The Man Who Walked Away A Novel by Maud Casey

makes the sign of the cross. “A statue of living pain.”
    With a quick jerk of her shoulders, she falls back as though someone has yanked her. She thrashes and twists. Flash: an image of her mouth making the shape for the sound the audience is making. O. Leaping to her feet, she thrusts a hip to one side and turns to the great doctor. Flash: an image of her as she says, “Get rid of the snake in your pants.”
    “Eroticism,” the great doctor says.
    The girl looks up into the audience. “When I am bored, all I have to do is make a red knot and look at it.”
    The Doctor thinks of Marian in the courtyard the other day, turning her attention to the single red flower triumphantly blooming among the green shoots in the asylum flower garden. The sun isn’t the only thing that speaks to her: there are the trees, the benches, the figures in the stained glass, the Virgin Mary who, it turns out, is very concerned the patients are not being fed properly, and the red flower too. The red flower frustrates her because it speaks a foreign language she has not yet learned. If she could only learn it, she said, and he’d had to call one of the attendants over to prevent her from banging her head against the wall in an effort to shake the language loose. The beautiful red flower isn’t beautiful to her; it is a red knot to be undone.
    “I’m not sure what we have here,” the great doctor says, aiming the same stern owly look at the girl that he had aimed at the photographer and then at the Doctor. You will be banished . Still, for a moment the Doctor thinks he may have lost control; the girl may no longer be willing.
    “You don’t want any more?” she shouts.
    Flash: an image of her pausing as she begins to pull something from her open mouth, from somewhere deep in her throat. The Doctor believes her entirely capable of conjuring something; he is only waiting to see what that something will turn out to be.
    “Darling,” the great doctor says, as if she is his wife with whom he is having a quarrel.
    The great doctor nods to the hairy bear who steps forward and puts his hand on the right side of the girl’s waist and presses.
    “Mother! I am frightened.” The fierceness gone; she is just someone’s lost daughter.
    “Note the emotional outburst,” says the great doctor.
    “Oh, Mother!” the girl cries.
    “Not quite regular as a mechanism today,” the aristocratic nose in front of the Doctor whispers to the high forehead.
    “The belt,” the great doctor says to the hairy bear, who leaves the amphitheater. To the audience he says, “This is no ordinary pain.”
    It is hard to tell from this distance, but the Doctor believes he sees a smile pass over the girl’s face. Certainly the girl’s pain is anything but ordinary. There is that great distance between where she began and where she has arrived; underneath the surface pattern that allows for the great doctor’s diagnosis, the messier life.
    “The ovary compressor,” the great doctor announces when the hairy bear returns with a device comprised of a leather strap and a screw. “It may be directed at a particular hysterogenic point, then loosened or tightened as needed.” The hairy bear secures the belt around the girl’s slender hips, pulling it tight, turning the screw to secure it, and slowly, very slowly, she begins to list from side to side, a metronome: tock, tock, tock . Slower and slower. Tock. Tock. Tock.
    “She may enter the withdrawal phase now. This phase can last for hours. Even days. The belt will give her a bit of peace.”
    The girl’s movement has become so slow it is almost imperceptible.
    “But she can’t wear it forever,” the great doctor says.
    The hairy bear hoists her up on the stretcher, where she goes completely still. Her light has gone out. Once again, she appears to be sleeping; once again, she appears to be shrinking.
    The monkey thumps against the door.
    “The regularity of a mechanism,” the great doctor says. The monkey