So his name was Joe? He made no answer.
The physician closed the door behind him and crossed the room. He had a square jaw and brow, smooth, pink features, wavy blond hair, and heavy-rimmed spectacles: a physician caricature, the generic of a type, giving the fleeting feeling of possessing no more substance than the room.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked. Joe shook his head. “I’m Dr. Arnold. We’ve known each other for quite some time now.”
“Oh,” Joe said.
Arnold peered at him closely. “Do you know who you are?”
“I’m Joe,” Joe told him.
The physician frowned and seemed momentarily perplexed. “Well, of course you’d know that. I just told you,” he said.
“It was a joke,” Joe explained.
“That was funny?”
Joe shrugged. “Not in a way that you’d split your sides over. But kind of, I guess.”
“Why was it funny?”
Joe was beginning to find this a strange conversation. “Well, if you don’t know, I don’t know how to tell you,” he replied.
“Then tell me why you think it’s funny,” Arnold said.
“Look, you don’t need to lose any sleep over it. It’s not that big a thing. Why are we making such a deal out of this?”
Arnold stared at him intently. “But I need to know. It’s important that I know everything that goes on inside your head. It’s been pretty messed up, I’m afraid. You’ve been a very sick man, Joe.”
Joe didn’t feel as if he had been sick. Not just at that moment, anyway. He did feel that Arnold was a strange kind of person to be telling him that he had been. But then the coherence that had momentarily given clarity to his thoughts fell apart again, and what happened next dissolved back into confusion.
* * *
“It’s great that you’re up and about, Joe. We can show you the place, and you can start meeting some of the other patients. That will do you a lot of good.”
The nurse’s name was Katie. They walked slowly along a wide corridor with windows on one side, looking out at the river and the bridges. Moving felt more natural, but he still had occasional attacks of giddiness—especially when he changed his direction of vision too suddenly. Sometimes everything would go completely blank for a moment. Arnold said it was because different parts of his nervous system were out of synchronization and needed time to accommodate to sudden changes of input.
“What city is this?” Joe asked.
“That’s good: you’re getting curious about things. This is Pittsburgh,” Katie said.
Somehow it did not come as a complete surprise. He had a vague recollection of coming to work here. But the clearer details of his still-blurred memories were from another city of high buildings with a river.
“How long ago did I come to Pittsburgh?” he asked.
“The second-largest city in Pennsylvania, with a population of over two million, once known as the Gateway to the West,” Katie recited, ignoring his question. She went on, sounding like a talking commentary at a museum exhibit whose button had been pushed. “In the eighteenth century it was a scene of intense rivalry between the British and the French, which caused five forts to be built here. It was a major producer of armaments for the Union during the Civil War, and subsequently grew to become the center of the steel industry through the 1960s.”
Joe shook his head. “No, I was asking about me. How long have I been here? What did I come here for?”
“I think you’d better talk to Dr. Arnold about that,” Katie replied.
Joe sighed. In his scattered moments of clearer perception, he was getting used to this kind of thing. Arnold said it was because his mind wandered off into its own internalizations and lost logical continuity. “Are you a history major or something?” he asked as they resumed walking.
“No. I’m a nurse. Why?”
“Do all nurses talk like that?”
“Why shouldn’t they? Don’t most people take an interest in such things?”
“Hardly.”
“What kind of things would you expect me to be interested in?”
It was such a peculiar question that Joe didn’t know how to answer. When he looked at her, her eyes, although fixed on him, seemed to have an emptiness that gave him the feeling of talking to a shell.