighty, eighty-one …”

  “Eighty-two,” Liam told him. He was able to say for sure because it had been his last year at the Fremont School.

  “Twenty-some years! Twenty-four; good God. And you’re still teaching?”

  “Oh, yes,” Liam said. (No sense getting sidetracked by any long involved explanations.)

  “Still hoping to stuff a little history into those rascally Fremont boys,” Dr. Morrow said, chuckling in his new elderly way.

  “Well, ah, actually it’s St. Dyfrig boys now,” Liam admitted.

  “Oh?” Dr. Morrow frowned.

  “And, um, fifth grade.”

  “Fifth grade!”

  “But anyway,” Liam said hastily. “Tell me how Buddy’s doing.”

  “Well, these days we call him Haddon, of course.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Well, Haddon is his name.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, Haddon’s all grown up now—turned forty back in April, would you believe it? Has his own trucking company. Statewide. Very successful, considering.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it.”

  “You were awfully kind to him,” Dr. Morrow said, and all at once his voice sounded different—not so bluff and pompous. “I haven’t forgotten the patience you showed.”

  “Oh, well,” Liam said, shifting in his seat.

  “Yours was about the only course he managed to get fired up about, as I recall. Seneca! Wasn’t that who he wrote his paper on? Yes, we used to hear quite a lot about Seneca at the dinner table. Seneca’s suicide! Big news, as if it happened yesterday.”

  Liam gave a little laugh that came out sounding oddly like Dr. Morrow’s chuckle.

  “I’ll have to tell him I saw you,” Dr. Morrow said. “Haddon will get a kick out of that. But enough chitchat; let’s hear about your injury.”

  “Oh yes,” Liam said, as if that had not been uppermost on his mind the whole time. “Well, evidently I was struck on the head and knocked unconscious.”

  “Is that so! By someone you knew?”

  “Why, no,” Liam said.

  “Lord, Lord, what’s the world coming to?” Dr. Morrow asked. “Have they caught the assailant?”

  “Uh, not that I’ve heard,” Liam said.

  The word assailant momentarily derailed him. It was one of those words you saw only in print, like apparel. Or slain. Or … what was that other word he’d noticed?

  “And yet they claim they’re working to make this city safer,” Dr. Morrow said.

  “Actually, I live in the county,” Liam told him.

  “Oh, really.”

  Exclaimed. That was another word you saw only in print.

  “But the point is,” Liam said, “I was hit and knocked unconscious, and I don’t remember anything more till I woke up in a hospital bed.”

  “They did a CT scan, I assume.”

  “That’s what I’m told.”

  “And they found no sign of intracranial bleeding.”

  “No, but …”

  Barbara used to say that he didn’t phrase things strongly enough when he visited his doctor. She’d ask, “Did you tell him about your back? Did you tell him you were in agony?” and Liam would say, “Well, I mentioned I was experiencing some discomfort.” Barbara would roll her eyes. So now he leaned forward in his chair. “I have a very, very serious concern,” he said. “I really need to talk about this. I feel I’m going crazy.”

  “Crazy! You told me memory loss.”

  “I’m going crazy over my memory loss.”

  “What is it you don’t remember, exactly?”

  “Anything whatsoever involving the attack,” Liam said. “All I know is, I went to bed, I slid under my covers, I looked out the window … and pouf! There I am in a hospital room. A whole chunk of time has vanished. Someone broke into my apartment and I must have woken up, because they say I got this hand injury fighting off the … assailant. Then a neighbor called 911, and the police came and the ambulance, but every bit of that is absent from my mind.”

  “You do remember other things, though,” Dr. Morrow said. “The time before you went to bed. The time after you woke in the hospital.”

  “Yes, all of that. Just not the attack.”

  “Nor will you ever, I venture to say. People always hope for some soap-opera moment where everything comes back to them. But the memories surrounding a head trauma are gone forever, in most cases. As a matter of fact, you’re fairly unusual in recalling as much as you do. Some victims forget days and days leading up to the event, and they have only spotty recollections of the days afterward. Consider yourself fortunate.”

  “Fortunate,” Liam said, with a twist of his mouth.

  “And why would you even want to remember such an experience?”

  “You don’t understand,” Liam said.

  He knew he had used up his time. A new tension had crept into the room’s atmosphere; the doctor’s posture had grown more erect. But this was important. Liam gripped his knees. “I feel I’ve lost something,” he said. “A part of my life has been stolen from me. I don’t care if it was unpleasant; I need to know what it was. I want it back. I’d give anything to get it back! I wish I had someone like the … rememberer out in your waiting room.”

  Dr. Morrow said, “The what?”

  “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.”

&nbsp
; “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 …