“Comme vous voulez, Docteur,” he repeated.
“Pour toi, Itzal, un souvenir,” I said, and gave him an old Baedeker guide to the Basque country I’d found in a used-book store.
“Je vous remercie, Monsieur Docteur,” he said with the hint of a bow as he slipped the little volume into his loose coat. Minutes later he’d vanished from the room, and I did not see him again. The new doorman is a mountainous, sweating Chechen named Bworz.
—
No word from Clementine. Six weeks since her graduation, four weeks since she left, going on five.
I force myself to walk the park or up and down the avenue, to keep myself from checking my answering machine, although the longer I am gone, the more I feel the hope burning within me, that in my absence Clementine will have gotten in touch.
Nothing.
After her departure, what felt like a terminal agony took hold of me. I was a hospice patient hooked up to a PCA drip, except that instead of a morphine pump, I clutched my cellphone and dosed myself with the redial button. Clementine’s number would ring several times before the connection switched to her voicemail; from this I assumed that wherever she was, she was still charging her phone. Eventually, however, her voicemail started answering immediately, and her message changed from her brisk “Clem here—leave a message” to a synthesized recitation of the telephone number. And yet I continued to call. Finally, a small package arrived at the apartment building. At first, when I saw the French postmark, I thought that the package must be from my correspondent, that he had taken to tormenting me where I lived. It made sense: Why not strip me of the two-block buffer that separated my home from the postal box? Why not revoke the possibility that I could somehow, someday, simply stop checking it? But then I noticed that the handwriting on the envelope was Clementine’s.
I tore open the package and a cellphone thudded onto the desk. It was her cellphone, the one I had been calling. Strapped to it with a rubber band was a note, also in her handwriting. Get a grip, Daniel, it said. Actually, it said, get help.
I tried to turn it on, but the battery was dead. Moving as though in someone else’s dream, I walked out to buy a charger, walked home, and plugged the phone in, calling it mechanically one last time just to—just to what? To verify that it had been working? To reassure myself that she had heard the messages I had left? When I called her number that last time, however, and her own telephone leapt alive on my desk, ringing and vibrating, when the voicemail picked up and the synthesized voice repeated her number, I heard my voice saying, This is your father, Clementine. And again, This is your father. This is your father. Your father.
—
Clementine’s telephone sat inert as a petrified egg on the hall table, and yet it seemed to throb with talismanic promise, as though for its sake she would bang back through the front door, exclaiming, God, I’m such a dork! Forgot my phone again—
But weeks passed. Suddenly it was July.
The phone had not rung.
—
How queer, the tendency of our days to flatten into a sameness, as water finds its level. I watched them pool up in the old routines of work and sleep. Each day I unlocked my office and watched my patients come and go. Each day I went to the post office, to peer into box 5504. Everything different, but everything also just as it was. As though everything were not, in fact, closing on its end, as though I had not, for example, begun to seek out new placements for my patients. My explanation? An unexpected family circumstance had required me to move from the city for at least a year.
The boy Micha, eight years old, my only child patient, was convinced I was leaving because he had thrown a tantrum and broken the Connect 4 set I keep for play therapy. When I explained to him that I was not mad at him, that there was a grown-up problem that I had to go fix, he announced that I was going to go spy on the Chinese and “steal the secret of their code writing.” I asked him what he would do while I was gone. He was going to take Chinese pills so he could speak to me when I got back.
My patient Mrs. Thalmann embraced with passionate intensity the conviction that I had cancer—most likely pancreatic, considering my age.
And what did pancreatic cancer bring to mind for her?
Bring to mind? Nothing. It brings nothing to mind. Pancreatic cancer, that’s curtains.
Curtains? I said.
Curtains means no mind, no mind left and nothing left to bring.
I said she was convinced I was going to die, that we would have to part for good, just as she had always been convinced that I would abandon her.
Everyone abandons everyone.
Yes. You are convinced of that.
But that is true, isn’t it? One way or another that will be true, whatever I think of it, whatever I feel about it. The future’s not some sort of Rorschach blot, Daniel. With that she stalked out of the session twenty minutes early.
It was the afternoon of Mrs. Thalmann’s departure that the next letter from my correspondent arrived in the post office box. Again I forced myself to wait until I was home and at my desk before opening the envelope. When I saw what it contained, I picked up the phone on my desk and dialed Officer Peña at the precinct house.
“Where’s your daughter now, Mr. Upend?” Officer Peña asked when the call was put through.
I said she was in danger.
“How do you know?”
I said she was still missing.
“Is she still an adult?”
I said I had a photograph of her, sent by God knows who.
“Is she in danger in the photograph?”
She was in Paris.
“Paris, Mr. Upend? Maybe she was the one who
