Theory of Remainders (4 page)

He shook his head. He didn’t need to read the articles. Fifteen years ago a man named Édouard Morin had cut through his life like a scythe. What would returning to France now accomplish?

In the fourteen years, ten months, and seven days since his daughter’s death, Philip had managed to recreate something resembling a life. It had been a halting and fragile process, a bit like building a ship in a bottle when you have neither the right tools nor the proper materials. But gradually he’d assembled the masts and rigging of an existence, had glued the parts in place. He’d even learned to deal once again with adolescent girls in his practice. Girls like Melanie Patterson.

He knew perfectly well how trauma maimed people’s minds, no less completely than weapons or heavy machinery mangled their bodies, leaving them scarred and damaged. But sometimes it’s better to hobble forward. After all, you can’t undo the past. A large part of Philip’s job consisted of helping people come to terms with that lesson.

He looked at his watch. It was late. However, it was also Friday night, so he didn’t need to worry about sleep. He might not feel good about it the next day, but morning was a long ways off. He could sit with the pictures just a little longer, and then he would lay it all to rest once again.

Three

The woman seated to his left had slumped against the window, snoring softly. The man to his right, a corpulent, unshaven specimen, chuckled out loud at a film on a tiny screen, shifting his elbow to conquer what remained of the armrest. Philip’s knees were splayed to make room for the fully reclined seat in front of him. His long frame didn’t fit well in these contraptions.

He hated flying. Feared it. It was an irrational panic, made no less dire by his knowledge of its irrationality. When patients asked for help with their own aviophobia, as it was called in the
DSM,
he tried to fob them off on a colleague. If they insisted on working with him, he didn’t hesitate to pull out his pad and write them a script for Xanax. The more, the better.

So he was not heartened by the information presented on his personal screen. The last thing he needed was this constant reminder they were hurtling through the stratosphere at 553 miles per hour.

It had been a struggle to get out on time. Jonas had agreed to take care of matters at the office, and Linda was rescheduling appointments. Philip had called some of his more vulnerable patients himself to let them know he’d be away, that Jonas would be on call. He’d even e-mailed Faruk89 to let him know their game would be suspended. He didn’t want to leave anyone in the lurch.

The Xanax left him parched, and it hadn’t even taken effect yet. People around him had drugged themselves with wine and beer, even indulging in after-dinner cognacs. He’d felt a pull in that direction himself. After all, who would be the wiser if he had a drink here? Moreover, who could blame him? He looked about in hopes of spotting a flight attendant.

A woman in a blue uniform swayed down the darkened aisle collecting empty cups. When she reached Philip’s row, he leaned toward her across the belly of his neighbor. “Any chance I could get a scotch?” he asked in a hushed tone. The words felt strange on his tongue.

“I’m sorry?” she replied in accented English. The thrumming of the engine had absorbed most of his request.

Her voice soothed something in him, and he reined himself in, amending his order as he translated it. “
Je voudrais un verre d’eau, s’il vous plaît
.”

She smiled. “
Vous parlez français
.”

“
Je le parlais
,” he replied, settling back in his seat. “
Dans le temps
.”

Je le parlais
. That was about right. Not
I spoke
, but
I used to speak
. Conjugated in the imperfect, the tense of habitual activities and unfinished actions in the past—a past that still felt utterly remote, even while the distance separating him from it closed at over 500 miles per hour.

The flight attendant fetched him a cup and he took a long gulp. As she moved ahead and leaned toward another passenger, he admired her blue-uniformed flank, the curve of her calf. He closed his eyes. The Xanax was finally kicking in, forming a pleasing fog.

He drifted into a zone close to unconsciousness, deeper than reverie but not as remote as dream. It felt awkward in his mouth now, this language that he’d struggled to master, whose foreignness had been like an obstacle course leaving him bruised and scraped—but cautiously victorious. French had become for him a kind of
open sesame
, a charm revealing a magical cavern of otherness. When he’d gone to France—what was it now, nearly twenty-seven years ago?—he’d been looking to escape so many things: his family, his Jewishness, a failed relationship. He’d been modern enough and naïve enough—in short,
American
enough—to think that he could really get away, that he might actually refashion himself. Worst of all, he’d tricked himself into thinking it had worked. In Paris he’d branched out. He’d gone to museums and concerts. Everything was exotic. Simple trips to the grocery store or the bakery reserved small surprises. During his time at the American Hospital he’d met Yvonne, a girl from a good Catholic family who was writing her dissertation on Italian literature and making extra money from Spanish and English translations. She possessed magical powers: a simple gesture from her expanded the cramped social circles of Paris enough for him to slip in at her side. Yvonne had coached him in his French—which still came out like the pidgin of an immigrant laborer, but grew to become more than adequate, comfortable even.

For a while, anyway, he’d found his place.

The impact of the tires on the runway jolted him awake. He’d only slept in snatches, enough to leave him groggy and thickheaded. Or maybe it was the Xanax. In the short exchanges at immigration and customs his French felt stiff. He was like the Tin Man, his jaw in need of a squirt of oil. Once beyond the security area, he stopped for a double espresso, hoping for a boost from the caffeine. But still he felt out of kilter, like a film where the sound lagged behind the image.

By three thirty he had picked up his keys at the Hertz desk and located the gray Renault Laguna in the parking lot, settling himself heavily behind the wheel. It was now nine thirty a.m. Boston time. He rubbed his palms against his eyes, then turned the key in the ignition.

The outskirts of Paris were a tight weave of traffic and it took an hour before the white tip of Sacré Coeur rose on the horizon. That was his sign to veer off to the west, looping around the city on the north. Progress was slow, and his grogginess didn’t help. Twice he had to slam on the brakes to avoid rear-ending the car ahead. After nearly two hours, the traffic still clotted, fatigue overwhelmed him. Edging toward an exit, he pulled into a highway hotel and got himself a tiny room, outfitted like a well-appointed prison cell. He collapsed on the bed fully dressed.

He awoke feeling alert and ravenous, ready for the day. However, a glance at the clock produced a new wave of exhaustion: it was barely three in the morning. But then he’d lost the rhythm of sleep, was incapable of turning off his mind. He tried the relaxation techniques he taught his patients—to no avail. Finally he gave up and made coffee with the cup-sized machine on the desk, sipping while he looked over the handful of photos he’d brought along from the album.

By six a.m. he lay on the bed staring at the dimpled ceiling. He knew sleep was done with him, and it wouldn’t be long before he’d be back on the road. Then he’d have no choice but to tough it out, lurching through the next twelve or fourteen hours, come what may. In some sense it was a relief to know he’d soon be underway, that the machinery of this ordeal was starting up. He’d push through, one way or another, and then it would be over.

He gave his eyes one last rest before it was time to go down for breakfast.

When he awoke again it was bright outside and the alarm clock showed 12:07. He cursed out loud as he rolled out of bed. In the mirror he scowled at the exhausted man with gray-streaked hair matted down by the pillow, the tidy outline of his beard blurred by two days of grizzled stubble. He showered and dressed, grooming speedily, shaving around his beard with a practiced hand. He knotted his necktie fast, leaving the ends lopsided, then shoved on his shoes. As he flicked the laces around in a flurry of tying, a snap sounded and his right hand jerked back, a strand of shoelace clutched in his fingers. Just what he needed. He flung the lace to the ground.

Then he caught himself. Irritation, disorientation, that faint feeling of sadness—the whole bouquet of chronobiological symptoms. Jet lag. He forced himself to breathe deeply.

Glancing again at the clock, he calculated the distance he had to travel and shook his head. There was no way he could make it in time for the funeral now, no way at all, and he had to let them know. He called from the phone in his room, and when he got Yvonne’s voicemail, he left his message in English.

“It’s me,” he said. “I overslept. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t look like I’ll get there in time. I don’t have a cell phone here, but I’ll contact you as soon as I get in.” He paused. “Bye-bye.”

She’d say he’d done it on purpose, that oversleeping was a way of avoiding what he didn’t want to face. Worst thing was, he wasn’t sure she’d be wrong.

Back on the road it wasn’t long before the first chalky cliffs appeared at a bend in the Seine, the gateway to Normandy. An hour and a half later, after Rouen, he left the
autoroute
, preferring the back roads, many of the intersections marked with stone crosses. The pavement grew narrow. He swept along the edge of a broad forest, then looped north, traversing villages and hamlets, some no more than a cluster of shuttered houses. Every few kilometers a new community appeared, the church steeple rising above the trees, followed by rooftops. He cruised through, unhindered by stoplights or roundabouts. The road curved easily, wending through parcels of pasture and woods, passing over threads of creeks. Lanky Norman cows grazed in the pastures.

After the turnoff for Le Mont de l’If, he entered the flat basin of Upper Normandy in the center of the coastal bulge.

Then, just before Yvetot, he spotted activity in a farm field to his left. A tractor idled amidst rows of turned earth, puffs of exhaust sputtering from its stack. On the cart path bisecting this plot of land two other vehicles waited, one a small car marked
Gendarmerie nationale
, a blue light blinking from a beacon on the roof, and the other a white utility van with its back open, a shovel leaned against its side. Further away, along the edge of the woods, a cluster of men stood together—farmers by the look of their caps and boots. He slowed the car to a crawl and watched as a stocky man in blue coveralls, an insignia embroidered on the front, stepped from behind the tractor, cradling a burden in his arms, hugging it close against his chest. Philip’s first, incongruous thought was that the man carried, of all things, an
infant
. But the load in his arms was dark and hard, and the way he lumbered forward suggested a great weight. A stone, perhaps? The man in coveralls continued his unsteady trudge toward the white van.

Then, in his rear-view mirror, headlights flashed. A car had come up, and he was forced to accelerate, abandoning the odd scene. It wouldn’t be the first time something in France had left him baffled.

As he crested the last hill, the square campanile of Saint-Pierre church rose in the distance, soon followed by the low, jagged skyline of the town as it appeared on the horizon, a familiar profile.

But the outskirts of Yvetot felt different. Formerly bordered by modest farms, the town had now attracted big box discount stores and a giant supermarket. Forlorn shopping carts sunned themselves in parking lots where Charolais cows used to graze. Service stations had replaced barns.

Perhaps everything had changed? But as Philip steered the Renault down the slope, winding toward the heart of town, bands of old slate roof and stone wall came into view. With each passing block he sensed another step of a reluctant awakening, like a tingling in a benumbed limb. After this ancient perimeter he encountered the more modern structures in the center, rebuilt after the German occupation. There stood the garish city hall, with its war monument of a soldier in a battle scene. Off to the left was Saint-Pierre, the oddly newfangled church, a giant cylinder of brick and glass, like a monstrous keg planted in the city center. Around the main square, small shops stood shoulder to shoulder.