The Institute on the Hill

Audio note, Dr. Adrian Vance, dictated in the car, transcribed by R. Kessler.

Twelve forty. I've driven four hours today and I've been in three towns and I have not written a prescription in any of them. Note to self, and I mean this seriously, my friend: you are becoming a man who looks at things. Stop it. Either open a practice or become a birdwatcher, but stop looking at things and calling it work.

The institute is quiet. Forty beds, thirty-eight of them full, which is three more than the license technically enjoys, and I have decided not to think about that this week. Meyer has the night. I came up the hill and there were lights in the east wing and no lights in the west, which is correct, because the west is the long-term wing and the west goes to bed at eight whether or not its occupants agree with the arrangement.

Emmett Doyle did not go to bed at eight.

Emmett Doyle is my oldest resident and my most expensive failure. Six years. He came to me at forty-one, a former litigator with a spotless record and a spotless apartment and a very specific compulsion that had already cost him his marriage and his license and, by the end, most of his money. He breeds insects. That is not the problem. A great many decent men breed insects. The problem is the second half of the sentence, which is that he keeps them, kills them, and eats them, and does it as religiously as a man saying his prayers, and does it, he told me on the first day, because every life he takes he keeps, and he would like to know, when he stands in front of it, whether I have ever seen a man who is losing everything except his friends.

I looked in on him at eleven. He was sitting on the floor by the window with the jar.

He said, without turning around: "Eighteen today, doctor."

"You're going to give yourself a bowel obstruction."

"Everything that lives is a small fortune." He held the jar up to the light of the window, which was the light of a lamp on a pole outside, and inside it something moved and glinted. "You keep your accounts in a ledger. I keep mine in here. When I die, I'm ahead. When you die, your accounts go in a fire and your files go to a shredder. Which one of us is the sane man?"

The interesting thing about Emmett is that he isn't wrong, he's only early. Ten years, and the whole country will be talking about what the body is for.

I gave him his trazodone. He took it, which he always does, and then he said the thing that has been sitting in me all night, and I am repeating it here because I want it in the record and I do not want to be the only person who heard it.

He said: "The master is coming up the harbor."

That is a sentence I have heard from him eleven times in six years, always in the spring, always at night, and it has never once been true. This is the first year it is going to be true, because the Marisol is a real ship and it went aground on the shoal off Salt Harbor on the eleventh of May, and I have three patients who have not slept since, and one of them is Emmett Doyle, and he has just told me, with his mouth full and his face full of peace, that the man who owns him is on the coast.

I am going to bed. I am going to sleep, because I am a doctor and doctors sleep in order to be sane in the morning. I am not going to think about the fact that he said up the harbor two days before the coast guard closed the harbor.

The note is fourteen hundred words long and it is in the folder in two forms, as Vance spoke it and as Ruth Kessler typed it, and where he is in the first person she is in the third, and that was not a mistake in the typing. It was a decision she made in the second week and never explained, and after the first year she stopped apologizing for it: that the doctor's account is what a man says about himself, and the account around it is what the record says about him, and a file kept in two persons is harder to argue with than a file kept in one.

The Marisol was a bulk carrier of the kind that is barely a ship and mostly a warehouse with an engine, registered in Cyprus and chartered out of Constanța, carrying fertilizer and timber and, according to her manifest, nothing else at all.

She came in on a nor'easter, west of the shoal, in a fog that had shut the town down. The harbormaster had her on the radio four times. The voice that answered him was not the captain's voice — everyone agreed on this afterwards, and nobody could describe it past that, and the state police would eventually conclude that the second voice was the first mate, and the first mate would eventually be found in the water and would never be asked.

She struck at four in the morning and lay over on her side in eleven feet of water and stayed there for nine days, and for nine days nothing about her was ordinary.

The fertilizer was ordinary. The timber was ordinary. The crates were not.

Everyone in Salt Harbor knew about the crates because everyone in Salt Harbor watched the unloading, which took three days and required a crane brought up on a flatbed from New Haven, and the crates came off that ship in a queue and were set down on the pier in ranks and were counted by a customs officer with a clipboard. Forty-one of them. Long boxes, banded, stencilled in a script nobody could read, and heavy in a way that made the crane complain.

Sand, the customs man said. Topsoil in containers, which is a quarantine matter, which is a customs matter, and a man with a signature has handled it, and if you want to see the paperwork you can file a request in Boston.

They went inland in the middle of the night, on four flatbeds, and the state trooper who was supposed to escort them off the coastal road later reported that when he stopped the convoy at the county line to check the permits, the driver of the first truck got down and came back to him and gave him the permits, and that he could not afterwards remember writing anything about the stop, or how long it had been, or what the driver's face looked like, and that the pages in his notebook where the stop should have been were blank.

The captain was found in the water at eight in the morning. He was fifty-two and had a wife in Piraeus and a photograph of her in the wheelhouse, and the coroner's report said drowning and the coroner's report was, in the narrow sense, correct.

The deck log was recovered from the wheelhouse by the same customs officer, who turned it in and did not make a copy, because he was an honest man and because it did not occur to him that an honest man would need one.

The last entry in the deck log was in the captain's own hand and it was not about the ship.

It said: NOBODY SLEEPING. ELEVEN CREW NOW. THREE OFF AT THE LAST PORT AND NOT ONE MAN OF THE THREE REMEMBERED SAYING GOODBYE. SOMETHING IS ON BOUND. I HAVE BEEN TWENTY-NINE YEARS AT SEA. I HAVE NEVER ONCE WRITTEN A PAGE LIKE THIS PAGE. IF THIS BOOK COMES BACK WITHOUT ME, TELL THEM IT WAS NOT THE WEATHER.

And then, at the bottom, in a different hand, in ink that had not been made in that country since the war, four words.

THANK YOU FOR THE VOYAGE.

Delia Hartley read that page in the newspaper on the sixteenth of May, sitting on the porch in a cardigan that did not belong to her, while Ruth sat opposite with a folder in her lap, and she read it twice, and she laughed, and she said: "Who writes like that? Nobody writes like that. Somebody's making a thing of it," and she handed the paper back and asked whether her mother had called.

Ruth took the paper home instead of throwing it away, and put it in the folder, and that was the third document in it, and it was the first one that was not about Delia at all.