“Oui.”
“My spirit?”
“Non non. Do not alarm. It will see you out the night.”
“The night. Terrific. That gives me, what, seven hours?”
“And more. How long is your arrangement at Arles?”
“Five weeks. This is my second day.”
“Mister Monsieur is an artist?”
“I teach at a junior college in Indiana.”
“But Mister Monsieur’s soul suffers?”
Miller stared at the odd-looking physician with his queer, Oriental, triangular face. He fixed on the man’s fiery left ear, his dagger’s-point beard, the sprawling flourish of his mustache like elaborate handwriting above his almost feminine lips. It was almost all he could do to keep himself from laughing at its foolish excesses. “Yes,” he admitted quietly, “it sure does.”
Then Dr. Félix Rey looked about the room, taking in his surroundings for apparently the first time.
“This is where he live.”
“Yes,” Miller said.
“Yes,” said Dr. Rey, “I have been here. Oh, many years since. But not much since the Foundation have kept it for Fellows. Well,” he said shyly, “for a group photograph once. Of the Club of the Portraits of Descendants of People Painted by Vincent Van Gogh. Here, may I present? My pleasure, my pleasure.”
He produced a second postcard from somewhere in his suit and extended it toward terminally cracked-spirit, soul- weakened Miller, a blurry black-and-white photograph of people as vaguely familiar to Miller as Dr. Félix Rey had been. In it, ranged about Van Gogh’s room at Arles, which somehow disappeared, was absorbed, swallowed up by their relentless, insistent, novelty presence as some historical place (where a famous general had died of his wounds, say, or the room where an important document had been signed or great book written) might be by the presence of tourists, were the peasant Patience Escalier, Joseph, Berceuse, Armand and Camille Roulin, Madame Ginoux (who herself bore a striking resemblance — they could have been sisters— to Kaska Celli), Rey himself, and the fierce Zouave. Six of the eight were crowded onto the room’s two chairs and along the side of Van Gogh’s bed. The other two, the postman Roulin with his salt-and-pepper, broad shaggy beard so layered with hair it was impossible to make out his neck or determine whether he wore a tie, or even if his shirt was buttoned, and the dashing soldier boy, surprisingly slight but with a large head and a powerful neck, posed for their picture in what was left of the room, in a small clearing on the tiled floor. It reminded Miller of some remarkable class photograph. (Good heavens, he thought, this might have been taken at one of the English-as-a-second-language courses back at Booth Tarkington.)
“We have not changed a day. It is as if the time stood still.”
“Indeed,” said Miller.
“I am a physician, Roulin is a postesman. Even the young lad is demob’d from the Foreign Legion.”
“And the peasant, Patience Escalier, is he still a peasant?”
“He is! It is a thing wondrous how that man wizardized us with his masterpieces left and right. It is beyond my poor proofs and scientifics. Art has its mysteriousness, eh, sir mister? We eat its dusts.”
Miller, though it struck him as an odd observation even at the moment he made it to himself, noticed that he was totally without appetite. Not even the burning, sour, transformed taste of his supper, still in his mouth from the bile he’d brought up when Dr. Rey had him cough, left him with even the most remote urge to clear it, neutralize it with a sip of water, the relief of gum. He guessed, too, that he’d had enough of Dr. Félix Rey.
Though he had complete, almost surprising, faith in Rey as a doctor, he understood that there’d been no reason to draw his blood, he understood that a sample of his pee would have revealed nothing of interest, and though Miller was as taken with his peculiar distinction (his residency in Van Gogh’s room at Arles) as the physician’s mad notion that in painting his great-great-grandfather, Van Gogh had somehow laid a spell on the great-great-grandson and fixed his fate forever. This, Miller realized, was probably not good medicine and he would have been content to bid the doctor goodnight and been permitted to turn the young man’s diagnosis (that he was weakly in spirit) and prognosis (that it would likely see him out his sojourn in Arles) over in his mind.
Then he noticed the muzzy class photo Félix Rey had given him and which he’d briefly examined and set down on the washstand. “You’ll want this,” he said and made to return it to the physician.
“Non non non. I insist not, Mr. Miller. It is yours to keep it. It is but a cheap trinket. The club makes them up.”
“Well,” he said, shifting, “thank you.” Miller, whose health, until Arles, had been so good he’d not had enough contact with doctors to understand that it was they rather than their patients who sent such signals, nevertheless hoped Rey had picked up enough English from the rubrics on his postcards — on this one, too, everything was in four languages — to guess by such shifts that their meeting was over.
As it happens he had.
Félix Rey rose from the rush-bottom chair beside Miller’s bed. “I shall see in on you again, Sir Mister Monsieur.”
“You don’t think you’d better leave me something to help me sleep?”
“What, pills?”
“Well sure, pills if you think that’s what I need.”
“An injection? Powders and sedatives?”
“You’re the doctor,” Miller said.
Félix Rey looked at him. “Did you know, Monsieur Mister, that it was to this chamber your neighbor called my great-great-grandfather on the night of the blood from the knife on his ear?”
“What,” Miller said, “because I asked you for something to help me sleep?”
“Does Mister have a gun?”
“If I had a gun do you think they’d have let me through airport security?”
“Knifes?”
“Please.”
“Ropes and poisons?”
“If I had any of that stuff what would I need with a sleeping pill?” Miller asked reasonably.
“Please,” said the doctor, “raise no hand against yourself. I know your position. You’ve nothing to fear from your position.”
“My position?”
“Your position, your bloom, your hale and your hardy. Your soul is a little sprained. It’s nothing. We see it all the time. If you like, I can ask them to alter your accommodations. It would be nothing.”
“My room? You mean my room? I like my accommodations, my accommodations suit me right down to the ground!” Miller shot back angrily, furiously really.
“Please? Suit you right down to the ground? Rest. Please Mister. I will see in on you.”
He was a country doctor, Miller reminded himself after Félix Rey had left. He was nothing but a country doctor. And a self-proclaimed curiosity. (Miller put him down as probably the president of that Sons of Van Gogh’s Subjects, or whatever it was, that he so liked going on about.) The Foundation probably called on him more for his language skills than for his medical ones.
What, Miller’s soul was sprained? He needed a doctor to tell him this? Ask the man who owns one! was all Miller had to say about it. And then the silly sod wouldn’t even leave him with a lousy sleeping pill to take a little of the edge off his god-awful wakefulness. What had he told him? Raise no hand against himself? This was his considered medical opinion? Well, thought Miller, we’ll just see about that! And then, to ease a little of that soul sprain and lift a little of the edge off that god-awful wakefulness, Miller, calling up images of Kaska Celli, got a wrong number, got Madame Ginoux instead (but who looked so like her) and, imagining the round, competent arms beneath the heavy sleeves of her thick black dress, raised a hand against himself and whacked off.