The Unnamed

1

It was the cruelest winter. The winds were rabid off the rivers. Ice came down like poisoned darts. Four blizzards in January alone, and the snowbanks froze into gray barricades as grim and impenetrable as anything in war. Tombstones were buried across the cemetery fields and cars parked curbside were swallowed undigested. The long-term debate about changing weather was put aside for immediate concern for the elderly and the shut-ins, while the children went weeks without school. Deliveries came to a halt and the warehouses clogged up on days the planes were approved to land. There were lines at the grocery store, short tempers, a grudging toward the burden of adjustment. Some clever public services addressed the civic concerns — heat shelters, volunteer home checks. The cold was mother of invention, a vengeful mother whose lessons were delivered at the end of a lash.

The ride home was slow going because of the snow and the traffic. He usually worked by eyelet light but this evening he brought no work home and sat in one quadrant of the car without file opened or pen in hand. They were waiting for him. They didn’t know they were waiting for him. The driver had on 1010 WINS, traffic and transit on the ones. Somewhere, out to sea or in the South, it might not be snowing. Here it slanted into the windshield like white ash from a starburst. The frostbite had returned to his fingers and toes. He unbuckled the seat belt and leaned over, stretching his long torso across the backseat, and what the driver thought he didn’t care. The sound of the radio faded as one ear was sealed up by the distressed leather and he put a hand on the floor mat and ran his tingling fingertips over the fiber-trapped pebbles. He hadn’t called to tell them. He had lost his phone. They were waiting for him, but they didn’t know it.

The driver woke him when they reached the house.

He was going to lose the house and everything in it. The rare pleasure of a bath, the copper pots hanging above the kitchen island, his family — again he would lose his family. He stood just inside the door and took stock. Everything in it had been taken for granted. How had that happened again? He had promised himself not to take anything for granted and now he couldn’t recall the moment that promise had given way to the everyday. It was not likely one single moment. He set his keys on the table below the mirror and uncharacteristically took his shoes off on the long Persian runner, which he and Jane had bought in Turkey. They had spent a week in Turkey and a week in Egypt. They always had a trip in the works. Their next trip was a Kenyan safari but it would have to be postponed now. He walked through the house in his socks. Inside the kitchen he ran his hand along the dimly lit countertop. He loved his kitchen, the antique cupboard doors, the Moroccan tile backsplash. He walked through the dining room, where they hosted dinner parties for his firm. The long table sat twelve. He reached the stairs and put his hand on the oak newel and took one step after another. Family photographs made the ascent with him. The sound of the grandfather clock ticking away in the living room gave way to the television laughter issuing softly from the bedroom down the hall.

Jane was still beautiful. She was wearing a pair of reading glasses that had a Pop Art zaniness of character, teardrop frames polka-dotted with drops of primary color. Spaghetti straps revealed her slender arms and the nightgown held her firm breasts in place just below a freckled slate and an articulated clavicle. She was doing the crossword. Whenever she got stuck, she glanced up at the late show on the flat screen mounted to the wall and drummed the pen between upper and lower teeth, as if to waken her brain. She looked at him as he entered, surprised to see him home so early. “Hello, banana,” she said. He took off his suit coat as if it were a T-shirt, thrusting the back over his head and turning his sleeves inside out. Then he found himself grabbing the hem, a hand on each half of the parted tail, and ripping the thing in two. Hard to break the seam at first, but once the first thread snapped, it went. Jane opened her mouth but nothing came out. He dropped the tattered coat and climbed onto the bed and hunkered down on his hands and knees like a man waiting for an explosion. “What is it?” she said. “Tim, what is it?” His head was lost inside his sheltering arms. “Tim?” She moved over to him and put her arms around him, hugging him from above as if they were about to engage in a wrestling match. “Tim?”

He told her that he had been forced out of the building and into the street. At 43rd and Broadway he hailed a cab, which he hoped would take him back to the office. After getting the cab to pull over, he reached out and opened the back door. But then he walked on. The driver, a Sikh in a pink turban, honked the horn, staring at him through the rearview mirror. Why would someone hail a cab and open the door only to keep walking? Near Union Square he had tried to call an ambulance, a recourse they had envisioned during his last recurrence. He was on the line with a dispatcher trying to explain the situation when he slipped on a patch of ice coming off a curb and lost his grip. “My phone!” he cried out as he regained his balance. “Somebody! My phone!” He walked on with a tweaked back. “Please get my phone!” Everyone ignored him. His BlackBerry had landed in the middle of the street where it lay defenseless against oncoming cars. He kept moving forward. He told her of all the city scaffolding he walked under, the manic traffic he managed to avoid, the parade of oblivious people he passed. He told her that he had turned tired in the old way by the time he reached a bench, somewhere near the East River, where his body gave out. How he had crumpled up his suit coat for a pillow and taken off his tie, sweating despite the cold. How he woke up in horror an hour later.

“It’s back,” he said.

2

First thing, she had to dress him. She knew he didn’t want to dress. He wanted to shower, crawl into bed, fall asleep — whatever action preserved the routine. Brush his teeth, reach for the light. He was still on top of the bed, frozen in the soldier’s huddled field position, his rear up and his arms encircling his head as if to shield it from flying shrapnel. His hair — he still had a full head of dark hair, one of his most distinguished features, he was a handsome, healthy man, ridiculously horse-healthy and aging with the grace of a matinee idol — was disheveled. “Tim,” she said, looking over his arm into his one visible and glazed-over eye, “you have to get dressed.”

He didn’t move. She got off the bed, walked into the bathroom and threw a black waffle-weave robe over her silk nightgown. She was startled by the complacency of the lotions, soaps, creams and deodorants arrayed on their bathroom sink, suddenly insulted by the rosy promises of common beauty products. She took an inventory in her head of all the things she needed and began collecting them from the places in the house where they could be found: his base layer of thermal long underwear and form-fitting insulator pants from the dresser; a sweatshirt and fleece from the walk-in; his heavy down coat; his hat, gloves and scarf. She placed his ski mask in one of the coat pockets along with several disposable heat packs she hoped hadn’t reached some unmarked expiration date. She reminded herself to buy more. She almost broke into tears by the washer-dryer. She brought up the GPS and the alpine pack from the basement. She filled the pack quickly: a rain poncho, eyedrops, dry-skin lotion, an inflatable pillow, a first-aid kit. And then from the cupboard, trail mix and energy bars and a Nalgene bottle of electrolyte water. She included matches for no specific reason. Then she zipped the pack and walked upstairs.

She went to the bed and began to move him physically as if he were a child. She turned him over and undid his belt and removed his pants and boxers and unbuttoned his shirt, all with little help from him. He was soon lying on the bed naked. She applied a coat of Vaseline to his face and neck and then to his genitals because Vaseline helped with both the chafing and the cold. Then she began to dress him in what she had collected, finishing with the wicking socks and his waterproof boots. She placed the alpine pack in the doorway where it could be grabbed easily on his way out and then she crawled onto the bed beside him.

“No Bagdasarian this time,” he said. “No doctors of any kind.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I mean it,” he said. “I got off that gerbil wheel and I’m not getting back on.”

“Okay, Tim.”

She reached out for the remote and turned off the late show.

“Have I taken you for granted again, Jane?”

A powerful silence settled over them. He lay on his back as overdressed as a child ready for the winter snow. She watched him from her pillow. His eyes were not as wide and his breathing had calmed.

“Let’s not do this,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Start in with the guilt and the regrets.”

He turned to her. “Have I taken you for granted?”

“Everyone takes everyone for granted,” she said. “It’s a clause in the contract.”

“How do you take me for granted?”

“How? In so many ways, Tim.”

“Name one.”

“I can’t even begin,” she said. “Okay, for one. The best vacation we ever took and for the life of me I can’t remember the name of the island.”

He began to smile. “Scrub Island,” he said.

“I depend on you for that.”

“That’s different than taking me for granted.”

“Scrub Island,” she said. “It was such a clean place, the name makes perfect sense. But I can never remember.”

“Wouldn’t you like to go back?” he asked.

“I thought Africa was next.”

They both knew there was no next, not now, not any time soon, and the silence returned.

“We should buy a place on Scrub Island,” he said. “There was such delicious food there. And do you remember the little girl walking the streets in a wedding dress?”

“She’d be grown by now.”

“And the ostriches. That man herding them with a bullwhip. Don’t you want to go back?”

“Yes,” she said. “When you’re well again, we’ll go back.”

“I’m hot,” he said.

She got off the bed and opened both windows. The winter’s crisp, shocking reality blew in. She turned back toward the bed. Then she remembered the handcuffs.

She walked over to his nightstand and removed them from the drawer. “What about these?” she asked, standing over him at bedside.

He pulled his stare from the unfocused void into which he had lost himself. He looked at the cuffs mournfully, as if they belonged to someone whose death had come on suddenly, and now he was taking stock, with great reluctance, of what to keep and what to throw away. He pursed his lips and shook his head and resumed looking at the ceiling. She put the cuffs back in the drawer.

3

Her sleep was fitful, responsive to every turn he took, the slightest shift. She woke up when she heard Becka come home, and later when Tim began to whistle — he never snored, but when he lay on his back his heavy breathing turned to a tuneless whistle. Their room was insanely cold, she could see her breath in the moonlight between episodes of some surreal dream, but Tim had not even bothered to get under the covers. He lay on the bed dressed for the subzero weather in coat and gloves. She woke every hour that never-ending night, sometimes more than once, and every time she reached out for him to make sure he was there.

It has been a good, long run, she thought.

When the dimmest fraction of darkness gave way to daylight, she opened her eyes and found him gone. She was furious with herself. Yet what could she have done but let him go?

She dressed quickly and left the house, walked down the long drive to the gate, and stood at the entrance looking in both directions. Their neighborhood had been developed to preserve the natural landscape, so that certain houses were set back on hills, some had small ponds out front, and all were safely buffered by trees. Late at night within the limited view of the headlights you could almost believe you were in the country. At the crack of dawn, with everything caught in the interminable cold snap, she found the street empty and quiet. Too early for the brave morning walkers, even for those neighbors who worked in the financial sectors. The black trees all around her stood with their sharp naked branches like burnt-out dendrites. She scanned for footprints in the snow, then returned up the drive.

She got inside the car and rounded the cul-de-sac. Braking at the gate’s edge to look both ways, she was gripped by a familiar fear. She did not know which way to turn. He had forgotten to turn on the GPS. She pounded the steering wheel with her open palms.

Anger with God was a tired and useless emotion, anger with God was so terrestrial and neutering. She thought she had arrived at a peaceful negotiation but in fact it was only a dormancy and when her anger at God met her at the end of the drive she was exhausted. She was caught unprepared again, and nothing could have prevented that, no promise made or lesson learned. Enjoy the BBQ, she thought, for no apparent reason. Enjoy the BBQ before God turns it to shit with His rain. She turned left and glided soundlessly down the street, fully aware of the comfort of a slowly heating car and how he would have been deprived of even that for how long now.

Minor mountain banks of greasy snow sat in front of the residential gates, in their valleys a paste of dead leaves or a patch of frozen earth. Cracked snow thin as flint covered the yards. More snow capped the red-brick gateposts. The NBA star’s house was gaudy even at dawn, lit up with faux gas lamps like some Frank Lloyd Wright spacecraft. She swung around and down the swooping curve leading to the frontage road and drove in both directions before heading back the way she came. She found him miles away in the opposite direction.

He was lying in a small wood separating two houses, sleeping on an incline behind some linden trees that prevented him from rolling down to the street. She pulled into the opposite lane and threw the car in park, leaving the door hanging open as she climbed up the culvert into the woods. She was relieved to see he had taken the pack, which he had placed under his head for a pillow. The black ski mask gave his prone figure an air of menace. Someone walking past with a dog might have rushed home to call the police. She knelt down beside him, feeling the cold through her jeans. “Tim?” she said, peeling back the mask. “Tim.” He opened his eyes with the innocence of a child and looked around him.

“I fell asleep,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I tried to make it back. I was too tired.”

“You did good, you took the pack. Can you stand up?”

“The sleep is even better than last time,” he said.

4

He enjoyed against his will those narcoleptic episodes that set him down wherever the walks concluded, the pinched-eye, clenched-fist sleep of a newborn. He had watched Becka as a baby with her smooth pink brow and he couldn’t recall ever sleeping with such enviable unburdened purity. Horses ran through his brain the minute his head hit the pillow. He drifted into bad sleep drafting motions. He carried on pointless exchanges with opposing counsel. But this sleep, these black-dot swoons — coming after such punishing miles, after the caloric drain and metabolic change — were invigorating. And he came out of them with perfect clarity. Everything was bright. Even in the landscape of that dead season, even among the black snow, the world was crisp and lucid. He could make out every nub-ended tree branch, he heard the crawl of a crow across a black wire, he smelled the carbon in the decomposing earth. It offered him a brief respite before he was forced to wonder again just where on earth he was.

He limped out from the trees. She brushed his backside of ice and crumbled leaves. He looked down the road. “Here comes Barb Miller,” he said.

The car was angled into the street on the wrong side of the road, as if it had swerved to avoid an accident. They stood still as deer and watched their neighbor approach. Barb slowed the SUV and powered down the window.

“Everything okay?” she asked. Her words formed white plumes of smoke in the cold air. Butch Miller sat beside her.

“Oh, everything’s fine,” said Jane. “Everything’s fine. Just something with the car.”

Butch leaned over and waved. “Hello,” he said through the window.

“Hello, Butch,” said Tim.

“Do you need us to call someone?”

“No, no. Triple A is on its way, thank you.”

“Thanks, Barb,” said Tim.

“Do you want a ride back to the house? You can’t stay out here, can you?”

“They promised to be here any minute,” said Jane.

Barb smiled and said okay. They waved good-bye and she started the car rolling again. Butch turned his head and they could see him continue to stare through the tinted windows. They watched the SUV dip and disappear out of sight. Then they exchanged a look that conveyed their shared exhaustion. Triple A? Could they really be at it again? The futility of communicating their predicament to the Millers had turned their kind gesture of help into something onerous and unwanted. To approach the world with evasion and thanklessness — that was no way to live. Jane walked around to the driver’s side and she and Tim got in and closed their doors at the same time.

They drove home. Soon after Jane killed the engine, the car began to crackle in the silent garage. “I have to go in,” he said.

She was surprised. He had shown such resolve the night before: no gerbil wheel. She wondered whom he intended to see. Bagdasarian? Copter at Mayo? Did he mean Switzerland again?

Then she realized her mistake. He meant in to work.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.

“Janey, I’m all rested up. I have to go in.”

The night before, she had pushed aside how they would deal with the long-term things like his work, in order to make him safe for that one night. Now she had to deal with the reality of the light of day, and she should not have been surprised that he would want to go in.

“You should take the day off,” she said.

“No, that would just be…”

“We need to—”

“… capitulation.”

“—to deal with this, Tim. Capitulation? It’s called reality.”

“But the case,” he said.

“Oh, fuck the case!” she said. “It’s back, Tim! You said it yourself last night. It’s back.”

The car was losing heat. He sat unmoving in his fleecy chrysalis of Patagonia and down, staring straight through the windshield at the spare gas tank and paint cans and the coils of extension cords and rubber hoses on the garage shelves. A row of old Vermont license plates had been nailed into the wall. Jane turned away from him in the still car and they sat in silence. Within the minute their breath became visible. She waited for him to say something, preparing the counterargument. After waking he always felt this false rejuvenation, but that strength was fleeting and within hours he could be walking again. And then what would he do, out in the cold with his frostbite and dressed in nothing but suit and tie, walking around Manhattan and ending up God knows where? She was about to remind him of this when he started pounding the glove box with his gloved fist. He rained blow after blow down on the glove box and she let out an involuntary cry and jerked back against the cold window. He stopped hitting the glove box and began to kick it until the latch snapped and the door fell. He continued to kick as if to drive his foot clear through to the engine block. One of the door’s lower hinges snapped, and thereafter the glove box had the cockeyed lean of a tired sun visor. It would never be fixed.

When it was over, he withdrew his foot and out spilled a handful of napkins. His heel had compacted the owner’s manual and ripped the maintenance records and insurance papers. He returned his feet to the mat and things were calm again, but he would not look at her.

“I have to go in,” he said finally.

Her gaze had a fire’s intensity.

“Okay,” she said. “You should go in.”

“I’m trying to tell you that I feel good.”

“I will pack your backpack,” she said, “with your winter gear, in case you need it, and you can take the pack in with you.”

“I have to go in,” he repeated.

“I understand.”

Then he turned to her. “Do you?”

“Yes,” she said.

5

Becka was up for school, showered and sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal. At seventeen, she wore a silver loop in her left nostril and never properly washed her hair. She was surprised when the door to the garage opened. She had figured her parents were upstairs. They came into the kitchen brooding and silent. Her father was overburdened with winter clothes and her mother looked pale and terrified.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

Nobody said anything. She just knew.

She stood up and hugged her dad, a rare hug. She approached him sideways, resting her head on his shoulder. He took hold of her forearm and squeezed.

“It’s not a hundred percent yet,” he said.

“It’s a hundred percent,” said her mom.

Becka had been nine the first time. She remembered driving with her mother into the city. She was scared by her mother’s silent, impatient driving. She wondered why she had been picked up at the school bus stop, and where they were going, and what had happened. Her mother turned and smoothed her hair in the stop-and-go traffic over the bridge but said nothing. Becka expected him to be waiting on a street corner with his briefcase and a rumpled newspaper under his arm, dressed in his beige overcoat. Instead they came upon a small triangle of park with a lone tree in a grate and a pair of trash bins, a phone booth and four or five wooden benches. Her mother pulled up to the curb and threw the hazards on. She told Becka to stay put. Taxis raced past as she stepped out. Becka watched as her mother approached a bench and bent down. She touched the man laid out there and he sat up. Becka recognized him only when he stood and began walking toward the car.

They began picking him up more frequently, never in the same place, three times a week, sometimes four. Becka accompanied them to the doctor when she was not in school and sat in the waiting room with her mother. She went with her mother into the room where her father sat on the metal table with the tissue paper and she listened to the doctor and to the questions her mom and dad asked, but she couldn’t understand what they were saying. They were saying everything it wasn’t. There was confusion and frustration and much talking over one another. She stood behind a glass window holding her mom’s hand as her dad moved inside the scary tunnel of an MRI machine. On the ride home they were silent and her father was distant.

Sometimes she came home from school and the car was gone and nobody was in the house. She watched TV until it got dark and ate after-school snacks instead of dinner. Her dad woke her on the sofa and carried her to her room and tucked her into bed. She asked him if he was sick and he said yes. She asked him if he was going to be all right and he said yes.

He started staying home from work, which he’d never done before. One afternoon after school she heard them in the bedroom. The door was ajar. She put her head in and saw her mother standing over him. He was dressed differently, not in a suit and tie but in sweatpants and T-shirt, and he was handcuffed to the headboard. His arms were stretched tight as if they were hanging from iron rings in the wall. He might have been doing calisthenics like at school, the one called bicycle-in-the-air, except his legs moved lower and kind of jerky. The fitted sheet had popped off and all the bedding was bunched up around him. His face was hurting and his T-shirt was stained with sweat. She fled from the doorway.

Soon after her mother came downstairs surprised, almost panicked, to find her there, as if she were a stranger. She told her to be quiet because her father was sleeping.

“Is Daddy addicted to drugs?”

Jane had moved to the sink to fill a pot with water. “What?”

“Because at school they told us about drugs. They showed us a video.”

“Daddy is sick,” said Jane, and turned the water off.

“Because of drugs?”

“No, sweetie, of course not because of drugs.”

“Then how come?”

Jane placed the water on the stove without answering. She went into the pantry for the rice and when she returned she took the meat out of the fridge and bent down for a cutting board. Becka waited for an answer, but her mother continued to squat in front of the cupboard, one hand on the open door, motionless and refusing to look at her. No one looked at her very much lately. Her mother was usually tired. She often told her to clean her room or asked her to go out and play. The house had never been so quiet, a hush timed by strikes from the grandfather clock and broken only when her father was kicking.

“How come he’s in handcuffs?” she asked.

Now finally her mother stood with the cutting board and looked at her. “Did you see Daddy in handcuffs?”

Becka nodded from the kitchen table.

“Daddy doesn’t want to leave the house,” said Jane, setting the cutting board down and the meat on top of it. “We’re just trying to keep Daddy inside the house.”

Becka didn’t want him inside the house. She heard him at night making noises like he was straining to lift something heavy. She heard the rattle of the handcuffs. His curses filled the house and his mumbling carried through the walls. Sometimes she heard nothing at all. Once she tiptoed to the door and put her head in the room and found him bound to the bed, staring into space. He saw her in the doorway and called to her but she ran away. “Becka, come back!” he cried. “Come talk to me.” She raced down the stairs. “Becka!” he cried out. “Please!” But she kept going.

It left as quickly as it came and he went back to work. After a few months her memory of him bound to the bed faded. They didn’t talk about it. They talked about other things. He came to her recitals again. Once again he woke her in the mornings and made her breakfast and got her ready for school. He never let a day pass without calling her before bedtime. Jane slept in and took care of her at night. That was the routine, the blissful family groove, and it had returned.

6

Was she up for this? She lay in bed under the covers, her breath visible in the slant moonlight. Really up for it? The long matrimonial haul was accomplished in cycles. One cycle of bad breath, one cycle of renewed desire, a third cycle of breakdown and small avoidances, still another of plays and dinners that spurred a conversation between them late at night that reminded her of their like minds and the pleasure they took in each other’s talk. And then back to hating him for not taking out the garbage on Wednesday. That was the struggle. Sickness and death, caretaking, the martyrdom of matrimony — that was fluff stuff. When the vows kick in, you don’t even blink. You just do. She had to be up for it.

She had nursed him once, and then a second time. About a year and a half of their lives, all told, and by the end of his first recurrence it was a full-time job. He was exonerated of all trifling matters when it returned. They were up against a specter that dwarfed the daily vexings. He could die out there. And so she set to the task of picking him up immediately, of learning how to properly rewarm the skin, of what food to bring with her in the car. She read survivalist manuals and prepared the pack. And when she wasn’t picking him up or preparing the pack, she was making the appointments and taking him to the doctor. She was his support staff and counsel. And when she was driving him home from the doctor she was the sounding board for all the confusion, doubt, anger and frustration. And when not the sounding board she was the cheerleader, dragging him out of the morass of self-pity. And when not the cheerleader, the quiet, supportive presence that said simply, I’m here, said without a word, you are not alone. But it was all-consuming, two intense periods of uncertainty and fear to which she gave herself entirely, often at the expense of Becka — after which, once it was over, in a mad dash to catch up with his life, he went back to work. He treated his first day back like any other day, while she was left wondering just what day is it? What cycle of their marriage had they left off on? How did she resume ordinary life after so many arguments with doctors and late-night car rides to random street corners? He was fine again, as if nothing had ever happened, but she wasn’t unchanged. She was suddenly bereft of purpose. And he wasn’t there to say, I’m here, you are not alone. She didn’t fault him for that. If anything, she envied him. He had an admirable passion for the work he did, and partnership at Troyer, Barr meant he did important work. But she did no favors to anyone by ignoring her own needs. She wanted what he had, something that would not abandon her to her own devices upon his recovery. She needed a purpose not entirely predicated upon other people, loved ones, the taking care of loved ones. She earned her license and started selling real estate.

Was she really up for a third time? To do it right, she would have to quit. She could not keep showing houses with him lost in the world. But what would happen when it was over? When it was over, if she quit and took care of him for however long, what life would she have to return to?

Jane stepped out of bed into the freezing room and walked down the hall to Becka’s. Becka was playing a late-night set of coffeehouse ballads cryptic with yearning, which came to a halt when Jane opened the door.

“What happened to knocking first?”

Gone were the days of her good-faith efforts to fit in with the TV-commercial vision of life. No more running shoes, no more hair gels. She let her heartbreaking weight be what it was, hiding behind the acoustic guitar. Senior year in high school and she refused to so much as order a yearbook. She wore her flannel shirt, Roxy Music tee, black sweatpants. Big surprise.

Jane peered unrepentantly around the room, at the mounds of clothes just waiting for the torch, the slag heap of dirty dishes on desk and nightstand. The room smelled heavily of itself. “Any good developments in here lately, Madame Curie?” she asked.

“I’m making music right now, Mom.”

“And a vaccine or two?”

“Do you even realize how old that joke is?”

“What are you doing up? It’s one in the morning.”

“What are you doing up?”

“Can’t sleep.”

Becka had eight or ten thick dreadlocked strands. They moved about her head the way mitter curtains dance lazily over the car at an automatic car wash, heavy and grayish. Their weight exposed the pale faultlines of her scalp. They cushioned her head as she leaned back on the headboard. “Do you think he fakes it, Mom?” she asked.

“Fakes it?”

“Have you ever Googled it? Google it and see what comes up.”

“Google what?”

“Exactly.”

“What comes up?”

“Some disease horses get when they eat poisonous plants.”

“That doesn’t mean he fakes it.”

“Not faking, then,” she said. “Just… I don’t know… mental.”

“There’s a lot of debate about if it’s psychological or not,” said Jane. “He doesn’t think it is. He thinks—”

“Yeah, I know, I know,” she said. “I know he thinks it’s the legs. I just have a hard time buying it. I think he’s mental.”

“You’re talking like a real jerk, kiddo.”

“He could control it if he really wanted to.”

“Like you can control your weight?” said Jane.

It was as if she had slapped the girl in the face, and for a moment, before the recriminations and tears, they stared at each other unmoving and silent, stunned into recognizing, after so long an indifference, the wicked force they could work on each other. Becka threw a guitar pick at her. “Get out.”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Get out!”

“I was just trying to make you see things from his—”

“Get! Out!”

The room was cold. She was relieved to find him still there, asleep in the down coat on top of the covers, as if he could expect only a brief nap. He was breathing heavily, perspiring through troubled dreams.

She got under the covers. She didn’t mind the cold. She preferred it, actually. One day she had been a young woman, and the next a panting complex of symptoms. The hot flashes and night sweats, the mood swings and sleep disruptions. And there was no way, no possible human biological way, of explaining to him, a man, what her body was putting her through. She could talk to her gynecologist, who understood. She could talk to her friends. But the words hot flash hit his ears and bounced right off. She imagined how maddening it would be for a doctor to insist that her discomfort was “all in her head,” or the burden of explaining symptoms no one had ever heard of. Thankfully she didn’t need to. Her problems were widely shared. Pharmaceutical companies spent millions developing medicines to ease her suffering. She was alone with specific hot flashes, but she was not alone in the world with them.

After menopause set in she stopped speculating that he might be crazy. She stopped speculating altogether. She didn’t know what had its hold on him. She didn’t care. He couldn’t know about hot flashes and she couldn’t know about walking. They were like two inviolable spheres touching at a fine point in their curves, touching but failing to penetrate, failing to breathe the other’s air. She chose to believe him when he told her that his condition was not a disorder of the mind but a malfunction of the body.

The health professionals suggested clinical delusion, hallucinations, even multiple personality disorder. But he said, “I know myself.” He said, “I’m not in control, Jane.” His mind was intact, his mind was unimpeachable. If he could not gain dominion over his body, that was not “his” doing. Not an occult possession but a hijacking of some obscure order of the body, the frightened soul inside the runaway train of mindless matter, peering out from the conductor’s car in horror. That was him. That was her husband. She reached out in the darkness and touched his breathing body.

7

The next day she brokered negotiations in a half daze. She accepted offers and arranged showings for later in the week. She tried calling him at work. When he picked up, he picked up on the first ring; the secretary waited until the third ring. That gave Jane the second ring to hang up and try him again later. She came to the second ring again and again, and then she quickly put the phone down. She didn’t want to push through to the secretary. She didn’t want to know if he’d left the office. If she didn’t know, she could still picture him in a climate-controlled conference room with his associates arrayed around him in their decorous business attire, drinking civilized lattes and assessing the other side’s evidence. It was what he wanted, this corporate pastoral. What the glove box had given its life for: the perpetuation, inherently a kind of celebration, of uneventful everyday life. Long live the mundane.

In early evening she tried him again but again he didn’t pick up. He didn’t pick up because he was walking through the front door of the realty office. She looked up from the telephone and there he was, with flowers.

“I’m sorry about the other morning,” he said. “The boxing match with the car.” He handed her the flowers, and they went to dinner.

It wasn’t the Italian you could get in the city but the food was better than most. The private lighting of the place lent itself to both proposals of marriage and requests for divorce. They sat in back in a dimly lit booth, dipping bread into an olive tapenade, a wine-red rococo carpet underfoot. Outside a new snow had started to fall over the old, adding a pristine frost to the winter’s blackening palimpsest.

They had agreed that the alpine pack could remain in the car.

“Five o’clock,” she said. “And with flowers. I didn’t think that would happen until I announced I had cancer.”

He stared at her intensely, as if this were a visit monitored by guards who would soon break them apart and return him to captivity, while she would walk through the parking lot to weep in the car. His expression was earnest enough to appear before God and she expected an apology for something: the late nights, the missed opportunities, the lacunae born of married days. But instead he smiled and picked up his wine and said, “It’s not coming back.”

“What’s not coming back?”

“I’ve gone two entire days,” he said. “It’s not coming back.”

The waiter appeared. Tim sat back to allow him to move in with the plate. Ordinarily after the food arrived she tucked her hair behind her ears and picked up her silverware. Now she pushed the plate away and leaned into the table on her elbows and looked at him.

“It’s happened twice already, Tim.”

“You should have seen me today.”

“I found you in the woods just yesterday morning, remember?”

“Sitting at my desk. I wasn’t going anywhere.”

“You know and I know that two times—”

“Are you going to eat?”

She looked down at her plate. “No,” she said.

“Why did we come here if you’re not going to eat?”

She didn’t want to fight. She picked up her fork. He took his first bite.

“Can we just assume?” She didn’t know how to continue. “What if it is back? What if?”

He took another bite. “Then I will buy a gun,” he said, swallowing, picking up his wineglass again, “and blow my head off.”

He drank. She removed her elbows from the table and sat back. Did she just hear him right? He continued to eat his penne. Was he that far gone? She entered a blinded moment. Kill himself? He was the only one in the body. Everyone else was locked out. But this misfortune was not his and his alone! She left the booth.

In the movies they throw cash down on the table but he didn’t have any cash so he stood quickly, instantly aware that he had provoked the response he’d wanted and just as quickly regretful of it. He removed a credit card from his wallet and followed her out. She was walking very quickly across a parking lot shared by suburban retailers and a grocery store, car-packed and big as a football field. “Jane!” he cried before he was out the door, and people seated near the window turned their heads and watched them go.

The sidewinding gusts were snow-flecked and bitter and filled his ears with a violent howl. “Janey!” He chased her down. She’d left without her coat and now she hurried away with her arms crossed, hands holding the opposite shoulders and her head lowered into the cold. She turned between two cars to lose him just as he reached for her. She shook him off but he grabbed her again and said, “Please, Jane.” She swiveled and hit him with the back of her fist. The blow landed just below his collarbone and made him flinch. “You stupid bastard!” she cried between clenched teeth. Angry tears came from her eyes like stubborn nails jerked out of brickwork. “You don’t fucking tell me that?” For some reason it came out as a question, which he couldn’t answer. Both confused, both at a loss for words. The little space between them, between cars, was filled with their furious white breath. She put her splayed hands on his chest and pushed him and he stumbled back a few steps while taking hold of her wrists. She yanked loose again.

“It was un-thought-out,” he said.

“After everything we’ve done, you would say that.”

“I would never do it,” he said.

“How do I know?”

A shopper rattled past them with a cart. He put his arms around her, but she kept her arms hugged to her chest.

“I never would,” he said.

8

The next day she drove into the city, the lower Bronx, to a storefront with a red plastic awning advertising African Hair Weaving. She parked at the curb and stepped out as a snowplow sparked past her down the neglected street. Eroded brick surfaces, dull and defaced, ghettoed the neighborhood. Wind picked up the trash. The chain-link fence to a barren lot was curled up at one corner like a pried-open sardine can.

She checked the name and address against what she’d written down. The front window was plastered over with yellowed clippings from hairstyle magazines and framed by a string of red Christmas lights. The same collage covered the door, obscuring what awaited her inside: two black stylists, one albino with pink pigmentation spots, both in heavy blue aprons and tending to matrons in chairs. Their hands paused in their labor as they turned to look at her. There were cords everywhere, cords and spray bottles and dusty fake plants reflected in the mirror-paneled walls. She saw him against the far wall, sleeping on a row of folding chairs.

A gust blew the door open again.

“Slam it now,” said the albino.

Jane did as she was told. When she turned around to face them a second time she forced a smile, feeling the interloper again, the tension of her unexpected presence in another random subculture. “That’s my husband,” she said, pointing to the man in back.

They were mostly quiet on the ride home. When they were out of the city, he said, “They were nice in there. I offered them forty dollars but they wouldn’t accept it.”

“Why did they agree to take you in?”

“I said I was having chest pains. I said I’d give them money if they let me sit down on one of their chairs, but they wouldn’t take it.”

“But they gave you the chair.”

“You expect the world to greet you with hostility,” he said, “and instead they give you a chair and call your wife.”

“You can’t count on that forever,” she said.

They pulled into the garage and she killed the engine but neither of them moved. She figured now, after African Hair Weaving, he would come to his senses. But he remained silent, and she realized that he was determined to persevere. The light clicked off. They sat in the oily darkness as if they were high school lovers at odds, too inarticulate to put their feelings into words, and with nowhere to go to resolve their differences but the car.

“What do you feel when you see a black albino?” he asked.

“Sorrow,” she said.

He stared through the windshield. “Me too.”

9

Becka was thirteen when he got sick the second time.

Puberty was hell. Everyone said that she’d lose her baby fat but it never happened. There was no sudden onset, no flash gain. She just never slimmed down.

She first asked her mother the difference between a protein and a carb when she was ten years old. For Christmases and birthdays she drew up lists of fitness books and weight-loss how-tos. “Why am I fat?” she asked them. “Nobody else in this family is fat.”

They did everything they could — consulted dietitians, endocrinologists, acupuncturists; bought her running gear and memberships to women-only health clubs; ordered elaborate machines and highly engineered plastic devices advertised on TV. Nothing worked.

Tim offered her every one of a father’s honest lies about her being the most beautiful girl in the world. At night he secretly wondered why she could not shake the weight. He and Jane talked about it just as often as they did the girl’s good grades and dark moods. They were afraid she was headed toward the tabloid destruction of an eating disorder, but she wasn’t one for easy answers. She packed a lunch with cold tofu. She asked for an alarm clock and woke early to jog. She was twelve years old in black spandex and fleece vest doing three miles a day in the seventh grade. She wore tailored Glad bags under her running gear and imagined the sweat making its way out of her, surface-bound molecules of dairy-white fat. The greasy squish between the plastic bag and her skin was unpleasant but she liked it almost better than anything else, this hard-earned sensation of loss. This was before the nose ring and the dreadlocks and the midnight trips to the Reddi-wip canister.

Her longer run took her around the elementary school. The pink stucco building was painted with murals. A glassed-in sign outside the front entrance offered a daily message from the principal’s office. The message was the same every day now: Enjoy Your Summer, Tigers! See You Next Year.

It was the summer before her freshman year. She cut across the empty blacktop poled for tetherball and sketched with four-square courts and hopscotch and entered the grassy field where the children ran relays and played kickball. Just past the rear fence of the baseball diamond, a well-marked trail led into the woods. The trail opened into clearings in which an outdoor sculpture was coupled with a nearby bench. There were half a dozen such sculptures along the trail — a steel Pink Pearl eraser tall as a tree, another called Abstract Cactus—which the village planning commission had installed as a part of a cultural outreach program. She ran across a footbridge into the last of the clearings and there she stopped. The heat materialized instantly. All the stimulated biology of a hard run hummed in her ears along with the summer crickets. She recognized the robe, white cotton with orange pinstripes. He was curled up at the base of Smiling Bronze Sun with his cheek on the dirt. His bare feet were bloody. She turned back. She ran home. She woke her mom and told her that Dad was asleep on the sculpture trail.

He woke up after Becka had gone. Utter terror woke him — or utter terror was the condition into which he awoke, hard to tell which. He bolted upright and sprang to his feet in one manic motion, as if expecting to be surrounded by physical threat. The quick rise made him stagger. Slowly he recalled where he was and how he got there. The night before, he had been wheeling the trash down the drive to the curb, one in the morning. It was the second of three bins. He knew halfway down that he would not be back for the third. He knew the sensation as an epileptic knows an aura. As an epileptic feels the dread of an oncoming seizure, he was crestfallen, broken-hearted, instantly depressed by what was now foretold. It’s back. The first time, that four-month nightmare four years earlier, he had erased from his mind. Something finite, and, so, forgettable. But now, no denying it: a recurrence. Not finite. Chronic. Motherfucker his first thought. Don’t take me away from my home. There’s more garbage. Jane expects it to be taken out. His body’s response: too bad. He read into it, because he had to find meaning, a morality tale: you fool, you blithe, oblivious fool. You should have thought about this possibility last night. You should have made it home at a decent hour to enjoy being in bed with Jane. He released the bin at the end of the drive and continued walking. He walked past neighbors’ houses, he walked barefoot down Route 22. He walked past the supermarket: empty parking lot and an eerie glow. He walked past the Korean Baptist church and the Saks-anchored mall into the dreams of late-night drivers who took home the image of some addled derelict in a cotton robe menacing the soft shoulder. He looked down at his legs. It was like watching footage of legs walking from the point of view of the walker. That was the helplessness, this was the terror: the brakes are gone, the steering wheel has locked, I am at the mercy of this wayward machine. It circled him around to the south entrance of the forest preserve. Five, six miles on foot after a fourteen-hour day, he came to a clearing and crashed. The sleep went as quickly as a cut in a film. Now he was standing again, in the cricket racket, forehead moist with sweat, knees rickety, feet cramped, legs aching with lactic acid. And how do you walk home in a robe with any dignity?

The doctor appointments started up again. He wasn’t well that time for thirteen months.

On the night Jane picked him up at African Hair Weaving, he knocked on Becka’s door. “Can I come in?” he asked. No response usually meant her begrudging acquiescence, so he turned the knob and eyed her for permission to enter. She sat up against the headboard.

“What do you want?”

“To apologize.”

“For what?”

He sat down on the bed. “For ignoring you.”

She drew her legs up to her chest and hugged her knees. Her thighs expanded in their black sweatpants.

“Let me try to explain,” he said. “I’ve always felt a strong sense of duty to provide for you and your mom. I’ve worked hard so that you would never have to want for anything.”

She looked at him skeptically. “I don’t really think that’s why you worked hard.”

“And that meant,” he said, “that I had to put certain opportunities aside.”

“Like what?” she asked. “Like did you want to become a painter on the Left Bank?”

“I mean opportunities with you.”

“Or an astronaut? Did I keep you from becoming an astronaut?”

“I would have liked to spend more time with you,” he said. “And your mother would have liked me around more.”

“So she could have somebody else to bitch at besides me?”

“Becka,” he said. He put a hand up. “Give me a second here, okay?”

She frowned and grew quiet.

“But the last couple of years,” he said, “the last couple of years have been different.”

He stared into the dead aquarium in front of him, a quarter full of rock-and-roll buttons and Mardi Gras beads and CDs and cigarette papers.

“Different how?” she asked.

“The last couple of years,” he said, “I haven’t really wanted to be around you.”

He turned on the bed to look at her, making a small vortex of the sheets below him. She didn’t move. They were never still anymore in each other’s presence. There was always some context for movement, some unspoken vectoring away. Now they stared as if startled by each other, years after having forgotten what the other looked like.

“I love you more than anyone in the world,” he said, “but I didn’t give a damn if I saw you or not. I didn’t understand the phase you’re in. The duct-taped sneakers, the dreadlocks. The music.”

“Right. It’s so hard. The Beatles.”

“You don’t just listen to the Beatles,” he said.

“Ew,” she said, “the Ramones.”

“Point is,” he said, “I hid behind my duty. I used work as my excuse to avoid you.”

He said he was sorry. He didn’t anticipate her saying anything in response and didn’t expect it or need to be absolved or even understood. He needed only to come clean. She said nothing as he left the room.

She found him sitting at the kitchen counter slouched over an uneaten orange, looking morose and inward. It had been only a few minutes, five at the most, since he’d left her, but in that time the kitchen had filled entirely with the weight of his self-pity. When he got like this, bundled up in his coat and carrying around his backpack, she wanted nothing more than to beat a retreat the hell away from him. It was like he was dying or something, when he wasn’t dying. He was just worried that he couldn’t go in to work anymore. It made him grumpy. He wasn’t even sick really.

“You think I care?” she asked.

He turned on the stool. She stood on the runner in her torn flannel and concert tee, barefoot, hands on her hips.

“You think I’ve been waiting around this whole time for an apology? That I give a shit what you think or what you do?”

He put his hands in the pockets of his down jacket. It was a defeated gesture, as if he were the child his daughter was scolding.

“The only reason you’re apologizing is because you’re sick again. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have even thought about it. You could have been stoned on crack since I started high school, nothing would be different. You think too much of yourself, Dad.”

And with that she turned and went back upstairs.

10

Coffee and a powdered doughnut sat on his desk. He might have thought to get something more substantial but he didn’t care to interrupt the flow of work. Night after night, he sat at his desk just as a sphere of oil sits suspended in dark vinegar — everything blotted out but his own source of light. To save on energy costs, Troyer, Barr and Atkins, LLP, had installed motion sensors on the overhead lights. From six in the morning until ten at night, the lights burned continuously; after ten, the sensors took over. He worked past ten most nights, and most nights found him sufficiently absorbed in something that required only the turn of a page or the click of a mouse — too little activity for the sensors to register. The lights frequently switched off on him. He’d look up, surprised again — not just by the darkened office. By his reentry into the physical world. Self-awareness. Himself as something more than mind thinking. He’d have to stand, a little amused by the crude technology, and wave his arms around, jump up and down, walk over and fan the door, sometimes all three, before the lights would return.

That was happiness.

Twenty-five years ago he had decided to go to law school. It offered interesting study and good career prospects. He made it to Harvard and quickly learned how to chew up and spit out the huge green tomes on civil litigation and constitutional law. He summered at Troyer, Barr and they asked him to return after graduation. But first there was a clerkship with a judge on the Second Circuit. A year later he was married to Jane. He worked hard at Troyer. Document production for the first couple of years, boring as hell, but then junior status gave way to opportunity. He started taking depositions. He showed a gift for strategy in both civil and criminal cases, and a rare composure in the courtroom. He impressed the right people and when his seventh year came around they voted to make him partner. He sat in the best restaurants and ordered the best wines.

But that was never the point. The point was Houston, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Orlando, Charleston, Manhattan — wherever the trial was. The trial, that was the point. The clients. The casework. The war room. He took on a few pro bono causes. And he worked in midtown amid the electricity and the movement. And his view of Central Park was breathtaking. And he liked the people. And the money was great. And the success was addictive. And the pursuit was all-consuming. And the rightness of his place was never in doubt.

Now it was morning, and he was preparing for trial. The case involved a client named R. H. Hobbs who had been accused of stabbing his wife in a methodical way and dumping her body in a decommissioned landfill on Staten Island. The evidence against R.H. was entirely circumstantial. There was a blood-soaked bedsheet with no trace of a third party’s DNA, his thin alibi of being stuck in traffic at the time of the murder, and a sizable life-insurance policy. The district attorney had managed to bring charges against him only by the skin of his teeth. Grand jury testimony revealed a case fraught with uncertainty, and the consensus among Tim and his team was that R.H., despite a loveless marriage, had not committed the crime he had been accused of. R.H.’s private equity firm generated an enormous amount of business for Troyer, Barr, and no one wanted a guilty verdict to interfere with that relationship.

He ate the doughnut over a napkin to catch the powdered sugar and recalled a time when he had watched what he ate. Not as a dieter, not with his daughter’s sad South Beach struggle, but with a fanatic’s vigilance for good health — for Bagdasarian had suggested that it might be dietary. Cut out the caffeine, Bagdasarian told him, the sugar and the nicotine, and consult a naturopath. And so he did. Because nothing had shown up, repeatedly, on the MRIs, because he was on his third psychiatrist, because the specialist in Switzerland had thrown up his hands, he saw a Trinidadian in Chelsea with golden tubes and magic roots for seven days of colonics and grass-and-carrot smoothies. Jane drove and waited in the naturopath’s living room among primitive wood carvings and bright tropical art. They took the highway home, and for the first couple of days there was this breathless, anxious hopefulness. Then he walked right out of the house. Jane picked him up six hours later behind a Starbucks in New Canaan. Nothing came of the marmalade fast or the orange juice cleansings except another possibility to cross off the list, though he could move his bowels like a ten-year-old.

His office was calm and pleasant. The early winter sun brightened the window behind him. Yet as every minute he remained in place moved effortlessly into the next, that new minute came with the increased anxiety that it might be his last. The wonderful warmth, his comfortable chair, the lovely rigor and stasis of practicing law were growing, with time, increasingly impossible to enjoy. He almost believed Naterwaul could be right, that worry alone could cause the attacks. Of course Naterwaul was also the moron who suggested that SoCal yahoo who had him reenact his birth. Those were some dim, desperate days. He’d be goddamned if he was returning to that giant foam womb and working to cry during reentry.

DeWiess, the environmental psychologist with the desert retreat, blamed urban air, cell phone radiation, and a contaminated water table, and gave him a sheet of paper with the names of everyday toxins listed front and back.

At ten he rose to walk down to Peter’s office. Standing was hard. His legs were eighty years old again. His first steps were stiff and careful, an easing back into fluid motion that stunned the cantankerous joints. He limped down the hallway.

“Knock knock,” he said at Peter’s door.

“Hey hey,” said Peter.

He entered the office and sat down. Peter was the senior associate on the R. H. Hobbs case. Tim didn’t think much of him.

“Maybe I’m in and out these next couple of days, Peter. Maybe, maybe not.”

Peter demonstrated the lack of curiosity required of associates when something personal appeared to be driving a partner’s decision. His blank expression conveyed the theater of total understanding. He didn’t even lean back in his chair. “Sure, Tim.”

“We’re under the gun, yeah. This thing is pressing down on us. But you don’t make a move without me. Understand?”

“Tim, who—”

“Not one move.”

“Who am I?”

“You call me, understand? I don’t care what it is. I’m always on my cell.”

“Of course. Of course.”

“From this point forward I’m on my cell. No Kronish. No Wodica.”

“No, no way. What for?”

“They don’t know the case. You know the case better.”

“I’ll call you, not a problem.”

“And you, I mean this with all due respect.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re just not ready yet.”

“No,” said Peter. “No. I’m happy to call you, Tim.”

Tim nodded and stood. Halfway down the hall, he heard his name being called. He looked back at Peter, who stood in the doorway, but his body kept moving forward.

“Hobbs is due in today, right?”

“Today?”

“Just wondered if you’d be here for that.”

“He’s due in today?” He was getting farther and farther down the hall.

“I thought you said he was coming in.”

“I said that?”

They had to talk louder.

“Tim?”

“You call me, Peter! Understand? You don’t make a move without me!”

He turned the corner and disappeared.

“There is no laboratory examination to confirm the presence or absence of the condition,” he was told by a doctor named Regis, “so there is no reason to believe the disease has a defined physical cause or, I suppose, even exists at all.”

Janowitz of Johns Hopkins had concluded that some compulsion was driving him to walk and suggested group therapy.

Klum dubbed it “benign idiopathic perambulation.” He’d had to look up idiopathic in the dictionary. “Adj. — of unknown causes, as a disease.” He thought the word, divorced of meaning, would have nicely suited Klum and her associates. Idiopaths. He also took exception to the word benign. Strictly medically speaking perhaps, but if his perambulation kept up, his life was ruined. How benign was that?

The internists made referrals. The specialists ordered scans. The clinics assembled teams.

He saw his first psychiatrist reluctantly, convinced as he was that his problem was not a mental one. Dr. Ruefle began their session by asking about his family history. He offered what little he had. His grandparents were dead; he knew their occupations, but nothing more. His father had died of cancer when he was a boy. On the twentieth anniversary of his death, his mother had been struck by a mirror, beneath which she had been sitting in a restaurant, when it came loose from the wall, and she died of blunt trauma to the head. Dr. Ruefle was never able to make sense of these facts or anything else. Tim lost the last of his patience with her when she suggested he see a genealogical healer, on the chance that something tragic had taken place in his past — an ancestor lost in a death march or some other forced evacuation. He had no idea what “genealogical healing” might entail and dismissed the idea as quackery.

He walked past the reception desk and through the glass doors, beyond the elevators and into the echo chamber of the emergency stairwell, where fire drills were conducted. He took the stairs with a determination he never displayed during drill time, as if now there were something to flee. He kept one hand on the railing. The orange stenciled floor numbers, the fire extinguishers. The toes of his dress shoes hit one note twelve times, reached the switchback, started the note again. He avoided the vertiginous glimpse down the rabbit hole of diminishing floors.

For some people the depressing setback was a return to the hospital, it was some migraine holocaust, lower-back blowout, inconsolable weeping, arthritic flare, new shadow on the CT scan, sudden chest pain.

Hobbs was coming in today?

Twenty floors down he encountered a black man. The man sat on the landing beside the painted piping that emerged from the wall. A thick coiled fire hose was encased in glass above him. He wore a winter coat, black but for the places where the white synthetic fiber cottoned out from tears in the shell. A collection of wrinkled shopping bags was arrayed around him. He had removed his shoes, a pair of high-tops gone brandless with grime. He was inspecting the brick-red bottoms of his feet.

“What are you doing here?”

The man looked up with a foot in hand. “Huh? Oh. Yeah, just…”

“What?”

“Looking for cans.”

Tim walked past him and continued to descend. He was forced to turn his head in order to stay in the conversation. “How’d you get past security?”

“It’s my brother,” said the man.

“What?”

“My brother.”

“Who’s your brother?” He reached the next landing and within a few stairs lost sight of the man. “You shouldn’t be here,” he cried up.

“What?”

“I said I don’t think you should be sitting in our stairwell!”

His voice echoed through the upper stairs. The man no longer responded. The clop of dress shoes filled the silence. In no time he descended past the twenties and the teens and entered the lobby.

Once he ran with the goal to exhaust himself. Maybe there was no slowing down, but he could speed up. He could move his head, his limbs — hell, he could dance so long as he kept moving forward. Like a stutterer in song. He juked and huffed around casual city walkers until he was in New Jersey and his lungs hit a wall and he stopped. But his legs, he realized at once, had every intention of continuing, and continue they would until they were through. He couldn’t believe what he had inflicted on himself, his muscles quivering with fatigue, every step like lifting out of quicksand.

He had Jane lock him inside the bedroom. The tidy circles he was forced to walk made him dizzy and half-mad.

He had Horowitz pump him full of a powerful muscle relaxant. Which worked for the time he was out. But after the medication wore off he was out walking again, this time drowsy and nauseous, his longest and most miserable walk, and he swore never to do that again.

They bolted an O-ring into a stud in the wall and tethered him with a chain and a belt made of leather. After a couple of days, that sort of containment was just too barbaric.

When the illness returned a second time, he thought of the treadmill. He’d beat his body at its own game, outwit dumb matter with his mind. But every time chance permitted him to have his body on the treadmill during an episode, he found himself stepping right off the revolving belt, into freedom. His body wouldn’t be contained or corralled. It had, it seemed to him, a mind of its own.

The lobby of his office building was set on a mezzanine. To access the street, one still had to ride down the escalator.

Frank Novovian looked up from his post, his eyes burdened with ripe bags, his cold-clock gaze greeting the world without humor. Yet he was deferential to the right people. “Good morning, Mr. Farnsworth,” he said.

“Frank, can I have a word?”

“Of course.”

Tim stepped onto the escalator. His feet continued to walk. He was forced to turn his head in order to further address the security guard. “Will you walk with me?”

Frank got off his stool and caught up with Tim long after he had stepped off the escalator. He was halfway across the lower lobby by then. “What can I do for you, Mr. Farnsworth?”

“There’s a man in our stairwell.”

“What man?”

“A homeless man.”

“In our stairwell?”

“Know what he’s doing there?”

He entered the revolving doors. He gestured for Frank to follow as he fought the wind pushing against the glass.

The uprush of city life, always unexpected. A far cry from his time behind the desk. Taxis heading past, cars, supply trucks, bundled men on bicycles delivering bagged lunches. Faces were as varied as the flags of the earth. A Hasidic Jew pushing a dolly in front of him weaved quickly between blustered walkers. The sidewalks were salt-stained; the cold swallowed him up. He walked into the wind, north, toward Central Park, a wind shaped materially by pole-whipped newspapers and fluttering scarf tails. The fabric of his suit snapped behind him angrily. His teeth were rattling. Poor Frank, forced out in nothing but his standard-issue security man’s blazer. Yet Frank followed him dutifully into the crystal heart of the season.

Could he send Frank for the pack? Frank would have to reenter the building, wait for the elevator, walk the hallway, head back down again. By then he’d be searching for one man among eight million.

“Frank,” he said, “R. H. Hobbs is expected later today.”

“Do you remember the floor the man’s on, Mr. Farnsworth?”

“Midthirties?”

Frank unclipped the walkie-talkie from his belt. “Two minutes and he’ll no longer be a problem.”

“Thank you, Frank.”

Frank cocked the walkie-talkie sideways at his mouth and radioed inside. A voice crackled back. He was in midsentence when Tim reached out. “Wait,” he said. Frank cut himself short and lowered the walkie-talkie in anticipation of further instruction, continuing to walk alongside him. “Wait a second, Frank.”

They approached an intersection clustered by pedestrians waiting for the light to change. He turned down the side street, walking opposite the one-way traffic he was inexplicably, almost mystically spared from throwing himself in front of, and Frank followed. Some failsafe mechanism moved him around red lights and speeding cars, moved his legs with a cat’s intuition around any immediate peril. Dr. Urgess had once pointed to that reprieve as proof he was in control at some conscious or at least subconscious level, although Dr. Cox later claimed that the body’s involuntary systems, especially its sense of self-preservation, were powerful enough to override and even determine specific brain mechanisms. One located the disease in his mind, the other in his body. First he had believed the one doctor and followed his instructions, and then he had believed the other and followed his instructions. Now he was crossing the street with Frank after the last car in line had made it through the light, and neither Urgess nor Cox had managed for all their curiosity and wisdom to bring a single thing to bear on the problem itself. Thank you for your beautiful theories, you expert professionals, thank you for your empty remedies. Frank kept peering over.

“I’d like you to leave the man alone,” said Tim. “Let him stay where he is.”

“I thought you wanted him gone.”

“Not anymore,” he said.

He was thinking of the way he’d been treated at African Hair Weaving the day before. White man walks in and asks for shelter, black women point to the folding chairs. Same white man walks past a homeless man seeking the very same shelter, has black man thrown out into the cold. Dharma guru Bindu Talati’s long-ago suggestion that some karmic imbalance might have caused a material rift that provoked his walking had claimed his imagination again, but partly he was just trying to be decent. “As a personal favor,” he said.

He looked over to drive the point home and saw that by some miracle a black wool cap had materialized on Frank’s once-steaming, egg-bald head. “There are perfectly good heat shelters in the city, Mr. Farnsworth.”

“There are, that’s true,” he said. “But by a strange coincidence I know the man, Frank. We went to high school together. He’s fallen on hard times. Will you do me the favor of seeing he stays put as long as he wants? And also make sure no one else harasses him?”

“I didn’t know he was a friend of yours.”

“A friend of sorts. From a long time ago.”

“Consider it taken care of then, Mr. Farnsworth,” said Frank, cocking the walkie-talkie at his mouth again.

“And Frank, I have to ask another favor of you,” he said. “Would you let me borrow your cap?”

With no hesitation Frank handed him the hat. Handed it off as if that had been the point of bringing it outside with him, its brief respite on top of his head merely a convenient place to store it until the request was made. Tim put the hat on and tucked in his singed ears, pinning them between warm scalp and rough wool. “Thank you, Frank,” he said.

“Is it the walking thing again, Mr. Farnsworth?”

Astonishment wiped his face clean of expression. No one at the firm knew — that he had made sure of. That had been the first priority. He had elegantly explained away his two earlier leaves of absence: everyone knew about Jane’s struggle with cancer. But now he wondered: did others know the real reason, and how many? Or was it simply true what they said, that Frank Novovian in security knew everything before anyone else?

“What walking thing?”

“From before,” said Frank.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Frank.”

“Oh,” said the security man. “Never mind.”

“You can go back to your post now.”

“Okay, Mr. Farnsworth.” But Frank kept walking beside him. “Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Farnsworth?”

There was never anything anyone could do. Jane could handcuff him to the headboard until his wrists couldn’t take another day, and Becka could feign understanding until she could flee the room again, and Bagdasarian could revisit the medical annals and run another MRI, and Hochstadt could design another pharmacological cocktail, and the Mayo Clinic could follow him with furrowed brows around the outskirts of Rochester again, and Cowley at the Cleveland Clinic could recommend psychiatric evaluation based on his patient’s “health-care-seeking behavior,” and Montreux’s Dr. Euler could throw up his hands again, Yari Tobolowski could prepare another concoction of bat-wing extract, Sufi Regina could smoke him with the incense promises of a spiritually guided life-force energy, his channels could be reopened and his mind-body connection yoga’d and Reiki’d and Panchakarma’d until he was as one, as a rock is as one — but the goddamned thing was back. Hope and denial, the sick person’s front and rear guards against the devastation of another attack, were gone.

“You can call my wife,” he replied at last, “and tell her to expect a call from me.”

The bodhisattva had encouraged him to look deeply into his reliance upon technology. Email and PDA, cell phone and voice mail were extensions of the ruinous consuming self. They made thoughts of the self instantaneously and irrepressibly accessible. Who’s calling me, who’s texting me, who wants me, me, me. The ego went along on every walk and ride, replacing the vistas and skylines, scrambling the delicate meditative code. The self was cut off from the hope that the world might reassert itself over the digitized clamor and the ego turn again into the sky, the bird, the tree.

He didn’t touch mouse or keyboard, keypad or scroll button all the months of his previous recurrence, and it had thrived then, and now it was back, so so much for the bodhisattva.

11

She said his name three times into the phone, each time louder than the last. The other brokers in the open plan looked up from their preoccupations. “You have to concentrate, Tim,” she said. She stood up and her chair rolled back to tap the desk behind her. The person sitting there exchanged a look with his colleague across the aisle. “What’s the name of the road, can you see a name?” It was impossible for anyone to ignore her. “But what town? What town?” She seemed to regain some measure of control. She sat back down and issued careful instructions, as specific as they were mysterious. “You have to call nine-one-one. Are you listening? If you can call me you can call nine-one-one. But if they can’t locate you — Tim? If they can’t locate you, you have to walk into that subdivision. I know you’re tired but you don’t have a choice if they don’t know where to pick you up. Move away from the main road. Are you listening? Move into the neighborhood. Go to the first house and ring the doorbell. Stay awake until somebody opens the door. If nobody opens the door, go to the next house. You tell them to call nine-one-one. Then you can fall asleep. Somebody has to call nine-one-one before you fall asleep. I know you’re tired, I know you’re tired, but are you listening?” She stood again. “Tim, are you awake?” She waited for him to reply. “Tim, wake up!” Everyone was silent. The only sound in the office now was of telephones allowed to ring. “Go into the subdivision! I will find you!”

He walked from the main road to the subdivision. His body trembled with cold. It had let him know, five minutes earlier, that the walk had come to its end. He wore his suit coat backward, the back in front, which did better against the wind, and his hands were wrapped in plastic bags. He had swooped down during the walk and plucked them from the icy ground, one hand in a black plastic bag and the other in a white one.

The first house was circumscribed by a chain-link fence. He forced the latch up and stumbled to the door. He tried to think of what he might say. The right idea wasn’t coming. The words behind the idea were out of reach. He was at one remove from the person who knew how to form ideas and say words.

He fell to his knees before he could ring the doorbell. He put his bagged hands on the storm door and rested his head there. The metal was cold against his cheek. He fought with angry determination for two or three seconds. If he could defy the tidal fatigue, his body wouldn’t win, and he might still learn that someone had discovered him and would see him to safety.

She made calls from her desk, starting with the easternmost hospitals and moving west. She left her name and number in case he should be admitted later. She was not unfamiliar with the patient voices of the operators, their assurances that she would be contacted immediately should his name appear in the computer. Colleagues came up to ask if everything was okay. Sure, sure everything’s okay. You’ve done this yourself, right — searched random hospitals for the one you love? Again she stared at the blank wall of explanation. She could have asked have you ever heard of… but there was no name. She could have said it’s a condition that afflicts only… but there were no statistics. “Everything’s fine,” she assured them. She turned back to the phone and dialed another hospital.

The call came in around five, perfectly timed for rush hour. Better late than never. Better than going to identify his body at the morgue. Still, she was angry when they told her he had been admitted two hours earlier. Nothing like wasting time making fruitless calls when she could have been on her way. That was always the impulse when she finally located him: I have to get to him. And when she got to him: never let him go.

She left the office to sit in traffic and didn’t reach the hospital until quarter to seven. He was in the waiting room of the ER. She moved past shell-shocked people and children playing on the floor. He sat against the far wall covered in a blanket, wearing a black wool cap. His face was windburned that distinct pink color two shades lighter than damage done by the sun.

“Your face,” she said.

“How’d you find me?”

“I made calls.”

“You always find me,” he said.

“It’s easier when you have the GPS with you.” She sat down next to him. “Where’s your pack?”

“They’re worried about my toes. The blisters are bad.”

“Where’s your pack, Tim?”

“I had just gone down to Peter’s,” he said. “But when I left I went in the opposite direction.”

“I asked you to always have the pack,” she said.

“Frank Novovian gave me his cap.”

She had to remember who Frank Novovian was. “The security guy?”

“All I had to do was ask for it.”

“You promised me you would carry your pack with you wherever you went.”

“I just went down the hall,” he said.

They drove into the city to retrieve the pack and then they headed home. She drove. He sat gazing silently out the window at the nothing scenery passing them in the night. He turned to her at last and announced that he hadn’t bothered to explain to the attending doctor what he was doing out in the cold for so long.

“You didn’t tell the attending?” she said. “Why wouldn’t you tell the attending?”

“Those band-aid scientists,” he said, “don’t get to know about me anymore.”

This alarmed her. They had always had faith, both of them, in the existence of the One Guy, out there somewhere, living and working with the answer. It was the One Guy they sought in Rochester, Minnesota, in San Francisco, in Switzerland, and, closer to home, in doctors’ offices from Manhattan to Buffalo. Time was, he would stop anyone, interns and med students included. Time was, he would travel halfway across the world. Now he couldn’t be bothered to so much as state the facts to an attending?

“One of those band-aid scientists may have the answer, Tim. You might be surprised someday.”

“What surprise?” he said. “There are no more surprises. The only way they could surprise me is if they gave up the secret recipe to their crock of shit.”

They pulled off the highway, went under the overpass and down Route 22, where the stoplights and shopping centers of their life together greeted them from both sides of the four lanes. His frostbitten hands were wrapped in something like Ace bandages intended to insulate them from the cold, a pair of taupe and layered mitts.

“I don’t like the way you’re talking,” she said.

“What way is that?”

“Without hope.”

They started up the hill that led into the neighborhood, headlights illuminating clumps of days-old snow formless as manatees, dusted with black exhaust. The blacktop glowed with cold, the salted road was white as bone.

“I must be crazy,” he said.

“Crazy?”

“I’m the only one, Jane. No one else on record. That’s crazy.”

“You’re not crazy,” she said. “You’re sick.”

“Yeah, sick in the head.”

He was a logical man who believed, as the good lawyer, in the power of precedent. Yet there was no precedent for what he suffered, and no proof of what qualified as a disease among the physicians and clinical investigators: a toxin, a pathogen, a genetic disorder. No evidence of any physical cause. No evidence, no precedent — and the experts could give no positive testimony. That left only the mind.

“I wish you would call Dr. Bagdasarian,” she said.

He didn’t reply, and they reached the house in silence. She took the driveway slowly as the garage door pulled up. She put the car in park and opened the door. She turned to him before stepping out. He stared through the windshield. Tears fell down his face into his day’s growth of beard.

“Oh, banana,” she said.

She turned in her seat and placed a hand on his chest. She felt his staccato breathing, the resistance as he inhaled to letting himself go further than he already had. He didn’t like to cry. He was fighting it the way a boy fights sleep, the mind pitted against the body and proving weaker. He cried so seldom that tears instinctively sprung to her eyes, too, the way they had when she was a girl and sympathy was as natural as breathing.

That night in bed she made him an offer. She would dress according to the weather, follow him as he walked, and watch over him as he slept. To make it possible she was going to quit her job. How could she be at work with any peace of mind when he might be anywhere at any moment, lost in the city and scared as a child?

“I know you won’t go back in the cuffs,” she said. “So the only solution is for me to quit.”

“I don’t want you to quit,” he said.

She had been able to take care of him when he required cuffing to the bed only because she wasn’t working. Then — poof! It disappeared. Her relief was enormous. She looked back on those barren days in the bedroom with a hazy feeling of house arrest. Once or twice she drove Becka to her violin lesson after too much wine. But her efforts had been so consuming that his life, his sickness, had in many ways become her own, and until she started selling real estate, she was at sea.

“We don’t need the money,” she said.

“But you enjoy your work. You’ve made a life for yourself these past couple of years.”

“You’ll find this hard to believe,” she said, “but you and Becka, you are my life.”

He was quiet in the dark. A peeled, flat moon cast some light through the bedroom’s open windows, just enough to make their breath visible. He was on top of the bed; she huddled beneath the covers. “Why would I find that hard to believe?”

“Because your life is your work.”

“Is that what you think?”

There was silence. “Listen to me,” she said. “You need someone to watch over you. You’re going farther away than ever before.”

She had no idea, no idea, how badly he wanted to consent. He was scared. He wanted someone to safeguard him.

“It’s too much to ask,” he said. “I don’t want it to be like last time when I recover and go back to work and you get depressed.”

“I wasn’t depressed,” she said. “I just had a hard time finding my old self again.”

“It’s too much to ask,” he repeated.

And she was silent then because she was relieved.

12

Mike Kronish appeared in Tim’s doorway. Even from that distance the man seemed to hover. Proximity to him felt like sudden contact with a grizzly bear risen up on its hind legs. His broad suited figure was an American corn-fed miracle. He made his own weather in hallways and conference rooms and was legend for screwing paralegals.

Kronish was the managing partner of the litigation department, a five-year position to which he’d been elected. He assigned new business to the other partners, set policy for the department, and ran the caucuses and litigation committees. He also served internally as the voice of the firm. There were no official hierarchies among partners at Troyer, Barr, but the managing partner had certain political obligations that involved keeping important matters under control. “Knock knock,” he said.

“Hey hey,” said Tim.

Kronish came in and sat across from him. A delayed tide of aftershave, masking any hint of flaw, floated over the desk. “So let me just come right out with it,” said Kronish. “R.H. called. He’s unhappy.”

“He called you?”

“You missed a meeting with him yesterday.”

“No, no,” said Tim. “I talked with Peter. Peter should have met with him. Where the fuck was Peter?”

“Tell me, Tim.”

“What?”

“Who’s the partner on the case? Is Peter the partner?”

“And whose case is it, Mike? If I want Peter to take the meeting.”

“Your case, your case. But when I get a call — me — from the client.”

“Then if it’s my case, I take the meeting or I tell Peter to take the meeting.”

Kronish pinched his nose twice quickly and then resettled his hand on his folded leg. He sat back in the chair. A moment passed.

Kronish was famous inside the firm for once having billed a twenty-seven-hour day. This was possible only if you plied the time zones. Kronish worked twenty-four hours straight and then boarded a plane for Los Angeles, where he continued working on West Coast time. When he filled out his time sheets later that week, he rightfully attributed more hours to that day than technically possible. This made Tim want to leap across the desk and eat his lucky, healthy heart. “Fucking guy needs a babysitter,” he said, breaking the silence.

“Fucking guy needs an acquittal,” said Kronish.

“Which is my entire fucking point as to why I wasn’t in that meeting. Why am I working this hard? And it wasn’t a meeting, it was a hand-holding. Look, Mike, butt out, with due respect. I can handle my client.”

“You know all he brings in on the corporate side.”

“I need reminding?”

“So you skipped the meeting to work the case?”

“Butt the fuck out, Mike.”

There was a momentary stare-down between the two men. Then Kronish’s eyes wandered. Tim followed them over to the wall, where the backpack leaned. “What’s with that?”

“What?”

Kronish gestured with his chin. “The backpack.”

“What, it’s a backpack.”

“Have I seen you walking the halls with that?”

For a moment he thought, I’ll just come clean. I’ll show Mike The New England Journal of Medicine article and I’ll detail the frustration of fighting the label of crazy and I’ll say, ultimately, Mike, they don’t know if it’s a medical condition or a psychiatric disorder. I’ll be honest, and Mike will respond in kind with a show of sympathy he’s never demonstrated because we are both human beings slated to fall ill and die. “All right, all right,” he said. “Look.” He was quiet, letting the moment build. “We’ve had some bad news.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

He took a deep breath. “Jane’s cancer’s come back.”

Kronish’s demeanor changed. He leaned forward in the chair and steepled his hands as if to pray, never letting his eyes stray from Tim’s. Soon he wore a duly woeful and theatrical frown. “Shit,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“That is bad news.”

They sat in respectful silence.

“Anything the firm can do?”

That’s what he wanted to hear. He let the pause linger. “Just let me work my case.”

Kronish put up his hands. “Your case,” he said.

He left soon after. Tim realized that Jane’s supposed cancer in no way explained why he should be carrying a backpack around the halls of the firm. Kronish, with his shrewd legal mind, should have seized on that. Maybe he had by now. The strands of his story were easy to take apart. But for the moment, Kronish had only heard the word cancer. Everything else went out the window. That was the power, the enviable, unlucky power, of a fatal and familiar disease.

13

Overcast was riveted to the sky as gray to a battleship. The footpath of the Brooklyn Bridge matched the color of the day, as did its intricate spiderwebbing metalwork. He went up the incline and under the first arch. The East River was scalloped white from the wind as it coursed south into the harbor. Believing he was alone, to vent his anger he cried out into the consuming gust, only to turn the corner of the arch and find two bundled lovers taking self-portraits. Startled, they backed up against the brickwork to give him a wide berth.

The path flattened out between the first arch and the second. He became aware then of someone keeping pace with him. He thought nothing of it until the man looked over and said, “Aren’t you the attorney defending R. H. Hobbs?”

He turned. Where had the man come from? He looked behind him. The picture-takers were gone.

“Excuse me?” he said.

“Am I right? You’re the man defending R. H. Hobbs.”

That someone would address him out of the blue halfway across the pedestrian walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge was surprising. That that same someone identified him as R.H.’s attorney was alarming. The murder had been mentioned in the papers once or twice, but nothing since the early days. The case lacked a celebrity pedigree, and Tim felt sure that no one outside the legal world would have recognized the lawyers involved.

“Do I know you?”

“Oh, I doubt that,” said the man.

He was about Tim’s height, of a slim build under the winter layers. He was dressed in a camel-hair coat with collar raised. Out of it blossomed the black folds of a cashmere scarf covering his neck. An enormous sable hat was perched on top of his head. The fur quivered in the wind like a patch of black wheat. He had a long pale solitary face, too pale to grow whiskers, bloodless in the cheeks even on so cold a day, with a dimple in his potbellied chin and a long pinched nose that accentuated the bone in the middle, as prominent as a knuckle.

“How do you know me?”

“I followed you from midtown,” said the man. “You work in midtown?”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” he said. And then: “You followed me all the way from midtown to the Brooklyn Bridge?”

“It’s a beautiful day for a walk.”

“No, it’s not,” he said. “It’s well below freezing. What are you doing following me?”

The man continued to keep pace a little too close for comfort. “That was one vicious murder,” he said. “Stabbed his wife like she was a piece of art. Almost beautiful, looked at in a certain light. But monstrous for sure. How can you defend a man like that?”

“Who are you? I’ll call the police.”

“Have you seen the crime-scene photos? Very premeditated cuts. He didn’t just pound away, not after the first couple of stabs. He is one sick bastard, your client.”

“I will call the police.”

But he hadn’t even taken out his phone. He was afraid the man might swipe at his hand. He didn’t want to lose the new BlackBerry as he had lost the old one. He would need it to call Jane when the walk ended.

“And why Staten Island?” asked the man. “Why dump her body in that old Staten Island landfill that’s been closed forever?”

“Who are you?”

“Your client lives in Rye. Why go all the way to Staten Island?”

“How do you know what you know?”

“Want to know what I know?” the man asked. “What I really know?”

The man came to an abrupt halt. Tim was forced to keep moving. They were quickly separated by a number of paces. He turned his head and watched the man recede. The man looked surprised that Tim would continue walking.

“Don’t care to know?” said the man.

“What do you know?” Tim hollered.

“Your client’s innocent, Mr. Farnsworth,” he cried above the wind. “R. H. Hobbs is an innocent man.”

The man removed a Ziploc bag from his coat. Inside the clear bag sat a butcher’s knife. The man held the bag up by the seam and gently shook the knife inside the bag. Then he turned and walked away.

14

The cemetery had been retired under a white sheet. Darkness now settled over it like dust. A black Mercedes threaded its way through the maze of winding streets.

Jane followed the Mercedes in her car. She pulled up to the curb and stepped out. She hurried through the snow.

He was lying on a cleared bed of granite. He sat up at her touch with a mortal start, as if she had jolted him out of another dimension. His eyes darted wildly in the holes of his ski mask. His unsheltered sleep had put him again at the mercy of an unknown world. He felt the approach of some violent reckoning.

“There was a man on the bridge,” he said.

“What man?”

“He knew who I was.”

His attention was drawn away by the slamming of a car door. He watched a man in a long charcoal wool coat approach them slowly through the crusted snow. Even from so far a distance he could make out those familiar Picasso features — the skewed nose, the plump lips, one eye bigger than the other.

“What is he doing here?”

She was also watching the man come forward. “I called him.”

“I said no doctors.”

“I know,” she said.

“He can’t help me, Jane.”

“How do you know that?”

“None of them can help me.”

“Hello, Tim,” said Dr. Bagdasarian.

They sat in the doctor’s warm Mercedes as halos of glowing halogen began to shine from the lampposts across the cemetery. Tim disliked Bagdasarian the least of all his doctors. He had been the recipient of many funny looks over the years, but Dr. Bagdasarian’s was due to the fact that he was born that way, not because he questioned Tim’s sanity or doubted the severity of his suffering. One look at Bagdasarian and the assumption was that God had deprived him of all beauty and vanity so that he could better dedicate himself to the puzzle of men’s afflictions. The doctor was learned and eloquent with his singsong accent and carried the aura of a polymath.

Yet Tim was not pleased to see him. Before he got sick, he was under the illusion that he needed only to seek help from the medical community, and then all that American ingenuity, all that researched enlightenment, would bring about his inalienable right to good health. At the very least, he thought, there would be one person, one expert in the field, to give him some degree of understanding, solace and action. But by now he had abandoned his search for the One Guy. The One Guy was dead, the One Guy was God, the One Guy was an invention in the night when he was bottomed out and desperate to believe in something. He was sick of searching for the One Guy and sick of having his hopes dashed. He would not let himself believe in the One Guy anymore.

And anyway, who the fuck needed the One Guy? He was still alive, wasn’t he? He could beat this thing on his own, couldn’t he? Fuck the One Guy. Fuck the One Guy’s answers and the One Guy’s hope.

Bagdasarian spoke over their heads for twenty minutes about advances in brain imaging technology. He discussed radioisotopes and motion degradation and atomic magnetometers. Considerable progress had been made, he said, since Tim’s last extended medical examination. In fact there were some very cutting-edge developments that allowed a clean image of the brain to be taken in situ.

“In other words,” the doctor said excitedly, “in other words, we no longer require complete immobility, you see. We can capture what’s happening in your brain when you’re walking, at the very moment it’s changing. In neurological circles, this is extremely significant. No one dreamed we could be where we are at this moment for another fifty, sixty years. I know some who said we would never get there. But it’s true. We no longer need to lay you out on a slab and push you inside a tunnel to get a very good idea of what’s going on inside your head.”

To his dismay, as he listened to the doctor, he couldn’t prevent a little bit of renewed hope from belly-flipping inside him.

“What does that do for me?” he asked.

“What does it do?”

“Where does it get me? Does it get me a diagnosis? Does it get me a cure?”

“Well,” said the doctor, “no, not a cure, certainly. It is only a tool, but a more refined tool than we’ve ever—”

“Not interested.”

“Not interested?” said Jane.

She hung between the two men in the backseat. Tim pivoted to look at her.

“Why would I do that to myself, Janey?”

“Do what?”

“Allow myself to hope again, when it’s really only another opportunity to be disappointed?”

“How do you know you’ll be disappointed when you haven’t tried it?”

“You just heard the man. It’s not a cure, and it’s not a diagnosis.”

“But,” said Bagdasarian, “it still might be of some comfort to you, Tim.”

He turned back to the doctor in the dim light.

“I know how you’ve struggled to validate your condition,” said the doctor. “I know you’ve fallen into depression because no empirical evidence has emerged to exonerate you — I use your word, which I have remembered many years — to exonerate you from the charge of being mentally ill. You hate it when people say this is something all in your head. You place great importance on having your condition regarded as a legitimate physical malfunction, something that members of the medical establishment like myself must take seriously. That is the very prerequisite of a real disease — that it’s taken seriously. We have a few new tools to do that now — possibly, possibly. Wouldn’t it be satisfying to prove to the world that your unique condition is as you insist it is, a matter of organic disease, and not something — a compulsion, or a psychosis — for which you, for personal reasons — and perfectly naturally so, Tim, perfectly naturally — feel you must be ashamed of? Wouldn’t that be, in its humble way, some measure of progress?”

Bagdasarian was good. Tim could feel himself getting sucked in again. “What would I have to do?”

The device Bagdasarian had in mind would be a prototype made to order. As such it would not come cheaply. Because his was a disease of one, they did not have at their disposal prefab medical supplies. Tim told him not to worry about money, they could afford it. In that case, the doctor resumed, he would approach one of the two private biomedical firms he knew capable of engineering the kind of thing he had in mind, an ambulatory helmet of sorts. It would take snapshots, so to speak — some before he walked, some during his walk, and some after. From that they would be able to reconstruct a full picture of what was happening inside his brain during a typical episode.

“I’d have to wear this device before walking?”

“Yes,” said the doctor. “To get the before-and-after story, you’d need to wear it day and night.”

The doctor had spoken eloquently and empathetically of Tim’s despair. Why should it be so important to him to prove that he was suffering from a legitimate medical disorder and not a mental illness? He didn’t know, except to say that it was. It meant all the difference in the world somehow not to be lumped in with the lunatics and the fabricators. He wanted to prove it to Jane, who needed no proof, and to Becka, who looked at him suspiciously, and to the medical establishment, who made a cottage industry out of dismissal, and to people at the firm who might doubt him with a lawyer’s inborn skepticism. Most of all, he wanted to prove it to himself.

But the doctor had stopped speaking, and Tim recalled the many tests he’d already endured, the hard exam beds and cold paper gowns, and the thousand times that hope had belly-flipped inside him before. And he thought about Troyer, Barr. There was already a backpack over his shoulder when he walked the halls. What would they make of him on the day he showed up wearing a made-to-order brain helmet?

“I’ll have to think about it,” he said.

“You’ll have to think about it?”

He turned back to Jane. “What if he doesn’t succeed?” he asked. “I get my hopes up again and nothing comes of it. What then?”

“But this is what you’ve wanted from the very beginning,” she said. “Proof. Evidence.”

“Where’s the guarantee of that?”

“And what’s the alternative?” she asked. “Give up? Lose hope?”

“I’m sorry,” he said to the doctor. “It’s something I’ll have to think about.”

“Perfectly understandable,” said Bagdasarian.

15

She ran into the grocery store to pick up dinner. She was waiting at the meat department for the butcher to come out with her veal chops when she turned and saw the man standing next to her. Her heart leapt.

It was a girl’s heart. She couldn’t explain what made her, even now, forty-six and twenty years married, want him. He was in a suit and tie and overcoat and his designer eyeglasses marked him as a man who loved jazz and art magazines. He went to the gym and pressed weights and his lovely sweat dripped down his neck. He couldn’t be a day over thirty-five. It was unkind of the universe to make a man so finely match her ideal of physical beauty and to place him a few feet from her at the moment she was trying to buy veal chops for her family. If she inched a foot closer to him, people passing by would think they were a couple. If she inched over, people would think they had a place in the city set high above the noise where music played across the open loft and the walls were hung with contemporary art. Maybe he had two kids, maybe he abused cocaine in club stalls — she didn’t know the first thing about him. It only made her want him more. She kept desire down and kept it down because of vows and obligations and an entire moral structure that could not collapse at the sight of one man in a grocery store, but it had collapsed.

She couldn’t recall the last time a person affected her so painfully. He turned to her and she quickly lost her nerve and faced the meat again. She turned back eventually. He was still looking. He smiled at her. It wasn’t one of those firm-lipped hellos with a polite little nod. It was a smile with locked eyes. He was flirting. She wanted to cry out. She wanted to wrap his tie around her hand. She wanted contact information.

What was it? Something encoded in her genes? Something reaching all the way back to the primates? The body talking. She disliked it intensely. The man’s smile was a totally negating force. It stirred complete abandon in her. It tapped into what was reckless and selfish. She saw herself stealing out of the store with him and getting into a different car and being driven past the car she shared with Tim where he sat in the passenger seat with his eyes closed, listening to public radio. A different life, a totally different life. How easy it would be. They would arrive at the man’s place and she would never leave. Give him to me and I will change. I will see the point again. I will discern the code. I will laugh into the pillow at my unbelievable luck. I will inhabit a bed for hours with a fullness I thought gone forever. I will not look at anything as a chore again. I will smile unprompted. I will be in love. I will have boundless energy. I will not complain. Get me out of my life and I will wax again. I’ll make trips to boutiques in SoHo and pick out garter belts and babydolls, and as the clerk wraps them in tissue, it will take every possible restraint not to cry out with happiness.

The calls in the middle of the night, the long car rides out to God knows where. The worry, the frustration, the uncertainty, the sacrifice. Let Becka pick him up from now on. Make him take cabs.

She left the meat counter and walked to the far end of the store. She walked down the wine aisle. She chose the most expensive bottle. She left and then returned to the aisle for a second one.

“Where’s the food?” he asked.

She shut the door. “The line was too long. I thought we could pick up something on the way.”

“I was looking forward to veal,” he said.

She set the two wine bottles in back.

“You could buy wine but not veal?”

“I bought the wine at the liquor counter. There was no line there.”

“You couldn’t buy the veal there, too?”

“You know, it really pisses me off that you won’t let Bagdasarian try to help you,” she said. “With the exception of me, he’s the only one who hasn’t accused you of being crazy. I mean, he’s gone out of his way to argue that this is a real disease, and now he has something that might offer some evidence, some hope, to do for you what you’ve wanted, what you have searched and searched — what you have begged for, Tim — he says to you here it is, possibly, maybe, can’t guarantee it, but hey, it’s more than we’ve ever had. Good news, right? Exciting stuff! And you look away and say, let me think about it? What the hell is wrong with you? How many times—”

“Hey,” he said, “where is this coming from?”

“How many times have I sat with you in waiting rooms? How many specialists have we seen? I have flown to Ohio, to Minnesota, to California, to The fucking Hague! to be with you while you track them down. All the big names, all the experts. I have been there. Do you remember the chart, Tim? The log? What did you call it? Every day. Every day we recorded what you ate, what you drank, how you slept, how many hours, on and on… when you had your bowel movements, what change in weather that day, the temperature, the barometric pressure, for fuck’s sake. What else? Every insane insignificance! I kept a map full of pushpins! Here’s where you walked to on Monday. Here’s where you walked to on Wednesday. I listened to your rants, your rage, your frustration—”

“Can I get a word in?”

“And after all my struggle and all my patience, you can’t make one — more — fucking — effort?”

“Don’t you understand that if he comes up empty, I’ll want to kill myself?”

“You said you’d never do that.”

“But I would want to, Jane.”

“So that’s it? That’s the final word?”

“I said I would think about it.”

“And I get no say in it? After everything, I get no say?”

“It has to be my decision,” he said.

“Don’t think I don’t know why,” she said. “You’d have to wear that helmet at work. Don’t think I don’t know that’s your thinking.”

She threw the car in reverse, then suddenly slammed on the brakes. She had come close to hitting a mother and daughter as they passed by.

They drove home in silence and did not stop for dinner. On their way up the drive, they saw the lights from Becka’s Volvo coming down. The two cars edged into the snowy margins. They rolled down their windows.

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere.”

“Where are you going, Rebecca?”

Becka turned impatiently to look through the windshield and then back to her mother. Tim leaned into Jane to better see his daughter. “I have a show,” she said.

“This is a school night.”

“School night? Are you serious?”

“Where’s the show?”

Becka unclipped her seat belt and pivoted around to the backseat, where her guitar case lay. She straightened herself and held a flyer out the window. Jane took it and read. Then she passed it to Tim without looking at him.

“It’s not an open mike?”

“I just gave you the flyer, Mom.”

Tim was reading the flyer. “This has your name on it,” he said through the window.

“It’s just around here,” she said. “Not like in the city or something.”

“Why didn’t you tell us about this sooner?”

“Because I didn’t want you coming,” she said. “Besides, what were the chances of that anyway? Can I go now?”

Jane made her promise to be home by one and Becka continued down the drive. Jane pulled into the garage, reached in back for the wine and stepped out. Tim was still reading the flyer when she entered the house.

16

R. H. Hobbs was a stormer. He stepped out of the car before the driver had a chance to open the door and he stormed through the lower lobby and up the escalator to the mezzanine. He stood at the elevators making the people around him nervous. He was the first in and somehow the first out, after the women. He stormed through the glass doors into Troyer, Barr’s reception area and drummed his fingers on the front desk. The receptionist took his instructions, picked up the phone and silently urged it to ring faster. R.H. was this way even when he didn’t have a murder indictment hanging over his head. While waiting for one of the team’s associates to show up and lead him back, he tried sitting on the sofa, but then stood and walked over to the window. He vigorously shook the change in one of his pockets while peering out the glass. His gaze failed to alight on anything so he took his hands out of his pockets and ran them over his slick, brutally dyed hair, smoothing down his widow’s peak as he walked back to the receptionist to ask her how much longer he was going to have to wait. He had been there just forty-five seconds. The receptionist picked up the phone to make another call when Tim appeared.

“Holy hell, look who it is,” said R.H. “An attorney I used to know. I wonder how I might retain his services.”

“How are you, old friend?” said Tim.

“Looking at jail time,” said R.H. “You might have heard.”

R.H. extended his hand. Tim’s hands were badly frostbitten but he didn’t feel he could deny him. He fought the urge to cry out as R.H. squeezed and pumped.

“Maybe I’m just being a prima donna because my life is on the line, but would it kill you to return my calls?”

“I’ve not been as attentive as I’ve needed to be, R.H.,” he said, leading his client out of the staid lobby into the firm’s quiet interior. “But I haven’t neglected you, despite how it might appear, even as I’ve had to deal with Jane’s upcoming surgery.”

“Uh-huh,” said R.H. “And what kind of cancer is it?”

“I’m afraid it’s spread. It doesn’t look good.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Why are you carrying that backpack?”

“This? Doesn’t it make me look like a schoolboy?”

“And you’re wearing snow boots. Why are you wearing snow boots?”

“There is a funny story about these boots, R.H. You’ll get a kick out of it.”

Suddenly R.H. stopped. He turned to face the wall. One of his knees buckled. Tim thought the older man was having a heart attack. But then R.H. covered his eyes with his hand and tucked the other hand under his arm and began to cry. He looked a little like the disgraced Nixon. His crying built to a steady heaving through thick nostrils. “Why is this happening to me?” he asked, struggling to breathe. “I swear to God in heaven I’m innocent.”

Tim pivoted in front of R.H. to shield him from hallway onlookers. He placed a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t know what to say.

“I’m an innocent man.”

Tim kept his hand there until R.H. pulled out a handkerchief and began to collect himself.

They were arrayed around the conference room table. Peter, the senior associate, had before him the manila envelope that contained the sketch of the man Tim had encountered on the bridge. To Tim’s annoyance Mike Kronish had asked to sit in on the meeting. A secretary put her head in to inform the four men that the detective and the assistant district attorney had arrived.

“We’ll let you know when to bring them in,” said Tim. “Thank you.”

After the door closed Peter opened the envelope and set the sketch before R.H. Tim had sat for an hour with one of the freelancers from the courthouse and considered it a good likeness.

“I don’t recognize him,” R.H. said within five seconds.

“Now, just take your time, R.H. Look long and hard. Clear your mind. There’s no pressure. Take all the time you need.”

“This is the man who showed you the knife?”

Tim nodded. R.H. focused on the sketch again.

“I could stare at this picture until Judgment Day, I still wouldn’t recognize him.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

“Well, Jesus Christ,” said R.H. “I sure the hell wish I did.”

The secretary ushered in the lead detective and the assistant district attorney. Detective Roy had a pack of cigarettes in the front pocket of his buttondown. He had the fissured skin of a veteran smoker, as if someone had come along and smoothed out the crumpled ball of his face. He filled the conference room with his smoker’s stench and the impertinence of a hostile witness mocking his interrogator. The assistant district attorney was a short, stout woman who upon sitting down declared her hope that no one here was wasting anyone’s time.

Tim pushed the sketch across the table to Detective Roy. The detective pulled it toward him slowly with all the indifference in the world. He puckered his lips as he looked it over and swished air between his two front teeth, disrupting the room’s silence. He passed the sketch to the assistant district attorney who, before looking, lifted her eyeglasses to her forehead, where they sat well perched.

“So he stops you,” said the detective, “he tells you your client’s innocent, he shows you what he claims is the murder weapon, and then he walks away.”

“That’s correct,” said Tim.

“Well, ain’t that just fucking bizarre-o, hey?” The detective turned to the assistant district attorney. “Isn’t that bizarre-o, Thelma?”

“Pretty bizarre,” said Thelma.

“And where again?”

“Just outside the office here. Right as I was leaving for the night.”

“And when?”

“Last week. Tuesday. No, Wednesday.”

“Uh-huh,” said the detective. “Hey-ho. Hundred percent bizarre. Thelma? Bizarre?” The detective turned once again to look at Thelma.

“Does your client recognize the man?” she asked Tim.

“Sure the hell wish I did,” said R.H.

Tim reached out and delicately touched R.H.’s arm. “Let us do the talking,” he whispered. And then, more audibly, he said, “He does not. But that has no bearing on whether or not this man is somehow involved with the crime my client has been accused of committing.”

“You didn’t try to, I don’t know… take the knife away from the man? You say he had it in a Ziploc bag. He wasn’t brandishing it?”

“It was inside the bag.”

“And you, what — you just looked at it?”

“You’re asking why I didn’t try to take the knife away from him?”

“Well, if he wasn’t brandishing it.”

“Yeah, why the hell didn’t you try that?” asked R.H.

Tim attempted to touch his arm again, but R.H. pulled back.

“Couldn’t you have at least swiped at it?”

Tim directed his answer at the detective. “When you are approached by a complete stranger who brandishes a knife that may be a murder weapon, your first instinct is not to try and take it away.”

“Maybe not your first instinct,” said R.H.

“Fair enough,” the detective said to Tim.

“During the course of your investigation, Detective, did you have a suspect, or perhaps interview someone, who looked like the man in that sketch?”

Detective Roy smiled. He looked directly at R.H. “We only ever had one suspect, Counselor.”

The room turned silent.

“Did you interview anyone who looked like that man?”

“What are you asking us to do, Mr. Farnsworth?” asked the assistant district attorney, whose glasses remained on her forehead.

“Look into who this man might be. He had the murder weapon.”

“Alleged murder weapon.”

“Fine, alleged. All the same, that’s not your everyday occurrence, I think you can agree.”

“Oh, for sure, for sure,” said the detective. “Bizarre-o indeed.”

“Why does he keep saying that?” asked R.H.

Tim had to reach out again. The detective and the assistant district attorney quietly conferred.

“Sure, why not,” said the detective as he stood and put a fresh cigarette in one corner of his mouth. The cigarette bobbed up and down as he spoke. “Terrorism, murdered police, getting guns out of the hands of children. We got all the time in the world for this shit.”

The assistant district attorney returned her glasses to her nose, and they departed.

Tim had had to excuse himself directly after the meeting to visit the men’s room. He returned to discover Mike Kronish inside his office with R.H. Sam Wodica was there, too. Wodica was the firm’s managing partner, overseer of all its departments, perched on the final rung of the invisible ladder. Wodica resembled an aging surfer. His sandy-blond hair, suntanned complexion and year-round seersucker had a way of disarming jurors. They expected him to pour sand out of his shoes during closing arguments and then invite them all to the bonfire afterward, which went a long way toward winning them over.

Kronish’s elbow was on a bookshelf and Wodica’s ass was in Tim’s chair, gently swiveling. Their unexpected presence gave the office a charge. Tim had walked into a voluble silence.

“Oh, I’m in your seat,” said Wodica, standing and gesturing for Tim to sit in his own chair.

Do you expect a goddamned thank-you? he wanted to say.

He walked around the desk as Wodica retreated to the wall. Tim set the backpack in the corner. He sat down. He looked directly at R.H. and said, “What’s up?” R.H. stared at him but remained silent.

Kronish spoke. “R.H. is worried that because of Jane’s health, Tim, you don’t have your head in the game.”

“I feel for you having to deal with she has cancer,” said R.H., “but I’m looking at some serious consequences if things don’t go my way. They’ll take my fortune and I’ll rot in a cell, or I’ll just fucking die who knows, so I need to know. Do I have your undivided attention?”

Tim looked across the desk directly into R.H.’s heavy-hanging eyes, ignoring the two partners, and said, “There’s nobody that can try this case like I can.”

“Everybody here knows you’re working this case hard,” said Wodica. “R.H. doesn’t see it like we do, day in, day out. So he just asked that we talk this through.”

“If he saw what we saw,” Kronish added, “he’d know he doesn’t have a worry in the world. Basically we’re just here to clear up a minor communication problem.”

“My guess is he needs to hear more often from you is all. He needs to hear from you every day the way he did before Jane fell ill and then he won’t have any worries.”

Tim did not once look at his colleagues. His eyes remained fixed on R.H. The room fell into silence and he said, “I’m the man who’s going to get you acquitted.”

R.H. peered back with an expression even more despairing than his breakdown in the hall. He craned his neck to look at Kronish and on his way back to Tim glanced briefly at Wodica. “You fellows figure this out on your own,” he said. He stood and buttoned his suit coat. “But for fuck’s sake, figure it out and figure it out quick, because I’m not going to jail for something I didn’t do.”

Tim rose. “I’ll walk you out.”

“No, sit,” R.H. demanded. “And do not stand until you figure this shit out. I can damn well find my own way out.”

“Twenty million dollars,” said Wodica after R.H. had departed. “I could give two fucks if the man rots in jail or spends the rest of his days eating buffet in Miami, but this firm cannot lose the twenty million a year he brings in on the corporate side.”

“And who the fuck found that money?” asked Tim. “Who the fuck, who the fuck’s client is that? And you two come in here—”

“He asked us to.”

“—and interrogate me? Lecture me?”

“Where have you been, Tim?” cried Kronish. “We lied through our asses just now. Where have you been?”

“And now you’re going to tell me I can’t take a day off?”

“If it were only a day!”

“Goddamn right you can’t take a day off when you’re in the middle of a case like this,” said Wodica. “What’s going on?”

“She’s dying!” he cried. “She’s fucking dying, gentlemen!”

This quieted them momentarily.

Wodica, who was good with transitions, sighed with the right mix of compassion and concern. “Well, that’s a problem,” he said.

“Should you go home if that’s the case?” asked Kronish. “Take a leave of absence?”

“Mike can take over for you,” said Wodica. “Peter will get him up to speed. R.H. will be in good hands with Mike.”

“She doesn’t want me to take a leave of absence,” he said. “It’s very important to her that we preserve the routine. Otherwise the disease wins. That’s what she says.”

Kronish and Wodica exchanged looks.

“Fuck you both,” said Tim. “This is my case.”

He returned to the men’s room. He locked himself in a stall, hung the backpack on the metal hanger affixed to the door, and took a seat on the stool. He untied the laces of his boots with stiff and unhappy fingers and removed two pairs of socks from each foot just as he had done fifteen minutes earlier.

The sight was the same. The little toe on his left foot had mummified. It frightened him no end, how easily it might be snipped off with a pair of scissors and he would feel no pain.

Later in the day it fell off on its own. He felt it moving around inside his sock. He shut the door to his office, removed his boot and retrieved what looked like a giant raisin. He crumpled the toe up in a clean piece of paper and threw it away in a trash bin.

17

What they used to call soul. What they used to call spirit. Indivisible, complete, that thing made of mind, distinct from body.

He thought he had one — a soul, a spirit, a nature, an essence. He thought his mind was proof of it.

If mood, facial expression, hunger pain, love of color, if everything human and happenstance came not from the soul, the core of self, but from synapses firing and electrical signals, from the stuff in the brain that could be manipulated and X-rayed, what could he say about himself with any degree of certainty? Was mind just body more refined?

He refused to believe that.

He stopped that night at the security post. Frank Novovian leaned against the backrest of his stool, his arms folded over tie and blazer. With his prune-bag eyes he presided over the building’s calm comings and goings. Tim put both forearms on the marble post.

“How did you know about my walking, Frank?” he asked.

Frank unfolded his arms and set his hands on his thighs. He was hesitant. His initial silence seemed to allow him time to work out some internal calculation.

“You don’t remember the girl, Mr. Farnsworth?”

“The girl?”

Frank told him the story. Tim had appeared one day at the security post and asked Frank to follow him out. Frank thought he detected some panic in his voice. What transpired was a preview of the events from a few weeks prior. Frank caught up with Tim halfway across the lower lobby and followed him through one of the revolving doors. It was a hot summer day. Tim turned to Frank and told him that he couldn’t get back to his desk. Frank mistook him to mean he had some pressing engagement and needed someone to convey a message for him or run an errand inside the building, but as they continued to walk and talk, Frank understood that the situation was more complicated. “Help me to stop walking,” Tim said to him. City life swirled around them, car horns, snatches of conversation. Tim asked Frank to grab his arms, tackle him, hold him back somehow. “I’m sorry, Mr. Farnsworth,” said Frank as he tried to keep up. “You can’t stop walking?”

Neither of them saw the little girl. She broke away from her mother and went sidewise straight into Tim. The impact of his leg threw her to the ground. He skittered to avoid stepping on her and had difficulty regaining his balance. Everyone — Frank, the girl’s mother, bystanders — stopped, some to stare, others to bend down to the girl who, after a second of stunned silence, began to wail on the sidewalk. Tim kept walking.

“You looked back at me terrified,” Frank told him. “And I looked at you wondering why you weren’t stopping. I mean, you’d told me you couldn’t stop. I just didn’t understand until then that what you meant was, you really couldn’t stop.”

“I have no memory of this.”

“I remember it like it was yesterday.”

“But we’ve never talked about it.”

Frank shook his head.

“You just believed me?”

“You would have come back to make sure that girl was okay if you could have,” he said.

He had moments of doubt, yet he always returned to the belief that he was sick in body and not in mind. But for whatever reason his memory of knocking that little girl to the ground had been erased. Could anything in his mind — indivisible, complete — be erased, or otherwise go haywire? What confidence did that give him in the permanent thing called the soul?

Tim thanked him and turned to leave. Then he remembered that he had something of Frank’s. He pulled the wool cap out of his coat pocket.

“I owe you a hat,” he said.

Frank took the cap.

“I can’t thank you enough for that. It saved my life.”

“Anytime, Mr. Farnsworth.”

18

He was prodded awake by a billy club. He sat up in the leather seat and blinked down at the cop, who stood on the blacktop at a defensive angle. He was shining the flashlight in Tim’s eyes. Tim had no idea where he was. The cop asked him to step out of the vehicle. Softer security light streamed through the broad windshield. The steering wheel in front of him was a big round toy. The van or truck had no door. He stepped down the single stair as the cop backed up to keep some distance. There was another cop on the other side of him with his hand at his holster. The three of them stood between the truck he’d slept in and another just like it. It said Utz Potato Chips on the side. A foggy memory of having slipped inside the fenced lot when there was still a little daylight remaining now returned to him.

The cop asked him what he was doing there. He said he didn’t know, which was the undeniable truth, but the cop didn’t care for honest answers.

He had been in the middle of witness prep. There was nothing more important prior to jury selection than readying R.H. for the possibility of putting him on the stand. It would not be without risk but Tim was leaning toward it. He thought it would be good to let the jury hear from the man directly. How many times had R.H. said he had nothing to hide? His protestations of innocence would be genuine, and therefore well received. But it would require damn good coaching. Tim considered it one of the more purely enjoyable aspects of going to trial. He was prepping his witness and loving it. Then he walked out.

By now he figured Peter and probably R.H. himself had alerted Kronish to his abrupt departure. There had been no incoming call that might have explained it, no urgent message. Tim just grabbed the backpack and fled. Kronish had probably marched the episode down the hall to Wodica. How was he going to explain this one? They were lawyers, these fellows, A-game litigators with suspicious dispositions and the professional training to detect a wide array of bullshit. Jane’s cancer wasn’t going to take him much further.

For the first time since this latest recurrence, Tim didn’t want to return to the office.

At the station, the lieutenant apologized for any rough treatment. Government trucks were parked in that lot and there was always the fear of terrorists.

“Terrorists?”

“Who knows,” said the lieutenant. “By the way, you ever try a sleep clinic? My brother-in-law walked in his sleep terrible. He went to a sleep clinic in Boston and now my sister tells me you can’t get that son of a bitch out of bed with a Hyster.”

“I’ll have to try that,” said Tim.

Outside the station he called Dr. Bagdasarian and got his service. He told the woman it was an emergency and she woke the doctor up. When he came on the line, Tim told him that he wanted to give the new technology a try. He no longer thought he had anything to lose.

“Just out of curiosity,” said Bagdasarian. “What made you change your mind?”

He told him nothing about walking out of witness prep or the increasing challenge of explaining himself at the firm. He just wanted something to show people, he said. He wanted to return to the firm with evidence that he was not crazy but sick, deserving of understanding, even sympathy. And he was doing it for Jane. He had to recognize that his sickness was not his alone. She had followed him down the dark and narrowing tunnel. How could he abandon her at a possible point of light?

He waited on the bench to be picked up. He waited and he waited, never having waited so long.

She pulled up and he got in. On the drive home he told her where he’d woken up and about the Utz trucks and the lieutenant who told him to go to a sleep clinic. “Like we haven’t been to sleep clinics,” he said.

Jane didn’t respond.

“Jane, are you listening?”

“I’m listening.”

“You haven’t said a word.”

“It’s three in the morning,” she said. “I’m tired.”

During his last recurrence he had agreed to go into handcuffs not only to save him from such episodes as being arrested in a parking lot three villages over from his own, but to spare her calls from arbitrary places at all hours, the chore of picking him up that grew more draining as the days and weeks passed.

“I called Dr. Bagdasarian,” he said.

She didn’t respond.

“I can’t keep waking up in potato chip trucks.”

“No,” she said. “I guess you can’t.”

They drove in silence the rest of the way home.

19

Dr. Bagdasarian removed the improvised device from a small shopping bag. Tim held it in his hands and said nothing, for there was little to say about a common bicycle helmet. It had been retrofitted to perform an extraordinary purpose and manufactured exclusively and at great expense, but he wondered how such an everyday object could serve to advance an understanding of his mystery. He doubted it could, and with that doubt, as he placed it on top of his head and buckled the chin strap, futility made off with his heart. The biomedical firm had installed sensors up and down the helmet’s foam-cushion lining. The wireless device that captured brain activity clipped easily to a belt. This silly and makeshift heroism of Bagdasarian’s, which he had encouraged in a moment of vulnerability, was all just so much overreaching, and nothing brought that home more than the snug feel of the chin strap pinching his skin and Jane’s sudden laughter at the sight of him across the table. He would try it, he would wear the helmet and hope for the right reading, but this felt like the last possible desperate grasp before the root to which he clung gave way and he plummeted down the sheer cliff. He had gone from MRIs and the Mayo Clinic to a trial made possible by sporting goods, with no guarantee of a success that was itself of questionable value. No diagnosis, no cure — what was the point again? Jane continued to laugh in a tenderly mocking way, tickling the doctor into a smile, but Tim despaired and felt the urge to cry. This was it, this little piece of medicalized headgear, and beyond it, he saw the hell of a permanently compromised life whose once-healthy past tormented him as the plain earth does a man passed over by the grace of God.

“Will it work?”

“We’ll find out,” said the doctor. “But remember to keep it on at all times. And you should also shave your head. It will read better that way.”

He sheared the bulk of his hair with clippers, then let the mirror guide him as he ran the blade over his knobby bumps. Creamy water dripped from his chin. The stark pale surface that emerged startled him. He didn’t know he had this look, hiding all this time beneath a civilized trim. He was menacing or ailing or just hatched from an egg.

He dressed and strapped his skull into the helmet and joined Jane in bed.

“I’m happy you changed your mind,” she said.

He was thinking about the consequences. He could not go in to work now, and he didn’t think it was an equitable trade-off, his life in exchange for a shot in the dark. But the choice had been made, and so it had to be said that above all, above living itself, he just wanted some measure of understanding, some small answer that might stand in for the clarification of all the mysteries in the world.

“I don’t have much confidence that it’s going to tell us anything.”

“Maybe that’s for the best,” she said.

“How’s that?”

“You won’t feel disappointed if it comes to nothing.”

He turned to her in bed. “I want to say something,” he said. He looked at her with a quiet, shamed temerity. “I know we haven’t had sex in a long time.”

She was silent. There was still the silence that an unexpected swerve toward sex in a conversation could provoke, even after twenty years married.

“And I’m sorry, banana,” he said. “It just lowers my libido. I don’t know why.”

“It’s okay,” she said.

“Walk walk walk walk walk,” he said. “And then it’s the last thing on my mind.”

Time passed. She changed the subject. “The doctor thinks you should be on an antidepressant,” she said.

“When did he say this?”

“When I walked him to the door.”

It was true he was depressed. Depression followed in lockstep with each recurrence, a morose inwardness with which he tyrannized whatever room he happened to drift into and glaze over, waiting for the next walk to take him. But it wasn’t a permanent, abiding depression. Sadness always gave way to a bout of pugnacity in which he thought again, I’m going to beat this thing. He was tough and he was special and he had inner resources, he had many things going for him, and others had seen much worse, time was precious and things happened for a reason and there was always an upside, and it only took a good attitude to fight and win and nothing was going to stop him and tomorrow was another day.

Then suddenly he rose off the bed. He grabbed the pack on his way out. Eventually she leaned over and turned off the light.

Better luck next time, she thought in the dark. Better luck making the stars align. Wouldn’t it have been a luxury to have some crystal ball into which a diviner gazed to map for the young couple their future in sickness and in health, the specifics therein. This one — pointing to the man — is no good for you. Not too far down the line, sweetheart, he will break, and you will be left carrying the load. And a heavy load it will be. Abort the union now while you still have the chance, or accustom yourself to the short end of the stick. Because a failing body is no grounds for divorce. A failing body and not even your own becomes your personal cross to bear and how fair is that? How desirable?

She hated these thoughts. They stole over the better part of her in the weakness of the night. She was waiting in half sleep for the phone to ring. She hated herself for imagining the concept of medical prenuptial. You are free to go if he turns too human too quickly. If his body derails, save yourself the grief and heartache of being nursemaid and watchman. Take intact your health and your future and go. You have a life to live. Unburden yourself.

20

A few weeks later he lay on the sofa, watching reruns of shows he’d only heard about. He watched Oprah and info-golf and C-Span and Seinfeld. He flipped channels to avoid commercials. Commercials were poignant reminders of what a waste of time it was to watch TV. He didn’t feel his life wasting away so much when he was inside a show, but when the show’s spell was broken by a message from the sponsor he was quick to change the channel. Changing channels distracted him almost as much as being inside a show.

He thought about the case and the man on the bridge. He returned to the day of their encounter and replayed events. He called Detective Roy to see what progress he’d made in tracking the man down, but there were only so many ways the detective could express his skepticism, sarcasm and apathy. Finally he told Tim not to call anymore. He would call if he had news. When Tim called anyway, the receptionist sent him directly to the detective’s voice mail and the detective did not call back.

Kronish took over the case. He supposed Peter would do his best to get Kronish up to speed, but the trial was soon to start and there was no way Kronish could learn everything. They thought Jane was in her final days.

Sometimes he walked around the house with the chin strap dangling.

Becka called to him from upstairs. It was the summer before her first semester at college and she was home during the day. He was sleeping off a walk in a gas station bathroom when she took the stage to receive her high school diploma. She called out to him as she made her way through the house. She appeared at the foot of the sofa. “Dad!” At last he looked at her. “Didn’t you hear me calling?”

“What is it?”

“Phone for you.”

“Who is it?”

“Mike Kronish.”

“Tell him I’ll call back,” he said.

She reappeared a little later, holding out the cordless. “Dad, I don’t answer this phone,” she said. “I only answer my cell.”

“Who is it?”

“Someone named R.H.”

“Tell him I’m at the hospital.”

“The hospital?”

“Tell him I’m at the hospital and just let it ring from now on.”

He discovered watching TV on DVDs, which eliminated the commercials, and after that he rarely went back to cable.

When the trial began, he called Fritz Weyer, an old friend and former associate who had moved to a corporate investigations firm some years ago and now did occasional work for Troyer. Tim explained over the phone that he was calling on his own behalf and not the firm’s and asked Fritz if he’d mind stopping by to discuss a few things. Fritz showed up in the afternoon and asked about the shaved head and bicycle helmet. Tim mumbled something about a mild case of vertigo and Fritz didn’t pursue the matter. He asked how Jane was doing, which seemed a pleasantry more than anything, so Tim presumed that he knew nothing about her fatal cancer and answered that she was just fine, selling houses and enjoying life. Jane had brokered the deal for Fritz and his wife when they bought their house in Scarsdale, and now the two couples went out from time to time.

They sat down at the kitchen table across from each other. Tim began with a vague description of his personal health problems, quickly segueing into his leave of absence, his abandonment of his client at the moment of trial, and his misgivings concerning the readiness of the defense team. The associate, he said, was a moron, and the partner was ill informed. He wanted to track the trial as it progressed by getting the rough transcripts each day, but he was more or less confined to the house and needed someone to get the roughs for him. Fritz said he could get the roughs, no problem, but he was a senior investigator at an expensive firm. Tim would be paying a lot of money for what was essentially a courier service.

“That’s fine, I don’t mind paying. I need somebody I can trust. I want to know when they fuck up. There are going to be fuckups and I have to catch them before they turn fatal. I’m the only one who can try this case and you understand now that that’s not possible, so having the roughs every night and reading through them is really the only way I can keep up with what’s going on.”

“Done,” said Fritz.

“There’s something else.”

He brought out a copy of the artist’s rendering of the man he encountered on the Brooklyn Bridge. In some way or another, he told Fritz, this man was connected to the murder of R.H.’s wife. He might even have the murder weapon in his possession. Tim believed R.H. was innocent but that he might nevertheless be sentenced to a punishment he didn’t deserve. His fading hope was that Fritz might find the man in the sketch.

“This is all you got?” said Fritz.

“That’s it.”

Fritz made a fleeting face of doubt, big eyes and a twisted mouth, and then took a deep breath. “That’s not a whole hell of a lot, Tim.”

“I know.”

“I’ve got people at the NYPD who will let me have a look at the case file,” he said. “But this, man…” gesturing with the sketch, “this is thin. I’ll be looking for one man among eight million.”

Tim asked him to do the best he could.

21

Jane woke Becka up before she left for work and Becka hung around all day while her dad watched nonstop television in his bicycle helmet. Her mom paid her as much as she would have been paid at Starbucks or wherever, and now she didn’t have to get a crappy part-time job for the summer. She just had to hang around waiting for him to leave and to follow him if he did. Her mom hadn’t quit her job to follow him around but she still picked him up and took care of him when she wasn’t working. But she still wanted someone to look after him during the day, so when the summer came around, she offered to pay Becka to keep an eye on him.

“How come he doesn’t just hire somebody? Like a bodyguard or something. It’s not like we don’t have the money.”

“He doesn’t want that.”

“Why not?”

“He’s too independent.”

“He doesn’t seem independent when he calls you at three in the morning and you have to pick him up in Queens.”

“Do you want the job or not?” asked Jane.

Her mom told her not to be too obvious about it, because it was more or less like she was babysitting him. And it was a little weird to babysit your dad, the man who makes you do chores and punishes you and tells you over and over again all the ways there are to be happy. He told her about more ways to be happy than you could ever try out even if you had twenty lives. But watching him was better than some crappy part-time job. Except that, day after day, he stayed on the couch and never moved. The whole point to the helmet was to record his brain waves or whatever, the whole point to babysitting him was to follow him wherever he went, but he wasn’t going anywhere but the couch and his brain waves weren’t doing anything but watching TV. Becka still thought her dad was mental. She didn’t want to think of it that way but who ever heard of what he had? Not even the Internet.

She couldn’t be downstairs with him all the time. Sometimes she took little breaks, as you would at Starbucks or wherever, and went upstairs to lie on her bed or check her email or play the guitar. She checked on him from time to time to make sure he was still there. Sometimes she found him dozing on the sofa with the bicycle helmet gone a little cockeyed. She thought if he wasn’t mental he was at least really strange.

One morning she woke up and he was sitting on the edge of her bed holding her DVD box set of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“Can I take this?” he asked.

“What for?”

“To watch.”

“You?”

“There’s nothing else.”

He took it away with him, and a few minutes later she headed downstairs in her hoodie, David Bowie tee and black sweats, on her feet a pair of Sylvester the cat slippers, a holdout from childhood, in which she shuffled across the kitchen floor. Her father was in the middle of the first episode. She put two Pop-Tarts into the toaster and fixed herself a cup of coffee with cream and sugar. She placed the Pop-Tarts on a paper towel and walked over to the recliner and sat down. She ate her breakfast during the concluding five minutes of episode one and the opening minutes of episode two. She had seen the episode a thousand times but happily watched it again, surprised to be watching it with him and pleased to be getting paid for it. At one point he said, “What’d she just say?” and she repeated the line for him, and then they sank back into silence.

He forwarded through the opening credits and they watched the next three episodes. When they were through she got up to use the bathroom. He got up to change discs. She came out and he was waiting for her before starting the next episode. It was a favorite of hers and she wondered how well she knew the lines so she decided to repeat out loud a brief exchange between Buffy and her friend Willow, which caused him to look over. She continued to repeat their lines perfectly all the way to the opening credits and he continued to look at her as the theme song came on.

“My God,” he said. “How many times have you watched this?”

They finished another episode. Around one, he asked if she wanted lunch. They ate their sandwiches in front of the TV and when they were through she took the plates without disturbing him and put them in the dishwasher. She returned to the recliner as he got up to resettle the bedsheet under him and fluff up his pillow and then he started another episode.

“How many do we have left?” he asked.

“Like, five,” she said. “But I have the second season upstairs.”

“How many seasons are there?” he asked.

“Seven,” she said.

They repeated the routine the next day and the day after that. She watched the show, but she also watched him watch it, looking for signs of his nodding off or standing up. But he did neither. Except to replace the DVD or work the remote, he remained on the sofa. When he got off the sofa to replace yet another disc, she finally asked him, “What made you want to watch Buffy, Dad?”

Growing up, she had had all the posters on her walls. She bought every offer of merchandise, the comic books and the novelettes and the magazines, the T-shirts and patches, the notebooks, pens, and pencils. She belonged to the fan clubs and ordered autographed eight-by-ten headshots of the actors. He once sat on the edge of her bed when she was in the eighth grade and asked if there was anything, anything at all, that he could do to make her happy, and she said the only time she was maybe happy was when she was watching Buffy.

“I was curious about it,” he said to her now.

Within the week they had finished the second season. He asked her if she had the third. Between the third season and the fourth he didn’t need to ask. She just got off the recliner and brought the next season down from her bedroom.

They were in the middle of the sixth season when he unexpectedly sat up mid-episode and turned away from the TV. He looked straight ahead, toward the fireplace. He set the remote down on the coffee table. He unbuckled the chin strap and peeled the bicycle helmet from his shaved head. It was startling to see him bald. It was almost like he suffered from a real disease like cancer or something. He placed the helmet and its portable device next to him on the sofa.

“Should you really be taking that off, Dad?” she asked.

“Why am I not walking?” he asked, more to himself than her. “Where has all the goddamn walking gone?”

It was the very thing she had been asking herself for weeks.

22

Mike Kronish drove to the courthouse every morning with R. H. Hobbs in the back of a tinted SUV. He reassured his client, who had taken to calling him at home late at night, about the previous day’s proceedings, and then prepared him for what would likely happen during the day ahead. The driver let them off at the foot of the courthouse steps, which they climbed in the hundred-plus heat. By the time R.H. entered the grand echoing foyer and joined the line to go through security, perspiration was pouring down his face and he was panting. Mike Kronish had started to fear his client wouldn’t make it through trial without suffering a heart attack. He had appealed to the judge to give them a continuance on that basis, but the judge ordered a physical and reviewed the results and the motion was denied. He would grant it, he told Kronish, when R.H. was admitted to the hospital for chest pains.

They made it through security, where the marshals took away their cell phones and BlackBerrys, and they entered the courtroom together. The judge began the day’s proceedings promptly at nine thirty. Kronish and his client walked through the gate separating the gallery from the well at exactly twenty-two after. Peter was already present, managing the work of two junior associates and three paralegals. They were assembled now no differently from the way they had been every morning since the trial began, with one exception: to the right of Peter in Kronish’s chair sat a man in a gray suit with a bicycle helmet on his head. When the two men came into view, Tim turned and greeted them. He stood up and shook hands with Kronish and R.H. awkwardly, with his left hand. Though it was now summer, the effects of Tim’s frostbite lingered. Kronish asked him what he was doing there.

“I’ve just been getting the rundown from Peter,” he replied. “I’m ready to help any way I can.”

Kronish set his briefcase on the table. “What do you mean, the rundown?”

“I’m all caught up. Peter and I talked.”

“About what?”

R.H. interrupted them. “I thought you were supposed to be at the hospital,” he said. “If it was important to be at the hospital, why aren’t you at the hospital?”

Tim didn’t look at R.H. He looked at Kronish and reiterated that Peter had caught him up and that he was ready to get to work. He also wanted Kronish to know that he’d been reading the transcripts nightly and, frankly, no disrespect intended, they could use his help. Kronish did not want R.H. to know that they had just walked in on the greatest breach of professional protocol he could remember in all his years as a trial lawyer, but he was having difficulty seeing straight. He asked R.H. to have a seat.

“Why is he here?” R.H. demanded. Tim’s reappearance could mean only one thing to R.H. — that his trial was going worse than he suspected, and that they had had to call a man away from his wife’s deathbed in order to salvage it. “Where were you three weeks ago?”

“Have a seat, R.H.,” said Kronish.

“Why haven’t you been here from the beginning?”

Kronish gave Peter a look and Peter understood immediately. Peter jumped up, took gentle hold of R.H.’s arm and started coaxing him into his chair. R.H. went reluctantly.

“What is he doing here?” he asked Peter.

Kronish would have preferred to talk to Tim privately, away from R.H., the prosecution team, and all those looking on from the gallery, but the judge was expected in less than five minutes and would not be pleased to find the defense team’s lead counsel absent from the courtroom. He remained standing, as did Tim, and spoke to him in a soft whisper.

“What the hell? What the fuck? What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck?”

“Hey, Mike, go easy. I’m here to help.”

“Help how?”

“Any way I can.”

“There is no way you can.”

“Come on, Mike. I was the architect of the strategy, Peter’s got me all caught up—”

“Fuck caught up, Tim! We’re three weeks into trial. You’re the architect of a strategy that’s radically changed. Do you not see? Do you not understand the delicate dynamic? Look at the man. Look what you’ve done. The fucking protocol, man!”

“Hey, Mike—”

“You arrogant bastard,” said Kronish. “This has nothing to do with R.H. and everything to do with you. And why are you wearing that fucking helmet?”

“Read this,” he said.

He handed Kronish a photocopy of an article from The New England Journal of Medicine. “John B.” was the pseudonym the authors had assigned him. The article detailed his condition and debated its causes. The psychiatrists believed his situation came from a physical malfunction of the body, something organic and diseased, while the neurologists pointed to the scans and the tests that revealed nothing and concluded that he had to be suffering something psychological. Each camp passed the responsibility for his diagnosis to the other, from the mind to the body back to the mind, just as they had done in private over the course of his endless consultations.

Kronish flipped through the pages he had been handed. “What’s this?”

“I’m John B.,” said Tim.

“Who?”

“The subject of that article.”

Kronish looked at him in disbelief. “Are you unaware of the fucking protocol, man?”

Just as he said this, the judge walked through the chambers door and the marshal called out for all to rise. Kronish was caught holding the article Tim had given him.

“Please be seated,” said the judge.

When Tim sat down, Kronish realized he intended to stay. He had no choice but to sit as well, if he wished not to draw attention to himself. As he did so, he considered rising again and asking the judge for permission to approach. He would ask for a fifteen-minute recess in which he would take Tim outside the courthouse and beat him behind a dumpster. But he preferred not to request permission to approach because R.H. worried about conversations he didn’t participate in. He was also loath to ask the judge for a recess before the day had even begun. Kronish was momentarily paralyzed. He was never paralyzed. He turned to Tim, who was sitting next to him, awaiting the resumption of a trial he’d been absent from since day one.

“Take that helmet off,” he whispered.

“What?”

“That goddamn bicycle helmet on your head. Take it off.”

“I can’t.”

Kronish stared. “Take that ridiculous fucking helmet off your head, Tim, before the fucking judge notices.”

“I won’t,” said Tim.

For a moment of blinding discomfort, the two sides of Kronish battled for primacy — reason, which knew any sudden movement would be bad for his client, and rage, which wanted to rip the helmet off Tim’s head and Tim’s head with it.

“When I get back this evening,” he said, “I’m calling an emergency caucus among the partners and I’m recommending that you be stripped of partnership.”

“I have a right to be here,” said Tim.

“You have no fucking right to be here!”

“Does the defense have something it would like to share?” asked the judge from the bench.

Kronish stood. “No, Your Honor.”

Members of the prosecution were peering over. Kronish heard the strokes of a sketch artist behind him and felt the gallery looking on.

“Is that Mr. Farnsworth?”

Tim rose. “It is, Your Honor.”

“You have arrived at your destination, Mr. Farnsworth,” said the judge. “Why are you still in your helmet?”

“He’s not staying, Your Honor,” said Kronish.

“I am staying, Your Honor,” said Tim. “I have not yet appeared before Your Honor during these proceedings, but I would like to request permission to appear now.”

As these words were making their way to the judge, Tim turned, grabbed his backpack, and began to walk out of the well.

“On second thought, Your Honor,” he said, turning his head around to address the judge as onlookers, seated on both sides of the gallery, watched from their wooden pews.

“What is going on here?” asked the judge.

Tim walked past the marshal and pushed the door open.

“Mr. Kronish, what is going on?”

Kronish had his back to the judge. He was watching Tim Farnsworth walk out of the room. Then the door swung shut and he turned around to face his inquisitor. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

He woke up in a booth at a KFC in Queens. He lifted his head off the table. A napkin stuck to his face. Becka reached out for it, straightening his helmet in the process.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

She had followed him from the courthouse steps across the Brooklyn Bridge. He shed his suit coat and his buttondown in the heat without stopping, without the least concern for how he looked to those he passed: a crazy man possessed. She picked up his discarded clothes and followed him into the heart of the borough. She trailed behind him, ready to seize on his first false move, at any subtle sign of fakery, but he never halted, he never paused. The city was a wading pool of cement heat. The buildings bleating with glare, the sidewalks pulsing with sunlight. The bus exhaust and the interminable miles made the long walk unbearable. But he never stopped. She watched him slog inside the KFC and collapse.

Now she looked at him with tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,” she said.

23

Wildfires burned across several square miles, closing highways and forcing evacuations. The rainless summer and the wind and the lightning had turned the brush border between counties into kindling. Flames left charred contrails in the land resembling the scars of comets running aground on the face of the earth. Emergency workers had corralled most of the fire into containment lines where they starved the blaze of the fuel it needed to burn. They called in backfire experts, leased Helitack helicopters, scheduled twenty-four-hour water drops to keep the fires from destroying forest preserves and the shockingly close residential homes. Golf courses were used as termination points in an art new to frightened cities that had just barely adjusted to the flash floods of a swift and freakish spring. Disaster once confined to the west had migrated, a wayward animal confused by scrambled weather. Reservoirs were poisoned. Pockets of fire continued to glow but eventually the expressways were reopened and most residents were invited to return.

He reached around the back of her neck and collected her hair into a ponytail as she eased into him. Their mouths met and pressed into each other. He cupped the small of her back in his hands and turned their bodies over and laid her down on the field. He removed her pants over her shoes, too impatient to bother with the buckles. She felt all along his lean walker’s body, the legs that were all muscle now and the torso that had slimmed down to the ribs as if he were a boy again. He took both her hands and stretched her arms as far as they would reach across the switchgrass as the hard soil began to skin his knees. They interlocked their fingers and squeezed as if to prevent death from separating them and they stared at each other under the smoke-fogged sky. They required almost no movement to be stunned again by something they had done so often, that had grown stale in the months before his recurrence but that now felt like the first time between them. They could smell the burn in the air and feel the heat on their faces. They were near a slowly dying outcrop of fire being tamped into embers by barely audible voices. Cows sauntered before a wooden fence in the distance.

They lay afterward, two bodies humming in a field. He felt bad that he had not been able to last. It had been a long time and after a minute or two there was no stopping what had taken over.

“It’s almost worth waiting when it’s like that,” she said.

“I’m sorry I didn’t last.”

“That’s the downside.”

They buttoned and zipped and got to their feet. They began to walk through the field to the car, tall steps through the high grass. It occurred to him that they were leaving too quickly. He wanted to reclaim that spent urgency, the irrefutable proof they both felt in their bodies that they needed each other for life. Had such a long and arduous walk out here to the middle of nowhere, had the task of picking him up, which made his sickness seem to her but a common irritant of clocking miles in the sleepiest hours, really been the occasion for the best sex they’d had in years?

“We should go back,” he said.

“Back where?”

“Back there.”

She looked behind them and saw only the fenced borderland and dry expanse of grass. “What for?”

“To get that back.”

She seemed to get his meaning. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

All at once she jerked away. She did a kind of stutter-step, shrieking, and ended behind him gripping his arms with her claws.

“What is it?” he cried.

“A snake!”

He stopped still and held her behind him. He looked down at the grass. “I don’t see it,” he said.

“How could you miss it?”

“Well, it’s gone now.”

“It’s not gone. It’s just ahead of us. Ahead of us is not gone.”

“It’s more scared of you than you are of it,” he said.

“You talked to the snake?”

“Want me to carry you out, banana?”

“I don’t like snakes,” she said.

She walked the rest of the way with a mix of trepidation and resolve, eyes frozen to the grass, feet choosing the least dense spots. They climbed the wooden fence. The car was waiting for them on the far side of the road. A sign in front of the fence said No Trespassing — Stony Hold Farms.

They drove out of the back roads, past the same fire-damaged landscape she had followed him into. They entered an area more densely populated by single-family residences and there saw exposed houses flaking with ash, cul-de-sacs with pitted cars more fitting the scenes of a riot from a troubled city. Porch pillars burnt down halfway turned ranch houses into small sites of ancient ruin. Most of the houses stood unmolested. The individual damage seemed arbitrary, or perhaps singled out by an inscrutable fate.

“It’s even worse than what you see on the news,” she said.

“What do you make of it?” he asked.

She drove in silence before answering. “It’s either the world just doing its thing,” she said, “or something we’ve never known before.”

They drove a long time. He sat in the passenger seat with the helmet on, the monitor in his hands, wondering what it might have recorded over the course of a walk they were driving miles to erase.

24

“Nothing,” said Dr. Bagdasarian. “I’m sorry, Tim.”

The scans had revealed nothing. That was neither positive proof of mental illness nor the negative confirmation of a medical disease. It was more of the same, exactly what he feared — greater inconclusiveness, additional absence of evidence, the final barrier removed from boundless interpretation. He was anything anyone wanted him to be — a nutcase, a victim, a freak, a mystery. He’d known to expect it from the moment he took the bicycle helmet out of Bagdasarian’s hands, yet the disappointment, so familiar, felt brand-new. He had no idea to what extent he’d allowed his hopes to rise once more. What a fool he was, an inveterate and self-punishing fool. He felt Jane and Becka looking at him. He turned to them and smiled.

The doctor made an effort to qualify these indeterminate test results. He cautioned again that the device was a prototype, that the sensors picked up only neural activity, and that a second-generation helmet might be made not only to improve the sensitivity of the readings, but to include electrical and hormonal changes, the flow of blood and other biological currents. He suggested they go back to the drawing board for a better device.

Jane shook her head. “This has been a mistake. I’m sorry I encouraged it.” She turned to her husband. “Tim, I’m sorry,” she said. She reached out for his hand.

“We’ve come this far,” said Bagdasarian.

“No, Doctor, thank you,” she said. “I think we’re through.”

Tim turned to her. “Why not give him another shot?” he asked. “See what improvements can be made?”

That night he went down to the basement after Jane and Becka had fallen asleep. He sat on the weight bench and put the barrel of the gun inside his mouth. The cold metal made him salivate. He angled the barrel up toward his brains.

He had told Dr. Ditmar, the psychologist beloved by New York magazine, that he would prefer the diagnosis of a fatal disease. Ditmar bluntly stated that he was being excessive and naive. Compare his situation to someone with Lou Gehrig’s, Ditmar suggested, dead within three months. Wasn’t it better to be on a walk than in a grave? “No,” he said. “I’d rather have something I understand.” To which Ditmar replied: “Do you think you’d understand Lou Gehrig’s?”

He had perfect conviction that killing himself was not only justified now but necessary, that the relief of death was the only reply to the torment of a life that had to be lived as a lost cause, and his mind told him to pull the trigger. But his body, which spoke a persuasive language of its own, singular, subterranean, objected with the most fundamental repulsion, and while he sat with the gun in his mouth, nearly gagging on the barrel, these two opposite wills worked to gain the better of each other in a struggle so primitive that it could not be named. And finally he removed the gun and set it back in the standing toolbox behind the blunt hammers and screwdrivers and returned upstairs. He lacked the courage and the will — although perhaps he had astonishing amounts of both and was simply defeated again, if barely, on a playing field most people never realize exists until the final days and moments of their lives.

25

Mike Kronish wouldn’t even deign to pick up the phone when he called. Sam Wodica broke the news. The caucus had convened, a vote had been taken, and his partnership was thereby revoked.

“It wasn’t just your appearance at trial, Tim,” said Wodica. “Your wife?”

“She’s not dying.”

“No shit.”

He thought he should have been present for the caucus. He should have been allowed to defend himself. They were lawyers. Weren’t they familiar with due process?

“Does R.H. know about my wife?”

“For fuck’s sake,” said Wodica. “You don’t just want us to lose the revenue? Let’s open ourselves up to malpractice, too?”

“I don’t see how what I did constitutes malpractice.”

“Just what the fuck did you do, Tim? Huh, please allow me to ask. Just what the fuck did you do?”

It settled in, the enormity of a crumbling life. Twenty-one years. The firm had been a second home. Now Frank Novovian would not even be required to greet him. Maybe Frank would look at him and say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Farnsworth. I’m not allowed to let you up.” And he might say, “Twenty-one years, Frank.”

He and Wodica briefly discussed R.H.’s conviction. The only good news was that New York State didn’t allow the death penalty. The presentencing report was due in a few weeks, and then R.H. would be sent off. How would R.H. have fared if Tim had been able to see his case through to the end? If Tim had been allowed to finish the pretrial preparations, to help in jury selection, to argue and object? He was certain that right now they would be celebrating R.H.’s acquittal.

He called Detective Roy from time to time, and Fritz Weyer to see what progress had been made on his end. Fritz had calls in to friends at the department and one of his guys searching databases for a possible match on the face in the sketch. Maybe they’d get lucky.

26

He was at the firm again, dressed in suit and tie and standing before his fellow partners. R.H. was there, as were Jane and Becka. He had to campaign for his job. He said he should not be blamed for R.H.’s conviction because R.H. was guilty. Detective Roy began to applaud. Tim looked at R.H. sitting at the defense table, attempting to conceal his weeping. He approached R.H. and whispered to him, “Don’t worry, I know you’re innocent.” R.H. thanked him. The assistant district attorney who had tried the case was now itemizing all of the infractions Tim had committed: the internal lies, the false statements to authorities, the unprofessional conduct. She concluded with a passionate plea to the jury that they expel him from the firm. The judge stood up and poured sand from his shoes. It was Sam Wodica in a black gown and sun visor. He peered over to the other partners in the jury box and gave them a big thumbs-up. Jane was at the defense table comforting R.H. Mike Kronish entered the courtroom and tried to yank Tim’s pants down. Tim grabbed at his pants to keep them up because he did not want his pants to go down when he was fighting for his job. But Kronish was strong. He wanted everyone to see Tim with his pants down. Tim tried to push Kronish away but Kronish was now on top of him on the courtroom floor in front of Judge Wodica while a sketch artist documented the scene. Kronish gripped the back of Tim’s neck to make it easier to take his pants down. Tim lost track of the people in the room because his head was pinned to the ground and little courtroom rocks were digging into his skin. He was trying to swat Kronish away. It was hard with Kronish on top of him. It was only when Kronish succeeded in getting his pants down and exposing Tim that Tim woke up and realized that his pants were really down and that his head was pinned against crumbling blacktop.

He was in Newark behind a boarded-up Safeway. Shattered glass and strewn garbage were illuminated by a single security light off in the distance. Some encampment of derelicts was living out of an abandoned semitrailer.

He used both hands to try and pry the man’s grip from his neck but the angle was awkward and the man punched him in the head with his one free hand. Tim’s skull dug into the blacktop. In the stunned minute that followed, the man got Tim’s pants off entirely. Tim swiveled under him, so that he and the man were face-to-face. A terrible burn had melted the man’s eye into his cheek and shriveled his right ear. Tim reached up and grabbed his neck. He dug his fingers into his windpipe as if to pull it out and at the same time grabbed hold of the man’s balls and squeezed, and the man’s horrible animal noises careened off the side of a dumpster. Tim kept squeezing while struggling to his knees. He got to his feet and kicked the man in the head as if punting a football. The man’s head hit the side of the dumpster and he fell back on his knees. Blood poured from his nose like some weak fountain. Tim could have walked away then but he couldn’t stop. He took up an empty forty-ounce bottle and beat the man over the head. The man’s blood jumped out of him and splattered the pavement. Tim fled without his pants.

He waited for Jane to pick him up in a public park full of dead trees and flitting shadows, in the dugout of a baseball diamond where trash had accumulated ankle-deep. He followed the car as the headlights turned in the parking lot. He crept out across the shadows. He hurried toward her in his underwear.

She saw him coming across the dead field and opened the door. “Where are your pants?”

“Stay in there.”

“Is that blood?”

“Not mine,” he said. “Janey, get back in.”

He stepped inside the car and they drove out of the park.

She put his bloodied clothes in the washer and then walked up from the basement. Over the kitchen sink she opened a bottle of white wine and poured herself a glass, drank it down, and poured herself another. She took the second glass and the bottle over to the kitchen table. It was two thirty in the morning.

He came downstairs after his shower in sweatpants and T-shirt. He saw how tired she was. The bags under her eyes had never been more pronounced. He was ruining her.

“I can’t keep doing this to you,” he said.

He saw it written on her face. She had had enough. No one could blame her.

She poured herself a third glass. “Sit down next to me,” she said. He did as he was told. “You’re going farther and farther away. You call me, it’s midnight, you’re in Newark. In Newark with the murder rate and the ghosts drifting across the street.”

He mumbled a tired apology.

“Listen to me,” she said, finally feeling the effects of the wine. “You’ve lost more weight. You’re depressed. You ran out of that dugout naked, blood all over you. If the walking doesn’t kill you, something else will. Is that how you want to go?”

“What’s the alternative?” he asked.

“I’m quitting my job. And you’re going back in the cuffs. No more midnight trips to Newark. No more somebody else’s blood.”

27

They say it takes a long time to really get to know somebody. They say a good marriage requires work. They say it’s important to change alongside your partner to avoid growing apart. They talk about patience, sacrifice, compromise, tolerance. It seems the goal of these bearers of conventional wisdom is to get back to zero. They would have you underwater, tethered by chains to the bow of a ship full of treasure now sunk, struggling to free yourself to make it to the surface. With luck he will free himself, too, and then you can bob along together, scanning the horizon for some hint of land. They say boredom sets in, passion dissipates, idiosyncrasies start to grate, and the same problems repeat themselves. Why do you do it? Security, family, companionship. Ideally you do it for love. There’s something they don’t elaborate on. They just say the word and you’re supposed to know what it means, and after twenty years of marriage, you are held up as exemplars of that simple foundation, love, upon which (with sweeping arms) all this is built. But don’t let appearances fool you. That couple with twenty years still fights, they still go to bed angry, they still let days pass without—

The trouble with these cheap bromides, she thought, is that they don’t capture the half of it.

He spent an entire day walking, only to arrive at the back of a grocery store. He woke up to a man attempting to rape him in his sleep. He beat that man to within an inch of his life.

When that’s your husband, who’s the right counselor to see? What episode of Oprah will be most helpful?

She would have liked to know if the man he beat was dead or alive. She didn’t ask and he didn’t offer. He just said, “It was in self-defense, Janey. I did it in self-defense.”

She would have liked him to show some greater agony over the beating and less certainty that he had done what needed to be done.

But then she hadn’t been there. How could she know what he needed to do, any more than he could know what she needed to do?

Which was, simply put, to leave him.

I dare you to leave him.

The timing was right. Becka had started college. She made good money on her own. She was still beautiful. She could start over. She had half a lifetime remaining.

The alternative to leaving him was sitting at his bedside for who knows how long, waiting on the whim of an unpredictable illness to lift, at last, and allow them to resume some measure of real life.

And what if it didn’t lift? And what did real life mean but the struggle to get back to zero?

Did she need him? She didn’t think so. Was there really only one person for you, one man, the one? She didn’t think so.

She would sit with him if he was wasting from Parkinson’s. If he was wasting from cancer or old age, she’d sit with him. If he just had an expiration date, of course she’d sit with him.

But this thing, this could go on forever. Is that how she wanted to spend her life? Tethered alongside him to that bed…

I dare you.

She pulled the cork out and filled the glass and downed it quickly. She needed a second one and poured it out and drank that one at the table waiting for him to come downstairs. He shuffled into the room.

“I can’t keep doing this to you,” he said.

He looked contrite and sad and ten years older. He was thin and desperate and as needy as a child. She poured herself another glass.

“Sit down next to me,” she said.

28

Bagdasarian came in and removed two toes. Tim screamed despite the anesthetic that dulled what surrounded the dead nerves and he thrashed futilely against his restraints. After fierce refusal he had capitulated again to being so narrowly confined, and now it felt like waking inside a coffin six feet under.He cursed the doctor angrily and his curses were mixed with personal insults aimed at the doctor’s ugliness and his medical impotence and the recklessness with which he offered hope to the sick. Dr. Bagdasarian said nothing but commented to Jane, who stood horrified in the doorway, that Tim was very lucky to suffer only the loss of two more toes, and that the absence of gangrene was nothing short of a miracle. Tim continued to scream, and his screams could be heard beyond the window, picked up by the breeze and spread throughout a neighborhood that otherwise knew only calm and prosperity.

Jane saw the doctor out. Before leaving he gave her two letters. He explained that the first was a letter to Tim from a friend of his, a renowned neuroscientist who had authored many books on medical curiosities. He said she might even have heard of him. The second was from a woman from an institute. The doctor didn’t know what to make of it. He told Jane that she’d have to decide for herself.

Dr. Bagdasarian reached out gently and put a hand on her shoulder. “Try your best that he doesn’t forget what it means to be human,” he said.

“I’m trying,” she said.

He opened the door. They shook hands and she thanked him. “You’ve been so helpful,” she said.

Dr. Bagdasarian smiled. “I’ve been no help at all.”

She walked through the house to the kitchen. She read the letters at the table. The first, from the neuroscientist, was a letter of introduction. She recognized him, as Dr. Bagdasarian had suggested she might, having read his articles in popular magazines. He explained that part of his goal in life was to give voice to strange cases. In his letter he wrote compassionately and without condescension, and she thought how heartened the letter and its tone would have made Tim even a short time ago. The second letter was from the executive director of something called the Endocrine Disruption Prevention Alliance, a loose affiliation of science groups based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The writer introduced herself and explained that Tim’s condition had come to her attention.

… and I am one-hundred percent certain that the cause is endocrine disruption, a phenomenon that results from the intake of chemicals extremely hostile to the human endocrine system. These chemicals, released in huge quantities into the environment, can fundamentally change how an individual functions, how he or she thinks, even — as in your case — moves. Here is the frightening truth: clinical trials have proven that a chemical agent no bigger than two benzene rings, or one-trillionth of a part of the human body (to put that in perspective, that is one second over the course of three thousand centuries) can take total control over our bodies. I am writing to you today to educate you, but more importantly to persuade you that your condition is caused by—

She stopped reading.

There was a time when receiving a letter like this one, no matter how odd its message, would have restored their faith in a flawed system. He had been forced to seek out the opinion of specialists, who sent him on to other specialists, who made him stand at the mercy of ever-more-refined specialists, who referred him to the specialists they most admired. Now a specialist was coming to him. The executive director of a medical alliance was telling him once and for all what ailed him. “Endocrine disruption.” It would not have mattered that he had never heard of it before. It would not have mattered if the science was debated, if the evidence was still outstanding, if the experts had been debunked. He would have been instantly on the phone. He would have flown anywhere, stayed any length of time. And she would have been there beside him.

Now she walked the two letters over to the sink and disposed of them in the trash.