But then something caught his attention. Not a presence, but an absence. (And it is absences that are always more unnerving.) He looked at the monitors. The whitewashed rooms were empty. Eli and the magician were gone.
“Thomas?”
He turned, found himself face-to-face with his father. Thomas placed the wastebasket to one side, stared into the still-life images of empty rooms on the monitors. “Where are they?”
“It’s nice to see you as well, son.”
“Where did they go?”
“Jesus One and Jesus Two? I had them committed. Long-term, under my care and custody.”
“You can’t.”
“I just did.”
“The magician—”
“You’re referring to Mr. Keshen.”
“I am.”
“Then use his proper name. Or Jeffrey, if you prefer.”
Thomas turned his attention from the monitors. “The magician was never a patient at San Hendrin. He’s not a threat, not to himself, not to others. The review board, the ethics committee, they’ll never allow it.”
“The ethics committee?” He laughed. “I am the ethics committee. And your friend is going to remain under my care for as long as deemed necessary. The experiment isn’t over, Tommy. It’s only just started. One down. Two to go.”
Thomas bolted, taking the stairway two steps at a time, almost tripping, down the hallway and out the door, scrambling to his vehicle.
The admissions nurse at San Hendrin looked up to see a frenzied young man sprinting toward her, incongruous amid the calming hues and wafting music of a modern mental facility. Thomas ran to, and almost into, her desk. “Rosanoff,” he said. “Thomas Rosanoff. You have two of my patients”—he looked back to see if anyone was behind him—“a Mr. Wasser. Eli Wasser. And a—a Mr. Keshen. Jeffrey Keshen. They were admitted, under my care. Here. This is my driver’s license, that’s my medical ID. Thomas Rosanoff. See? Right there. Harvard Medical.”
“But they’re in seclusion, as requested. Until the sedatives take effect, we won’t be able to—”
Thomas stretched his body across the desk, looked at her computer. “That’s them,” he said, finger on the screen. “Right there. Rooms 22 and 24. I’m signing them out. I’ll need a—a requisition form. Ah, a twelve-sixty-one—”
“Sixty-two.”
“Right. And I’ll also need a—”
Thomas looked back, saw his father striding down the hallway toward him, flanked by his two orderlies. Thomas grabbed the keys from the nurse’s post and ran. Behind him, he could hear his father shouting, “Thomas! Stop!”
Down one hallway, up the next. Searching for Seclusion Room 22. Thomas turned a corner, backtracked, counted down the doors as he passed, found the one he was looking for. It had a thin window, wire-meshed. Thomas fumbled with the keys, tried one, then another, dropped them in a jangle, snatched them up again, and that was as far as he got.
One of the orderlies pulled Thomas away, held him against the wall.
Dr. Rosanoff closed in. “Thomas,” he said, out of breath and ragged from exertion. “I don’t know who you are trying to impress with these antics. But it has to end.”
But before Thomas could respond, the other orderly whispered, “Dr. Rosanoff, I think you should see this.”
Thomas’s father peered through the narrow window, then pushed on the door. It swung open. The room was empty, unlocked.
“Where is he? He must have been moved to another . . .”
Eli!
Thomas raced to the next room, with Dr. Rosanoff and the orderlies in pursuit. But Thomas slowed as he approached the door. They all did. They could already see it was unlocked—and open.
Eli was gone.
Gone where?
Having spoken at length and with increasing increments of irritation, Dr. Rosanoff found himself in the facility’s surveillance room, with Thomas and the two orderlies crowding in behind him as San Hendrin’s head of security scrolled through the footage. They could see the magician sitting on a cot, arms crossed by a restraining device, more commonly known as a straitjacket. He sat so still that even with the tape on fast-forward he barely moved, only small jerky movements, and then—
“Stop! Right there. He’s doing something.” Dr. Rosanoff moved closer to the monitor, watched as the magician rose to his feet. The straitjacket fell away. The effect was so startling they jumped back.
The magician then looked directly at the camera. He reached out his hand to a place below the lens, and as soon as he did, the security camera cut to the white noise of static.
Everyone was speaking at once, voices overlapping.
“What the hell . . .”
“He cut the feed. How?”
“No idea.”
“Where did he go?”
“There!” said Thomas, pointing to the camera in Seclusion Room 24.
A different monitor. A different Messiah. Eli in his own straitjacket, writhing on the floor, eyes rolling back in his head, a lion in chains roaring at the world.
“The door handle,” said Thomas. “Look.”
They could see it jiggle once, twice, and then—a fan of light spilled across the room. Eli fell silent. The magician entered, sat down beside him. He spoke to Eli, and Eli became calm. Rising up once again, the magician walked toward the camera, stared directly into the lens, directly into their eyes.
And this time he didn’t need to reach out his hand. The image on Eli’s camera cut to sudden static as well.
“He must have shorted something when he yanked the wires out of the first camera, some kind of trick.” The security supervisor began flipping switches, more or less at random, hoping to reboot the cameras, but there was nothing. Only static.
Dr. Rosanoff stumbled backward, looking like a man who had been hit in the throat.
The orderly beside him smiled; it was the faintest of flutters, there and then gone. “Looks like your experiment got away from you,” he said.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
THE PEWS WERE MOSTLY empty. Family and friends were up front, shaking hands and making conversation. Stained glass and the waxy smell of candles flickering in the nave. Wishes, set alight. Our Lady of Constant Sorrow.
“Do you believe in the Seven Sacraments?”
“We believe in the Seven Sacraments.”
“Do you believe in Christ Everlasting?”
“We believe in Christ Everlasting.”
A baby in a lace gown, gurgling and full of smiles, is lowered toward the baptismal font. The priest dips his hand into the water, trickles it over the child’s forehead, makes the sign of a cross as he speaks.
“Go in peace, and may the Lord be with you.”
He passes the child to Amy, equally radiant, who passes the child to the child’s father. That would be Lars, from the gallery. The handsome man from Minnesota, so deeply, doomfully in love. (He is not her One True Love, either, the one waiting for her beyond words. Should we tell him? Would it matter?)
Thomas, in his white coat, medical satchel by his side, watched this anachronistic ritual from the back row. He’d been invited, almost didn’t show. He was on his way to the shelter for his weekly rounds, trying to pretend he’d forgotten the date of the baby’s baptism, when the sound of church bells brought it all back to him. He couldn’t escape those, even if he tried.
Amy came down the aisle afterward, smiled at him. There was affection there, maybe even the remnants of something else.
“You came,” she said.
“Beautiful child.”
She looked back to the receiving line that had formed around the infant, parents and colleagues cooing over the newly anointed, congratulating the father, posing for photos. But Lars was distracted by Thomas’s presence and he kept a wary eye on them.
Amy turned her attention back to Thomas. Pale eyes and hair that refused to hold a part. “Look at you, all grown up. A real doctor.”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“GP?”
“Community health.”
“I didn’t know you needed a PhD for that.”
“You don’t.”
The plastic tag on his shirt read: T. ALEXANDER.
“I heard your father was let go,” she said.
“Removed from the ethics review committee, yes. He’s on a forced sabbatical, under review. He’ll be fine, though. He’s editing the expanded SDM manual, working on a new study, keeping busy. And Sebastian? How is he?”
“Good,” she said a little too quickly. “Better. He couldn’t be here today. He’s starting a new shift up at the plant. Dad got him the job. Assembling box springs, but he hopes to move up. And anyway . . .” She looked around at the stained glass windows and cruciform corridors, “I thought maybe, with everything that happened, it might be a bit, you know . . . He asks about you.”
“He does?”
She laughed. “No, not really. But I’m sure he thinks about you, as if in a dream.”
It’s a hard thing, giving up one’s faith, whether in crucifixes or molecules. Thomas took her hand, looked at the fingernails, was reassured to see that they were still cut short, still showing stubborn signs of paint along the edges. He had no doubt that if he were to bury himself into her arms and hold her, eyes tightly closed, that he would smell toothpaste and Dove. Perhaps even traces of turpentine and tea. He let her hand fall away.
“I never did thank you,” she said.
“Thank me? For what?”
“For caring about him.”
“I don’t know that I did.”
“You must have,” she said, her laughter returning. “That’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
They were calling for her now. “Where’s the mother?”
“I have to go,” she said.
They shook hands, awkwardly, in that half embrace of ex-lovers, and she walked away from Thomas into the stained glass sunlight to where her family and friends were waiting. It seemed as though she were far away, as though he were watching her through the wrong end of a telescope. Halfway down the aisle, she stopped and turned, gave him a small almost secretive wave. The faintest of expressions flitted across her face, but she was too far away and the light was in his eyes—and it might have been love, or the traces of, or it might have been nothing. Nothing at all.
Later, when Thomas arrived at the shelter, Frances said, by way of greeting, “You’re late.”
“You should be glad I showed up.”
“Just grab a bedpan,” she said, and then, sensing something—not sadness, exactly, but something like it—she asked, “Are you okay?”
“I am.”
“How’s the noggin?”
“Better. I’m taking Risperdal, mild antipsychotic, low dosage. Symptoms are under control.” The music in his head had almost entirely disappeared. That’s the problem with modern medicine. It works.
“Bedpans,” she reminded him. It wasn’t a question.
“You’re a mean old woman,” he said. “Anyone ever tell you that?”
“Only you. All the time.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
IT WAS ONLY WHEN Thomas went to report Bernie’s death that he discovered Bernie was still alive. This was soon after Eli and the magician had disappeared.
The media would dub Bernie the “Tent City Killer” and would dredge up horrors from Bernie’s own past, the uses and abuses of authority, of trust, divine or otherwise. Bernie was sent for psychiatric assessment, but he wanted to face an open court. Professor Cerletti testified at the hearing. He’d assessed Bernie as mentally unfit to stand trial, but the courts remained unconvinced. “He was my star student,” said Cerletti, “and it breaks my heart.”
When Thomas visited Bernie at the San Hendrin mental facility, the staff kept them on opposite sides of the glass, even though Bernie had never shown any evidence of violence. Even his crimes had been largely passive, relying on a soothing voice and medical injections deftly delivered, not brute force.
Bernie’s voice was frantic. “I’ve seen the brain scans,” he said to Thomas. “The psychopathy isn’t there. There’s nothing wrong with my brain. Don’t let them commit me.” And then, growing angry, growing sad, he said, “I am not a sidekick. I am not a supporting character in the Story of You. I will not be locked up and forgotten like some lunatic.”
But there was nothing, nothing, nothing Thomas could do. And every time he went to visit Bernie, he left feeling despondent—with his friend suspended between competing judgments, caught in limbo. At those times, the anguish of Saint John of the Cross came back to Thomas, and the lines that Bernie had recited, not so long ago: “If by chance you see him I love the most, tell him I am sick, tell him that I suffer.”
• • •
Outside in the dusty heat of summer, a city bus rattled past smokestacks and warehouses, straining uphill and then fighting its own momentum on the way down. Sebastian was inside, dressed in factory blues, toolbox on his lap.
The driver looked at him in the bus’s rearview mirror. “You seem familiar. Do I know you?”
“Maybe,” Sebastian said softly. “I used to be somebody.”
And the bus trundled into the haze.
• • •
Thomas never spoke with Sebastian again, or Eli. He missed Eli, his rampaging voice and thundering invective, his sly humour and tender mercies. The shoteh who came out from under the bridge.
In the weeks that followed, the heat would give way to rain and with it the usual permutations and combinations: fitful winds followed by muggy drizzles, humid and heavy, which promised a relief that never came. At Hynes Station, the commuters hustled past, pouring in and out, ignoring a small card table that had been set up beside the entrance. With head down and palms flying, a raggedy man in frayed clothes was playing three-card monte, keeping up his patter as the pedestrians pushed past. “Find the lady! There she goes, round and round, no one knows.” Sucker bets, down by the station.
Thomas watched from across the street as the man’s hands moved in a blur. The most effective magic is always close up: the card disappears and the coin reappears before your very eyes. “Find the lady! Place your bets!” The monte-card dealer glanced up, caught Thomas’s gaze. But it was someone else. Not him.
Thomas never saw the magician again, but he kept searching for him nonetheless, down by the tracks, late at night, or in the park on sunnier days when he thought he might see him surrounded by children as he performed small feats, sleight of hand. And though he knew he’d never find him, he kept looking, and is looking still. The Boy in the Box, chasing echoes down endless hallways, trying still to close that gap.
And there he is now, pushing his way through the dishevelled shelters of Tent City, down to a makeshift medical clinic where patients crowd in. An old man with festering wounds. A woman, infant on hip. Chest infections and hearts beating out of time. And Thomas in the middle, opening his satchel with a sigh, taking out his stethoscope, leaning in to listen. A doctor, lost in a sea of humanity.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
“LIMITED-TIME OFFER! CALL in the next ten minutes and you will get two Ginsu knives for the price of one. It slices, it dices, it cuts, and it peels! And every Ginsu comes with a money-back guarantee. If you are not completely satisfied, you can return it for a FULL REFUND. Shipping and handling not included.”
In a dimly lit bar in a dimly lit city—it doesn’t matter which city, and it doesn’t matter which bar—an infomercial is playing to an empty room. On the television screen, the woman holding up the product has a decidedly strained look on her face. She turns to her cohost for the demo.
“Eli, over to you!”
Eli, in an ill-fitting suit, hair slicked back, beard neatly trimmed, attacks his assignment with gusto.
“That’s right!” he bellows. “Only $29.99! Order now and we’ll throw in our patented salad shooter at no extra cost! It’s delightful and diversionary! Every Ginsu knife is made of the finest tempered steel. Th
ey can cut through anything!”
He begins sawing through a tin can.
“Metal. Copper. Frozen pork chops. They can even”—he holds up a heavy frying pan—“cut through cast iron!”
The panic in his cohost’s eyes is self-evident. “Um, no,” she says. “No they can’t.”
Eli ignores her, launching at the frying pan with his knife, pieces of metal flying up, as his cohost looks into the camera, almost pleading. “Order now . . . please?”
Above the set, in the studio control room, the director has called for camera two. “Stand by, Camera Two.” On the monitors, Eli has made a sizable nick in the cast iron.
The editor at the switching board shakes his head. “Jesus. . . .”
“I know, I know,” the director says. “But you should see how sales spike whenever he’s on. It’s a miracle.”
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
ON THE BLENDING OF MONTREAL AND BOSTON
THE SHOE ON THE Roof was originally set in Montreal, a city rich in Catholic lore and academic traditions, but I soon realized that the story only works in a place where there are private mental health facilities. I tried again and again to rework the narrative to make it fit, but it couldn’t be done. And so, reluctantly, I packed up the characters and their belongings in a U-Haul and moved them to Boston, a city similarly rich in Catholic lore and academic traditions. Thus, McGill University became Harvard, the Saint Lawrence River became the Charles, Notre-Dame Basilica became Our Lady of Constant Sorrow, and the Sisters of Charity became Carmelite nuns. At some level, though, I’ve always felt there is still a great deal of Montreal in this story, as though the two cities have blended into one, creating a fusion of the two. But I could be wrong.