Walton began talking immediately: no greeting, no surprise at seeing her. In his dream, he’d been in the mountains, in some Ottoman area, and a kaftaned nurse had given him a bed on the ledge of a cliff, ideal for the view of the rock strata looming above and a canyon below. But one of his legs kept dragging him closer to the edge when he dozed off, and finally he woke in midair. “I felt like a bird with wet feathers,” he said. “There was nothing to be done but fall.”
A crane trapped in a greenhouse, soggy and white, all sharp angles and flopping plumage. He was flushed and his long hair was damp and tangled; he’d lost twenty pounds since she’d seen him in July. Someone had stuffed him into a high-necked, long-sleeved nightshirt and given him red wool socks. Except for the ceiling-high French windows, the room was similarly padded: cushioned carpets, velvet walls, a tapestry that showed dancers who had very short noses and legs. Victor had packed the room with palms, as if he thought he could coax Walton into an African memory. Maybe Victor thought Johannesburg was a jungle.
She read through the doctor’s notes and found no obvious slide: he didn’t have fresh sores, his vision was fine, and much of his confusion could possibly be put down to overmedication, rather than end-stage tabes dorsalis. He’d never looked like someone with syphilis: he was a good-looking man, outwardly austere, a cultured figure with a solid sense of humor, tall and lean with a strong, bony face. He dressed well and spoke well and no one meeting him guessed he was sick, let alone that he’d been raised in a workhouse. Under the bespoke suits he tracked the progress of potential sores with pens, drawing circles and stars and arrows around potential gummas, the necrotic holes many tertiary syphilitics developed. His lesions came and went, but they rarely left a scar and almost never appeared on visible skin, his face or neck or hands. He kept a chart in the last pages of his medical notebook listing rumored victims and the men (and women) he’d met at the world’s clinics, with notes on the duration of what he called their benign suffering , and at every clinic, worn down by language—chancres, preputial edema, indolent buboes—he’d peer through doors at the other, hidden patients, his imagination wrestling with the horror of dissolving eyes, food falling through an open cheek. Some people survived for decades without the events he dreaded: a dropped nose or penis or mind.
Dulcy read the spines of the books on his table—mythology, minerals, medicines—while he told her about the ship home, a new plan to buy diamond mines in Namaqualand, the injustice of being kept captive as he recovered. The cold air from the open window cut through the violet and aspidistra fug, and while she listened she arranged the talismans he always carried: a soft chunk of native copper, one small root of silver, an acorn of gold. He began to wind up: If he could not walk down a sidewalk, was he truly alive? Where did they think he would go, an old unsteady man? Why were his nurses ancient and ugly? He hissed—in a whisper like a magpie call—that everyone was trying to take his money and his medication, and that he’d appreciate Dulcy locating both. His medicine chest had been replaced by a bottle of Bromo–Seltzer and a bellpull. He wanted a new doctor, and he wanted his potions back.
The chest had been taken away when he’d been found trying to jam several substances up his nose. “Henning says you took too much of everything. They’re afraid you’ll kill yourself.”
“I should think it would be a relief.” His eyes fogged. “I had forgotten that you and Victor had reached an agreement.”
“We haven’t,” she said. “I’ve come to see you.” She gave him a sip of water, but he kept his eyes on the window and a roof across James Street, where a young workman hurried to patch some tar before the rain fell again. Clouds scudded behind the building, which had a glassed turret and an open door. It looked like a fine place to hide, but she doubted the workman would be allowed inside for long. He’d stacked lumber next to the tar bucket, and she wondered if the person in the turret would have a roof garden.
“My bad moments are due to the state of my stomach. The bilge they give me—raw cabbage and rolls with wheat like quartz shards. Fetch that journal, the one on top.”
He pointed to a gaudy turquoise silk-covered notebook at the end of the bed. “A new one?” she asked, before she took in a dozen jewel-toned journals nearby. “You’re starting fresh?”
“No,” he said. “The same old. I spruced them up a bit. This one’s for dreams; I seem to spend half my time having them now. I found a talented Hindu binder in Cape Town.”
“Why this color?” she asked.
“Daydreaming. Looking at the sky.”
Not Seattle’s sky. The air above the workman across the street was a resolute battleship gray. Walton, man of science, had never cared about the sleeping world before. He smelled boozy, but maybe the spruce bows in the hall had ruined her nose. She was surprised that Victor, who was terrified by illness, would knowingly have Walton under the same roof.
But: the money. She flipped the new book open and stared down at someone else’s writing, a baby’s jiggery lines. “Oh, Dad.”
“What? I had such visions on this last ship, beautiful things. A woman appeared to me—semi-classical, you know—and as she came closer all the fog or fabric fell away entirely.” He smiled, locked on other skin even though his own looked as if it would crack over his cheekbones. “She was soothing.”
Inside, he still believed he was beautiful and adept, fast and smart and smooth. Dulcy started to drizzle, tears rolling down her face. “What the hell is wrong with you, Dulce?”
“You can barely hold a pen. You must have brain lesions.”
“Spare me, please. I’m only a bit punky, and if your fiancé could find a real doctor in this fogbank town, there’d be no problem at all. If he can’t, I’m off.”
“He’s not my fiancé.” This was how things would fall apart, if Walton kept it up.
“Well, I’m sure that’s news to him.” But he looked away, a retreat. Walton was arrogant, but he wasn’t Victor; he hadn’t spent life on an untouchable plateau. So much hung on keeping both altitude (though Walton still used the word as a synonym for drunkenness) and a certain dose of self-deprecation, even in a nightshirt, even with a tremor that could thresh wheat. She watched him seesaw, searching for a safe change of tangent. “I would appreciate some meaningful medicines, darling. You’ll set these people straight. I have a snake in my gut.”
“No,” said Dulcy. “You don’t.”
“A snake on fire, running up my throat to my brain. Go fetch a real bottle.”
One snake would lead to another—he could talk about nearly stepping on a rattlesnake in a Nevada silver mine for hours. She stalled by turning pages: the newest entry was a description of a childhood dream, about being small and trapped. At the end of underground , you can hear the rocks scrape and talk , Walton had scratched out and talk and replaced it with and swell and growl .
“Is your silly sister cavorting in the city?”
Dulcy nodded. Swanning, dancing, running a finger too far up timid Alfred’s sleeve. And why not? The workman across the street moved with economy and grace. She liked his curly hair, and wished she were in the turret, though it made her queasy when the man walked near the edge. She was no good at heights.