Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler Read Free Book Online Page A

subconscious, don’t you think? You can’t imagine how it feels to know you’ve been through something so catastrophic and yet there’s no trace of it in your mind. I almost wish you all hadn’t cleared away the evidence. Not that I don’t appreciate it; I don’t mean that. But it’s as if I’ve been excluded from my own experience. Other people know more about it than I do. For instance, how bad were my bed sheets? Were they soaked with blood, solid red? Or just spattered here and there.”
    “Yuck,” Kitty said.
    “Well, sorry, but—”
    A throaty rasp started up, like the sound a toad or a frog would make. Kitty lunged out of her chair and grabbed her cell phone from the coffee table. “Hello?” she said. And then, “Hey.”
    Liam sighed and set his spoon down. He hadn’t made much headway with his soup, and Kitty’s bowl was fuller than when she had started—a disgusting mush of crackers and swirled milk. Maybe tomorrow they should eat out someplace.
    “Oh …” she was saying. “Oh, um … you know”—clearly responding in code.
    Liam’s hands had a parched look that he had never noticed before, and his fingers trembled slightly when he held them up. Also, the vinegar smell was still bothering him. He was sure it must be obvious to other people.
    This was not his true self, he wanted to say. This was not who he really was. His true self had gone away from him and had a crucial experience without him and failed to come back afterward.
    He knew he was making too much of this.
    Liam had once had a pupil named Buddy Morrow who suffered from various learning issues. This was back in the days when Liam taught ancient history, and he had been paid an arm and a leg to come to Buddy’s house twice a week and drill him on his reading about the Spartans and the Macedonians. Anyone could have done it, of course. It didn’t require special knowledge. But the parents were quite well off, and they believed in hiring experts. The father was a neurologist. A very successful neurologist. A world-renowned authority on insults to the brain.
    Liam liked the phrase “insults to the brain.” In fact it might not be a phrase that Dr. Morrow himself had used; he might have said “injuries to the brain.” He’d said neither one to Liam, in any case. They’d talked only about Buddy’s progress, on the few occasions they’d spoken.
    Still, on Tuesday morning at 8:25 Liam telephoned Dr. Morrow’s office. He chose the time deliberately, having given it a good deal of thought in the middle of the night when Dr. Morrow’s name first occurred to him. He reasoned that there must be a patients’ call-in hour, and that probably this was either prior to nine a.m. or at midday. Eight a.m. until nine, he was betting. But he had to wait till after Kitty left for work, because he didn’t want her overhearing.
    She left at 8:23, walking to the bus stop beside the mall. He was on the phone two minutes later.
    He told the receptionist the truth: he was Dr. Morrow’s son’s ex-teacher, not an official patient, but he was hoping the doctor might be able to answer a quick question about some af-tereffects of a blow to his head. The receptionist—who sounded more like a middle-aged waitress than the icy young twit he’d expected—clucked and said, “Well, hold on, hon; let me check.”
    The next voice he heard was Dr. Morrow’s own, tired and surprisingly elderly. “Yes?” he said. “This is Dr. Morrow.”
    “Dr. Morrow, this is Liam Pennywell. I don’t know if you remember me.”
    “Ah, yes! The philosopher.”
    Liam felt gratified, even though he thought he detected an undertone of amusement. He said, “I’m sorry to phone you out of the blue, but I was recently knocked unconscious and I’ve been experiencing some very troubling symptoms.”
    “What sort of symptoms?” the doctor asked.
    “Well, memory loss.”
    “Short-term memory?”
    “Not short, exactly. But not long-term either. More like …