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I See You Everywhere - Part Five

By Julia Glass

"So, is it back to California?" Dr. Slocum sits, as he does too often, on my bed. He visits at least twice a day, claims he's writing me up as a special case of retrograde amnesia. The thing is, he rarely takes notes.

"Rhode Island for a little while. Till I get my head together." I touch my bandage. "So to speak."

He twiddles his stethoscope and nods. He shifts his weight toward me.

"Listen, don't do it," I say, as nicely as I can.

"Do what?"

"Ask me out to dinner, say you want to see me again, whatever. No matter what you have in mind, you'd be disappointed."

When he says nothing (what would he say?), I say, "Not good timing."

He stands. "Well. Say it like it is." He fingers his beeper, willing it to save his pride.

"You need a nap; go. I'm sorry to be such a jerk. I'll see you later." We both know I won't.

"Got everything you need?" he asks.

"Within reason."

"Sayonara," with a smirk, is how he tells me good-bye.

I turn on my TV. Out blazes a football montage, men colliding over and over. Everywhere, everywhere: men, men. I leave it on but mute. Football in July? I feel more disoriented than ever.

I jump when the phone rings. Oh Jerry, change your mind roars to the front of my brain like a projection onto a movie screen. But it's Louisa, calling from New York. She tells me, in a breathtaking rush, that not only is she not having a baby; she's fallen in love and doesn't know what to do. She wanted to tell me in person, but she chickened out. If you want advice, I tell her, take anyone's but mine.

"I know what your advice would be," she says. "'Burn those bridges! Choose hellfire over tundra!'"

"I guess that's how well you know me. You think I like hearing this news."

"I'm sorry. This is selfish. I just need to tell someone ... outside my life. Get it out of my head, to keep from going nuts, but somewhere safe."

She sees me as safe? This brings tears to my eyes.

"I trust you, Clem. Are you pissed?"

"Come on, Lou. I'm flattered. But Lou -- what a mess." Isn't that what Jerry said? Then she does what I guess she intended to do from the start, no matter what my reaction. She tells me about the guy, eyelash by eyelash, cuticle by cuticle (a man every inch the animal her husband is not). Gutless, I listen. I wonder if the gypsy put a curse on me too -- just in case I canceled all three of my Visas.

"I think I'm moving out," she says.

"Oh no," I say. "Don't do that. That's crazy!"

"I have to!"

I take a deep breath. "I thought you wanted my advice."

I have to wait a few seconds before she says, "I thought I knew what you would tell me. I guess I was wrong. It's okay."

Everyone seems to know who I am, and what I think, but me. After Louisa hangs up, I think instantly of her husband. I feel more sorrow for him than I do for Louisa, which isn't right -- not morally, but because I have no real bond with Hugh. Am I suddenly the queen of empathy? No. It's more that I need Louisa to be with this placid, loyal man. I needed her to make that choice in the first place -- and I need her now, though it's none of my business, not to unmake it. Please stay married and have that baby, I'm thinking. Please have several. I wish I could blame this insanity on drugs, yet my head, however sore, is clearer than I want to admit.

---

Dr. A. examines me one last time. When he comes in, I am as thrilled to see him as if this were a date -- even though, after so many meetings, he's still immune to chat. "Miss Jardine," he greets me. "I know you are expectant to depart, but will you please take your seat on the bed?"

His hands close around the back of my skull as usual. As usual, I'm surprised how little I resent the confinement. The heels of his hands, resting on my cheekbones, smell as green as ever, but today a little less arid, as if they've come straight from pruning young trees. Ah, horticulture. Perhaps that explains why I'm charmed by this fusty man who I'm guessing drives a dog-eared Civic and, come winter, wears wool socks in bed to console his Mediterranean feet. It's Freudian after all.

He asks me to define archipelago, estuary, fjord. Piece of cake. Then he asks for the names of the oceans and the Great Lakes. I leave out Ontario. "Listen, doctor, you'll never discharge anyone with tests like this," I say. "Schools over here haven't taught geography in years."

He jots on his clipboard. "Dr. Slocum has told me you are a scholar of the water." He rips off a form and hands it to me. "Your father, how is he?"

"Dad? Dad's fine. You met Dad?"

"Oh, you will not remember, of course," he says. "The day he was here with you -- a long day -- he was massaging your feet while we attended to your head. At one moment, I was resolute that he thought you were to die. I could not say otherwise, though I felt your case to be hopeful. Before he drove that long way home, I asked him to languish in my office and take a little drink. He told me you were so very small when you were born. He said it was the first time he ever prayed since he himself was a child. This day, he said, was the second. He said prayer is -- I remember exactly -- pointless but indispensable. The membrane of sanity. I told him that a doctor would be obliged to agree. It made a strike upon me." He taps his head with a finger. He gives me one of his rare smiles. "You will please thank him for the beneficent roses."

I wait for him to go on, but he looks at his watch and hands me his card. He says that if I have any unusual headaches, I am please to call. Without hesitancy. His first name, which did not fit on his badge, is Anastasias. Anastasias Athanassiou. Live forever; that's what his last name means, according to Dr. Slocum.

---

Larney has brought me a silk scarf to wrap my patchy head in, a dowdy yet sumptuous thing printed with sailor's knots. Probably his mother's. It looks silly with the jeans and Peter Tosh T-shirt he's fetched from my parents' house, but I am too touched to refuse. In the parking lot, I get a few stares.

He helps me into his car. "You are something, honeybee, you are a tough one," he says when he gets in beside me. (You might wonder how it is that I let him go on using his silly endearment. I let him because it's true. Yes I carry sweet stuff, but yes I wander far afield, and yes I sting.)

I smile. Am I something? What is that something? Why does everyone insist all the time on my toughness? How blind can they be? I take one of the inventories that have become second nature in the past week: I am confused, weary, ashamed of things I will never recall, but I am glad to feel the sun, then glad to be riding in a fast expensive car, top down, along a shining river. Though ultimately I will be in no one's care but my own, and that's just as well, today I find myself c/o J. Larned Quincy Poole and glad about that, too.

After a mile or so, I say, "Larney, what does the J. stand for?"

"Jephthah. A great-great-grandfather. Name like a mouthful of gauze."

"Well Jephthah, you are one charming guy. You know what? In the hospital, I got asked the definition of chivalry -- long story. But it's you: you're the definition. And I have a feeling you saved my life." I can tell he knows my honest praise is the beginning of a respectful letdown, fair and square. It's my way of saying that he's made, as Dr. A. would put it, a strike upon me.

When we turn south, he reaches across the rearview mirror and lowers the visor, to shield me from the sun. After I thank him, he says, "You're welcome," both reflexively and with a bottomless heart. I pretend that dust has blown in my eyes.

He says, "If you're tired, just sleep. Please."

At the touch of a chrome toggle, my seat swoons slowly back. How sweet such tiny empirical pleasures feel at a moment like this. As I turn on my good side to search for a semblance of comfort, my cheek soothed by the warm leather, I see on the backseat a blue plastic bag labeled Personal Belongings. It contains, I imagine, nothing I owned before the accident: just the books, underwear, and lotion my mother bought me; the satin pajamas from Larney, now flecked with coffee and saline. Stowed there as well are my sister's secret longing, my father's fears, and this stranger's curious devotion, so worthy it pains me. I close my eyes and relabel the bag Things Entrusted To Me ... We Will See How Wisely. Then I'm off, scholar of the water winging toward a lofty, land-locked retreat.

---

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