The Forgetting Time(35)
“Kap khun kap,” Angsley said, placing his hands together in a parody of a polite Thai, or perhaps he had become one, Anderson didn’t know. He’d seen him only twice since they’d graduated college ten years before, and each time had been a disappointment to both of them. They were on different paths: Anderson rising quickly within the university, en route to becoming chairman of the Psychiatric Department within a few years, and Angsley going in another direction, or rather (as far as Anderson could see) in no direction at all. Anderson had been surprised to find his friend settled anywhere; since college he had seemed perpetually on the move, briefly inhabiting the fine hotels and women of major cities from Nairobi to Istanbul, trying and failing to exhaust all that money born of generations of tobacco.
They watched the waitress go back through the open doors into the lobby bearing her silver tray. Nearby a string quartet was playing “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”
“Look what I’ve brought.” Angsley wagged his ginger eyebrows, reached into a paper bag at his feet, and pulled something out with a flourish, plopping it on the table. The thing slumped against the silver teapot, its legs splayed across the white linen: bright red yarn hair, striped legs, red circles for cheeks.
“You brought me a Raggedy Ann doll?” Anderson stared at it dumbfounded; gradually, it dawned on him. “It’s for today. To give the girl.”
“I was hoping for some kind of porcelain number but this is what they had. The stores here…” He shook his head.
“Are you out of your mind? You can’t give a doll to the subject of an experiment.” (Was that what this was? An experiment?)
“For god’s sake, man, loosen up. Have a scone.” Angsley took a bite out of a scone as large as a hand, sprinkling crumbs across the white cloth. His reddish hair was prematurely thinning across the expansive dome of his head, and his features had gone pink and blurry from too much sun and Thai whiskey, giving him a soft, pumpkinish look. Perhaps his brain had gone soft as well.
“It’s bribery.” Anderson frowned. “The girl will say whatever you want her to say.”
“Consider it a gesture of good faith. She’s not going to change her story for a Raggedy Ann doll, believe me. At least, I don’t think so.” Angsley peered at him. “You’re hating me under those shades, aren’t you?”
Anderson removed the sunglasses and blinked bare-eyed at his own white fingers. “It’s just that I thought you wanted a scientific appraisal. I thought that was the point of bringing me here?”
“Well, we’re kind of making it up as we go along, aren’t we?” His friend smiled a broad, slightly manic smile with his crooked teeth, as deranged in its way as that of the doll.
A mistake, Anderson thought. This was all a mistake. A few days before he had been in Connecticut, trudging through the snow to his lab. He’d been studying the long-and short-term effects of electrical traumatic stimulus on a rat’s central nervous system. He’d left the experiment at a crucial juncture.
“I thought this was a serious endeavor,” he said slowly. The note of complaint rang in the air like a child’s.
Angsley sounded hurt. “You didn’t put up much of a fight, if I remember correctly, when I asked you to come.”
Anderson looked away from him. The dog was still trying to cross the river. Would it make it to shore or drown? Two children exhorted it from the other bank, hopping in the mud. The rank river smell mingled in his nostrils with the floral scent of the tea.
What Angsley said was true. He had been eager to come. It had been a feeling, more than anything else, that had led him here, a wave of nostalgia that had overtaken him the moment he had heard his friend’s excited voice in the midst of those bleak months after the baby had died and everything had fallen apart.
He and Sheila were in separate hells and hardly spoke to each other. He made it through his days, studied his rats, took down the results as he ought to, drank more than he ought to; yet felt much of himself, most days, to be no better than the vermin he studied. Actually, the rats had more spark.
Angsley’s boyish enthusiasm had traveled the long distance between them like a memory of the interest he had once had in life and might find again, if he took the chance; and in any case it would be an escape, a respite, the thing he was looking for every night at the bottom of the glass.
“I’ve heard about the most extraordinary thing. It’s Shanti Devi all over again,” Angsley had said on the phone, and Anderson had laughed for the first time in months to hear the name. “I’ll pay your way, of course, in the interests of science.”
“Go,” Sheila had said. Her eyes were red-rimmed, accusing.
So he had taken it, this chance, this respite. He was taking it. He’d been relieved to leave Connecticut, with its oncoming Christmas and its angry, devastated wife. He had told Angsley nothing of his circumstances, preferring not to discuss it.
“Shanti Devi,” Anderson said now, aloud. It was probably nothing, he knew that. Still, the name was a tonic on his tongue, bringing him back a decade, to the taste of beer and youth. “It’s pretty hard to believe.”
Angsley brightened. “That’s why we’re going. So you don’t have to.”
Anderson glanced away from his eager face.
The mangy dog had made it across; he was scrambling up the muddy banks of the other side. He shook his fur, and the children screamed and scattered, avoiding the droplets of foul water that spun and sparkled in the light.