Shadow Man: A Novel (3 page)

The woman in white lays out my clothes on the bed as if I’m a child. Khakis, a blue buttondown shirt, gray socks, a brown braided belt. She says I need a shave and leads me to the bathroom and sets me in front of the big mirror over the sink. She runs the water, hands
me a razor and a can of shaving cream. She leans against the wall and watches. I have two thoughts: Why am I here? And if I know what to do with a razor and shaving cream, why can’t I remember this lady Eva who is coming to visit me? The razor scrapes. It’s a sound I know well, a soft sound, like sand on waxed paper. Every shave peels away a mask and brings a new man. I seem to know this analogy; maybe it’s from Kurt, maybe from those times when I was a boy standing in the bathroom watching him the way this woman in white is watching me. It’s a nice thought, to be new. I finish shaving and am pointed toward the shower. The woman in white steps outside the door, but leaves it open a crack. The water runs hard and warm; it feels good, washing away the clenched feeling the face has after a shave. I dry and put on my clothes. The bed is made and I sit on it. I smell of powder and deodorant. The vase on the table holds flowers; they look fresh.

A man, a doctor, slips into the room and asks me questions and writes things on a clipboard. He says I have a far-back but not close memory; my childhood vivid, my adulthood dormant, colorless. What I see, witness, experience one day disappears the next, like that shiny plastic paper I wrote on as a kid; when you lifted the paper off the inky board, whatever you had drawn was gone so you could begin anew. There are, apparently, endless analogies for what’s happening to my shriveling mind. A small part of my brain resembles a glacier with deep recesses sunlight cannot penetrate. He says it’s like when ice climbers descend into a fissure and the light dims as they dangle on ropes in the darkness. The doctor says there will be fewer fissures of light, and eventually all will be black, except for an occasional flash of unexplained lightning that may revive a memory for a few seconds or maybe an hour, but it doesn’t matter because it won’t last and the memory won’t be remembered anyway. Confetti in the wind; a shattered mosaic; these are other examples he uses. He brims with metaphor. The doctor is heavyset with a broad face and
curly brown hair that glows in the window light. He speaks quietly but in a determined, uninterrupted flow, like a book on tape, or a man telling you interesting facts between train stops. He is intrigued by me or, more precisely, my case; I am younger than the ashen-faced droolers lingering in hallways of piss and peppermint and that antiseptic scent that makes the floors sticky. That’s what excites him, my youth. I am, he says, very young “for such depletion.” Usually, a mind in my state is seventy or seventy-five years old, but I have somehow “depleted” earlier and this concerns the doctor, who says it’s happening more and more as baby boomers age; a whole generation dangling in the dark. He says he suspects “environmental causes mixed with the stresses of modern life that somehow, in its technology, has done something to the mind.” He speaks of synapses, brain circuitry, and promising drugs that have done wonders with rats. I have a headache. I want to ask him a question but I don’t. I just sit in my powder smell, staring at the flowers until he leaves. What is there to say about lost ice climbers?

“Do you want one of your books on photography, James? You like those.”

Does the woman in white ever go home, I wonder.

I shake my head and she leaves the room. I go to the table. It’s messy with
Philadelphia Inquirer
s, books (Emerson, Updike, Edward Weston), pens (Uni-balls), and notebooks scrawled with pictures, words, and stray, strange symbols. On one page “James” is written one thousand times in minuscule letters as if with a rat’s paw. On other pages paragraphs seem to lift out of nowhere as if they arrived uninvited, without context. One notebook is full of stories copied exactly from the
Inquirer
, except for the bylines, which all read “James.” I am James. I write the name James; the penmanship is the same. These are my notebooks. There’s a box on the table. I open it. There’s a stack of newspaper clippings inside, most from the
Los Angeles Times
. I pull the top one out. It’s dated September 12, 2001. The headline reads
TERRORISTS ATTACK NEW YORK, PENTAGON
. Fireballs and huge blossoms of smoke roll out of two buildings that look like silver pillars in a war without soldiers. Under the picture there’s a story written by James Ryan. There’s that name James again. I pull other clippings from the box. They are all written by James Ryan; some go back twenty years. I am James Ryan. I write for newspapers. Do I still? If this is me I’ve been to Prague and Budapest, Baghdad and Tehran, and many other places I don’t remember. But these are documents and datelines; they don’t lie, don’t appear mysteriously out of folders; no, they are real. There are pictures with the stories. One is of a crowd in the snow, stony faces peeking through a gray dusk dotted with ripped umbrellas, raised gloved fists, and a husky man with a full mustache and a bullhorn suspended above the crowd, transfixed in twilight, his eyes like dark fire. The caption identifies the man as Lech Walesa. I know that name, but I don’t; who is that name? I stare at the face, run my fingers over it, but he is meaningless to me, a stranger.

Another picture shows bearded men in the desert, bandoliers crisscrossing their chests, their faces hard and thin, their white teeth flashing, all of them standing in the back of a pockmarked pickup truck. They seem a ragged army of bank robbers or castaway nomads in the desert. The caption says they are mujahideen fighting American forces in a place called Anbar. I study their faces, too. But nothing comes. How can it not come? My name is there in ink. James Ryan. James Ryan was in Anbar with wild, bearded men. How does one forget that?

My head hurts. I close the box. I pick up another notebook. Pages and pages filled with spirals drawn in red, black, and blue ink; they look like twisters and tornadoes, storms whirling across paper. Another notebook is full of noses. Drawings and drawings of noses, fat, slim, long, bulbous, pert noses. They remind me of when I was a boy with Kurt and we went to a Halloween store to try on masks and I picked out a big waxy nose attached to black glasses and bushy
eyebrows. Kurt said I looked like Jerry Lewis in
The Nutty Professor
. Why can I remember Jerry Lewis and not Budapest?

I pick up the Emerson book and sit on my bed. I don’t read it. I hold its worn hard cover and let the sunlight warm me. I see steeples out the window, crosses pricking the sky, sneakers draped over phone lines. It seems familiar to me, as if out there on those streets part of me wanders. I step closer to the window. I am suspended over the city. I see a bridge, a twist of river, row houses, pigeons, laundry on rooftops, a silver train silent in the distance, racing beyond the car traffic and out of sight, so sleek and beautiful. There’s a park to the left. The leaves are yellow, plum, and brown. It must be the last days of autumn; I imagine I can hear the fallen leaves scratching the street, spinning in crinkly coils in the alleys. I try to go back to that last image, but it’s gone; my thoughts are ether, burning one brilliant moment and then vanishing. Perhaps they return, but how can I know.

I hear shoes squeaking. I turn from the window and see a woman in white. She smiles and steps into the room. There is someone behind her. The woman in white smiles, turns, and leaves the room. The lady standing near the window with me has dark hair, black, I think, but I can’t say for sure — sunlight plays tricks with color. Her face is sharp and pale, not sickly pale, but radiant, as if lit from inside. Her eyes are aluminum blue; her lipstick is red, but a quiet red; her hands are the long hands of a magician, or maybe a seamstress or a sculptor. She reaches into her purse and pulls out a paper scribbled with ink. She unfolds it; it makes no sound. She looks at me, then at the paper. She reads:

She folds the paper and slides it back into her purse. She puts her hands on my face, her thumbs skimming gently beneath my eyes. Her perfume I do not know. She looks hard into my eyes, studies them, as if something is written on them, a language or thoughts to decipher. Her hands slide from my face, brush my shoulders, and withdraw. I look at her, maybe the way a man looks at a map from another country. She sighs.

“You don’t remember that, do you? You wrote those words in 1989. In Prague, after Havel led them through the streets. James, you must remember. They are your words, in your hand, to me. I was the one sleeping in my clothes in the night. Don’t you remember how we laughed about working so hard that we slept in our clothes and woke up wrinkled.”

She steps closer and whispers into my ear.

“Sometimes we slept without our clothes. You must remember, James, the snow falling outside. Who am I, James?”

I want to know who she is, but I do not.

“I am Eva. The girl you met when the world changed.”

I am the woman in white.

He doesn’t know my name; doesn’t remember my face. Every day he asks: “Are you the woman in white from yesterday? I think there was one yesterday.” I listen to Eva tell him those stories; what a time it must have been, on the brink of so much. How can he not know this? He is young and handsome, the way men get when they start to gray, an angular classicism. His mind shouldn’t be so decrepit. These other drones in here, okay, they’ve slipped away. I see them, blank and ghost-eyed, fortunate their bodies move to permutations other than thought. Or is it? I don’t know. But he is younger and should not be so lost.

He tells me every day about Kurt and Vera. They’re the only alive things in that brain of his. I listen and imagine as he repeats their story under his breath. I am good at that. As a child I played make-believe, running through hidden passageways and lurking beneath windows, spying on neighbors with pocket cameras and decoder rings. Life is best understood in whispers, not in laughter and loud voices; we carry with us the secret things that quietly wear us away. I watched birds, too. My binoculars scanned the skies over fields of wildflowers and thistle. Dusk was the best time to see them, flying against the invading darkness; swift birds with tiny hearts and wings of purple, yellow, and black, and higher, hawks circling on wind currents like kings and queens in a storybook. I collected fallen feathers and taped them to my closet door, which over the years grew into a plume as lush as a Cherokee headdress. Birds were magic to me. They could go anywhere. I was a gangly girl, untamed
knees and elbows peeking from my communion dress, lost in the silk and taffeta of my prom gown. I evened out eventually and, although I am not a beauty, men have suggested I possess a bookish sexiness. I can never tell if that is a promise or a lie. There is so little space between the two, and as any woman knows men are capable of the sweetest phrases between happy hour and last call. I suppose it means I am thin and wear glasses and tied-back hair but have good breasts and clear skin. Even in adolescence, when other girls cotton-balled themselves with astringents and emollients, my skin was as bright as an empty page. James doesn’t mention such things. He offers no compliments, tells no half-truths; he looks at me the way a stranger does in a grocery store, a flicker of recognition that vanishes as the carts pass. I hope for more. The doctors, the administration, no one knows the secret bond I have to James. The way I appeared — an applicant with strong recommendations seeking work in an institution with high turnover — is a matter of perseverance with which I have been blessed. A natural talent, I suppose, in the way a handyman is gifted to fix broken blenders and sewing machines. We each have our proclivities, those things big and small that make us unique and enviable in the eyes of others. I suspect I am not much envied, although I do have, despite my previously mentioned active imagination, a reputation for pragmatism, but that may be the twin of perseverance. I prefer to think of myself as a quiet multitude of unappreciated qualities.

If that sounds bitter, I am not. I am a woman searching amid hallways, carrying syringes and paper cups of pills. I like the weight of the stethoscope around my neck, and sometimes I listen to my heart, marveling at the mystery of its energy and wondering how and when it will stop. Tick-tock. I don’t linger on such thoughts. I have a mission. I carry James’s chart. It is battered and heavy, and although I write neatly in it, meticulous in my numbers and abbreviations, it is filled with pages of what we nurses call “doctor-scratch.” I cannot
read it all but I know what it says about advancing Alzheimer’s, the shutdown of the light field across the medial temporal lobes (MTL), where the larva-shaped hippocampus loses its grasp of memory, perhaps caused long ago by trauma or maybe a disfigured gene or other predisposition that lurked in the tissue since birth only to one day bloom with mischievous intent. There are so many ways for a mind to tumble and lose itself in worlds far from us. The body on those Discovery Channel documentaries is glorious, intricate, and strong, a wonder of God conspiring with nature, but really we are as fragile as rice paper, ruined over time by imperceptible rips and tears.

I search for clues on a color-coded poster of the brain in profile I kept from nursing school. It strikes me that the most ingenious thing about us humans — not counting the soul — looks like a boxing glove. Atop which, to borrow a metaphor from James’s curly haired doctor, the cerebral cortex hovers like a trapped cloud. Where are the answers? I study the science and anatomy of James, his blood pressure, reflexes, temperature, the dose of his cholinesterase inhibitors, but I don’t know him, not even on my late shift, when all the doctors are home and I hold his CAT scans to the light and he floats before me, fleshless, a silver-gray apparition, yielding little. His hip bones resemble folded wings, his forearms flutes, his legs strange spindly reeds. He has five fillings, a broken rib that must have been untended when he was a boy, healing poorly, leaving the thread of disjointed marrow. This is what the pictures of science and technology bare. This is what I see. It is not enough. I need him to come back.