Until I Find You

only American,” the nurse said. “Bleibel,” she added, vigorously shaking Jack’s hand.

“Excuse me?”

“Waltraut Bleibel—I’m telling you my name!”

“Oh. Jack Burns.”

“I know. Professor Ritter is expecting you. We’ve all been expecting you, except for poor Pamela.”

They went outside the building and walked across a patio; there was a sculpture garden and a shallow pond with lily pads. (Nothing anyone can drown in, Jack was thinking.) Most of the buildings had big windows, some of them with those black silhouettes of birds painted on the glass. “Our anti-bird birds,” Nurse Bleibel said, with a wave of her hand. “You must have them in America.”

“I guess I went to the wrong building,” Jack told her.

“A women’s ward wouldn’t be my first choice for you,” Nurse Bleibel said.

The grounds were beautifully maintained. There were a dozen or more people walking on the paths; others sat on benches, facing the lake. (No one looked insane.) There must have been a hundred sailboats on the lake.

“I take William shopping for clothes, on occasion,” the nurse informed Jack. “I’ve never known a man who likes shopping for clothes as much as your father does. When he has to try things on, he can be difficult. Mirrors are a challenge—triggers, Dr. von Rohr would call them. But William is very well behaved with me. No fooling around, generally speaking.”

They went into what appeared to be an office building, although there were cooking smells; maybe a cafeteria, or the clinic’s dining hall, was in the building. Jack followed the nurse upstairs, noting that she took two steps at a time; for a short woman in a skirt, this required robust determination. (He could easily imagine his dad not being inclined to fool around with Waltraut Bleibel.)

They found Professor Ritter in a conference room; he was sitting all alone, at the head of a long table, making notes on a pad of paper. He jumped to his feet when Nurse Bleibel brought Jack into the room. A wiry man with a strong handshake, he looked a little like David Niven, but he wasn’t dressed for tennis. His pleated khaki trousers had sharply pressed pant legs; his tan loafers looked newly shined; he wore a dark-green short-sleeved shirt.

“Ah, you found us!” the professor cried.

“Er hat zuerst Pamela gefunden,” Nurse Bleibel said. (“He found Pamela first,” she told him.)

“Poor Pamela,” Professor Ritter replied.

“Das macht nichts. Pamela just thinks it’s her medication again,” the nurse said as she was leaving.

“Merci vielmal, Waltraut!” Prof. Ritter called after her—a bilingual “Many thanks!” in French and Swiss German.

“Bitte, bitte,” Nurse Bleibel said, waving her hand as she had at the anti-bird birds on the big windows.

“Waltraut has a brother, Hugo, who takes your father to town—on occasion,” Professor Ritter told Jack. “But Hugo doesn’t take William shopping for clothes. Waltraut does a better job of that.”

“She mentioned something about mirrors,” Jack said. “She called them triggers, or she said one of the doctors did.”

“Ah, yes—we’ll get to that!” Professor Ritter said. He was a man used to running a meeting. He was friendly but precise; he left no doubt about who was in charge.

When the others filed into the conference room, Jack wondered where they’d been waiting. On what signal, which he hadn’t detected, had they been summoned forth? They even seemed to know where to sit—as if there were place cards on the bare table, where they put their almost identical pads of paper. They’d come prepared; they looked positively poised to take notes. But first Jack had to endure the obligatory handshakes—which, in each case, went on a shake or two too long. And each doctor, as if their meeting had been rehearsed, had a characteristic little something to say.

“Gruss Gott!” Dr. Horvath, the hearty Austrian, cried—pumping Jack’s hand up and down.

“Your on-screen persona may precede you, Mr. Burns,” Dr. Berger (the neurologist and fact man) said, “but when I look at you, I see a young William first of all!”

“On the other hand,” Dr. von Rohr said, in her head-of-department way, “should we presume that we know Jack Burns because of our familiarity with William? I’m just asking.”

Dr. Huber had a look at her pager while shaking Jack’s hand. “I’m just an internist,” she was telling him. “You know, a normal doctor.” Then her pager beeped and she dropped Jack’s hand as suddenly as she might have if he had died. She went to the telephone in the room, which was just inside the door. “Huber hier,” she said into the phone. There was a pause before she added: “Ja, aber nicht jetzt.” (“Yes, but not now.”)

Jack was sure that he recognized Dr. Anna-Elisabeth Krauer-Poppe—the fashion model who protected her clothes in a long, starched, hospital-white lab coat. She looked knowingly into his eyes, as if trying to discern what medication he was on—or what she thought he should be taking. “You have your father’s good hair,” she observed, “if not—I hope not—his obsessions.”

“I’m not tattooed,” Jack told her, shaking her hand.

“There are other ways to be marked for life,” Dr. on-the-other-hand von Rohr remarked.

“Not all obsessions are unhealthy, Ruth,” Dr. Huber, the internist, said. “It would appear that Mr. Burns adheres to his father’s diet. Don’t we all approve of how William watches his weight?”

“His narcissism, do you mean?” Dr. von Rohr asked, in her head-of-department way.

“Are you seeing a psychiatrist, Mr. Burns?” Dr. Berger, the fact man, asked. “Or can we rule that out?”

“Actually, I have been seeing someone,” Jack told them.

“Ah, well …” Professor Ritter said.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of!” the deputy medical director, Dr. Horvath, shouted.

“I don’t suppose you have any indication of osteoarthritis,” Dr. Huber said. “You’re too young,” she added. “Mind you, I’m not saying that William’s arthritic hands are anything you need to worry about. You don’t play the piano or the organ, do you?”

“No. And I don’t have any symptoms of arthritis,” Jack said.

“Any medications we should know about?” Dr. Krauer-Poppe asked. “I don’t mean for arthritis.”

“No, nothing,” he told her. She looked somewhat surprised, or disappointed—Jack couldn’t be sure.

“Now, now!” Professor Ritter called out, clapping his hands. “We should let Jack ask us some questions!”

The doctors cheerfully tolerated Professor Ritter, Jack could tell. The professor was head of the clinic, after all—and he doubtless bore lots of responsibilities of a public-relations kind, which the doctors probably wanted nothing to do with.

“Yes, please—ask us anything!” Dr. Horvath, the skier, said.

“In what way are mirrors triggers?” Jack asked.

The doctors seemed surprised that he knew about the mirrors—not to mention triggers.

“Jack had a conversation with Waltraut, about taking William shopping for clothes,” Professor Ritter explained to the others.

“Sometimes, when William sees himself in a mirror, he just looks away—or he hides his face in his hands,” Dr. Berger said, sticking to the facts.

“But other times,” Dr. von Rohr began, “when he catches a glimpse of himself, he wants to see his tattoos.”

“All of them!” Dr. Horvath cried.