The Unnamed

1

They woke that morning in the bed that had contained them like a miracle for another night. Four years had passed since her return. Any predawn stir in those days that rustled the bedsheets put the one on guard that the other might be ready to rise and start the day. But if neither of them opened their eyes to look at the other, that was a sign that sleep was still irresistible in the lengthening hour, maybe because of the lengthening hour, and they drifted back to sleep. They dozed in and out like that most mornings, half-conscious of the clock and of the other.

She woke in the bed alone and had no memory of his having left the room, and this surprised her. In the daze of half sleep she was vulnerable and for an instant she felt that bottomless fear. She got out of bed quickly and put on her robe and slippers and carried her reading glasses out of the bedroom, through the apartment into the kitchen, where the smell of coffee made her both instantly comforted and more alert. She went up to him without speaking and put her arms around him from behind as he read the newspaper.

“I was scared when I woke up,” she said. “I didn’t hear you get out of bed.”

“Why were you scared?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

The kitchen at that hour was a place of drift and small preparations. The milk and the sugar bowl and the jars of jam and the butter dish were laid on the counter, and when the toast popped up they dressed it, and when their coffee ran low they refilled it. She preferred a delivered paper, in part so she could do the crossword but also for its fresh inky smell, second only to coffee as an announcement of a new morning. She liked the physical touch of the pages and the sense of fullness that having it all in front of her gave her, a containment of the world. He ate his toast and she peeled a tangerine and they talked of what they were reading, sharing parts the other had not yet gotten to. They added a little commentary if something seemed outrageous or, more common, all too predictable, and sometimes one of them reached across the counter and briefly touched the other, as in good morning, and smiled, and then went back to reading.

At some point one of them got up and started to put the lids back on the jars and to move the dirty dishes into the sink, and the other, not to be hurried, finished whatever article had been started before standing and replacing the lid to the butter dish and collecting the crumbs off the countertop and moving them to the garbage below the sink.

“Do you have a showing today?” he asked.

“Too many,” she said. “Although look at that.”

He peered out the window. “Another beautiful day,” he said.

“If it keeps up—”

“Let’s hope it keeps up.”

“Then we can do something this weekend.”

A few years prior he had found a job as an adjunct professor teaching a class on mediation at Columbia, and now she said, “You have class today?”

“At three,” he said.

He rinsed the dishes and placed them in the dishwasher and heard the water going as she prepared to take a shower.

He was back at the counter looking at the Internet when she came in dressed for work. She told him the tub was still leaking and now seemed to be draining slowly, and he said, “The one-two punch.”

“Let’s just call a plumber,” she said.

“Where do you want to have lunch today?” he asked.

Later that day at an early lunch they talked about what had transpired since breakfast, which was nothing, really, but they still talked as if they hadn’t seen each other in a while. They had lived another half a day and that time had gone by without incident and they were together again, and this alone made them talkative. Then, after paying the bill, they walked to the back of the restaurant as they did once or twice a week, sometimes more, first her, followed by him, and entered the same door and locked it, and sometimes they did it with her on the sink and sometimes they did it against the wall. The illicit risk, the appeal of the fear of being suspected or caught, never attenuated or grew stale, and they knew that to make things really exciting, they needed only to change the tempo and slow everything down and stare intently at each other and stay in there much longer than anyone ever should. Then they left the bathroom just as they came in, her first, followed by him a minute later, keeping their eyes fixed on the exit until they were outside again.

“Well,” he said. “That was fun.”

“Have a good class,” she said, kissing him modestly on the cheek.

“Good-bye, banana,” he said.

“Good-bye, banana.”

She troubleshot the downpour that descended on the city by slipping inside a Starbucks, where she bought a latte in exchange for temporary shelter. All the tables were full and the show of the tempest out the window was standing-room only when things really got going. Everyone watched it as they would some gripping season finale. The only sounds not of the storm were of order calls and cries from the espresso machines. Outside it was torrential. The skies were all drumspit and fury and made her feel a child’s awe at the natural world, even if her view was only of stalled taxis and whipped awnings and water flowing over a slanting putty-colored pavement. She waited half an hour until the contentious storm eased back a little and she could wait no longer. Then she reentered the street with a small umbrella that went sailing in the wind and proved as ineffective against the driving rain as a kite on a string. Her heels hit every pothole and puddle and curb-hugging rapid and she felt dog-wet and slimy when she entered the lobby running woefully late.

The man she met there was an art dealer named David. David owned two galleries, one on Tenth Avenue and the other in London, and he came to her as her other clients did, by referral. He was sitting on a leather sofa under a softly lit sconce and rose to greet her when she walked in. She apologized for being so wet. He wore a tailored suit with a linen shirt, no tie and an open collar, and did not appear to have a single drop on him. She wanted to ask what portal he had emerged from, but instead they made small talk and then went up together in the elevator.

She took him around the apartment, a seven-room duplex with a wall-to-wall view of the Hudson, a wine pantry, a professional culinary kitchen, and it dawned on her, slowly, as they drifted through the impeccable rooms filled with the occult light of a sky gone prematurely dark, and talked casually about the place, with none of the usual tension that characterized conversations during walk-throughs with prospective buyers who tended to think you were lying about every I beam and faucet — it slowly dawned on her that this man, David, was of that type, on account of his shoulders and full head of hair, his two days’ growth flecked with gray on the chin, and the bright blue of his intelligent eyes, that he was of the type she found tempting. He would have been a temptation. Five or six years ago, he would have been better than a drink. If a man like David had pressed himself on her five or six years ago, she might have avoided drinking altogether.

They talked over the details of the building’s recent renovation and she pointed out the best features of each room. She did most of the talking but when they turned silent again and his attention was elsewhere, she looked at him intently. He reminded her of other men she had encountered in passing, infrequently and always fleetingly, who in their wake left her feeling reckless and intense, afraid of what she was capable of. They brought out in her a longing that stayed with her for a day or two, like a particularly vivid dream, until it began to fade and was finally forgotten. As they continued through the rooms, she started to feel giddy and romantic. Just to indulge a fantasy, she pretended that they were looking at the place together, that she knew everything there was to know about contemporary art, that her name was not Jane, that she went to parties with painters and eccentrics, and that as they looked at each room, they wondered what piece would go best on what wall. Then she returned to earth, smiled at David, and told him that she would wait for him in the kitchen while he had a chance to look over the place on his own.

She was staring out at the grim day through the window overlooking the river when he came down the spiral staircase. The steps were white and curved and reminded her of the wings of a swan. She turned and watched him descend the final few steps. He clapped his hands together and rubbed them hungrily. “I’m going to put a bid in,” he said.

“On the first one you’ve seen?”

“I love it,” he said. “And I’m very impulsive.”

“Well,” she said, “that’s wonderful.”

They talked about what his initial offer should be and what she thought they could get the developer to come down to. He wanted it badly and suggested starting at the listing price minus ten percent, but she knew that the developer was having a hard time selling and suggested that he start at minus twenty and go from there. He thanked her for the advice and after going over a few more formalities, they left and she locked up.

In the elevator, he surprised her. “Remember how I said I was impulsive?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, I say we celebrate.”

“Celebrate?”

“A drink, my treat. A deal like this can’t happen every day, can it?”

“Well. Nothing is, you know, final yet.”

She felt dull and sobering, having said that.

“I can promise you this,” he said. “I’m buying that apartment. And at this hour—”

He moved to reveal the watch beneath his cuff. She liked the watch and she liked the graceful way he brought it out into the light.

“—we can just avoid scandal.”

For one fleeting instant, her sobriety was tested as it had not been since the day Tim picked her up from Cedarview. For one fleeting instant, her way of life, necessary for normal healthy functioning, struck her as totally lifeless, drained of spontaneity and energy and pleasure. She wanted nothing more than to have a drink with him. She wanted to get herself lost inside the darkness of a neighborhood bar, become unrecognizable to herself, gorge on the excitement of a stranger and risk everything — the languorous mornings, the illicit lunch dates, the companionable nights — risk it all for the sake of the risk itself. Then, the moment passed.

“I’m not much of a drinker,” she said.

“Oh, don’t make me beg,” he said. “Everyone enjoys a glass of champagne.”

“Especially recovering alcoholics,” she said.

He leaned back in his tracks and winced. “That was stupid of me,” he said. “I would have never suggested.”

“How could you have known?” she said. “Don’t think a thing of it.”

“Dinner, then,” he said.

His look was unwavering. He was so prepossessing that it didn’t seem brazen. It seemed merely part of his charm that he didn’t give a damn about whether she was married or not. She was flattered, mystified, exhilarated. She was also, after a moment, steady.

“I’m having dinner with my husband tonight,” she said, just as the elevator dinged and the doors opened. He smiled and gestured for her to go first.

Walking through the lobby, she felt effervescent. She had shown resolve. They stepped out together onto Greenwich Street just as night was falling. She was surprised by the sudden chill in the air. “It’s plummeted,” she said, as her phone began to ring.

“At least it’s stopped raining,” he said.

“I have to take this,” she said to him. “I’ll just be a second.”

Later she thought back on that moment, and the ironies were not lost on her. That she was with that particular man who had the power, just in passing, to make her feel restive and extravagant, urgent, fanciful, and destructive. That such a man was buying, in essence, shelter, protection from rain and falling temperatures. That Tim calling at that very moment should have driven the final stake between her and temptation.

“Tim, are you there?”

She gestured for David to give her a minute. David opened his umbrella to shake the trapped water from its folds. There was more sound on the other end than that stillborn nothingness of a bad connection, so she persisted. “Tim?”

“It’s back.”

She turned around and looked at David. In that moment she saw more than a temptation. She saw a life.

Hang up!

So I’ve had a change of heart about dinner.

Say wrong number, say…

But first take me to a bar. Order the champagne.

Say are you there? I can’t hear you. Are you there, Tim?

Start from the beginning. Teach me everything there is to know about art.

Turn it off and throw it in the gutter.

Where do you think this piece should go — this wall here, or that one?

Jane? Jane who? You must have the wrong number.

Hurry, David, come to the window! Look at the storm gathering over the river.

I wouldn’t want to be out in that.

But it’s beautiful, isn’t it?

“Jane?” he said. “Are you there?”

“Come home,” she said.

2

A sudden splintering of the wind had scattered the rain like a school of silverfish. Women held their clothes to their bodies as they ran. The freak menace drove people inside, some to where they belonged, the rest to the nearest shelter. The fear was ingrained in them, bone-deep, and their reactions foretold. One or two wretches wandered around in it, indifferent to the lashings, drenched, labeled crazy to give the world its point of reference. His body moved him down the sidewalk. From the storm, the raging city edges, the clanking lanyards, the corridors of wind, the raindrops white as blisters, the windows whipping in their warped sills — from these things he had no awning under which to take cover, no deli, no lobby, no office, no Starbucks, no bedroom.

Blue security horses lay in the street. He removed his gabardine blazer and let it fall to the ground. A man came out of a doorway, one of a loose association of the ill and unkempt, and picked it up and put it on and returned to the doorway where he sheltered. The man should have followed him as he discarded the rest: his tie next; his white oxford, which he tore the buttons off and let fall some distance from the tie; his watch, which Jane had given him for a recent anniversary, sent clattering into the gutter. Rainwater backed up around the sewer drains with a gray and foamy choleric density.

His undershirt and chinos and tennis shoes were soaked through, his hair was matted and his eyes red and clenching as they struggled to make out the next step in his advance. He was trapped again in the next step, the next step and the next step. He walked across a halted intersection where the lights flashed red in both directions and long lines of cars sounded their horns down the lanes. They honked louder at his impudent passing. He paid no attention. His world had constricted. He cried out. People on the sidewalk turned.

Two pole workers were repairing a downed line at the corner.

“Did you hear that guy?”

“What was he saying?”

“Just screaming to himself.”

“About what?”

“About somebody.”

They stood in his wake and looked at him through the storm. He shed his T-shirt at last and flung the wet lump to the sidewalk, inviting the chill that came with the rain. Who did that? Who walked bare-chested through the cold rain? Maniacs. People at war with themselves. You saw them from time to time, wasted, psychotic, off their meds, poor naked wretches doomed to crime or death or jail or forced sedation. They tear a hole in the city for half a block until they disappear again inside the crowd.

The two workers turned back to the downed line, shaking their heads. He had not noticed them. His world had constricted to exclude everything but himself, and then was riven in two.

“You and me,” he cried, “you son of a bitch!”

He woke up shivering on the wet pavement in the back of a gas station. The rain had died but the wind continued to shake water from the trees and the sky was draped in folds of purple shrouds. The trees behind the station were leftovers, demarcation points convenient to separate the surrounding developments, choked at pavement’s end with crushed beer cans and soggy newspaper. The dumpster was overflowing with uncollected trash. Near one of its wheels lay an old rag. He stood and took up the rag. It folded out into a T-shirt. Though it was soaked through with rainwater, it remained stiff and required a series of shakes before he could put it on, and still it retained its bellows-like wrinkles. It was moldy and smelled of rot and advertised MasterCard, but he needed it to walk the distance up the road, past the auto-parts dealers and the fast-food franchises, so as to look presentable enough to rent a room at one of the motels. He did this, and once inside the room took the shirt off and washed it with the bar soap, scrubbing it with itself inch by inch. When he was through he wrung it out as best he could. He removed the rest of his clothes and wrung them free of the rainwater over the tub. Then he put them back on. They clung to him and that made him cold. He got under the blankets, shivering, thinking what he needed was a good fire. Instead of a fire he had free HBO. He could still smell traces of mold on the shirt. As night fell he stopped chattering and reached for his BlackBerry.

Jane was standing with David on Greenwich Street just south of West 10th. She took her phone out of her purse and looked down at caller ID as David unwrapped his umbrella. He twirled it lightly with his wrist and the rainwater fell off in drops.

“Hello?” she said.

He kept silent.

“Hello? Tim?”

He didn’t want to tell her.

“Tim, are you there?”

Jane put up a finger and smiled at David. She repeated Tim’s name into the phone a third time.

Finally he told her. She was silent.

“Jane?” he said. “Are you there?”

“Come home.”

The next walk took him from the motel to a Home Depot to the McDonald’s to the strip mall with the Family Dollar store. He came to a stop outside a mall, specifically the long wall of glass doors leading into the Sears wing, locked that time of night. A stone ashtray and stone bench matched the plain stone arcade above the doors that extended twenty feet out toward the parking lot to keep the smokers dry and the old people safe from the treacheries of the curb while awaiting rides. He remembered all over again how pleasurable it was, arguably the most pleasurable physical experience of his life, to arrive at the end and, without giving a damn where, to lie down, the blood in his veins still walking, and to yield to the exhaustion. He fell asleep on the stone bench by a refugee tree in a metal grate and by the time mall security came around to run him off he’d gotten the sleep he needed and felt oddly cheery.

He walked to the fork in the road and went left and that road gradually curved around and followed the stucco wall of a private country club and then went up past the cemetery and a few miles later down a hill to a reservoir sitting beyond a bank of trees, which gave way to a public golf course, and then to a switching station humming menacingly behind a chain-link cage, and he continued onward to a town square, through the parking lot, and he walked the edges of gas stations hung with red and white flag bunting along another endless avenue until five miles later a writhing parabola of highway appeared and his body stopped under an overpass festooned with graffiti, where he lay down a few feet from the traffic rushing overhead and fell asleep.

He squatted at the top of the concrete ramp after waking. He could descend and go left or right or he could remain squatting. There were things he should probably do, like secure some kind of food before being forced to walk again. Usually he called Jane and she picked him up. He was either going to get picked up by Jane or from this point forward have a lot of time on his hands. He wasn’t good with excess time. He stopped breathing and had to remind himself to start up again. The traffic went by him overhead and one of the things he thought of doing was climbing up and throwing himself in front of the passing cars. But that was letting the son of a bitch off too easy. He decided to call Jane.

His BlackBerry was dead. He was going to have to stop squatting and make his way down the loose rock and broken glass scattered across the ramp to the shoulder of the highway and go back the way he came, where he would search out a pay phone.

A few miles down he found a convenience store. He went inside and microwaved some burritos. He ate outside, standing next to the ice machine. When he finished he walked over to the pay phone and pulled out some pocket change. She picked up on the first ring.

“Well, I’ve fed the son of a bitch,” he said.

“Tim?” she said. “Where are you? For God’s sake, it’s been almost twenty-four hours.”

The relief in her voice gave way to panic. He let her go on for a while longer. “I’ve fed the son of a bitch and now we’re standing outside the mini-mart where I bought the burritos.”

“What mini-mart?”

He didn’t reply.

“Tim, come home, you need to come home, tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up.”

“We’re feeling better,” he said. “I think maybe… maybe we’ll go over to that sporting goods store while there’s still time.”

“What sporting goods store?”

“Jane?”

“Yes?”

“Jane, you don’t have to worry about us. We’re going to be just fine.”

“Are you with someone?”

“We’re going to be just fine,” he said. “We’re going to go over to that sporting goods store and stock up on a few things.”

“Tell me where you are so I can pick you up.”

“That’s the operator, and I don’t have any more change.”

“Tim!”

“Don’t worry about us,” he said.

He supposed that decided it: he wasn’t going to be picked up. He walked over to the sporting goods store. Their winter offering was on display. They had fleece and spandex, neoprene and knit, polyester and cotton. He needed a different shirt. The one advertising MasterCard was dry now and the stench of rotted milk enveloped him. But to choose a size and a color and to do all that human business inside the fitting room was so exhausting. He needed boots and a coat as well, but that was also a pain in the ass. You had to hunt down a salesperson, give him your size, and wait for him to return from the back, where everything was kept, and then try on one of the boots — maybe both, depending on how the first one fit — and all the rest of it. What a pain in the ass. He didn’t want to make the effort. He refused to. He left the store and stood outside the automatic doors, just off to the side, where he remained standing a long time.

3

She did not say, she told Becka later, “Tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up.” As far back as Becka could remember, that’s how it was done. He called and told her where, what town, what gas station, what intersection, and then she and Becka got in the car and drove. Becka remembered the long drives. She remembered watching her mom get out of the car, walk up to him, and bend down and shake him gently. Her mom would tuck her hair behind an ear as she squatted beside him, waiting for him to come to. She remembered the car rides home, some tense and silent, others full of anguish and adult talk going nowhere. By the time she was old enough to better understand, she didn’t ride along as much. They would just suddenly return to the house together, or the phone would ring and wake her up and her mom would leave in the middle of the night. Her idea of family was bound up in those car rides and midnight runs, in her mom’s attempts to keep everyone together, everyone safe, and in the memory of her mom squatting patiently beside her dad as he slowly rose to a sitting position.

This time her mother didn’t have the energy. She didn’t want to get in a car and resume the ordeal. She told Becka about the art dealer named David she had just finished showing a listing to when she got the call and how she didn’t want to leave him. She wanted to hang up the phone and start a new life. So instead of saying, “Tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up,” she shifted the responsibility and the struggle to him: come home. As if that was such an easy thing to do when you were on foot, when you were lost and hungry and exhausted from walking so many miles.

“We had our heads in the sand,” she said. “We never talked about it. But I knew one day it would come back, and when it did, I promised myself I’d do it right. No drinking, no compromises. I would follow him everywhere, I would never let him out of my sight. Then he called and said it was back, and my first instinct was to abandon him.”

“But look where you are now,” said Becka. “Look at what you’re doing now.”

The two of them sat inside the lobby of a police department in western New Jersey. Behind them on the wall the authorities had posted profiles of wanted fugitives. Even in a sleepy town like Oldwick, the police station was a depot of the wayward and the deviant.

He had called Jane three times, once from a motel in Newark, once from a pay phone in Chatham, and then once from Potters-town, nearly fifty miles away. They learned these town names by taking down the area codes from caller ID and looking them up on the Internet. Eight days had passed since his last call.

“What does he say when he calls?” Becka had asked.

“Not a whole lot that’s coherent,” her mother replied.

The rides out to New Jersey reminded Becka of the ones she took as a kid. Except now her mother was going ninety miles an hour and they had no idea of a final destination. They just got in the car and drove, wandering around New Jersey, aimless and on edge, their eyes everywhere but on the road. Usually, as now, they ended up at one of the police stations.

An officer came out to talk to them. He took the flyer with Tim’s picture and all of Jane’s information and then he assured them that if anyone from the Oldwick police department ran into him, they’d contact her right away. She and Becka walked out into the start of another long night inching toward winter.

On the interstate Becka’s eyes moved back and forth from the median to the side of the road, squinting for her dad through the gloaming. She gazed up underpass ramps and turned her head to peer back at the concrete pylons. She saw nothing up the exits and no human shape or color among the clusters of trees. He was nowhere. Or he was standing right at the point she had just turned away from an instant earlier. She felt the deep deficit of not being omniscient and the insecurity of human limitations that a time of crisis lays bare. They’d never find him. They had already passed him. He was standing in front of them mile after mile but they were too blind and frantic to see.

She let her eyes drift from outside the car to her mother, who was holding herself together, all things considered. Her mother’s eyes were also moving from road to median to rearview mirror. Becka had her hand on the parking brake between them, and for an instant she had a familiar urge to yank it up with everything she had. They would then skid safely to a stop and take a big collective sigh and turn to each other and abruptly burst into laughter. Then her mom would undo the brake and drive them home. They would eat together somewhere in the Village and Becka would finally open up about all the boys she had had crushes on since the third grade, all the secrets and vulnerabilities that she had kept from her mom first and foremost, for some obscure reason, and her mom would be able to share a bottle of wine with her without consequence. They would embrace outside the subway station before Becka went back to her apartment in Brooklyn, where she worked as a bartender and played in a band. Once a week they would get together to do something like that, and their conversation would never, or almost never, touch upon her father, whom she had known only as either absence or sickness. They might mention him in passing with some sadness or toast him in memoriam on his birthday. They would not talk about the nights they each spent alone in their separate beds, sobbing for a memory or simply staring blankly in the dark, wondering why and never receiving an answer.

The phone began to ring on the windowsill, where Jane had not intended to leave it. She leapt up from the sofa and studied the caller ID. She glanced away, defeated. Becka listened as her mom told the party on the other end to call the main office, she wasn’t showing at the moment. She had to repeat herself. “I said call the main office,” said Jane. “The main office!” She paused. “Then look it up in the fucking phone book!”

She stabbed the phone long and hard and it issued a discordant tone change, a small chaotic noise. She walked back to the sofa.

Becka had a feeling that he wasn’t coming home. She didn’t know how she knew this. It was an intuition brought on by the memory of the misery he suffered strapped to the hospital bed and a certainty that he would not willingly repeat it.

“Are you prepared for him not to come home?” she asked.

“He has to come home,” Jane said. “What other option is there?”

She told Becka about the man who had tried to rape him behind the grocery store in Newark. “It’s not safe. There’s only one place for him.”

The phone rang again. Jane answered and turned to Becka, nodding. It was him. “He won’t stop talking,” she said. She listened awhile longer. “I can’t make sense of it.”

“Tell him I’m here. Tell him I want to know where he is.”

“Tim? Tim, Becka’s here. She wants to know where you are.”

She could hear her dad’s voice, muffled inside the phone, breathlessly spilling out word after word as her mom’s face grew increasingly blank. She looked at Becka and shook her head almost imperceptibly. “This is what I mean,” she said, and handed the phone to Becka.

“Dad?”

“—cruel, and dumb. Like those idiot kids from the high school, you see them in the movie theater, you can’t understand their speech. You don’t know, maybe they’re going to follow you out into the parking lot and jump on your car and then pummel you to death with a baseball bat. He doesn’t know reason—”

“Dad—”

“What sort of life is that? He belongs in an institution, but what institution would have him? There’s nothing specially designed, there’s no expert on hand. Oh, I know, they’re all experts, we’re nothing but a country of experts. But this one? This one’s an idiot. So treat him like an idiot. I don’t just mean restrain him. I mean subdue him, electrify him. Electrify him at the highest voltages, and beat him, they should beat him with batons, they should withhold food from him, starve him into submission, starve him within an inch of his life. They really should just abandon the hope of reform and work on him and work on him like cult leaders do, you know, like how political torturers do, really work him down until there is nothing left, he will never walk again, there is just a mad little smile maybe, maybe every once in a while he opens his eyes or remembers a little bit of song… news guy wept and told us… earth was really dying… cried so much his face was wet— I’d be happy with that,” he said, and then the phone went dead.

4

You go on and on. Your one note gets repetitive, it’s taxing. The crying, the lowing, the constant me me me. Do you know what you’re missing? The color of birds, a vibrant spectrum. The moon. The, the… a lot, let’s just say you’re missing a lot. Some very interesting people, opening their eyes to the wonder of the world, responded by taking voyages across the ocean, setting up easels on mountaintops. You, on the other hand, you hum. You vibrate with cold pain. You moan dumbly of want and complaint. Your steady low register, it would have driven them mad. They would have jumped overboard if their souls had been saddled with you.

“You are a hominid,” Tim said out loud.

Food!

Thunder was rattling in the distance and the lightning cut a vein of silver across a cloudy opaline sky.

“You have walked backward three million years. You are a branch of ancestors fallen extinct.”

Food! replied the other mutely.

“Food!” Tim cried out above the thunder.

People packing up their trunks and returning their carts stopped to look.

Food food food! the other howled.

“FOOD FOOD FOOD FOOD FOOD!” cried Tim.

And within the minute they had walked the rest of the way through the parking lot of the supermarket.

He waited out by the pine tree under the eerie light of dawn. When the Dunkin’ Donuts opened he walked across the street and brought back a dozen doughnuts and set them on the ground and ate them by the pine tree. The other stopped saying food, food, and started saying leg, leg — but he continued to eat the doughnuts and ignored him. One by one the bankers showed up and filed into the bank. He crawled out from under the pine tree and went inside. He was tightening his belt in the lobby when a woman came forward and greeted him. He told her he needed to reallocate some funds and maybe establish a trust. He really didn’t want to deal with the belt anymore. The far notch was too tight but the near notch was not tight enough. The woman stared at him while he debated which notch. He finally settled on the near one.

He noticed an urn of coffee on a nearby table. He walked over and poured himself a cup and sat down on a padded chair with his legs outstretched. Contentment should have buffered him all around but the other kept moaning leg, leg — so eventually he pulled up the cuff of his chinos and looked at the leg. Something had torn right through. The cut was deep and clean, from shinbone to calf. He had no memory of it happening. Blood had dried down the leg. One of the bankers approached. The banker watched him, dressed in a soiled T-shirt and ripped chinos, peel the blood-stiffened sock from his skin. He looked up and saw the banker watching and clapped his hands on his knees and said, “I need to reallocate some funds and maybe establish a trust.”

“It looks like you might need stitches,” said the banker.

“I might go to the drugstore later,” he said. “Get some analgesics.”

When the banker took him back and accessed his portfolio with the various websites and passwords he’d been given, he saw an inordinate amount of money diversified across a wide spectrum of investment vehicles. This caused him to turn away from his computer screen and stare at the man across from him. His foot was perched on the edge of the desk and he was picking dried blood from his leg and collecting the flakes in the palm of his hand. The banker fished the garbage pail out from under the desk. “Do you need this?” he asked. Tim pocketed the flakes of dried blood as if they were so many nickels and dimes and settled back in the chair and looked past the banker. The banker returned the pail to his desk.

“Are those your diplomas on the wall?” he asked.

The banker turned to the wall and said they were.

“They’ll come down someday,” he told the banker.

When he finished banking, he walked out into a cold and still afternoon under solid ashen clouds. Cold pricked the insides of his nostrils. He wandered through a parking lot and then followed the exiting cars to the road where he walked along the curb to an intersection of three competing drugstores. He patronized the closest one. In the middle of the store he found a rack of sweatshirts. Among them was one of orange cotton with an iron-on decal of a cornucopia spilling forth with vegetables and rich with autumnal colors. It said Happy Thanksgiving. He bought it. He also bought some rope, a steak knife and a box of cookies. He threw his old belt away behind the drugstore, where his breath blew white, and with the knife fashioned a new one out of the rope.

He circled a downtown rotary. He fell asleep in the city square. In the morning he woke up to a young man squatting a foot away. The young man wore a blue polo with an official insignia visible between the flaps of an unzipped down jacket. He held a small cardboard box with a cardboard handle and fruit emblazoned on the sides. He had been trying to wake him without violating one of the first rules of training: never touch the Client. Sometimes the Client had bloodshot alcoholic slits for eyes and took a minute to orient himself, in certain extreme situations, like the victim of a car crash.

Tim clambered to a sitting position and leaned back against the gray stone of the city building.

“Good morning,” said the young man. “Would you like some lunch?”

He offered him the cardboard box. When he made no move to take it, the young man said, “I’m going to leave it here,” and set the lunch box just outside the perimeter of a circle of pigeon waste. “It has enough calories to keep you going for twenty-four hours.” He continued to squat. “It’s cold out here, you know,” he said. “You’re going to need more than just that sweatshirt.”

“Fuck him,” he replied.

The young man looked around, but there was no one else there. Finally he stood and walked away.

“Hey!”

The young man turned. The Client was holding the lunch box. “You have me confused with someone interested. Come back here and get this.”

The young man returned. If the Client refuses to accept the offered meal, gently encourage him to reconsider, while maintaining the appropriate distance. Do not insist if he continues to refuse. Always remain courteous.

“Are you sure you don’t want it?”

“The makers of our Constitution,” he replied, “undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness, conferring, as against the Government, the right to be left alone — the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man.”

The young man looked at him. “I’m not with the government,” he said. “I’m with Food Bank America.”

The lunch box remained suspended in the air between them. The young man took it and walked away.

Then the other started to howl with a kind of primal senescence. The pitch rose above Tim’s pride and forced him to call the young man back a second time. He took the lunch box and, in exchange, offered him a hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet. The money was a condition for taking the food, which the confused young man, more than surprised by the amount in the Client’s possession, finally agreed to accept, after much protest, as a donation to the cause.

On the state highway, drivers came around the bend erratic and unmindful. These were roads no one expected a pedestrian to walk down. The electricity poles all had a lean to them. A carload of teenagers passed by honking as if he were a night at the prom.

Clouds of broken granite covered the sky. He passed the Village Dodge and the Wonderland Farms Storage. He walked past rain-bleached boxes of cigarettes and what might have been the carapace of a sea turtle. He didn’t believe he was anywhere near the ocean.

He stood at the customer-service desk of a Barnes and Noble waiting for the woman at the computer to free up. In the meantime he bent to a knee and gingerly untied his shoestring, which had been double-knotted and made tight by water. The blisters of frostbite on his fingertips and the lost sensation in his hands made the action crude and slow. He pulled off the wet sock and saw that his remaining toes were also blistered and his foot was as white as the pallor of his hands. Removing the shoe momentarily eased the pulsating swelling caused by so much walking. His feet were like two engorged and squishy hearts.

He rolled up the cuff of his chinos to inspect the cut on his leg. There was weeping from the abscess. A halo of soft pink tissue surrounded it. The calf had ballooned. He had been confusing its stench for the MasterCard T-shirt. He removed dirt with his fingernail — not dirt, it turned out, but a trapped bug.

“Can I help you?” asked the woman.

He sprung up. “I’m looking for a book on birds.”

“Any particular title?”

“Something I can use to identify them in the wild.”

Name a bird and master the world. Reveal nature’s mystery and momentarily triumph over it. The fleeting containment within the mind of spotted flight, which has no name until you give it one. That was something the other could never do. He should buy a book on butterflies and trees, too. Trees would include flowers and shrubbery.

The woman stepped away from the help desk and quickly started on her way to Nature. He walked behind her with his cuff still rolled, holding his sock and shoe. It was only when she arrived at the section and turned to look at him that she saw his exposed leg, swollen like a goiter in the middle of the calf.

“Oh my God,” she said.

He read books on birding in the café. He warmed himself with cups of coffee and replenished on the baked goods under the display case. Then he was forced to move as quickly as possible through the store to the men’s room, where he remained a long time. A manager came in and said generally, “Is everyone okay in here?”

Eventually he reemerged. They asked if he needed an ambulance and he asked what for. He bought one of the birding books and left the store. When his walk started later that evening, he abandoned the book first thing.

Hands and feet are cold. Leg is hurting. Stomach is empty and would like some food.

He was assailed night and day by such complaints. They were crude and unimpeachable. He was accustomed to accommodating his body, so his defiance had to be deliberate, disciplined, as Zen-like as possible.

System is weak in general. Neck stiffness is never good. This dark road is scary.

He had tried to learn bird-watching because the other, despite his ability to detect light and color and movement, was too coarse for such refined activity as the appreciation of beauty and the translation of nature into names. Name a bird and master the world. It would be a victory over brute want and dumb matter.

But brute want was more powerful than he might have guessed. He knew more about case law than he did about bird-watching, so after discarding the burdensome book on birds he started reciting the better bits from famous decisions. The recitation of case law was refinement purely of the mind, many layers of sophistication above what the other could ever hope to achieve.

Fluid balance is essential to proper organ function. A fever indicates the need for medical attention. Would that not be a fine place to stop and rest?

“Law in its most general and comprehensive sense signifies a rule of action,” he said, “which is prescribed by some superior and which the inferior is bound to obey.”

McDonald’s is quick, tasty, and conveniently located. Everyone loves TV. Discharging semen is an unbeatable sensation.

“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women, and when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.”

Operations functioning below his reach were sending out distress signals. He ignored them as much as possible. He revolted against the disproportionate power enjoyed by chemical imbalances and shorting neural circuits. He could say the words “autonomic nervous system,” whereas the autonomic nervous system just was; therefore he was superior to the autonomic nervous system. He passed the Printing Plus and Pik-Kwik and the Wing Ting. All the driveways in the subdivision had pickups and one had a Corvette. “Corvette,” he said.

He climbed partway up the hill behind a Jiffy Lube, closed for the night, where he fell asleep. He woke with his head on the hard earth and for an hour or two listened to the hydraulic thunder of the mechanics’ instruments and to the banter of the men at their work.

Good shoes are not simply a luxury. Funny looks from male strangers are unsettling. A change in bowel habits is cause for alarm.

Later, when the day’s walk seized him, it was his turn to complain to the other. He passed billboards and stoplights and shopping centers. There were stop signs and rec centers and residential houses. There were train tracks and entrance ramps and signal towers.

“You go on and on about how cold and hungry you are,” he said. “The night is long, you say. Good shoes are not just a luxury. But then you’re off and there’s no appeal. There’s no explanation for your behavior and no memory of your complaints. Are you not still cold? Are you not hungry? What is your purpose, your aim, but to hurl us both into suffering and darkness? Speak to me! You destroy my life, you rob me of my will, you troll me through the streets like meat on a hook. You have laid plain all my limitations and my total illusion of freedom. To what end? What do you gain from this?”

The other limped along steadily, saying nothing.

They agreed on one thing. If he wanted to starve the other of all alimentation, if his only pleasure was a kind of a suicidal spite, he did a good job with shelter and a so-so one with food, but he failed every time to resist the call of sleep. When the other stopped, he could have kept right on walking and driven him into the ground. He could have drowned himself in a body of water or thrown himself in front of a car. But he was too exhausted. The body released him, and then he walked bareheaded to some hovel, to some dubious sanctuary, where they collapsed in a harmony of purpose. For a minute, he knew the meaning of bliss: oblivion. In oblivion, they were at peace.

He came out of the men’s room. The man who had been knocking swung wide to let him pass. He left through the side door where the drive-thru line had stalled and vomited up his lunch by the dumpster. He wandered off to a nearby patch of frostbitten grass between the McDonald’s and the Conoco and sat down there and perspired. The cars out on the road went by in slow motion.

He stopped in front of a display window in a downtown district recently renovated so as to better highlight its desolation. He stared through the glass of a sporting goods store at a pitched tent with a forest-green fly-sheet. Accessories surrounded the camp pastoral — a lantern and a canteen and a fire made of cardboard.

He lay down on a bench and took a nap. The city cop woke him by hitting his billy club against the wood.

“You got identification?” asked the cop.

He sat up slowly. He removed his wallet from the back pocket of his chinos. His insensate fingers made it difficult to remove the license. The cop looked it over and handed it back to him.

“No sleeping here.”

“Do you know your right-of-public-access laws?”

The cop looked at him. “You got some place to go, wise guy?”

With a crude and mechanical deliberation he opened the wallet in his lap and removed a crisp sheaf of newly minted hundred-dollar bills and made their edges flop between his fingers. “I can go anywhere I want.”

“Then get there,” said the cop.

“Your concern for my well-being is touching.”

The cop started to walk away.

“One might as well ask if the State, to avoid public unease, could incarcerate all who are physically unattractive or socially eccentric,” he called out. “Mere public intolerance or animosity cannot constitutionally justify the deprivation of a person’s physical liberty!”

He went back to sleep. When he woke up, he said no, he would not get up, no matter what, not now, no getting up, you are a fleshy weed for plucking. He said you are a feast for worms. You are a carping and hidebound bitch with your fevers and limps and predictable appetites.

Deficiency of copper causes anemia, just so you know. Which at this point is way down there on the list of concerns.

“A stench, a rotgut, a boil,” he retorted aloud, rising again on the bench. A woman stood nearby walking her dog. When his voice rose up she tugged at the leash to get the sniffing dog going again. “A gaseous blowhole. You are a blind clutch and claw. Go off. Go off and leave me alone.”

Can’t.

“You hang on the wheel of fortune. I rise upward on angel’s wings. You turn in the gyre. I dream of old lovers with youthful smiles.”

Sorry, pal, we’re in this together.

“Prove it!” he cried.

What is a wing? What is a smile?

“You can’t be smart,” he said. “Only I can be smart.”

I’m evolving, replied the other.

A crane and a tractor and a few smaller excavating vehicles sat as still as a display of dinosaurs in the man-made pit behind the convenience store. He took the access road down and sat in the cabin of the tractor as he ate a pair of hot dogs. He was able to keep them down, which he attributed to the other’s shrewd calculation for what nourishment a walk would require. “You are a wily cunt,” he said.

On the road that led out of town, a blackbird fell out of the sky. A second bird hit the shoulder and a third one landed in the far lane, followed by the rest of the flock. They hit with heavy thuds one after the other and lay scattered like jacks on the road. Then darkness fell and he was walking again.

He skirted the edge of a copse of trees that had been corralled at their trunks by orange plastic fencing and climbed the bluff that rose over the highway and traversed that weedy expanse that offered no purpose to commerce or settlement but a clear border. When he came down he diverted away from the highway into a neighborhood of half-finished Tudor-style homes on acre plots with dumpsters in the streets full of broken Sheetrock and mounds of rose-hued stone gravel in the driveways that with their air of thwarted expectancy accentuated the abandonment of the stillborn development. The freezing rain had soaked through his cornucopia sweatshirt and made it stiff. He was chattering and perspiring and raging like the fierce storm itself at the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of the other. His threats and accusations echoed in the ghost town as the icy pellets rained down white and round as balls of salt and soon he was gone from there, and the rooftops and windows froze over with a second skin of glass, and the trees and shrubbery looked part of some crystal city.

He was under the eaves of the highway oasis when the man with the garbage bag approached. It was a black industrial-strength garbage bag so old that its pale stretch marks had started to give way to holes, especially at the gathered neck, where the man gripped it to carry it over his shoulder. He set it down and then sat next to Tim on the stone bench.

“Why your fingers like that?” asked the man.

Tim was holding his hands in his lap. His curled and rigid fingers faced upward. The blisters had disappeared and much of the surface area had turned a dark purple that faded at the tips to pitch-black. He looked down at them. They resembled a carrion bird’s claws set by rigor mortis.

“He’s a wily cunt.”

“Who? You frien’?”

“He’s no friend of mine.”

“You ain’t got no frien’?”

He shook his head. They sat quietly. “You got the poison?” asked the man.

The question lingered between them.

“The poison?”

The man stared at him. Eventually he nodded.

“You be all right,” said the man, who looked off in the low visibility. People stood at the rear of their cars, filling them up at the Mobil station.

Before he stood again, the man said, “You oughta be thinking about getting yourself over to the shelter clinic on McAdams. Have the volunteer man check you out.”

Out on the old highway a man driving home steered his clattering pickup over to the shoulder. He pulled in twenty yards ahead of Tim and spoke to him through the passenger-side window when he caught up to the truck. The belly-white clouds foretold the coming blizzard.

“You look like you’re hurt,” said the man. “Do you need some help?”

He stopped before the window. He felt the hot blasts from the vents. They stung his benumbed skin and he took a step back.

“You have a bad limp there,” the man continued. “Are you a veteran?”

He didn’t reply.

“I was Third Battalion, Ninth Marines, in the first Gulf War,” said the man. “Now I help run a place, it’s kind of a safe haven for us. We feed everybody, everybody gets a place to sleep.”

“Do you have the poison?”

“The poison?” said the man.

He stared at him through the open window.

“I’ve never heard it referred to that way,” said the man. “I suppose I do, even if they tell me I don’t.”

He opened the car door and stepped inside the truck.

“Will you do me a favor,” the man asked, before he could put the car in drive, “and roll up your window for me?” He did as he was told. The man looked at his clawed grip crudely manning the handle as his stench grew strong in the cab. “Jesus Christ.” The man opened the driver’s-side door and stepped out. “I’m sorry,” he said, with the door hanging open. “I don’t mean to be rude. There’s just a smell.”

“That’s my leg,” he replied. He delicately rolled up his chinos to show the man.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, you have to get to a hospital.”

He stepped out of the truck just as the man, who quickly began to roll down his window to let the air in before stepping back inside, got behind the wheel again.

“No way,” he said, standing again on the shoulder of the highway. “No hospitals.”

“Hey, I understand,” said the man. “A hospital is not my favorite place, either. But that infection, that could kill you.”

He shut the door. “No hospitals,” he said through the window.

“But you’re in danger.”

“Nobody asked you to stop for me,” he said.

Eventually he made it to the grounds of the local high school where he passed out on the baseball diamond behind home plate. He swooned in and out. He was awake for the first of the snow. He found the strength to remove his clothes so that he sat under the winter sky in nothing but boxer shorts, feeling the evaporating sizzle of the billowing flakes along his fevered body. He was euphoric with the certainty of physical death. The other had gone completely quiet. No more complaints of hunger or the cold. He had no memory of the last time it had managed to keep anything down. He was winning. He had never given much thought to heaven before, but now he was certain it existed. Without God, the body won, and that couldn’t be possible. He was one thing, his body a different thing altogether, and he was willing a separation, in which he went off to eternal repair while it suffered its due fate of rough handling, dirt, and rot.

Then he was made to stand and walk.

As the wind picked up and the snow grew frenzied he entered a small town. He walked barefoot and near-naked on the side of the road, his belly distended and his leg dragging along. No one can see me, no one would stop me, no one could help me anyway. They would just call the ________ but it would be too late. My only regret is ________. She’d have the coffee on. There was a time during my search for a cure when I tried everything to stop walking including giving up ________. The smell filled the ________. I loved to drink a ________ of ________ in the ________, to say ________; to ________ after we’d spent another ________; together. I’d tell her now it’s going okay except for the poison. It’s going okay except for how much I miss her and ________. ________?

________?! I’ve never been a very good ________.

He came up a final hill alongside a street opposite a multilevel parking lot and a courtyard with a fountain and a few other professional buildings. He wondered where he would end up, in what outpost of trees or behind what building, inside what unused doorway or, if he was lucky, what unlocked bathroom or backseat, his final resting place. But then the other let go of its mineral grip and he saw the doors part before him.

He went down on his knees on the rubber mat. “You son of a bitch! You can’t change the rules.”

The nurse saw him and started from behind the station.

“He changed the rules!” he cried, as an emergency crew came forward.

You didn’t really think I would let you kill us, did you?

He was lacking identification and admitted to the ICU under the name Richard Doe. He had renal failure, an enlarged spleen, sepsis-induced hypotension, cellular damage to the heart. He had trench foot and a case of dysentery. He required assisted breathing and intravenous antibiotics. He did not wake day or night.

The other made him say things. “Oof!” was one of them, “aaa, aaa” another. They entered into the type of interminable conversations that often break out in fevered dreams.

Q: What did you do for a living?

A: I was a ________.

Q: “Lawyer”?

A: Yes, that’s it. Is this an interrogation?

Q: A simple word, “lawyer.” Why can’t you remember it?

A: Intelligence has its limits. Knowledge cannot determine in its entirety the measure of a man’s ________.

Q: His what?

A: You know, his ________.

Q: “Soul”?

A: That’s it, soul, yes.

Q: You believe in the soul now?

A: I do.

Q: I wasn’t aware you gave any thought to such things.

A: I haven’t, typically.

Q: Then what accounts for your sudden mystical impulse?

A: Without God, you win.

He didn’t think the taunting was fair, but then the other had proven it didn’t play fair. But how was it feasible? The other had co-opted his powers of recall and discourse. In his former life as a lawyer, the stress of an upcoming trial would cause him to dream of cross-examining expert witnesses on technical matters about which he knew nothing — handwriting analysis, abstruse accounting methods. The author of such dreams, he played both parts, interrogator and expert, but he knew only the interrogator’s questions. When it came time for answers, he listened as the expert whom he had conjured conveniently mumbled, or spoke too softly, or omitted entire words.

It was like that now, only the other was the interrogator and he the muttering subject of its dream.

He was hooked to machines and monitors. He heard their pulse and suspiration, the steady mechanical beep of his heart. He realized that the other was content simply to lie there, to let the drips and antibiotics work their magic. He wasn’t going to walk, the son of a bitch. The wily cunt wasn’t going to walk. The wily cunt had been made to suffer and brought close to death and then he changed the rules. It wasn’t fair. Tim tried to tear himself free. In so doing he learned how many fingers and parts of fingers he had lost. He was too weak to pull out a single IV and fell unconscious again.

Q: Are you aware that you can be made to forget words, if certain neurons are suppressed from firing?

A: Certain what?

Q: And that by suppressing the firing of others, you can be made to forget what words mean entirely? Like the word Jane, for instance.

A: Which?

Q: And do you know that if I do this—

[inaudible]

A: Oof!

Q — you will flatline? And if I do this—

[inaudible]

A: Aaa, aaa…

Q — you will cease flatlining? Do you really want to confuse that for God’s work?

He woke again, unable to move. He saw a man peering in at him from the doorway. Was the man smiling? Just before losing consciousness, he watched in horror as the man came forward — unmistakably the same man he had encountered on the bridge. The man was approaching and there was nothing he could do, no defense possible, he was utterly paralyzed and his eyes were closing. He was trapped inside. The paralysis was worse than movement. He wanted to call out, but his throat was plugged. The man stepped to the bed. Wake up! he cried to himself. Tears leaked out from his closed eyes.

The next time he woke he found the strength to tear the lines out of his veins and the tube from his throat. Alarms began to sound. He slowly climbed out of bed, which kept pulling him back in, as if he were in a gravel pit struggling to get a purchase on the collapsing rock. A nurse caught him at the doorway as he was leaving the room. He tried to scream but his vocal cords were out of commission and all he could produce was a long hoarse cry. “He’s tormenting me! He’s tormenting—”

He collapsed in the doorway, where he had another seizure. He shook on the floor with an animal gaze. His contorted mouth spat foam. The nurse came around quickly to cup the back of his head with her hands.

He was docile when the orderlies returned him to bed.

Q: If I can make you forget words, make you flatline, make you see things and seize up—

A: Oof! Oof! Oof! Oof!

Q — is that not all the evidence you need that I control your fate, and that my fate is your only future? Why turn for comfort toward the fanciful conceit of corrupt men and frightened old ladies?

A: Aaa, aaa…

Q: It’s just you and me, pal. Forget God. Act like a man. It’s what we are.

He broke free every time he woke, so finally they strapped him down by the wrists and ankles, which made him thrash and weep and cry out without sound because hell was a bed, hell was a bed, while life, down the corridor and through the door, was out there — life and death both, it didn’t matter which.

He raged when the tube was removed and his voice healed. He refused to tell them his name or the whereabouts of his family. He spoke of hallucinations and visions. He said he had the voice of the devil in his head. He disrupted the peace of other patients and hurled curses at the frightened staff. They transferred him to the psych ward, diagnosed him with paranoia and schizophrenia, and started him on a cocktail of antipsychotic medications.

They continued to ask him his name.

“Who are you?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘you,’ ” he said.

“Do you have family? Wouldn’t they like to know where you are?”

“I never told her how sorry I was for the life I led her into. I had hoped to start over with the new apartment. Now I’m trying something different.”

“Which is what?”

“I don’t call home anymore.”

“Where is home for you?”

“Home is where the heart is, right here.” He pointed to his chest. “I go where he goes, and he doesn’t give me much say in the matter.”

The medication began taking effect and they no longer needed to restrain him. Still he snuck out of bed and wandered the hospital corridors asking patients if they had the poison. Some engaged him and others thought he was crazy. Some seemed to know exactly what he was talking about.

“I been getting help from the twelve-strand Orion healing technique. You tried that?”

“And they wanna call it a fascinoma.”

“They keep threatening to cut me off.”

“The whole family been eccentric with mental problems all along.”

“Let me show you my scans.”

“We need to discuss the voices you’ve been hearing.”

“Voice,” he said. “Not voices. Voice.”

“Sorry, voice.”

“And it isn’t a voice. It’s a point of view.”

“A point of view?”

“A bleak and uninspired one, but convincing. Very evolved. He gains control of my powers — rhetorical, argumentative. Don’t ask me how. There should be docket numbers to our conversations.”

“Is the voice still there, louder, fainter?”

“Fainter. He makes it known when he’s angry or wants something, but it’s quieted down since you patched me up.”

“That’s good.”

“Don’t be fooled. He’s just lying in wait.”

“But if you keep taking the medication, there should be no problem.”

“Pharmacology is only one tactical maneuver in a protracted war.”

“What war is that?”

“The one we’ve been fighting for centuries. The one we’ve always lost, so far as anyone can tell.”

“Sorry, I’m not sure I understand.”

“Death. The will to live versus inevitable decay. What’s not to understand?”

“Were you trying to kill yourself?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘yourself,’ ” he said.

He resumed eating voluntarily. He got up and voided himself of his own accord. He was quiet in the evenings. They gave him donated winter clothes and released him.

He walked out in a gray hunter’s cap with fur brim and earflaps, a winter jacket. He stood just beyond the automatic doors where he had fallen to his knees almost two months earlier. He was trying to decide whether to go right or left, his breath visible in the cold. He had no impulse to undress and wander off into the winter. Ascension through annihilation wasn’t his immediate concern. The other was happy. The other liked the warmth, felt a little hungry. He knew his first task was to get his personal details in order — to call a private banker he knew in New York, who’d help him restore his identification and credit cards. He had these clerical impulses. The good hospital staff had restored him to the land of the pragmatic. In his pocket sat several prescriptions, some of which he even thought worth filling. Pharmacology was a legitimate tactical advantage. Eventually, he decided to turn right.

She let go the second she heard his voice and for the first minute of the call she cried with an abandon that he, on the other end, did not entirely comprehend. “Oh,” she said. He listened to her let out a heavy sigh in sobbing degrees. “Oh, Tim.”

“I’m not dead,” he said. “But I do have to take medicine.”

“Oh,” she said again. “I’ve been so…” She tried to collect herself. “Tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up.”

“But there’s one I just don’t take because it’s probably better to be dead than to go around feeling like that, all zombie you know, just totally whacked out and exhausted and who gives a fuck you can’t even think — I have two like that, actually—”

“Where are you, Tim? Please tell me.”

“—but the second is for the seizures and I probably shouldn’t, I don’t know—”

“Seizures?”

“Probably shouldn’t give that one up, I guess, even though I haven’t had one since I was in the hospital so maybe they’re gone now. I wouldn’t put it past him to make something just — poof! — you know, disappear. He makes his own rules and what the fuck am I supposed to do if they keep shifting? It’s like I told the doctors. Medicine can secure a base here and there but there will always be a battle going on somewhere else.”

“Tim, please tell me, please tell me where you are,” she said.

“I try not to pay attention and I do a pretty good job, too, when you consider how demanding he is, like I’m torturing him, you know, like I’ve taken him captive. For a while there we were trading retaliations in a zero-sum game. The chain of command was in constant flux. I thought I was winning but he changed the rules on me and that’s when he got the upper hand, when I went down, and that lasted for, I don’t know. I was under maybe three weeks?”

“Under?”

“Three weeks of torment. I was defenseless. He just had the run of me. He doesn’t think much about God. I’ve come around on that matter. I believe in God now. Isn’t that something?”

“Tim, please listen to me. I want to say something to you.”

“Do you remember that doctor one time, he told us about the blood-brain barrier? Now, that’s a distinction. On the one hand you’ve got the blood, just dumb as a train full of rocks, important rocks but dumb dumb dumb, and on the other hand the brain, which is where, you know, the me and the you, where the me and the you come from, and with this barrier in place, you keep the bastard out, you see. Integrity is maintained. There’s a beautiful sanctity, when you think about it, a really holy and reverent sanctity that keeps the pure godlike parts from mixing with the rank and baser stuff, the rot, the decay, the blood, the rocks. That’s where the real armies of God are, right there on that blood-brain barrier, doing God’s work. I mean, that is the real frontline in the battle between the two—”

“What two?”

“The body and the soul. The blood-brain barrier and the synapses are the two main fronts. You’ve got both sides fighting for control of the dendrites and the axons and what all else I don’t know.”

“I don’t understand, Tim, I don’t understand.”

“But he still finds ways to break through, even when I’m taking the medication. He commandeers my mind. That’s my theory, anyway. Have you started drinking again?”

She was silent. “If I said yes,” she said, “would you come home?”

He didn’t reply.

“Tim, listen to me. Are you listening?”

He continued to say nothing.

“Scrub Island,” she said.

He was quiet.

“You know what that is,” she said. “Scrub Island. You remember Scrub Island?”

“Don’t drink,” he said. “Okay?”

“The little girl in the wedding dress,” she said. “The ostriches and the man herding them with the bullwhip. I know you remember Scrub Island.”

He stayed silent, holding the phone with one hand and the cord in the other, staring down at his high-tops gone brandless with grime.

“Tell me where you are,” she said, “and I’ll pick you up.”

“I have to go now,” he said. “Don’t drink.”

He hung up and walked from the pay phone to the dining hall, situated in the church basement. The tables were laid with yellow plastic tablecloths. A faint odor of steamed food, bland and heavy, drifted across the room. Those eating wore their winter coats while the volunteers manning the deep basins of food behind the main table wore white aprons. He got himself a set of plastic silverware bundled in a napkin and a Styrofoam plate of food and sat down and ate his dinner as best he could.

5

I respected you more when you were indifferent to God. You were beset by matters of urgency in your life that took precedence over the lofty speculation of divinity students and men in pews on Sundays. You didn’t have the time. You didn’t make it a priority. You formed your notions on the fly, in flashes of grim insight, in brief feelings of certainty that consumed you entirely and then quickly faded into the background. When you die, you thought, you die. Why linger on that unpalatable truth? And the alternative, the alternative was a sham. You hated the institutions and the corruptions and the hypocrisies and the evils. You thought it was all a racket designed by the mighty to fleece the weak and keep them in check. The existence of the numinous, the mystical, the godhead itself — who knows? Maybe. But what evidence was there? You had been chiseled by reason to a diamond point. You were deferential to logic and evidence, skeptical of specious oratory, an enemy of hearsay. At best, you put the possibility in abeyance, knowing that even when one of your cases went to trial, when every detail was presented and picked over, every side aired and attacked and defended, there was slippage, lacunae, things no one would ever know. God was like that. God was a trial. But if pressed you sided with the disbelievers and sometimes you even showed contempt for those who spoke with the conviction of the weak and the credulous. You had that luxury. You stood outside of the wind and the rain. Your insights and arguments came to you in prosperity. Death was far off. You could afford to be leisurely. A drink was better than a thought. A meal was better than a conviction. Your family and your work were more meaningful to you than the ministrations of a hundred gods. That is, until you caved.

He approached the pharmacist at the drop-off window and handed her a number of prescriptions. She inspected them.

“These are all from out of state,” she said, handing them back.

“What does that mean?”

“They have to come from an in-state doctor.”

He looked over the writing on the prescriptions. Apparently he wasn’t in Missouri anymore.

“I really need these,” he said. “It’s getting bad.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “it’s state law. You have to get them from a doctor here.”

He took the prescriptions and walked back through the drugstore and out into the cold.

The rooftops and the rooms disappeared, and you caved. O weak thing called the spirit! O untested man! Nature proved itself to be indifferent on the mildest days, dependably vicious and antagonistic on all others. That this came as a surprise to you reveals the narrowness of your imagination and the naiveté that characterized every matter—

“You shut up.”

— of so-called life and death. You made your steadfast convictions cradled in a swivel chair. Now you’ve shown yourself vulnerable to sentimentality. Your “belief” is no moral law or cohesive thought or even a beautiful speculation. It’s a desperate search for comfort and has nothing to do with goodness, truth or beauty. You’ve simply weakened to the primordial fears that shook your superstitious forebears to the bones and convinced them to incant in extinct languages and drain their daughters of blood. For all your higher plane and beloved evolution, you now quiver in the same gradations of faith and testament, and your appeal is no less shrill. You want the old comforts and narratives—

“Shut up!”

— the folk mass and evensong—

“SHUT UP! SHUT UP!!”

— the great words repeated in the dark and over the heads of newborns and the bodies of the dead. Indulgent, happy to compromise, eager to see it all in a different light, in a finer and more noble and prettier light, the best light of man, the beacon and the hope. But that’s just food—

“Food!” he cried aloud.

— just food. The verdict arrives in doses, century after century, and looks increasingly grim. The world is too old. The soul is the mind is the brain is the body. I am you and you are it and it will always win.

6

He laid out before him his morning’s work. He uncapped his pen and folded back the legal pad to a clean sheet and began to write. Outside, the sun was baking the world. He didn’t like his new office or the view that came with it and assumed they gave it to him to keep him out of sight from clients who might notice the bottles of prescription medication on his desk, or his missing fingers. One hand, with thumb and pinkie still intact, was fixed in a permanent expression of hang loose, dude; the other, with only the middle and ring fingers, looked like a roadside cactus. As for the medication, he had no choice in the matter: they refused to give him a desk with drawers. These systematic downgrades, which he suffered after every leave of absence, were humiliating. He usually forgot about them once he was lost in the writing. To be lost in the writing was to be absorbed, and to be absorbed was to lose awareness of everything — the shitty view and the third-class furniture, but also, and here was the paradox, even the contentment. To be lost in the writing was to be happy, but it required giving up any awareness of that happiness, of any awareness whatsoever, and so he was blissfully unaware — until the secretary came by and in calling him to awareness made him unhappy again.

“I don’t need anything right now, thank you,” he said. He made a kind of karate chop over the desk with his hang-loose hand. He couldn’t look her in the eye, he was so annoyed. “I’ll let you know if I do. Thank you.”

She departed. He was given ten minutes of peace and quiet and then, sure enough, she reappeared. He had once argued during a partner caucus that secretaries were relics of an earlier era. You wanted something done right, you asked a paralegal to do it. Secretaries should be phased out. But too many partners treasured and coddled their secretaries, so he had to continue to suffer their anxious interruptions, their quivering attempts to justify their salaries. He realized he was going to have to give her something to do.

“May I have some coffee?” he asked. “Can you just bring me a cup of coffee?”

She had anticipated him. Her name was Ella, and she was coarse with premature age. He did not think, with those knees, she should be wearing a skirt. She began to pour the coffee into a cup on his desk. The coffee steamed upward and, almost against his will, he was momentarily grateful. It was a nice thing to have, a fresh cup of coffee, even in the summer. Never something to take for granted. As she poured, he pulled out his wallet with his cactus hand and using the middle and ring fingers removed a hundred-dollar bill, which he pressed into her free hand. She looked at the crumpled bill.

“What’s this for?”

“An hour,” he said. “An hour to work in peace, no interruptions, no inquiries. Surf the Internet, take a long lunch, talk to your kid on the phone. Whatever — for one hour.”

She pocketed the hundred. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll surf the Internet.” She shambled away.

Glare penetrated the window as cars went by. Semis with heavy loads rattled the plate glass. He kept his head down and slowly worked himself, word by word, back into communion with the other hours, days, years — there was in fact no name for this particular unit of time — that together formed a continuum of unawareness that was as close to transcendence as he would come. He was working himself, as if with a spade in a tunnel that finally yields to light, out of the physical world. Rested, at ease, contented by the coffee, the other had no complaints. He would get hungry soon, but with cunning, careful focus, Tim might have another hour to himself.

But before that hour was out, someone knocked gently on one corner of the desk. It was a visitor, and he had not had a visitor in a long time.

“Hi, Tim.”

Fritz’s tie was loosely knotted and his sleeves rolled up. He had dragged in with him a measure of the heat. “May I sit down?” he asked.

“Fritz?” He began to collect the work laid out before him into tidy piles. “Did we have an appointment? What the hell time was our appointment?”

Fritz climbed in across from him. “We didn’t have an appointment,” he said.

“Well, that’s okay, hell. I’m just writing a brief. When I’m not being interrupted.”

“Am I interrupting?”

“No, no, it’s not you.”

“Do you know what you want?”

“Not now,” he told the secretary.

“Just some coffee,” said Fritz.

Tim’s hands returned to fussing with the loose-leaf paper. His eyes refused to meet Fritz’s. Fritz noticed his missing fingers.

“Now’s as good a time as ever,” he said. “So where are we?”

Fritz looked up from his friend’s hands. He hadn’t known what to expect, but it wasn’t this. “Where are we?” he asked.

“With the man. What progress?”

Fritz looked at him. “Nobody’s seen you for months, Tim,” he said. “We’ve been worried about you.”

“Busy, you know.”

“It took me a long time to find you.”

He stopped fussing with his papers and sat up straight. “Now, look. We’ve been after this guy and after this guy, and while you guys are supposed to be the best, you still haven’t found him. And every day we don’t find him is another day an innocent man wastes away in that jail cell of his.”

“R. H. Hobbs is dead, Tim.”

The woman reappeared. Fritz turned his coffee mug over and set it right side up on the lacy paper doily. “Thank you,” he said, and the woman departed.

“Do you know how long I’ve been petitioning to have secretaries phased out of this firm?” he said to Fritz. “What do they do? They fetch coffee. That’s it. You want something done, you ask a paralegal. The only thing a secretary can do is fetch coffee, because fetching coffee is beneath a paralegal.”

“Tim,” said Fritz, “did you hear me? R. H. Hobbs is dead.”

“No, he’s not.”

“He hanged himself in December.”

“When did he get out?”

“Out?”

“Of prison. When did he get out of prison?”

“He was serving a life sentence—”

“I know what his goddamn sentence was, goddamn it,” he said. “I know what he was serving.”

His raised voice caught the attention of the two truckers sitting at the counter. Ella stood across from them, smoking and staring. One of the truckers turned and said something.

“I’m asking a simple question,” said Tim. “When did he get out?”

“I’m afraid he didn’t get out,” said Fritz.

Tim remembered sitting on the sofa watching TV with Becka when R.H.’s trial began. He was unable to leave the house for some reason. Why was that? He couldn’t recall. Uninterrupted doses of Buffy, like an IV drip, kept the guilt at bay. After he went into remission, he went to see R.H. in prison. He sat across from him and noticed the gray hair on his arms. He had never really seen him until that day, an aging man in a prison jumpsuit.

“What about the man?”

“What man?”

“The man. The man, Fritz, who I saw on the bridge. And at the baths. At the baths, too, when he attacked me. Where are you with him?”

“We’re nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“It hasn’t been an active case for a long time.”

“Why did I establish a trust, then?” he cried. “I made a specific provision in the trust for your firm to be paid so that the case would continue.”

“It’s not a matter of money, Tim. We got the money.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I refunded the payments.”

Tim leaned back in the booth and looked at Fritz confidently for the first time. “What the hell for?”

“We can’t find him,” said Fritz, leaning forward over his untouched coffee. “We’ve looked, Tim. We’ve looked everywhere. We can’t find him.”

“So you just quit?”

“It’s a cold case, man. I’m sorry. It’s been cold for years.”

“You can’t find one guy, big firm like yours and one guy eludes you, when R.H. is wasting away in his cell.”

“R.H. is dead, Tim. R.H. killed himself.”

“How hard can it be to find one guy?” he asked. “You found me, didn’t you?”

Tim sank down in the booth. His view now included the ill-swept tiled floor and the windowsill scattered with dead flies. Fritz looked at him intently, his elbows on the table, but said nothing.

“So if there’s no news for me,” said Tim, “why did you stop by?”

Fritz turned briefly to look out at the uneven slope of the parking lot, its potholes and crumbling blacktop. He turned back. Tim’s obdurate eyes remained under the table.

“She was worried,” he said. “She asked me to find you. She wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“She? Who’s she?”

Fritz pointed out the window.

“What?” said Tim. “What am I looking at?” He turned back to Fritz with an expression of outrage. “Oh, no, that’s unacceptable,” he said. “That’s totally unacceptable.”

“She’s your wife,” said Fritz.

“I’m working right now, goddamn it. I have work to do.”

“She just wants to know you’re okay,” he said.

She talked briefly to Fritz before going in. Tim kept his eyes focused outside the window as she entered the restaurant and approached him.

She came up close to him and reached out and touched his cheek. He didn’t want her to, but he did not move. He tried not to think of how he must look to her. He looked quickly into her eyes but then turned away. He did not want to read the emotion on her face. He did not want to see the particulars of her face again or how they came together to make her beauty. He did not want to know how she had or had not aged or what she wore, if it was something old or something he would not recognize. He did not want to be so close to her that he could smell her perfume. It was that faint but unmistakable scent and her pale eyes and her freckles that announced her inimitable self and called him back to everything he loved about the world.

“You haven’t been taking care of yourself,” she said. She glanced at the table for a plate that wasn’t there. “When did you last eat something?” she asked. “You’re too thin.” She smoothed down the hair on the back of his head. “Please talk to me,” she said. She stayed standing over him as if they had merely just finished eating and while he was collecting the change she was casually showing him affection in the instant before he stood, in the moment before they got back in the car together and returned home. “You need a wash,” she said. With patience she picked a nettle from his oily hair, a nettle from a tree he must have brushed past. “Where you’ve been,” she said, shaking her head. Her eyes filled with tears. She finally let her hand fall. “I’m going to sit down,” she said. She slid into the booth, opposite him. She wore a light pink blouse of crepe de chine with three-quarter sleeves. The color highlighted the fairness of her skin, that reddish tint that maintained without effort the youthfulness of her face. Her laugh lines and the crow’s-feet raying out at the corners of her eyes were an incongruity on that girlish face, like some unfair miscalculation. Her entire presence there was an incongruity. It brightened the dismal fluorescent brutality that such chain places wore like trademarks — unmistakable lighting from the highway, the national color of insomnia and transience. The hard booths were an insufferable yellow.

“Are you not going to talk to me?” she asked.

She reached out for him with both hands. He did not want her to touch his disfigured hands nor did he want to feel her touch, but again he didn’t move. He managed only to keep his eyes averted. His apparent indifference might have seemed to come from someone hardened past the point of having his heart moved. With her arms outstretched and her hands covering one of his, her silence grew out into the kind of delicate pause that is called for when the other person is in deep mourning and minor gestures are meant to offer some portion of an unattainable solace.

She looked at his hand in hers. “Your poor fingers,” she said.

He heard the quiver in her voice. He pulled away. He placed his hands together under the table, away. Soon he felt the phantom sensation of her hands. The advantages the other had over him, advantages that made hunger gnawing and pain vigilant and a touch from a woman bound up in memories of love more unbearable than all the other ills put together, were insurmountable. The senses were unvanquishable. He despised her for reminding him. There could be no stronger reminder. Hungry? Fuck you, two days without food. Hurting? Too bad, it’s your funeral. But Jane. Jane was different. He resided behind armed checkpoints and coils of razor wire and slabs of blastproof concrete, but her touch was a convoy.

“Becka misses you.”

“Please don’t talk about her,” he said.

She was silent. “I miss you,” she said. “Your apartment misses you. Tell me you don’t miss it. Tell me you don’t miss the muffins I make you. You try to find a muffin like that in here. Try to find one fifty miles in any direction. I don’t know how we’ll do it, Tim, but we’ll do it. And you’ll be there when the apartment fills up with the smell of muffins. Haven’t we done it in the past? We’ll do it better this time. We’ve learned some things. Tell me you don’t miss it.”

The ghost smell, triggered by his memory of her sweet baking, made his mouth water and brought on such a strong physical yearning that his body reasserted itself over his mind completely and he had to admit finally that he was not in the city and not at the office. He was in the front booth of a Waffle House on the unnamed borderland between two stagnating townships.

“Tell me you don’t miss sitting in front of me in the bath getting your hair washed,” she said. “Tell me that isn’t a better consolation for your sickness than this.”

“I have work to do,” he said.

“Tell me it’s not a better consolation,” she said. “Tell me you don’t miss my fingers in your hair. Let me show you.”

“No.”

“Let me remind you.”

“No.”

“Tell me,” she said, standing and moving with a fluid grace from her side of the booth to his, and lowering her voice so that it entered only his ear, “tell me you don’t miss your tongue in my pussy. Tell me you can make any sense of this world without that, without your lips on my pussy, making me come.”

Her words shocked him. They started an erection he didn’t want. He moved closer to the window to put distance between them.

“Tell me one of us should suffer without the other’s help. Tell me you’d let me wander off on my own, forget to eat, forget to bathe, forget the promises we made. I know you think you’re doing this for me. I know you think it’s saving me by freeing me up to live my life. But that’s not living. My life is you.”

So much of who he was was involuntary. The watering mouth, the stirring erection, the unbidden burning in his eyes. The only control over the coursing world that he retained in his littleness was his selfless refusal to turn.

“Tell me you don’t miss me,” she said. “Tell me honestly that this is working out for you, that you’ve found the best way to live with it, that of all possible solutions, this is the only one, and it doesn’t include me — you tell me that, Tim, and I’ll go away.”

He sat very still, like a sullen boy whose stunted brain lacked the resources to admit error and forsake the lost days for a better way.

With her arms around him, she pulled herself toward him, raising herself up a little on the hard bench so that her chin rested on his shoulder, and she fought her tears to speak as firmly as she had since entering, though he refused to turn to her even an inch.

“I’ve come a long way to find you,” she said, “and it took so much longer than I thought it would, too long, and the wait killed me, but I was patient, because I promised your daughter that I would find you and bring you home, and I promised myself that, too, no matter how you objected or what you said. And if I leave here without you, my heart will break. But if you tell me you don’t want me, if you tell me you still have to go it alone, then I will leave you alone.”

He sat silent and unmoving. Her chin was against his shoulder. He felt her hot tears.

She felt his reply in the vibrations of his body.

“I don’t want you,” he said.

She sat next to him for a while, unable to rise right away. Eventually she released him but remained in the booth beside him. Ella and the truckers glanced over at them. Angled away from each other as they were, he and Jane might have seemed enmeshed in some petty domestic squabble. Jane slipped a napkin out from under the silverware and wiped her face. Then she leaned back into Tim, put her arms around him and hugged him, kissed him on the cheek, on the temple, and stood up and left the restaurant.

Her embrace stayed with him. He remained sitting in the same position, unable to move. There was nothing he could do now to reclaim unawareness. He had lost to the other. The rest of the day was shot. He was just dithering now, waiting for the walk to take him, and, following hard after the walk ended, the struggle to find shelter. He was lost in this grim forecast when someone knocked at the window. At first he didn’t recognize her. She wore a simple red sundress and a pair of leather flats. The sundress was patternless and fell over her new figure. Her hair was long and layered and the natural chestnut brown it had been when she was a little girl. She was almost a different person, but he knew her. She stood close enough to touch. She waved at him. He looked at her, at his daughter waving through the glass, and without thinking of how ugly it might look to her, he raised his hand and waved back.