The Shoe on the Roof

  “I am.”

  “No, you’re—”

  “I’m watching the pen closely.”

  “You’re not, actually. You’re—”

  “I can see it reflected in your eyes.”

  And that, perhaps, was the first moment in which Thomas realized things might not go quite according to plan. He tucked the pen into his jacket pocket.

  “There’s food in the fridge. I bought fish sticks and nonalcoholic wine. Seemed appropriate. You can help yourself to anything.” He packed up the blood samples. “I’m going to run these down to the lab. Don’t open the door to anyone. If the phone rings, let it go to voicemail.”

  When Thomas returned an hour later, he found the magician sitting in a plush robe, freshly showered and peering squinty-eyed into Thomas’s microscope.

  “Hey!” said Thomas. “Don’t fool around with that. It’s expensive. Anybody call?”

  The magician shook his head without looking up. He flicked on the light under the microscope, adjusted the knob. There was no slide under the lens.

  “That’s odd,” said Thomas. “The requisition must have gone through by now. Someone should have called.”

  At which point the doorbell rang. Thomas headed for the door, shouting at the magician over his shoulder, “Put that away, it’s expensive.”

  A pair of frazzled hospital attendants greeted him. Hair askew, shirts untucked, they looked as though they’d been wrestling a bear.

  “You Dr. Rosanoff?”

  Thomas nodded.

  One of the attendants shoved a clipboard at Thomas. “Sign here.” He flipped a page. “Here. And here.”

  Thomas signed. It was his father’s signature.

  The other attendant handed Thomas a plastic bag filled with pills, and Thomas signed for those as well.

  “He’s down the hall, at the back door. That’s as far as we got.”

  “Aren’t you going to escort him in?” Thomas asked, genuinely puzzled.

  The attendants gave Thomas a “you’ve got to be joking” look.

  “You signed, we’re done. He’s all yours now.”

  And then, at full roar . . .

  “Pharisees! Sons of whores!”

  Thomas felt gut-punched. His knees gave out from under him. “No,” he said. “No, wait!”

  But they were gone. Thomas crept down the hallway to the stairs, peered around the corner—and there he was, wrists trussed in leather restraints, head back, voice booming to wake the dead. “Philistines! Fornicators! Sons of whores!”

  Dr. Rosanoff’s patient. The real Dr. Rosanoff. It was Thomas’s father who’d had this man committed, so when a requisition was submitted under Dr. Rosanoff’s name . . . The hallway began to tilt. Thomas felt nauseous, as though he were going to faint. Oh God, oh God no. One of his neighbours peered out from behind a chained front door.

  “Babylon has fallen!” Eli roared. “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!”

  “Oh no, oh God,” said Thomas. “They sent me the wrong Jesus.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE SAN HENDRIN ASYLUM, late afternoon.

  A murmur of nurses. Crepe-soled shoes padding down the corridors. Mental patients, marooned in their own worlds, twisting their bodies in silent contortions.

  Thomas, earlier, running back down the hallway into his apartment, pressing his credit card into the magician’s hand. “Go! There’s a store across the street. Go get cigarettes, now! Go, go!”

  At the tempered glass of the San Hendrin reception desk, Thomas was rehearsing his alibi as he waited for the receptionist to return. But then he spotted the orderly he’d spoken with last time rolling a gurney down the corridor. An elderly lady, thin as famine, was draped under skeletal sheets.

  What was the orderly’s name again? Bill? Phil?

  “Phil! Wait up!” Thomas hurried to catch him.

  Thomas, earlier, desperate to stop his neighbours from calling 911, speaking to Eli in a frantic hush, “Listen. Calm down. I have cigarettes. They’re on their way. But you have to stop yelling.”

  The orderly at San Hendrin wheeled the gurney around a corner. Thomas pursued.

  Thomas, back in his apartment, sitting across from the smouldering, one-eyed mountain of a man that was Eli. Thomas, waiting for the magician to return, realizing he had handed over his credit card to a known confidence man. Thomas, wondering if he was ever going to see the magician again and what his next credit card statement might look like. Thomas, eyeing the restraints that held Eli’s wrists to the belt around his waist, a permanent gunfighter’s position. The magician, reappearing with an armful of cartons. “I wasn’t sure which kinds he liked, so I asked for one of each.” Eli, roaring at the magician: “DO I KNOW YOU?” Thomas explaining to the magician, “He thinks he knows everybody.” Then, addressing Eli and realizing midway he doesn’t actually know the magician’s name, “Eli, this . . . this gentleman will help you light your cigarettes. You have to keep your restraints on, for now. I’ll be back soon.”

  In the quiet corridors of San Hendrin: the rattle of wheels. The orderly was humming to himself as he rolled the elderly lady along.

  “Wait up!”

  “If it isn’t ‘Mr. Doctor,’ ” said the orderly, not breaking stride. “What brings you back? Need another member of our congregation?”

  “Phil, listen. There’s been a mix-up.” Thomas had to scurry to keep pace; the orderly was moving faster than he thought. “It’s a long story,” said Thomas. “But I need to return one patient and sign out another. But before I speak with Admissions, I have a couple of questions, y’know, to make sure everything is done properly. It’s basically a patient swap. Eli Wasser for Sebastian Lamiell.”

  “Patient swap? Never heard of such a thing,” said the orderly. “So what’s your question? And make it quick. I’ve got to get Joan of Arc here down to Psych.”

  “Joan of Arc? Really?” He looked at the elderly lady on the bed.

  The orderly laughed. “Nah. Just run-of-the-mill dementia. Isn’t that right, Alice?”

  “It’s lovely,” she said, smiling.

  They stopped in front of an elevator, but the orderly didn’t push the button. He turned to Thomas. “So what exactly is the problem? You want to return Eli, and take temporary custody of that young priest. Not a big deal.”

  “It’s not? Oh, thank God. You see—”

  “Just submit your request for custody when you hand in your interim report on Eli.”

  “Report?”

  “For the review committee.”

  “The review committee?”

  “They meet every Wednesday, three o’clock. They’ll go over the details with you in person.”

  Thomas, weakly: “In person?”

  “Clinical reassessment. Standard procedure when a doctor returns a patient. You are a doctor, right?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of a doctor? Isn’t that like being ‘sort of’ pregnant? Didn’t think it was possible.”

  Oh, but it is. It is possible to be “sort of pregnant.”

  “There was no baby. Don’t you see? I drew the line with a pen.”

  “I am,” said Thomas, voice wavering, “a doctor. That is, I have—I have signing authority.”

  “Well, then. You’ve got nothing to worry about.” He pressed the elevator button, and with a ping! disappeared inside with Alice. Down the rabbit hole. “And by the way,” the orderly said as the doors closed. “It’s Bill.”

  With that, Thomas was alone and on his own.

  We like to speak of strange twists and marvellous coincidences, campfire stories of stepping off a ferry in a strange town and running into a friend we haven’t seen in years, or of spreading out a blanket at a fireworks festival in a distant city only to realize we are sitting next to our neighbours from back home. But we never consider the missed encounters, the lost opportunities, the ones we were never even aware of. How many times have we passed a former lover or a childhood playmate on the street or i
n an airport without realizing? Statistically speaking, there must be far more of these missed encounters than there are fortuitous ones. (Perhaps today, while you were at the local Whole Foods, your old elementary school teacher was two aisles away, comparing prices of Müeslix and feeling wistful.)

  And so it was, as Thomas walked, shell-shocked on shaky legs, out of the San Hendrin Mental Institute, he never knew that Amy left only moments earlier, and that she left in tears. Just as well they hadn’t transferred Sebastian into his custody. Had Amy arrived to find her brother gone, what then? Thomas had until Amy’s next visit to fix everything, though he didn’t know this at the time. He knew only that he couldn’t return Eli until he had cured Sebastian. And he couldn’t cure Sebastian without the magician.

  His apartment was about to get crowded with Christs.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  BERNIE LAUGHED. “SO IT’S easier to take a mental patient than return one?”

  He was on speakerphone with Thomas, who was sitting in his Prius in the seminary parking lot.

  “Apparently so.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Bernie. “It’s probably for the better. You really can’t run a proper test with only two subjects. You would need three anyway, at minimum.”

  Thomas hadn’t told Bernie that one of the test subjects was Amy’s brother; it would have compromised the objectivity of the experiment.

  The last hour had been hectic. Thomas had scrambled back to the seminary, had sought out Father Patrice, had explained, in dulcet medical tones meant to reassure the elderly priest, that Thomas was there to help Sebastian, to guide him gently back to the flock. All he needed was a signature from Father Patrice, a formality, really, and Father Patrice had consented—with gratitude. He’d assumed he was signing off on in-house treatment, hadn’t realized that it was a custody release form, or that Sebastian was being taken to a private residence for a treatment of unproven efficacy.

  Thomas was worming further into the wet earth of duplicity, and he knew that those layers of subterfuge were becoming more and more suffocating, but if the experiment succeeded Amy’s brother would be shaken out of his delusions once and for all. The other two Christs might be cured as well. Thomas would be celebrated, and even better, Amy would be grateful. He would win her back by saving her brother. Cognitive therapy redefined! And if he failed? Well, better to fall off that bridge when he came to it. . . .

  “I have to admit, it’s an interesting idea,” said Bernie, Thomas’s sole confidant. “Much better than sending Igor out for another round of brains. Our other experiment, the one you are always too busy to help with? Tracing thought patterns in brain cells? The tissue samples are decaying, something to do with the dye-to-PFA ratio. So it’s a bit of a bust. This new idea of yours? This is even better than the God helmet. Have you told Cerletti?”

  “Not the details, no. Or even the premise, really. If it doesn’t work, I’d rather not draw attention.”

  “But it will work,” said Bernie with a certain misplaced confidence. “Why wouldn’t it? What could possibly go wrong?”

  “What does that mean, exactly? Negative therapeutic reaction.” “It means the therapy only made things worse.”

  “Nothing comes to mind,” said Thomas.

  It was a question that would stalk Thomas on the drive back to his apartment. What could possibly go wrong?

  His unease followed him up the steps to his front door, a sense of undefined dread that preoccupied him to such a degree that he was only dimly aware of the sound coming from the kitchen when he entered his apartment. Thomas threw his keys in a ceramic bowl, removed his scarf in slow mummy-wrap turns, unbuttoned his overcoat. He now became more aware of a strange sound around the corner, shhk, shhk, shhk, like an envelope being opened repeatedly or a broom whisking the floor.

  “Hello?” said Thomas.

  The sound grew louder as he came closer.

  Shhk, shhk, shhk . . .

  A large knife was cutting through tomatoes. Eli, free of his restraints, was at the cutting board.

  Thomas swallowed.

  The magician was sitting at the marble-topped counter blithely flipping through Thomas’s SDM:III manual, wholly unconcerned about the large, mentally unstable man with a knife standing across from him.

  Thomas, trying desperately to remain calm: “Hey, guys.”

  The magician looked up from the book. “Hello, Thomas.”

  Shhk, shhk, shhk. Eli had moved on to cucumbers.

  “So . . . Eli. How did you, um, get out of your restraints?”

  “Know what you need?” said Eli, eyes wild with enthusiasm. “One of them Ginsu knives. That’s what you need!”

  “Eli, how did you—”

  “Oh, those?” said the magician, referring to the restraints that now lay in a heap on the kitchen counter. “I took them off for him. They looked uncomfortable.”

  “Ever seen a Ginsu knife? Those things’ll cut through anything! Frozen chickens. Regular chickens. Cantaloupes. Coconuts, even really hard coconuts. Steaks. Frozen steaks. Bones.”

  Eli continued his inventory even as Thomas spotted the plastic pill bottles lying on their sides. Empty.

  “Eli. Did you take all your pills?”

  “Pork chops. Frozen pork chops. Lamb chops. Frozen lamb chops. Metal tubings. The entire Yellow Pages. Anything! Leather boots. Copper wire.”

  Thomas, throat dry: “Listen to me, Eli. This is very, very important. Did you take all your pills?”

  “Tin cans. Yams. Pineapples. Frozen pineapples. Particle boards. Two-by-fours.”

  “The pills?” said the magician. “We flushed those.”

  “Sheet metal. Sugarcane. Those hard nuts, you know, like walnuts but smaller. Action figures. Baseball bats. Iron rods.”

  Thomas looked at the magician. “You flushed his pills?”

  “We decided he didn’t need them anymore.”

  Eli dumped the sliced vegetables into a pot.

  “But—he’s on quetiapine. It’s a dopamine inhibitor, 300 mg a day. Plus haloperidol. Plus a stabilizer. It’s a pharmaceutical cocktail. He can’t just stop. He’ll crash and burn. It could trigger a full-blown psychotic episode, violent outbursts. Shit.”

  “Did you know,” said the magician, referring to the SDM:III manual in front of him, “there are three hundred seventy-four different ways to be crazy? That’s up from two hundred ninety-seven since the last edition.”

  Thomas felt numb, as though novocaine had been injected into his limbs. “The refills. When they dropped him off, they left a week’s worth of refills.”

  He careened to the bathroom, flung open the medicine cabinet. Empty bottles rolled away. Oh God, oh God.

  From the kitchen, he could hear Eli calling out. “Soup’s on!”

  Amy’s brother arrived at his doorstep the next day.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THOMAS’S FIRST REAL CRUSH (aptly named, these youthful infatuations; they aren’t at all pleasant) was on an older, wiser girl (Thomas was twelve, she was thirteen) and in his misplaced innocence he went to his grandfather for advice. Thomas’s grandfather, dead these many years, had been a fleeting but formative figure in Thomas’s youth. Crooked as a question mark, with suspenders and a concave chest, plagued by a bronchial cough, he shuffled through the family garden at Kingsley Hall, stopping only to hack mucus into the rose beds. (“Nutrients,” as he put it.)

  Manicured hedges formed a maze in the backyard—an easy maze, and one Thomas quickly memorized, so when he spotted his grandfather, stooped over, tuft of hair bobbing above the hedges, Thomas caught up easily enough. “Grandpa, wait!” And when Thomas explained his adolescent conundrum—How to make someone who doesn’t like you, like you—his grandfather said, “Well, kid, somebody’s got to tell you the truth about this stuff, so it might as well be me. And I can only pass along the advice I got from my own dad, dead these many years. That’d be your great-grandfather, biggest prick the world has ever seen. But he spoke the tr
uth, such as he knew it, and here it is: Men give love in order to get sex. Women give sex in order to get love. Everything else is commentary.”

  (This incident, what Thomas had thought was a private moment, would later appear in Dr. Rosanoff’s notebooks, sanitized slightly as: “Tommy walked through the gardens today, discussed the correlation between sex and love with his grandfather.”)

  By the time Thomas turned sixteen, he had outgrown the hedges, even as his grandfather had shrunken behind them, bent almost at a right angle as though he were constantly searching for something he’d lost. A few weeks before he died, Thomas’s grandfather would give a final piece of advice, one that would stand Thomas in good stead lo these many years.

  “At some point,” he rasped, “every goddamn woman you ever get tangled up with is going to ask you the same damn question. It seems innocent enough, but trust me, it’s a depth charge waiting to go off. She’s going to look at you, probably when she’s naked, and she’s going to ask, ‘Do you like me better with my clothes on or my clothes off?’ Now understand, Tommy, there is no correct answer to this. Whatever you say will be wrong.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Trick is, you don’t answer the question at all. Instead, you say, ‘Just as long as I can see your eyes, that’s all that matters.’ Works like a charm. Hell, you’ll probably get a blow job out of the deal.”

  It was the last conversation he remembered having with his grandfather. The next thing Thomas knew they were at the cemetery, taking slow solemn turns shovelling dirt onto Grandpappy’s casket.

  Memories of Amy: half dressed, half naked. Amy in a man’s shirt, unbuttoned and open. The chubbiness of her thighs, the feathered down of her pubic region. Amy, hips at an angle, asking Tommy: “Do you like me better with my clothes on or my clothes off?”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “Honey, just as long as I can see your eyes, that’s all that matters.”

  Amy, grinning. “Come here, you.”

  Thanks, Grandpa!

  There was once a time, celebrated even now, when the story of “boy meets girl” would be followed by “boy courts girl,” “boy buys girl flowers,” “boy coaxes girl into bed.” A time when you got to know each other first, and then you slept together. But that era has long since passed (it expired sometime in the mid-1980s) and exists today primarily in pop songs, paperbacks, and rom-com cinema. Today, sex is taken care of right at the outset, dispatched in a “let’s get this over with” manner, so that, having cleared the air, you can then decide whether or not you actually like the person. Sex is the audition; the relationship (if any) comes later.