Read Online Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler - Free Book Online Page A

drugs? Some sort of pill, or truth serum?”
    Dr. Morrow had a firm clasp on Liam’s upper arm now. He was guiding him toward the door. “Trust me: this whole concern will fade away in no time,” he said, and his voice had taken on the soothing tone of someone dealing with a minor pest. “See Melanie at the cashier’s window on your way out, will you?”
    Liam allowed himself to be ejected. He mumbled something or other, something about thank you, appreciate your time, say hello to Buddy, or Haddon … Then he went to the cashier’s window and wrote a check for more than he normally spent on a month’s groceries.
    In the waiting room, Louise was nodding and tsk-tsking as she listened to a sallow girl in overalls—a new arrival who had taken Liam’s old seat. “I’m just watering the perennials,” the girl was saying. “I work at the Happy Trowel Nursery, out on York Road; know where that is?
    And all at once I start hearing this song playing way too fast. It doesn’t sound real, though. It sounds like … tin. All tinny and high-speed. So I say to this guy Earl, who’s hauling in the pe-tunias, I say, ‘Do you hear Pavement singing?’ Earl says, ‘Come again?’ I say, ‘It seems to me I hear Pavement singing “Spit on a Stranger.” ’ Earl looks at me like I’m nuts. Well, especially since it turns out he had no i-dea Pavement was a musical group. He figured I meant York Road was singing.”
    “Where has he been all this time?” Louise asked. “Everyone knows who Pavement is.”
    “But he’d have thought I was nuts anyhow, because there wasn’t no music of any kind playing. It was all in my brain. This big old tangled clump of blood vessels in my brain.”
    Liam jingled the coins in his pocket, but Louise didn’t look up. “That must feel so weird,”
    she said.
    “Dr. Meecham thinks they can, like, zap it with a beam of something.”
    “Well, you know I’m going to be praying for you.”
    Liam said, “I’m ready to go, Louise.”
    “Right; okay. This is my father,” Louise told the girl. “He got hit on the head by a burglar.”
    “He didn’t!”
    Louise told Liam, “Tiffany here has a tangled clump of—”
    “Yes, I heard,” Liam said.
    But he wasn’t looking at the girl; he was looking at the old man sitting next to Jonah, the one with the hired rememberer. You couldn’t tell, at the moment, that anything was wrong with him. He was reading a New Yorker, turning the pages thoughtfully and studying the car-toons. His assistant was gazing down at her lap. She seemed out of place next to the old man, with his well-cut suit and starched collar. Her face was round and shiny, her horn-rimmed spectacles smudged with fingerprints, her clothes hopelessly dowdy. Liam wondered how he could ever have taken her for the old man’s daughter.
    Well, but consider his own daughter, rising now to grasp both of the overalled girl’s hands.
    “Just keep in your heart the Gospel of Mark,” she was saying. “Thy faith hath made thee whole. Go in peace and be whole of thy plague.”
    “I hear you, sister,” the girl told her.
    Liam said, “Could we please leave now?”
    “Sure, Dad. Come along, Jonah.”
    They passed between the two facing rows of patients, all of whom (Liam was convinced) were giving off waves of avid curiosity, although nobody looked up.
    “Must you?” Liam asked Louise the minute they reached the hall.
    Louise said, “Hmm?” and pressed the call button for the elevator.
    “Do you have to air your religion everywhere you go?”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. She turned to Jonah. “You were such a good boy, Jonah! Maybe we can get you an ice cream on the way home.”
    “Mint chocolate chip?” Jonah said.
    “We could get mint chocolate chip. What did the doctor have to say?” she asked Liam.
    But he refused to be diverted. He said, “Suppose that girl happened to be an atheist? Or a Buddhist?”
    The elevator door clanked open and