The Unnamed

THEN THE LETTING GO

His condition never went into remission again, the walking never ceased. The nature of how he walked and his relationship to it as that thing which hijacked his body and led him into the wilderness (for everywhere was a wilderness to him who had known only the interiors of homes and offices and school buildings and restaurants and courthouses and hotels) changed over time, over a long adjustment and many misfortunes. The path itself was one of peaks and valleys, hot and cold in equal measure, rock, sedge and rush, the coil of barbed wire around a fence post, the wind boom of passing semis, the scantness and the drift.

He removed his medication from the labeled plastic baggies that had proven good for storage and transport. He placed the pills in a small pile on the floor of the tent. He poured water into the tin cup from the thermos and drank them down. Then he returned the baggies to the pack and rose to a squat. He released the air from the pallet and rolled it up and rolled up the bedroll and latched them tightly to the pack. Then he took down the tent. Finally it bulged fatly in its blue vinyl bag. He strapped it on top of the pack, so that as he walked, it hovered just behind his head. He loaded up the few essentials left by the campfire and doused what remained of the fire with creekwater. Then he set off under a full moon at the start of frost. He would look for some way to dispel his considerable energies in the downtime before a new walk began.

He came up from the arroyo and walked a mile down to an ATM. He withdrew enough cash to make it awhile. Then he walked across the street and ordered eggs and coffee. He stood up and took the newspaper from a nearby table, but none of it kept his interest. A strong breeze pressed against the plate glass and seeped diminished through the cheap glazing. Outside a woman was nearly halted by the wind and he heard a man’s laughter as he reached back for her arm. His food came. He ate a late breakfast as the cloudburst moved in. Then he was on the other side of the glass in his transparent poncho heading toward the coastal springs, into the wind.

In the past he could sleep anywhere, in the snares of frostbite and the hothouses of heatstroke, exposed to ticks, spiders, snakes, the insult of birds, the menace of authorities and of the evil intentions of men.

The decision one night to sleep on the side of the road had forced him into the back of a squad car and his God talk and end-of-days ranting combined with some old-fashioned disrespect ended him up in the psych ward under physical restraint. He was given a more effective cocktail of antipsychotics and forced to take it, daily, until his release, upon which time the importance of finding seclusion and providing protection for himself became intuitive again. That’s when he bought the tent, the bedroll and the new pack.

He established a rule never to linger too long at a campsite. He was not free to enjoy the ebb and flow of an hour, the leaves quivering in the wind, or the distant patch of drifting sky. Meditation and mindless wonder led to disaster.

He had once walked away from a campsite out of a valley and across a pine ridge, down an embankment to the foothills, where he awoke behind an Airstream in a designated vehicle area. Night rain on his skyward face woke him. He played back the image of the valley as it broadened and the tent receded. He had been forced to walk away from the few and only things he still possessed and they had taken on a value greater than any other man would have given them. The separation felt like heartbreak. He did not have the first hint how to return.

He searched for two days, and on the third day he started to withdraw from the medication, which was with his other things at the campsite. He became lightheaded and short of breath. He followed the arterial road into town and wandered around a Men’s Wearhouse where he sorted unhappily through the tie racks. He paid for a double-breasted suit and arranged for its tailoring in anticipation of an important meeting. He burrowed further into mental daze after returning to the park. He started talking to himself again. He scolded the other and prayed to God that the foot soldiers of His army would vanquish the chariots and trespassers of the enemy on the frontlines of battle threatening him with chaos and death. His steadiness defected on the rain-slicked switchbacks, and he was laid out on a picnic bench, soaked through and bleeding, when the ranger came upon him.

“We’ve been looking for you,” said the ranger.

“You have?”

“I’m with the angel mercenaries of God’s army and the bugle blowers leading the charge,” he said. “Here, let me help you.”

The ranger reached down and helped him to the station and presented him with every item of his illegal campsite, the tent and bedroll and backpack. He took his medication and slept on a cot in the back of the station and when he woke up the ranger spoke much more harshly to him, fined him for failing to obtain a backcountry permit and for camping outside the designated area, and never said another word to him about the army of God.

Thereafter he pitched the tent immediately after coming to the end of a walk, slept, and, upon waking, packed everything up again. To own something was to keep it on his back or risk losing it forever.

A sonic flock of stealth fighters zipped by overhead, the briefest of black apparitions. He walked past fields of mesquite and tract housing and came to a Verizon store where he bought the cheapest phone and a package of prepaid minutes.

He called her at least once a month, sometimes twice, to let her know where he was and that everything was okay, he was safe, and she called him, but his cell phone wasn’t always charged.

“We got twenty miles away from the Waffle House before I realized what a terrible mistake we’d made,” she said to him. “I told Fritz to stop the car and turn around, but you were already gone. Did we really think you knew better than we did what was right for you, that you even knew how to take care of yourself? We should have dragged you out of there. Anybody could see you needed help. I don’t know what we thought we were doing letting you stay there. I think we thought we were dealing with the old Tim. So I let twenty miles go by before I realized the old Tim was gone and that we had just abandoned a child. I stuck around after Fritz flew home and I drove around in the rental looking for you.”

He said nothing.

“I have looked for you from the window of a moving car for so long now, I still do it out of habit. Even now, even knowing you’re getting by, knowing you’re taking your medication, I still look for you when I get in the car. I think I always will. I do it hoping to find you and convince you to come home. I’m used to it now, not having you with me, but I still look out the window hoping to find you so I can follow you and we can start over. Is there some way of starting over, do you think, some way we haven’t thought of?”

He didn’t answer.

“I’m just glad you’re calling,” she said. “I’m glad you’re okay. You would like it here. It’s smaller than what we had, but for me it’s perfect. I could probably go smaller. Two hundred square feet maybe. I’m probably the only person in the city who wants a smaller apartment. Even Becka’s is bigger. People ask me where I live and I feel the need to lie. If they knew the truth I don’t think they’d trust my judgment as a broker. Sometimes I find myself describing the old house for them. I say I live in a house in the suburbs with my husband and they nod and don’t think anything of it. They look at me like of course you do, where else would you live?”

The free health clinic in a college town was in a squalid corner of hell. He was there for a simple refill. His neighbors in the basement waiting room looked drained and ghoulish in the fluorescent light. His name was called. He waited inside the exam room until the official walked in. The official had credentials that made him the nearest approximation to a physician in the building. He handed the official his medical file. The official asked him if he still believed that God was waging an insurgency on the frontlines of his mind to capture that territory for the soul. He was quoting from the file.

“I’m not so sure about God anymore,” he replied.

“It’s an interesting theory, though.”

“It wasn’t always a theory.”

The steady gaze that followed was unnerving. Silence filled the cubby in that warren of underfunded cubbies.

“God needs all the advocates He can get,” said the official.

The statement sounded like a challenge. There seemed a right reply and a wrong one. The official stared at him without blinking. He didn’t know if he was being tested for signs of continued madness or recruited to a cause.

“Of course He does,” he said finally.

“You can’t medicate the calling out of your life.”

“I never would,” he said.

He received his refills and took them to a pharmacy.

He passed up diners and hotels and the idle hour of rest in bars and bowling alleys because indulgence in the creature comforts during his downtime made him sluggish and contrarian when it came time to walk. He continued to think, “I’m winning,” or “Today, he won,” depending on how well his mind, his will, his soul (he did not know the best name for it) fought against the lesser instincts of his body. “He” or “It” or whatever you wanted to call it — but certainly not “I,” he thought — still bellyached for food, needed water, complained of soreness in the joints and muscles. He tended to its needs while trying not to spoil it. He made every effort to remember a time when he was not just the sum of his urges.

“I guess I don’t understand why it hasn’t gone into remission. It went into remission before. You’d expect it would go into remission again. And then you could come home and we could pick up where we left off.”

“That would kill me.”

“Why?”

“Because if it went into remission, it would come back, and I don’t want to have to do it all over again.”

“Do what?”

“Resign myself to it.”

“You wouldn’t have to. We’d make it work.”

“Go on with your life,” he said.

“And do what?”

“Sell houses,” he said. “Be happy. Remarry.”

There was a pause on her end. “I can’t believe you’d say that.”

“I’m out here now,” he said. “I’m doing what I have to do. You should do the same.”

He stood outside a big multiplex reading the listings and showtimes. He was not current with the popular reviews but he could distinguish from the titles the political thriller from the romantic comedy from the animated feature. He badly wanted to be inside. There was a comfy seat in there for him and plenty of warmth. The distraction of mindless entertainment promised to shuffle off a pair of hours that might have otherwise been spent dwelling dully on a bench.

Against his better judgment he bought a ticket. He lost interest within fifteen minutes and dozed. He woke up to the credits and walked across the hall to a different screen and sat down before a story of intrigue whose plot was more sophisticated for his having missed the first half. When that show was over, he exited the building and bought a second ticket. He saw another show and half of a fourth before he was forced out of the warm plush oblivion into a torrid pace more odious for the dumb comfort that had preceded it.

He resolved never to indulge himself again. Then he woke and decamped and felt the blank expression of eternity boring through him again, downtime’s merciless black-hole eyes, and in a small misfortune of time, he drank himself into a state watching a game on a bar TV.

After letting the dead battery languish a long time, he bought more minutes from an authorized retailer located beside a mattress store. He was unable to reach her on her cell so he tried her at the office, and there they informed him that she had left months earlier for another firm.

He dialed the number the old firm gave him and a casual voice answered. He was informed that Jane was on vacation and wouldn’t be returning for another week. Did he care to speak to a different broker?

“How nice,” he said. “Where on vacation?”

“I want to say Paris, but don’t quote me,” said the voice. “The south of France, maybe?”

He stood in the snow-patched prairie with the ice-blue brook running toward the rafting centers and trailer parks, far from the south of France, far from Paris, and a wave of death washed over him. Not biological death, which brought relief, but the death that harrows the living by giving them a glimpse of the life they’ve been denied. Its sorrow was a thousandfold any typical dying.

He pocketed the phone and walked slowly toward the russet uplands rising in the distance. Ravines in the granite of a north-facing slope sprouted green fronds in feathered clusters. He leaned back against the rock face and felt like crying. She was only resuming life. In the many months that passed between phone calls, she had done just as he had told her. He had no one to blame for it but himself.

He walked about the prairie until he got a decent signal. Becka was on a tour bus when his call came in. “Hello?” she said.

“Is your mother on vacation?”

“Dad?”

“Where’s your mom?”

“Where are you?”

“Who cares where I am?”

“I do. Can’t you imagine I might be curious?”

“I’m in a field,” he said. “What more is there to say?”

She was silent. “Mom’s in France.”

“On vacation?”

“Yes.”

“What’s she doing there?”

“She’s on vacation,” she said.

“What’s the name of the hotel she’s staying at?”

She paused again. “Why do you want to know that?”

“I want to call her.”

“What for?”

“Did she go there alone,” he asked, “or with someone?”

Again she paused.

“Becka?”

“With someone,” she said.

He bought a used car from a local dealership wreathed in flag bunting. He was dragged away from his new purchase by a long walk, and afterward looped back without sleeping. His body cried out for rest but he was determined to trump its dumb singular want by keeping constant attention on the pain of the living death he would suffer until he found his way back to her.

But he was too tired to drive straight to New York and did not make it a hundred miles before falling asleep. The road curved around while he kept straight. He went through a wire fence into a field where he struck a cow. The car undercut its hind legs and lifted the animal off the ground. It hit the hood and the windshield shattered into a cobweb. He slammed on the brakes and the beast caromed off. He stepped out, bleeding and dazed, and approached the animal, which lay flat, legs broken, and stared back at him with an unblinking eye that began to drip blood. He bent down and put both hands on it as if trying to keep the life inside, but the movement of its moist nostrils died out, and with it any final hope that he might make it back home.

He grabbed the pack and abandoned the car with the door hanging open as the rest of the scattered herd lowed at him, agitated and alive. He grew smaller in the shimmering distance and soon disappeared around the bend.

She called and called again. He let the phone ring into voice mail. He let the battery die. His right eye closed up from conjunctivitis and the pharmacist recommended that he see an ophthalmologist, but he settled for nonprescription drops that took effect slowly. Passing a downtown bank with an electronic clock, he noticed the date. He counted backward. Sixteen days earlier, it had been his birthday.

He recharged the battery using the men’s-room outlet in a visitor center. He discovered fourteen messages waiting for him. One was from Becka wishing him a happy birthday. The others were from Jane. He had meant to be self-preserving, not cruel, in not calling her back, but he understood now that he could not have it both ways.

Still, he waited. The sun infused the green skin of the tent. He was staring up at it, preparing himself to rise and pack, when the phone rang. He answered in a voice he hadn’t heard in days, maybe weeks. She spoke faster than he was accustomed to.

“Do you think I wanted this to happen? I wanted you. How many times have I called you since I came back from France? Twenty? I’m not trying to be heartless. This thing with Michael, it just happened. These things happen. Do you know how long you’ve been gone? Do you know it gets lonely? It gets so lonely. I didn’t intend this. I kept telling you to come home. You told me to remarry. Go on with your life, you said. Well, that’s what I did, I went on with my life. I went to France with a man I like. Can you blame me for that? You can’t because you told me to. I’m not in the wrong here. All you had to do was come home, Tim. I kept telling you that. Come home. I’m telling you now. None of this matters. France, it doesn’t matter. It was nice being taken care of for a while, that’s all. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t nice. But it’s not what I want. I want you. Say you’ll come home, and I’m yours. I’ll come get you. I’ve always been willing to come get you. Are you there?”

He didn’t reply.

“Say something. You won’t call me back and when you finally pick up the phone you won’t even talk. Say something, please. Say what you’re thinking.”

“I’m happy for you, banana.”

She began to cry into the phone. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I never imagined one of us taking a vacation without the other.”

Her sob came from deep down in her chest. He told her she had nothing to be sorry for. She was exactly right. He had told her to do it.

“Can’t you come home?”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t, or won’t?”

“I honestly can’t,” he said.

The call ended. He had told her to go on with her life only because her love and constancy had been so true for so long, he never dreamed they would actually be taken away.

She called a few months later to see if he would agree to make their separation official. Michael had asked her to marry him.

He was quiet. Finally he said that a few days prior, he had passed a Mail Boxes Etc., where he thought he could open up a mailbox. She could have the paperwork sent there.

“Are you sure you don’t mind?”

“I don’t mind,” he said.

“Maybe the lawyer can just fax it.”

“Either way,” he said.

He spent a few days walking back to the Mail Boxes Etc. during his downtime and then called her with the fax number.

“I’m not asking for anything,” she told him.

He didn’t understand. Then it dawned on him that she meant money.

“You should take what you need,” he said. “I’ll sign whatever you send me.”

“I don’t need anything,” she said.

He walked, and after he woke he returned to the Mail Boxes Etc. and found the fax waiting for him. The woman at the counter was also a notary public and together they signed the paperwork. Then he paid to have it faxed back to the lawyer.

He stopped in the alleyway and removed the phone from his pocket. The battery was dead and he hadn’t bothered to recharge it for some time, maybe two months. He stood considering it awhile before tossing it inside a hollow dumpster where it hit with a cheap and lonely echo. He moved off, past the kids playing catch. He turned right and his presence was replaced by that window of space, no longer than a car’s length, in which cars passed one another all day long, shooting off little sunbursts of glare.

He watched her from the back of the crowd. He wore his beard and snow cap and backpack, as if his age were not sufficient to set him apart. He was drowsy.

He had stayed put, approximately, near this ground zero, going on ten days. When he found himself twelve or fifteen miles out, he fought the urge to crash, turned around and walked back. Deprived of sleep, his body was pliable. It was his again. It was also sleep-deprived, and he struggled to retrace the dozen miles. He was not only tired on the return but weak and hungry, too.

She wore army-surplus pants and a denim jacket and a faded T-shirt that said Heavenly Lake Tahoe. She was moody and focused and she punished the mike stand. She moved around with iconic revolt as if the world that contained her was that murky bluish stage and she was thrashing and screaming for release. She removed her denim jacket and her T-shirt was soaked at the pits. She had gained back her weight and more.

He drifted over to where the crowd was thinner and rested his head against the wall and dozed standing despite the enormous sound.

To his surprise, she clung to him desperately outside the venue. She broke down in his arms while he worried that his clothes might smell.

“I’m sorry that it’s been so long.”

“You’re so thin,” she said, releasing him, but gripping his arms as if she feared that he might slip away.

They sat in a booth along the far wall of a Greek diner. Periodic voltage drops grayed the gold fixtures and darkened the cake display. Everyone at some point looked ceilingward.

She asked him if it was gone, and he said it wasn’t.

“Then how did you make the show?”

“I’ve been circling the city since you posted the tour dates. I turn around and walk back.”

“Without sleeping?”

“Part of the challenge, not sleeping.”

“When do you sleep?”

“When I get close enough.”

“And what do you do with your downtime?”

“Get closer.”

“And then you walk away again?”

He nodded.

“Isn’t that exhausting?”

He shrugged. “Gives the day its purpose,” he said.

It was an act of willful defiance, looping, circling back, keeping within a certain perimeter. It imposed a pattern on the random arrivals and departures, even if that pattern was just to see a show, or to pick up a few pieces of mail from a p.o. box. He was collecting p.o. boxes, he told her, all across the country.

“Speaking of which,” he said.

He unzipped the pack and brought out a freezer bag. He removed the two CDs he had ordered over the Internet. He showed her that he had uploaded them to his iPod as well. “I also have a concert tee and a poster of the show you did in San Francisco.”

She was surprised and touched. “You’re a good dad,” she said.

He demurred. “Just a fan.”

“I thought you only liked David Bowie.”

“That was in the room,” he said, remembering the months he spent in the hospital bed and the music she had introduced him to. “Out here I listen to everything.”

He put the CDs back in the freezer bag and returned them to the pack. The power dropped out again and didn’t return. There was a stir as people murmured and faded to shadows and shifted unsurely in the murk, as if from this point forward they would require absolute guidance as to how to proceed.

The waitress came over. “Your order didn’t go through, hon.”

“That’s okay,” said Becka. “Are you okay?” she asked him.

“I’m okay.”

“Can we just have some more coffee?”

He wondered, in the dim light, if his eyes had played tricks on him. The sundress was gone. There was nothing skinny about her.

“The last time we saw each other,” he said. “When was that?”

“I don’t remember,” she said.

“You were with your mom and Fritz.”

She shook her head slowly in the darkness. “I wasn’t with them.”

“You look wonderful,” he said.

“There’s more of me, anyway.”

He didn’t reply immediately. Then he said, “Does it still bother you?”

She puffed out her cheeks like someone about to burst, eyes popping wide. Then she settled into a grin shaded with resignation. “It’s my one go-around,” she said. “What do you do — hate yourself till the bitter end?”

“I’ve always thought you were the most beautiful girl in the world.”

“You’ve always been biased.”

“I’m glad you don’t hate yourself.”

“Acceptance,” she said. She shrugged. “It’s a bitch.”

Out in the parking lot she offered to give him a ride but he needed to be no place. Occasionally he stayed the night in a motel or at the YMCA and she tried to encourage him to do so that night but he said it was easy to fall back into the custom of television and a real bed, which later made his nights in the tent harder to reckon with. He was happier avoiding those places. And he no longer did cars.

“What does that mean, you don’t do cars?”

“They’re not an option,” he said. “If I need to be somewhere, I walk.”

“Not an option?” She rattled her enormous collection of keys in an unspoken admission that what he said was deeply strange to her. “Well, will you at least sit in the front seat with me a minute?” she asked. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

Her mother was sick. She had debated a long time over whether it made sense telling him. She knew his limitations and she didn’t want him to feel guilty about what was out of his hands.

“Is it serious?”

“It’s cancer.”

“I don’t know what that means,” he said.

“You don’t know what cancer means?”

“No, of course I know. I’ve just lost track.”

“Lost track of what?”

He paused. “What does the man say?”

“What man?”

“The man she married.”

“Michael?” she said. “She never married Michael.”

“She didn’t?” He was taken aback. “Why not?”

“I don’t know the details, Dad. She broke things off.”

How long had it been? He had lost track.

He looked out the window and down at the parking lot, a frivolous patch of blacktop into which one sprung toward a better destination or from which one departed in an onward spirit. But he would do neither. He would soon get out of the car and remain. Becka would drive away, and an empty evening ache would press down. And there was nothing he could do for either of them, for any of them.

He turned to look at his daughter. “There’s nothing I can do,” he said.

“I’m not asking you to do anything. I just thought you’d want to know.”

He shook his head. “I don’t,” he said.

He entered a town of cattle murals and savings banks where he bought a mocha frappuccino. He walked with the coffee drink between a double row of single-story houses, many of which were for sale. The gate to one hung open. The realty sign was strangled under an unmown thicket and a stained mattress lay on the front porch.

He stretched out on the mattress and finished the mocha while watching a black squirrel with a frayed tail fitfully stalk the trees. A man with a cane came out of the house opposite. He sat on the porch and turned to his left, then to his right, then to his left again, with the cane between his legs and his hands on top of the brass handle. Then he stood, and with the deliberation of a man whose life had narrowed to a single task, he broomed pooled water from the porch. He sat down again to inspect the neighborhood. Eventually he went back inside.

Tim rose from the mattress and left the yard. He went back into town, passing the murals on the sides of the buildings, mostly of cattle and horses but one of Native Americans. He stopped in a camping supply store and bought another pair of boots, adhesive reflector strips, a new tent, rain gear, energy bars, an additional base layer and pullover, and a compass. He replaced the old goods with his new purchases inside the pack.

To be more than the sum of his urges. Part of the challenge, not sleeping. Something guaranteed to expend his considerable energies and lend purpose to the day. He loved her. He had always loved her. To return to her before she died — that would be the last thing ever required of him.

He started off at the end of his next walk. He turned sluggishly until the compass pointed him east. He crossed the road at its instruction and angled across a field of forage grass to a creek and walked along the bank against the downstream current. The water rippled white. He wanted to sleep. His exhaustion was that of a field soldier who debated whether or not living was worthwhile under such circumstances. But it was only his first day. He couldn’t quit on his first day. He skirted a reservoir slower than shadow moves across a room. The black range in the distance stood against the sky like a spiked dinosaur.

He made it to the scenic drive. He fell to his knees in the rock beside the road. He told himself to get up. Don’t fall asleep, he said. Tourists were gathered at the fence to behold the wonder. The green valley cut a snaking halfpipe through the brown monoliths of the canyon. He could curl up in one of their backseats, or in the aspen grove that sprouted above the ravine past the row of parked cars, or inside the room of the La Quinta Inn just down the road. But he stood up and continued on his way along the shoulder of the highway.

The tree was a terrible luxury. He leaned up against it and fell asleep. It was meant to be a quick respite, but as soon as he woke he fell asleep again. It was a lone willow in a field. He woke and slept, woke and slept, and every time he woke, he considered lying down between two of the willow’s sinewy roots. But he slept upright for hours because to lie down would be indistinguishable from quitting.

He was taken far afield without water. Above him, daubs and strokes of rainless clouds. He came across a ranch house on a sloping dirt road nestled between sagebrush hills and knocked at the door. With a mouthful of dust, slow to conjure the name of the thing he needed, he said to the woman, who circled wide around him because he was a stranger and he sat on her porch with his back to her, “Water.” The woman went back inside and returned. She watched him clutch the glass with his primitive assortment of fingers and gulp the water down before spitting it out and vomiting the rest. “You have to take it slow,” she said.

It was a two-lane highway of blind curves and bent guardrails. The darkness was so absolute that headlights leapt over the paved summits to the effect of a poor man’s aurora. He sleepwalked from the shoulder into the lane. The car behind him flicked its brights on to find him drifting over. The driver swerved just as a pickup cleared the blind in the opposite lane, twenty yards away, and the two vehicles headed directly into each other. The truck lurched to a full stop close to the guardrail, only a foot from the drop-off. The car’s raging horn woke him. He stumbled back to the shoulder. The driver went around slowly, leaned into the passenger-side window and flipped him the bird to convey how offended he was by this show of dumb negligence. Then the truck pulled out and he was alone again on the highway.

A caravan of cyclists whirred past him in the slanting rain, leaving him in the wake of their fine, fast community. Their passing talk pierced him with longing. Geese with the white underbellies of bowling pins squawked overhead.

He sat in the back of a bar in a recess of tables with a half-finished beer in front of him, vaguely aware of a foosball game going on a few feet away. He fell asleep on the table. The bartender woke him at closing time. He went outside and resumed walking.

“Please don’t tell her I’m coming,” he wrote to Becka the next day, from a computer at a public library. “I don’t think I can make it.”

He broke a rule and spent a night in a rented room. He reentered a white world where scant traffic was treading delicately in the icy fall. It was a sanatorium of snow. Flurries mocked visibility and found cracks in his best gear. He did not make it east two miles when his will was pulled out from under him and he was forced to walk in a different direction. He woke later inside the tent and felt the pressing urge to make up for lost time. When he decamped, the sun was out and the snow had melted into a pristine damp that mellowed the earth like a trickling stream. He walked half the day only to come upon the same motel where he’d spent the night twenty-four hours earlier. His heart sank.

The glow in the distance appeared to intensify in pulse and color, it beat blood and energy like a diseased heart. The sun, reversing course, might have been setting in the east just over the edge of the lower range. He didn’t know what it was. Night had fallen, and the snow was thriving after hours of indifferent drift. The glow was situated directly in his path. Two men on horseback came at him at a trot, followed by a tether of additional horses.

“What are you doing here?” asked one.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking these horses to safety.”

Tim stumbled a little where he stood, having fallen asleep.

“You drunk?”

He got down on his haunches. “Just tired,” he said.

“If you’re gonna pass out,” said the man, “better you do it away from here. Highway’s closed.”

“Is there another route that takes me east?”

The man looked behind him in the direction of the glow. “See that fork? No, it’s too dark,” he said. “You’re going to hit a fork up there, leads you on if you take a left. Take a right instead. That’ll take you to the Wal-Mart and such.”

“Is that east?”

“If east is south.”

He got to his feet. The weight of the pack made him wobble. One of the horses stirred. He smiled faintly in the torpid light and continued on.

He tried to make it through a wind-driven brush fire. The air was thick with ash and pine smoke. He retreated. Two days later he walked the same route when all that remained were black stakes of trees stabbed into the pale hillside.

“Okay,” wrote Becka, “whatever, you won’t fly, you can’t fly. Whatever. At least let me come out there and get you. I drive to where you are, we tie you up and throw you in the trunk or something, and drive you back here. Why wouldn’t that work?”

He reread the email. It was a perfectly reasonable proposition. He tried to think of what he might say to make her understand why it would not work for him.

The truth made him a monster. It put his struggle, the one he was waging against his weak and determined body, before Becka, before Jane, before everyone.

He decided to tell a partial truth. During every hour, there was a moment of despair, he wrote in reply to her email, and during every day, an hour. In that hour, he resigned himself to never seeing them again. But he had made some progress since his last email, and, despite quitting every day, he had not yet quit. He was on his way, he wrote, he was on his way, he promised. And then he dispatched her elegant solution with a single line that she could not possibly understand, obscuring his monstrosity, but clarifying for him nothing short of the reason he continued to live and breathe.

“I can’t have you pick me up because I’m still at war,” he wrote, “and I’m determined to win.”

At first his body was subject only to little local breakdowns, to infections and inflammations, to aches, cricks, tweaks, cramps, contusions, retentions, swellings, fevers, tinglings, hackings, spasms, limps, displacements, dizziness, stiffness, chafing, agitations, confusions, staggerings, spells of low blood sugar, and the normal wear and tear of age. Yet it persisted to function more or less with an all-hands-on-deck discipline. He was certain that it had a mind of its own, an unassailable cellular will. If it were not that it needed sleep, and a bit of food, it would not need him. It would walk without him, after his mind had dimmed and died. It would walk until it collapsed into a pile of whitened and terrigenous bones.

He crossed the creek at a ford and continued east to lower elevations. He took the arterial roads that linked the logging towns with the tourist centers. Ten days later he left the rain shadow of the Rockies and walked out of Colorado.

Farewell Orion and the winter stars. He walked past a low-lying billboard that had weathered into a long canvas of abstract expression, above which stood a regal plastic pony in midstride. The pony had a brown coat and a pitch-black mane. The black mane matched the pony’s hooves and forelegs. The billboard pony was a Great Plains totem presiding over the safety of passing automobiles. He thought he could discern, in the far corner of the billboard, a figure of piety wrapped in a nun’s wimple, which some attentive kook could legitimately claim was a silhouette of the Holy Mother. Little birds roosted at the pony’s feet.

He walked through the ten-mile-apart towns, past the water towers and grain silos, and after several days arrived in grim Grand Island. He slept in the skeletal start of a new house with crossbeams and a cinderblock base. In the night he used the on-site johnny. Plastic sheeting lay in the yard, weathered and pale like a disintegrating shroud. Above him burned a pavilion of stars in a final unfettered night. In the morning he walked through Grand Island into rain.

Upon the plains the sulphur stink of the corporate ranch reached many miles before and after him. In the middle stood ten thousand cows, an undulating field of Black Angus. He walked along the fenced land to a strip of clean wire and bowed under it and waded among the steer. Their crudely sculptured mass steamed in the chill. They thickened the farther he went in until the crowd inhibited his movement and the sad things jostled him to the soundtrack of their discontent. The overcrowding had wearied them out of instinct. He squatted down in the atom heart of their huddling and drew heat from their bodies and drowsed on his haunches, bumped off balance from time to time by a shifting rump, dreaming of shit-strewn coasts and squall lines of black rain.

The clay-gray water lapped at the porches of the houses on both sides of the street. He was down in the water with the cars. Their rooftops were visible above the flood and a quarter, sometimes half their windshields, depending on the make and model. Everything was gray, the electricity poles, the saturated trees. He waded deep and slow through the water with help from the current. He climbed to the roof of a pickup to consider his options. Visibility was low but it looked as if the street he was on rose up in the distance. If he just kept wading straight, he would reach a clearing.

He climbed down from the truck and made his way forward. The shift in the current took him by surprise. He was lifted off his feet as if in the middle of a rapid and made to float downhill. He had not anticipated the crosscurrent at the intersection. There his own little street of rain was draining into a steeply graded side street like a gulch into a river. He paddled like mad but the pack filled with rainwater and pulled him down. He choked on the water. He grasped at nothing, at the air, at the rain, while houses floated by. A brief blur of red caught his eye and he reached out for a stop sign. He grabbed one slice of the octagon and struggled to get a better purchase. It was thin and slick and awkward. He hooked the top edge of the sign with a forearm. The rest of his body was floating downstream. He pulled himself toward the sign, against the force of the current. He pivoted around and pinned himself between the sign and the rushing water. He hugged the faceplate and struggled not to fishtail. The pack was latched to his back like an anchor pulling him down. He watched as trees, shopping carts, a section of fence coursed by.

“Do you miss me?” she asked.

He didn’t reply. His medication was holding but the walk was having unintended consequences.

She asked him again. “Do you miss me, Tim?”

He stood with a finger in his ear trying to block out the video-game noise. Bad placement of those things, right beside the pay phone. The place was touted as the World’s Largest Pit Stop, as if to draw tourists. He had paid for a shower and bought new clothes.

“Tim,” she said, “why did you call if you aren’t going to talk?”

“I hear you’re sick.”

“Who told you that?”

“What did you ask me?”

“Who told you I was sick? Did Becka tell you?”

“No, before that.”

“I asked her not to.”

“Before that, Jane. Before that.”

“I asked if you missed me,” she said.

He started to laugh. “Ha ha ha ha ha,” he said. “HA HA HA HA HA HA!”

“What’s so funny?”

All around him, the fluorescent illumination of tobacco ads, power-drink displays, heat-lamp chicken, postcard racks, shrink-wrapped magazines, scuffed aisles of candies and chips, and the purgatorial shuffling transients that fed off it all. His laughter gave way to strained tears. He turned into the pay phone so no one would see.

“Yes,” he said. “I miss you.”

It was summer in suburbia. The world smelled of well-mown lawns. The sprinklers churred round their rotaries. American flags wore gravity’s folds on garage-mounted poles in all God’s neighborhoods.

He had wandered off the path of greatest efficiency and succumbed to sleep in a park tightly bordered by town houses and cul-de-sacs. He was woken by a rooting noise. Something sizable was trying to burrow under the tent. Its odd shadow reared up across the slanted vinyl wall. He stepped out of the tent into the early-morning sun and humidity and came face-to-face with a tusked and rangy animal. The hairs along its scruff were gray and bristly. It looked up at him as he stood frozen with fear. He casually took one and then a second step backward and slowly retreated to the other side of the tent. He was relieved when the mad rooting resumed.

In the distance he saw the herd. They were up the small hilly incline near the glinting jungle gym. A few outliers were rutting under the wooden fence that separated the park from the houses. His own outlier was snorting and shaking the tent and very likely shredding the fabric.

He heard the slamming of a door and turned to see two men stepping out of a truck. One man stretched and yawned. They wore identical dark blue slacks and short-sleeve work shirts and the door of the truck had some kind of decal he couldn’t discern from such a distance. They each pulled from the bed of the truck a rifle with a scope, walked halfway up the incline, and began to shoot the boarlike animals. He threw up his arms and fled. He stood by the stone water fountain watching every member of the herd fall during the noiseless spree. He walked back to the tent. The boar that woke him lay on its side with a dart in its neck. One of the shooters approached smoking a cigarette. His shirt said Downers Grove Park District.

“Is it dead?”

The man shook his head. “We don’t kill them here,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Feral pig.”

He took a drag from his cigarette in the punishing heat, sucking his cheeks in and squinting off into the distance. There his colleague was lifting the first of the pigs by a hoist into the bed of the truck. The man with the cigarette turned back and silently regarded the tent. Languid billows of smoke escaped his mouth as he spoke. “You can’t camp here, you know.”

He dreamed of a resurgent tribe of vanquished Indians. They materialized body and soul from the bloodred horizon of the central plains and walked out of the shores of the Great Lakes. Their mournful spirits had trailed him since the tepee rings in Wyoming. Their business outside the tent was bloody and serious. A collective chanting accompanied their war preparations. He was not welcome on their reclaimed land. He knew as much but he lay paralyzed with fever. Some ravishing pioneer bug, or perhaps heatstroke. The brute inarticulate chanting grew louder as the tribal chief entered the tent and demanded to know the name of the tribe, forgotten by the enemy and the descendants of the enemy who now inhabited the land and by the land itself. He tried vainly in sleep to remember the name. His recall would determine whether he lived or died, but it escaped him. The chief smelled of a popular aftershave. He filliped Tim’s boot with his middle finger and Tim opened his eyes. A middle-aged man with a vigorous tan and a whistle lanyard dangling from his neck squatted in the mesh doorway. He wore a white polo and baseball cap. “I said what are you doing here, huh?”

“Where am I?”

“Christ, I thought you must be some kid,” said the man. “You’re on my field.”

With chills and a fever he decamped from the North Side High School practice field as the sun beat down on the varsity team chanting their songs and running their drills at the vast eastern edge of the corn belt.

He woke on the hard curved pew inside a Methodist church, a small white monument to the simplicity and beauty of the Allegheny Jesus. He raised his head off the hymnal and sat up. He felt the fluid overload slowly drain down his limbs.

From the altar the preacher delivered a trial run of his sermon to the empty pews. Tim would have left were it not that he was lethargic and slow on the uptake. Beams of sunlight radiated through the stained-glass windows. He listened to the final ten minutes of the sermon, which concluded, “The wise man’s eyes are in his head; but the fool walketh in darkness: and I myself perceived also that one event happeneth to them all.” He thought he might be hallucinating again, but the preacher came down the aisle and reassured him: the leg cramps that had driven him inside the night before, common among extreme sportsmen, were the result of excessive muscular exertion, which led to inflammation, and to a buildup of a particular enzyme that his body was having difficulty breaking down.

“When that happens,” the preacher continued, “you start to show signs of confusion, have visions, that sort of thing.”

The preacher was seated in the pew in front of him, turned at an angle so they could converse. Were his words intended to put him at ease, or to make matters less certain?

“How do you know all this?” asked Tim.

“I run marathons.”

He was a diminutive, bearded man with a serious face that did not smile falsely. He said he didn’t think Tim was a regular member of the parish, and Tim explained that he was trying to reach New York to reunite with his wife, who was sick. Tim began to speak openly. On other occasions he had wanted to share with men like this the agonies of his circumstances, but it was difficult to overcome the fear that their reactions would be defined by incomprehension and a lack of sympathy, and that he would look weak before them.

“I’m glad to see you returning,” the preacher said when he was through. “It is not good that the man should be alone.”

“No,” he said.

“But I’m curious. Why take such long walks?”

“I don’t take them,” he said. “I’ve told you. They’re forced upon me.”

“But, Tim, this sort of thing doesn’t just happen.”

He had never told the preacher his name.

“You only know my name because I’m hallucinating.”

“I’ve assured you that you’re not hallucinating,” he said. “Now, why do you think you take such long walks?”

“You tell me. They have checked and double-checked the medical textbooks. They’ve searched for others like me, living or dead. I’ve been looking my entire life for just one other similar case.”

“But is there anything whereof it may be said, see, this is new?” The preacher shook his small, round head. “No,” he said. “There is no new thing under the sun.”

“Okay, but I’m telling you: I’m not doing it.”

“So all your life you’ve searched and searched for a rational explanation,” he replied, “while presuming there is one. But if there isn’t?”

“There must be.”

“What is the rational explanation for the bees, Tim? The blackbirds? The fires? The floods? Do those things happen by accident, too?”

Tim stared at him blankly. The preacher finally smiled, in a small but comforting way. He reached over the back of his pew and kindly patted Tim’s knee. Then he came around and helped him to his feet.

He carried on through rain-sodden leaves running in color from copper to yellow. They quivered in the wind with a high-pitched rustle and fell in sloping tumbles to the earth. In the Great Valley, north of the Piedmont region, he passed a lone farmhouse thrashed by a storm. Its roof was gone, its four sides reduced to timbers. A minivan looked as if someone had driven it halfway up the side of the aboveground pool. Lighter household possessions were strewn about as if the farmhouse had been a bag of garbage attacked in the night by a scavenging animal. And standing in the doorway, a child naked but for its diaper cried loudly into the void. A woman was running across the field toward the child. The clouds had dispersed by then. Contrails gone to drift in the upper winds littered the broad blue sky.

His conjunctivitis had come upon him outside Pocatello. It finally healed by Ogallala on the north side of the Platte River and returned on a desolate stretch of Highway 83 between Thedford and Valentine, during a despised detour inside the Nebraska sandhills. Leg cramps had plagued him by basin and range and became unbearable as early as the Laramie Plains. Around the lake region of Ravenna in central Nebraska he began to suffer from myositis, or muscle inflammation, which would lead through an inevitability of biological cause and effect to kidney failure by the time he was hospitalized in Elizabeth, New Jersey, ten miles as the crow flies from his final destination.

His infrequent showering brought on skin complications beyond the painful erosions of chafing and blisters, and in Mount Etna on the northern tip of Lake Icaria in western Iowa, he broke out in shingles that made carrying the pack an exercise in medieval torture. He would finally ditch the pack altogether when his back pain reached a pitch at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

He was bothered by bug bites, ticks, fleas and lice, and after the heat burned off all memory of his participation in the flood that drowned an Iowa town, he let himself fry from Mount Pleasant to the western border of the Mississippi before the sun blisters appeared and he realized it was too late. He fought not very successfully against heatstroke and dehydration across Illinois and most of Indiana until he voided deep orange and finally not much of anything at all. Rhabdomyolysis was on him, medicalspeak for the dangerous elevations of a muscle enzyme released when the body undergoes severe trauma, so that by the time he was bivouacking in the windbreaks of barley, corn and soybean fields, in stands of bushy trees meant to protect crop yields from the unpredictable weather that punished the midwestern plains, his blood was berserk with excess potassium and he was at risk for a ventricular tachycardia that would have taken him faster than a bolt of lightning. Something with the delicacy of chisel and hammer set to splintering the bones down both his legs, a tap, tap, tap with every step, step, step.

The chain gas station with the logo of a dinosaur sold him a map, which he studied out by the propane tank. Everywhere he stopped he filled a cup with ice to soothe his burning tongue. His heels ballooned and forced him to unlace his boots and to walk on his toes which led to higher orders of osteal complications in the charnel house of his body. Beauty, surprisingly, was everywhere, in the wildflowers, the wheat fields, the collapsed barns, the passing trains, the church spires, the stilled ponds, the rising suns.

During another great diversion, from Tylersburg to Punx-sutawney — which required him to cross I-80, his inconstant companion from the Continental Divide to his collapse in New Jersey — he walked past a field discharging one hot air balloon after another into an endless appetite of sky, on the same pink morning he was hit with a head cold. The cold developed into pneumonia with the leathery rales of pleurisy by the time he reached the twin towns of Peapack and Gladstone.

The first tasks of the specialists at the hospital in Elizabeth were to place him on mechanical respiration to fight the acute respiratory distress syndrome, tap and drain the excess fluid from his peritoneal cavity, and put him on dialysis for his liver and heart. His body played a game of touch-and-go with a team of doctors whose tender antagonisms were touching in the extreme. Uncompromising matter did not care for the abuses and insults of heroic stunts. It had the upper hand on practitioners of a medical science who believed they might speak to it fluently and convincingly when in fact they were deaf hostages to a great mocking laughter. They flooded his bloodstream with intravenous meds, fresh plasma and vitamin K, but how could they know if the brain swelling would subside or if he would ever regain consciousness?

A man came occasionally to visit him. He entered the hospital room pulling behind him a portable oxygen tank. On days he found Tim asleep, the man departed. On days Tim was awake but mute and unalert, he was no good to the man. Much later he was breathing on his own again, which was more than the man could say for himself. Many tubes had been affixed to Tim with flesh-colored tape. The man stood over him.

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

The world was blurry. He couldn’t harden his focus on the man any further. He slowly shook his head.

“It’s been a long time,” said the man. He looked Tim over. “And you’ve been through one hell of a something.” The man pulled a chair up to the bed and sat down next to him.

“What about him?” he asked. The man produced a photograph and held it above him, as steadily as his hand would allow, to give him a good look. “Recognize him?”

He stared at the photograph, trying to make sense of it. The shapes and colors bled into one another and into the room and his focus began to wobble and fade and before he could answer he was asleep again.

The man sat back in the chair and sighed. He returned the picture to his suit coat and removed from the same pocket a business card. He turned the card over and jotted down his cell phone number. Then he realized there was no good place to set the card. The room was bare but for a small table affixed to the wall beside the bed. He decided to leave one there and to put another in Tim’s sleeping hand. Then he walked out of the room, pulling his oxygen behind him.

He sat unhurried, not easily distracted, as if he had no plans or set arrangements and life was only a profligacy of time. It was a little past midday in Tompkins Square Park and other such men were on similar benches strung along the footpaths, unafraid to fritter away the day’s frugal hours with the mildest curiosities.

Becka had brought her baby to meet his grandfather for the first time. It was an unplanned pregnancy but one that had given her mother a great deal of joy in a short amount of time, and Becka was grateful for that. She was curious about how he would react. She had gotten used to the idea that he would never return, would never meet her son, because he had not sent an email in months. He had given up, she thought, or he had died trying to reach her mother before she did, and in neither of those instances did she know how to find him, or how to be angry, or how to mourn. She went days and weeks without thinking of him at all, and on those occasions she did think of him, it was with an abstract sadness that transmuted disappointment, concern, and compromised love into a final resignation that as far as fathers were concerned, this — silence, mystery — was all life would have to offer her.

She stopped when she saw him. She moved off beside a tree under which a terrible pink fruit lay trampled, fouling the air. Jack was in the carrier, facing forward, and suddenly he moved his arms and legs in synchronicity while letting out a little squeal. She smoothed his pale hair as she stared into the distance.

It was sad to see her father so docile and inexpressive, and so thin. Much thinner than he had been when she saw him in Portland. He had explained in a totally unexpected email that he had been in the hospital a long time and now he was out, but he gave no specifics, made no inquiries, and requested nothing. She had had to arrange this meeting, though he chose Tompkins Square Park, where now, under a linden tree swiftly shedding leaves in the wind, he sat, as unremarkable a feature of the city as the park bench. She found herself lingering. She needed a moment to take him in so that she could greet him with a familiarity that would not betray any trace of the pity that had pierced and then repulsed her when he first came into view.

Jack was still doing a noisy dance of the limbs when she approached and yet her father didn’t turn at the sound of her footsteps or their sudden halt nearby. “Daddy?” she said. He turned to her then, and in the long seconds that passed before he said it, she believed he had forgotten her name.

He had lost his way somewhere. He had forgotten why he had pushed and pushed to come so far. It seemed to him just another battle in the war.

Becka was carrying a baby in a harness. His grandson. It didn’t touch him. She sat down on the bench next to him and introduced them. He repeated the boy’s name and reached out and with one of his fingers gently lifted the child’s soft pink foot. A small smile animated the weathered gray lines on his face, but that was all. Then they set off. Becka’s apprehensions and warnings on the way there didn’t touch him. Much more important was the matter of rising off the bench and starting off again and getting to where they were headed in one piece, with the pain under control, stopping for water or food if necessary, and making an end that got him out of the weather. He hoped not to be taken away by a walk, but otherwise nothing much else. And if he was taken away, there were other days to do this. It had waited a long time already.

She walked him down old city streets of old memories. When they arrived, even as he walked the hallway, he was still intent only on making the distance.

But he was not so far gone, for when he saw her in the hospital bed, swimming in that awful blue gown, he knew at once what it had all been for, why he had started off and why he had struggled, and it wasn’t to win, it wasn’t for God, and it wasn’t stubbornness or pride or courage. He went to her and she looked at him standing over her. All time and distance between them collapsed, and without any mental searching for the word, he said to her, “Hello, banana,” and then reached out to take her hand.

She was ready, she had been all packed up and ready to go. She’d made her amends and given herself final rites in a church of her own devising, godless, none of that superstition that cancer patients, some former incorrigible atheists, suddenly invent out of desperation. She had actually heard from another woman in the ward that God had created cancer, with its lag time between diagnosis and death, to give the disbeliever time to reform. Chemo and radiation weren’t cures. They were modest foretastes of the hell the unrepentant could expect if they persevered in their godlessness.

When it came to God, she thought, ordinary people were at their most inventive.

God, if He was anything, was the answer to the mystery of why you got sick. She knew about the tree and the serpent and the temptation and the fall, but call that the broader cause. She wanted the revelation of the biological confoundedness. If He’s in the details, He should be able to explain them. Upon dying you get paperwork that takes you step by step — the reason for the first errant cell, the exact moment of its arrival on the scene, and then, and then — and when you finish reading, the coffin light goes out, and you roll over for your eternal rest. That was the extent to which she permitted herself to believe in the existence of God.

Before he suddenly walked into the room, she hadn’t heard from Tim. If he was dead, she wanted to believe that when his suffering ended, he was finally given an explanation, that his paperwork listed the cause or causes and unlocked the mechanics and offered a justification. That would be the least God could do for him.

Which was wishful thinking, no less than that of the conversion-through-cancer nutcase down the hall. Death was God’s secrets extended into eternity.

Her modest size could not afford the weight she had lost. The tendons in her neck showed when she strained to sit up. To touch her back was to feel along an exotic scale of ribs and spine. She kept her hair in barrettes as a way of doing something with her hair at least. So few people had sent flowers. Dr. Bagdasarian had stopped by with tulips, and Becka’s boyfriend had sent a mixed bouquet, and Michael, of course, who still loved her. She could not have made it any plainer to Michael and yet he would probably stand at her graveside as she was being lowered into the ground and profess his devotion once again. She didn’t want it. Yet she did want more flowers.

They were counting on something new, a clinical trial. She was in it for everything she had.

She hoped he’d died indoors. She didn’t think it was likely but the alternative was unthinkable, dying in a frozen field, or in some doorway in a distant city, alone until some inquisitive soul bent down, and the gapers started to cluster, and the cops found nothing, no wallet, no phone, nothing, and so had no next of kin to call. That was how they came to mourn him, she and Becka, without really mourning him, a totally unsatisfying way to mourn. Then he walked into the room, ravaged by the acts of time, thinner than she had ever known him to be, who knew every inch of him by touch, sundered from every appearance of happiness, suffering every ailment except immobility, and it took everything in her power to attribute his reappearance to the determination of a man who loved her, and not to a merciful act of God.

After Becka left with Jack, he drew a chair over to her bed and explained where he had been and how he had come to be there.

“I thought the worst,” she said.

“That I would be alive and look like this?”

The film of tears that glazed over her dark and hollowed eyes quivered as she smiled. She squeezed his few fingers, no less bony and fragile than her own. “I think you look devastating,” she said.

“Devastated?”

“As handsome as you ever were.”

“Now there is a tender lie,” he said.

They got reacquainted after so long a time apart. He said little at first because there was so little to say, confusing his experiences on the road for the ordinary banality of endurance. They came to know him at the hospital, where she referred to him as her husband again, and they adjusted to the sight of a man they would ordinarily expect to be tending to in a room of his own walking in and out of hers. He did not smile at them, at the nurses at their station. He hardly even cast them a glance. He said nothing unless it was to ask for something on her behalf, and he came and went like a tinker or beggar, in the same hitchhiker’s outfit, if not the very same clothes, and with a heavy backpack swaddling his skinny frame.

Though returned to her at last, his body continued its demands and he was forced to leave her at a moment’s notice. This was a new twist in an old cruelty, as time now meant so much more to him than those odious deposits of downtime and distant walks that had come to define these latter years. They could not say how much time she had left, and to leave under such circumstances was prodigal, ridiculing any sentiment of homecoming.

He discharged the walks with dutiful resignation, the way a busy hangman leaves for the day without scruple or gripe, and then he turned around and walked back.

“Where do you go when you leave?”

“I go lots of places.”

“When you left yesterday, where did you go?”

“Yesterday I went to the beach,” he said.

He removed from his pocket a smooth seashell with a swirl of brown leading into its dark hollow. The top of the shell spiraled to a sharp point. He put the shell in her hand and then sat down in the chair in the corner.

It was the perfect shell, exotic and intact. This was no Rockaway shell or Coney Island shell, not even a Jersey Shore shell. To get a shell like this, you had to walk to the Caribbean.

“Where did you get this? You can’t find a shell like this around here.”

“I told you. I went to the beach.”

“What beach? What was it like?”

“At the beach? It was cold.”

“What did you see there?”

“Well,” he said. “I saw nothing, really.”

“You walked and walked,” she said. “You must have seen something.”

“On the way I remember seeing an old woman. She was in her nightgown but with a heavy overcoat. She wore a pair of pink boots and she was raking leaves in front of a brownstone.”

“What else?”

“People leaving a building for the evening.”

“What else?”

“I ran my hand along a chain-link fence.”

“What else?”

“That’s it. That’s all I remember.”

“In all that time?”

“That’s it,” he said.

For the first time he began to pay attention to the things he saw on his walks, so that when he returned to her, he had observations of the outside world to share. They were fleeting, they were middles without beginnings or ends, but they were diverting — for him to witness, for her to hear. She soaked them up. They seemed just as much nourishment as whatever the doctors were providing.

He realized he might have been doing it wrong for years. He might have seen interesting things had he been able to let go of the frustration and despair. He wondered what kind of life he might have had if he had paid attention from the beginning. But that would have been hard. That would have been for himself. It was easier now, doing it for someone else.

“I saw a woman in a leather apron outside a beauty salon, smoking a cigarette. I saw two cops standing around the remains of an accident, broken reflector bits on the pavement. I heard kids running behind me and then they overtook me like a herd of cattle and they all wore the same school uniform but each one still looked so different. I smelled chocolate for almost a mile. I saw some men playing soccer and I thought I could even see the steam coming off their bodies. It’s getting colder.”

She interrupted. “When I get better, do you think it might be possible for us to go on vacation together?”

“Of course,” he said. “Of course that’s possible.”

They discussed different places. She offered a new country, and then he suggested another, and they grew more and more excited. There was nowhere the two of them would not have enjoyed. They agreed on the African safari they had planned many years before but had never taken.

He stood in the window holding the baby in his arms, rocking back and forth to keep Jack dozing happily against his body. The weight was a glorious burden. The little lumpy fellow and he each shared their body heat. Jane was asleep in the hospital bed. Becka sat against the far wall of the room, reading a magazine. They had worked out the procedure for what to do if he suddenly had to go, but for the moment, in that unlikely place, a wonderful peace was holding. He had even taken off his boots. The window was radiant with cold sunlight. The only noise was the imaginary one that came from dust motes slowly tumbling in the light.

He came into the room and pulled the chair close and sat down next to her.

“I saw a dog in a purse. I saw bread being delivered, loaves of bread in paper sacks, dropped off in front of an Italian restaurant. Later in the morning I saw a bodybuilder in nothing but a T-shirt and sweatpants, such an enormous pair of arms, leave a health club and trip over himself. He went down with his gym bag, and a woman with a baby stroller stopped to ask him if he was all right. I saw a quiet street where I thought you and I could live very happily, a street of brownstones with good little yards. I saw a man chipping the ice off his windshield with a butter knife. And it was working! I saw the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even at this time of year, people are sitting on the steps out front like it’s the Fourth of July. I saw the last of the last of the light. Should I go on?”

She had her eyes closed. “Close the door,” she said.

He stood up and closed the door. She took down her pajama bottoms. He saw what she was doing and reached out for a chair and placed it in front of the door. He turned off the light and walked back to her as shadows began to assert themselves in the room. He climbed on from the foot of the bed and pulled her to him until her head left the pillow. A small spray of hair still clung there. She began to unzip him. He wasn’t sure what to expect. He couldn’t rule out one final treachery of the body, which if it had its way, he thought, would crown its triumph of cruelty by depriving him — them — of this too. But he overestimated its power, or underestimated his own. Or did they both want the same thing? Now was not the time to wonder. Now was the time to forget his body and to look at her. He needed nothing but the look she returned. Then she shut her eyes, and he shut his, and they began to concentrate. He found more strength in her than he expected. She moved under him with an old authority. He listened as she began to come, as she was coming, as the coming wound down to a long final sigh that accompanied a burst of static from the nurse’s intercom above the bed. He used the pillow to muffle himself. It was a two-minute triumph for both of them, and afterward they calmly restored respectability to the room.

He was sitting in a booth in a gas station convenience store. In the booth ahead of him sat an old man drinking coffee and reading a newspaper.

He tapped one edge of the business card against the table until his middle and ring fingers reached the bottom edge. Then he flipped the card over and tapped it down again.

He stood up and walked outside. He crossed the lot to the pay phone and dialed the number on back of the card.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” he said. “I believe you came to see me in the hospital.”

They met at a diner on the Upper West Side. He sat at a booth with a view and while waiting watched a man on the corner, closer to the diner than the street, take a final puff from a cigarette and snuff it out under his shoe. It would have been unremarkable if not for the thin clear tube that ran from the man’s nose down to a portable oxygen tank. It caused him to look closer, and by the time the man entered he realized it was the same man he’d been waiting for, which should not have surprised him. He had been told to look out for the tank.

He stood up and waved. He didn’t think he’d be recognized otherwise.

“Hello.”

“Hello,” said Tim. They shook hands and the man sat down across from him.

“You’ve recovered.”

“More or less.”

“You were in a bad way there for a while. Taking care of yourself?”

“Trying to. Every day I feel about a year older.”

“Oh, I hear that. Try doing it all with emphysema,” he said, grabbing the clear tube that ran up to his nose. “That’s fun. Let me tell you. A-plus fun-o.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Fucking cigarettes,” he said, tapping the pack in his front pocket. “Fuck them to hell.”

They talked awhile longer. Then Tim said, “You said you had something to show me.”

From the inner pocket of his suit coat, Detective Roy removed the sketch from long ago that presented a likeness of the man who had accosted Tim on the bridge. It was quartered by heavy creases and he took care in unfolding it. Then he took out the photograph he had tried showing Tim in the hospital room. Tim patted his pockets in search of the eyeglasses he was still unaccustomed to having at his disposal. He removed the glasses from the case and gazed down at the sketch and the picture sitting side by side on the table. “What am I looking at?”

“This is your sketch. The sketch of the man you thought might have had something to do with the, uh—” He stopped and peered at Tim. “Sorry, do you remember… do you remember a man named R. H. Hobbs?”

Tim looked up from the table. He nodded.

“Sorry,” said the detective. “Stupid of me…”

“Why are you showing me this?”

The detective tapped the picture. “Is that the same man as in the sketch?”

Tim picked up the picture and studied it. “This is an old man,” he said.

“Taking that into account, do you see a resemblance?”

He stared hard at the photograph. It was taken at an office party. The man stood some distance from the camera in a huddle with six or seven others, among cubicle divisions and fluorescent lighting, holding a red plastic cup. The longer and more willfully Tim looked, the more distant his memory of what the man had once looked like grew. He looked frequently to the sketch for help. “Maybe,” he said. “The nose is the same, I think, with that knob in the middle. But it’s not a very good angle.”

The detective coughed violently. “Look harder,” he said, collecting himself. “Concentrate.”

“You don’t have any other pictures?”

“This one’s it.”

He looked back down at it. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

The detective resumed coughing. Soon his eyes were red and teary. His words issued out in the brief staccato pauses. “We want him for another murder… last year… victim like Evelyn Hobbs.”

“How?”

“Same pattern, same stab wounds… and there are others.”

“How many others?”

The woman in the booth behind them turned to see if the detective was going to be all right.

“Do you want some water?” asked Tim.

He dismissed him with an abrupt shake of his head. “And he harassed the lawyer.”

“Harassed?”

“Provoked… as he did you…”

“How?”

“On the street… knew the details. It’s how we got on to him.” Now the detective was having trouble breathing. When he wasn’t coughing, he was wheezing to take in air.

“Do you have him in custody? I could take a look at him, maybe then—”

“Can’t locate him… he might have fled…” The detective stopped talking and abandoned himself entirely to coughing. He was barely able to say he needed some air before standing and walking out of the diner, trailed by his oxygen tank.

Tim waited for the waitress to bring around the check. He paid up front and then joined the detective outside. He found him smoking a cigarette. His coughing was all cleared up. Tim handed back the photograph and the sketch.

“I can’t tell you one way or the other,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

The detective looked down the avenue and exhaled before returning a baleful gaze. “Right now he’s just a person of interest in a single murder. But if we can tie him to Evelyn Hobbs, we can maybe tie him to the others. There are six, maybe as many as eight. And people, family members, who need to know what happened.”

“You were adamant,” he said. “Remember? Only one suspect.”

“I know.”

“He hanged himself in prison.”

“I know,” said the detective. “I know.”

The detective thought he knew something but he knew nothing. What did it matter, these other people? R.H. would never know the details. He would never know the name of the man who might be responsible. That was the travesty. This death-sealed ignorance, and the indifference to that ignorance by any power higher than man.

The detective snuffed his cigarette out under his shoe. “You’re the only one we’ve got,” he said. “The one guy in the world if we’re going to get anywhere on this.”

“Don’t pin that on me,” he said. “You’re the one who didn’t believe my client.”

“And I feel awful about that.”

“Awful enough to kill yourself?”

The detective was taken aback. “To kill myself?” He had fired up a new cigarette and now blew out a dismissive stream. “No,” he said. “Not to kill myself.”

“Then you should feel indifferent,” said Tim.

His departures from the room were peremptory. A sudden movement, a glimpse of him passing through the doorway, and he was gone. “Going now,” he might say. He might be in the middle of recounting for her things he’d seen. “Back soon.”

If they were lucky, he had time to turn his head so that she saw he was addressing her and not some ghost standing before him.

Some days he left, and as he walked, he brooded that his final words to her one day might be, “Going now.”

He did not want his final good-bye to be a hasty good-bye.

He returned one morning smelling of fresh snow and brick mortar, car exhaust and woodsmoke. Was that all in her head? She wanted him to resume telling her what he’d seen. He brought the world inside for her. He stood over the bed.

“I want to say good-bye” he said.

“But you just got here.”

“I mean as if it were for the last time.”

“Why do you want to do that?”

He explained. They had the opportunity, before it was too late, to preempt the regret that nothing or too little had been said between them. She agreed that that might be important. He assumed a serious expression. He did not have anything prepared. He took her hand, kissed it, and said good-bye. She thought there would be more to it, but nothing more came. She started to laugh.

“Is that it?”

“I guess so.”

“Well,” she said. “Good-bye, then!”

They spent the next several hours in each other’s company, long after they’d said good-bye. Then, against everyone’s sunniest assessments, in defiance of the grimmest percentages, and to her own astonishment, she began to recover.

It was wonderfully swift. He watched as her weight started to hold. Every time he returned to her room, she seemed to have gained back some measure of strength. She was up. She was getting off the bed to go to the bathroom. She was walking the hallways on her own. The final phase of the clinical trial came to an end and she was released.

She went home to that apartment where they had lived happily during the time between his second recurrence and his third, final, permanent one. She hadn’t sold it, as he had assumed, but had kept it, hoping someday that he would return to her and that they would resume their life together there. It was the same old place with the same furnishings, the lived-in chairs and pretty Persian rugs, the books lined up on the built-in shelves, the fireplace. He stood in the doorway a nostalgic stranger.

He had been living in parks and rented rooms, his home base the cancer center on the Upper East Side. Now it shifted to the parlor-floor apartment in the West Village. He left and returned frequently, but discovered this difference. Upon his arrival, he no longer found her hanging over an uncharted abyss, but rinsing a glass or making herself a grilled-cheese sandwich, or doing something downright vigorous, like scrubbing the bathtub. It occurred naturally then, as the days passed and he came to the ends of walks and faced the myriad challenges of reversing course — the tedious backtracking, the physical exhaustion — that the urgency to return, the motivation to get back to her, began to wane.

A livery wrangler orchestrated the waiting lawyers through the drizzle into towncars on Eighth Avenue, holding an umbrella over their heads, opening and closing the back doors. The sky was wrecked and darkening.

He stood outside the old bastion under the arcade, staring at the revolving doors. Once upon a time, he could have taught a master class in entering with authority. Now he was building up to something, summoning courage. There was some dismay. There was also indifference. He struggled to recall all the significance, investment, meaning, now petrified.

He entered, walked across the lobby, and stepped on the escalator. Midway up he glided toward a man he recognized. It was Peter, his old associate. He stared at Peter, unafraid to size up or be sized up. Peter’s hair had thinned and he had grown enormously fat. He was cultivating a massive heart attack under an expensive wool coat. The flamboyant signature of a red bow tie sat framed between the coat’s lapels. Just as they passed, Peter finally graced him with a glance. He might have quickly turned away again if Tim hadn’t been staring as hard as he was. He flipped Peter the bird. Peter continued to descend, now following the hostile stranger with offended eyes.

Frank Novovian had also gone fat. His head no longer shaved to the skin, his dirty gray hair was clumped and patchy, like the quills of a feather permanently skewed by a rough hand. His retiring slouch behind the security post said there was no going back. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“My name is Tim Farnsworth,” he said. “I wonder if you remember me.”

Frank held him suspended in a surprised and penetrating gaze. He lifted an inch off the chair, righting his jellied form, which immediately settled back into place. All at once his expression broke into clarity.

“I sure do,” he said. “Like it was yesterday.”

He waited around for Frank’s shift to end and then they walked to a bar on Ninth Avenue. Frank continued to express surprise at his reappearance after so many years. He might have thought Tim was dead. Most likely he hadn’t thought of him at all. Tim didn’t ask.

They sat at the bar and talked about the people they once had in common. Frank asked him if he’d heard about Mike Kronish. It was policy at Troyer, Barr to make partners “of counsel” when they turned sixty-five — an emeritus-type designation that furnished them with an office and an income for perpetuity, but stripped them of responsibility and power. When they tried to make Kronish of counsel he declared a fight. He made it clear that he had no desire to be the defanged old man coolly sought out on occasion for some niblet of sage advice. He campaigned hard to have the bylaws changed. When the vote was rejected at the partner caucus, he threatened to sue for age discrimination, but he knew as well as anyone that the bylaws were the bylaws. Troyer, Barr was bigger than any one man. He resigned and started his own firm downtown. He was, Tim guessed, siphoning off clients and billing like a bull fresh out of law school.

Frank told Tim the details of Sam Wodica’s death. Unlike Kronish, Troyer, Barr’s former managing partner had been happy to retire. He moved to Malibu and devoted himself to surfing and flying. His antique biplane drifted off course and ran into trouble during a sudden ice storm over the desert. He radioed for help and then went silent. The wreckage was spotted a few weeks later between broken canyons, and his remains were confirmed by dental records.

“An ice storm over the desert?”

“That’s what I heard, Mr. Farnsworth.”

Mr. Farnsworth. He had not heard those words spoken in years. It was someone’s name, his name, but it was no one he knew. It had belonged, if it belonged to anyone, to a fiction, the name of someone who might never have walked the earth.

“There’s something I’ve always meant to ask you, Frank,” he said. “Do you have kids?”

Frank was tipping back his beer. He nodded with his brows. “Two boys,” he replied, resettling his bottle on the coaster.

“Do you have pictures?”

“Pictures?”

“With you. In your wallet.”

“They’re grown men now. Twenty-eight and thirty.”

“No families of their own?”

“One’s married. The other… I can’t say one way or the other about that one. To be honest, he’s always sort of confused me. Maybe he’s gay. I don’t know.”

He turned away and drank his beer. Tim did the same, and for a moment they looked like perfect strangers forced together by the confines of the bar. After a moment Tim removed his leather wallet, water-stained and contoured by age. He opened it to a portrait of Jack at just a few months, sitting on Becka’s lap. Next to them sat Becka’s boyfriend what’s-his-name, the producer. Jane stood behind them.

“That’s my family there,” he said.

Frank took the wallet offered him and admired the picture. Then he handed it back with a kind word. “Looks like a happy bunch,” he said. When they were through with their second beer they left the bar.

He walked with Frank to the subway terminal. They walked leisurely, avoiding the puddles. He spoke freely to Frank. He told him about his wife’s sickness and recovery, his daughter’s music career, and his walking. He admitted that a breakdown some years back now required him to take a cocktail of antipsychotic medication. He wasn’t confiding, for there was nothing to keep secret anymore, and no one to keep a secret from. Surprised by the candor, or simply attentive, Frank said very little.

When they reached the entrance he held out his hand, something he never liked to do because of his missing fingers. “Mr. Novovian,” he said.

Frank showed no reservations in taking his hand. The two men said good-bye, promising that if the chance arose in the future, they’d do this over again. Then Tim watched him as he disappeared into the terminal, heading toward the train that for all these years, night after night, had taken him from the city into New Jersey, toward home.

Months before his reappearance, Becka had mentioned that he was trying to return. She wanted to give her mother reason to live. But Jane didn’t want him to come and she didn’t want to live. She had made peace with dying. She had watched him struggle for too long to pretend that struggling was profitable. If it was her turn to go, she would go. She would go peacefully.

Then he returned and she wanted to live.

If he could suffer like that, if he could endure such an ordeal. If he could be so valiant.

The equipoise she had struck was ruptured the minute he walked into the room. Going peacefully, that was history. She began to rage as he had raged.

Did he think it was the clinical trial? The clinical trial wasn’t what saved her.

He didn’t believe that. With him it was just working or failing to work. Cells lived or they died. The heart beat or stopped beating. Then the entire thing returned to ashes and dust. He’d come a long way from the man who once believed that God was in the trenches surrounding every atom, fighting the devil for the soul.

“There’s no soul,” he said. “No God and no soul.”

“What about your mind, all the miracles of your mind?”

“It’s captive.”

“Captive to what?”

“The body. The body’s decay.”

“You don’t believe that,” she said. “I don’t believe you believe that.”

He did. The medicine had set him right at last.

She stood up and went over to the window. She looked out for a while before turning and sitting on the ledge. “When you recover from an illness,” she said, “as I have, no matter what you thought you believed, you start to think maybe there’s something.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” he said. “I’ve never recovered.”

“Don’t be self-pitying.”

“I’m not self-pitying,” he said. “Just stating the facts.”

He had walked and walked to get back to her, and now that she was home, there was nothing more to do. Returning to her, returning to her, returning to her again and again, was not a possible life. It was twice the challenge as the going because he was working on low energy and no sleep. He could do it when it was a matter of life and death. But now, now he needed to let himself rest when it came time to rest, and to move on when it came time to move on, and to do so in the direction of the moving on.

“What about the vacation?” she said. “We planned a safari.”

He didn’t reply. The safari had always been pure delusion.

If he left now, she told him, he would be leaving her worse off than when he found her. She would not want to live, but she would not want to go peacefully, either. She would rage, and her raging would be pointless.

She became deeply afraid and began to cry. He made no move to comfort her. He had kept his backpack on, which made it hard to read his intentions. Did he mean to leave now, that night?

Not wanting to wake the baby, he thought twice about ringing the buzzer so early in the morning. He settled himself on the stoop. Becka’s boyfriend rescued him an hour later, coming home from a late-night recording session, and brought him up to their third-floor walk-up where the coffee was brewing and Bob Dylan was playing low on the radio. Becka’s boyfriend said, “Look who I found.” Becka turned and showed surprise. She poured him a cup of coffee, which he drank on a vintage barstool with a sparkling red vinyl seat. Her boyfriend finished his beer and excused himself to get some shut-eye. He kissed Becka on the forehead and left the room. There was a certain unorthodox domestic tranquillity here that made her father happy to have witnessed.

She placed Jack in his arms while she went to the bedroom to change out of her pajamas. When she returned she was wearing a pair of denim coveralls and a faded 7UP T-shirt. She asked him if he wanted breakfast.

“No,” he said, “no breakfast this morning.”

“Let me make you some breakfast, Dad.”

“My iPod is a wasteland,” he said. “I wondered if you could give me some new music.”

She took his iPod and walked over to the computer with it. For the tenth time he requested her new CD but she wasn’t completely satisfied with the production and didn’t want to give it to him until it was perfect. He said she was acting unconscionably toward her biggest fan. He threatened to get down on his knees. He had every intention of getting that album before leaving. She gave in finally and uploaded it. He took off the backpack — to store the iPod, she thought. But then he put the iPod in his pocket. He put his arms around her. He went over to the crib where Jack was now lying contentedly on his back. He picked the baby up and held him above his head and brought his exposed belly down to his face, breathed in his baby’s scent, and kissed his smooth skin.

The phone was ringing when he shut the door behind him.

He crossed the George Washington Bridge and an hour later turned off the primary road and walked the sidewalk past the day-care center and the library that were nestled inside the residential neighborhood. The road dipped and came to a second primary road where he turned left and the traffic picked up again. Past the gas stations he walked to the overpass and followed the shoulder down the on-ramp to the divided highway where the cars washed past with an old familiarity that quickly settled back in his ears.

He regained an eye for those locations that best served his needs for rest and renewal. He landed on a final redoubt of trees, he slept behind deserted buildings. There were occasional run-ins with unsympathetic authorities who pressed on him their provincial dogmas of safety and propriety. People did not like him on their private lawns or inside their public parks. He made no appeal to their sympathy. He simply packed up and moved on. He had proven long ago that there was no circumstance under which he could not walk if he put his mind to it.

He never returned to New York. Months passed before he could even bring himself to call home again.

Three years after leaving, he drifted into a community library in what remained of central Louisiana to use the free computers alongside the homeless and the refugees. Becka had sent him an email that had languished in his inbox for over a month. She told him of test results that confirmed with near certainty that her mother was no longer in remission. What Becka did not mention was that those tests had come in months ago and that Jane had asked Becka to wait until the end to tell him, so that he wouldn’t be tempted to return to her bedside.

He called that afternoon. He stood on the exposed side of a gas station as a heat wave issued from an incinerating and merciless sun.

“Why do you put any stock in those test results?” he asked Jane. “What are your symptoms?”

“My symptoms?” she said.

“You’ve already proven it was bogus, Jane. The whole thing was bogus.”

“It’s different this time.”

“What are you saying? That you’re dying? Who’s telling you that you’re dying?”

“Nobody needs to tell me,” she replied. “I’m dying. They tell me I’m dying because I’m dying.”

He had to inform her that she wasn’t dying. She simply wasn’t trying hard enough to overcome the nihilism of the body. The soul was inside her doing the work of angels to repulse the atheistic forces of biology and strict materialism and she needed to do her part to show God which side she was on. He suggested going for a jog or cooking a large meal.

His medication required tweaking from time to time, and then the clarity would come flooding back to him. He spoke a mile a minute. She could hardly get a word in. She asked him if he was taking his medication and he became furious. The obnoxious certainties of some people! The rigid orthodoxies of cause and effect! Whenever anyone was presented with the one true eschatology and the work of the divine, they wanted to drag those verities through the rivulets of shit dug and tended to by Western medicine. They were the drugged zombies, not him. He wasn’t crazy. He just saw things others could not see.

A week later he sat weeping in the waiting room of a psychiatrist he had seen on two other occasions. The doctor had been closing in on setting the cocktail straight again when Tim failed to return, clear-eyed once again to the bullshit and the lies. He wept because in the midst of such lucidity, he could only be confounded by what mysterious force had compelled him to return now, by the layers and layers of complexity in a war he would never comprehend.

He called home again within the month. The phantasmagoria of heaven and hell that had whipped him into a frenzy the last time he spoke to her had been replaced by the cool and measured assessment of someone observing the objective differences in a before-and-after picture. Gone was his manic pace. The soul was once again unlikely. It was despairing news. It meant that he would not see her again, not here, not in any afterlife.

He would tell her anything, of course. Yes of course he would tell her that he loved her and that the soul was vibrant and real and death only an interlude. His banana, how she had taken care of him. She had come to him in far-flung places no matter the time of day or night. Of course he would give her every reassurance, he would say anything.

But Becka answered and told him that she was already gone.

He maintained a sound mind until the end. He was vigilant about periodic checkups and disciplined with his medication. He took care of himself as best he could, eating well however possible, sleeping when his body required it, and keeping at bay to the extent his mind allowed it a grim referendum on life, and he persevered in this manner of living until his death, which took place in the far north on a day of record snowfall, during a morning blizzard.

By then he was something a passing car couldn’t resist. Gaunt and weathered, limping sturdily, he walked the shoulder of the highway like a wasted beggar moving between two ancient persecuting cities. The driver turned to look at him as he blurred past, then picked the sight back up in the rearview mirror. There he receded slowly into a terrible smallness, into nothing, not even memory.

By then he was paying attention, as Jane had taught him, and had learned to distinguish between a hundred variations of unnamed winds. He couldn’t name the twitchy burrower with the black-tipped tail that scanned an upland prairie for danger, but he knew it as well as the raspy grass with the flowering spike that left soft yellow pollen on his pant legs, and he knew it as well as the bright constellation that suddenly resolved itself out of a confusion of stars. He knew fee-bee fee-boo, fee-bee fee-boo came from a small bird with brushed gray wings and a tail as firm as a tongue depressor, and he knew the sharp clear whistle of set-suey, sedu-swee-swee of a scythe-beaked bird he saw often in winter, and he knew the French-inflected call of a small stately black and white bird who sang teehee tieur, teehee tieur— though he knew none of them by name.

By then he had stood on the riverbank and watched men shoot into the running water. He was startled by the echo. He watched them pull their mauled catch from the water to the parched rocks. Half the meat was missing. He had to wonder the point, if it was a matter of sport, or a supply of bullets greater than hooks and nets.

By then he had remembered the morning he returned to her hospital room to tell her he worried about the insufficiency of the final words they would say to each other. They had an awkward ceremony that made her laugh. “Good-bye, then!” she had said to him. He could not forgive himself that he had urged her to cook a meal as she was dying, so he clung to the memory of that morning.

By then he had given up everything but his need for shelter and nourishment, but there had been afternoons he spent in community libraries, reading books he would not finish and sending and receiving email. That was how he learned one day that Becka had married. She sent pictures of a small outdoor ceremony. He had never seen her look so healthy or beautiful, or so old. He was sorry that neither of her parents were in attendance. He wrote back to congratulate her. “How big Jack has gotten!” he said in response to seeing the little man in his tuxedo. He left the library with an uncertain heart, grateful that he had been spared the disappointment of anticipating an event he could not attend, but hopeful that she had done so out of mercy and not forgetfulness.

By then they wondered if he had the money for the things he brought up to the counter. He was a certain type, mute and suspect. Some contrariness kept such old men moving, as if to stop and settle would be to fall back into the human business of bickering and violence. Better for all if he was on his way. They watched him leave the store with his small bundle and stand on the other side of the road packing as if for some journey by foot, and they wondered if he knew which passes to avoid, what roads closed at the start of November, and if his permits were in order. They predicted some quarrelsome run-in or tragic end. He had a whippy sort of strength and an old rapport with his pack, which he shouldered on with a burdened grace. They watched him walk along the side of the highway, asking nothing of the passing cars and leaving town without having uttered a word.

He wanted a drink of water. It was deliciously painful, his thirst, a thought to relish quenching.

He had yet to open his eyes. He was lucid and alert as he usually was in the first few minutes after waking. He heard the wind outside, sonically layered and multidirectional, and he heard the crackle of descending snow and the slight sizzle of one flake as it caught hold of the combed bluffs accumulating against the side of the tent, shaped by the wind. His thirst persisted beautifully. What gratification would come when he finally rose and poured a cool cup into the lid of the thermos.

He made no effort to move, though, so content in the bedroll, so warm and easeful, while the wind howled madness outside and drove the snow to frenzy.

A similar feeling had overtaken him the night before. He had pitched the tent at the end of his walk and climbed exhausted inside the bag, expecting to fall quickly into a long and satisfying sleep. Despite the severity of the weather, he liked it up here almost better than any other place in the world. The bustle and tempo of people proceeding with their eventful lives could not cripple him with longing here, and it was unlikely that he would be awakened by a meddlesome authority or a group of noisy jerks. He relaxed into the warmth of the bag and felt his body, still humming with the jangle of his recent walk, wind down into a stillness that eventually made its way into his deepest interiors. The wind was just then starting to pick up, but beneath its bellowing he became aware of his heart whispering listen… listen… listen.… He heard the blood pump out of his chest and flow down his arteries to pulse faintly at his wrist and in the hollow beside his anklebone, and his breathing lifted him up and down, up and down, and he heard the calmness, like the coals of a settled fire, of his rested bones. He luxuriated in his exhaustion. The weariness was inseparable from pleasure. He half struggled to stay awake just to stretch the moment out for as long as possible.

Now it was morning. It was wrong to dawdle like this. Wake up, pack up — that was the protocol. This sort of indulgence could be dangerous.

But was there anything comparable to a languorous morning in bed, under the warm confines of a blanket, while you kept the vicious cold at bay another minute, and then stretched that one minute out to five? It was only a bedroll set on top of an inflatable pallet inside a makeshift shelter, but he didn’t open his eyes. He listened to the wind. He heard other sounds, too: a clock ticking in a warm kitchen, the coffeemaker sucking and percolating on the counter, Jane treading lightly across the floor, gathering the cups, opening the refrigerator for the milk. “Tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up,” she said from somewhere in the distance.

Five minutes gave way to ten, and ten to twenty. There was no question now that he was starting to press his luck. He had to rise and dress. He had to break down the tent. He still had to find food for the day. There were many things that awaited his command, not least the pleasurable taste of the water he promised himself as a reward for disturbing such a delicate peace.

He languished another twenty minutes. Then he absolutely insisted that he rise that instant and take care of business or else he might find himself wandering out there in the blistering snow, fighting the wind with his bare hands. But just then he realized that, at some point during his sumptuous idling, he had stopped hearing the wind. He didn’t suppose that it could have died completely and so quickly, recalling the terrible fury it was kicking up. He expected the vinyl to whip taut again in its stitching any second now, or at least to hear a few high-pitched, snow-borne whistles of the storm departing, but time marched on and there was nothing. He thought he might open his eyes to see if the silhouette of the falling snow continued to dapple the skin of the tent, but he decided not to exert himself unnecessarily. Instead he chose to do as he had done the night before: settle deep inside himself and listen to the strange, subtle operations going on inside his body. He listened for his heart to whisper its soft word. He listened for the breathing that lifted him up and down inside the bag. But listen… listen… listen was gone. His quiescent nerves gave no signals and received none. He detected nothing but an enormous, gentle stillness from the things he could name and those he couldn’t inside him, the organs and muscles, the cells and tissues. He never had to rise again, the silence informed him. Never had to walk, never had to seek out food, never had to carry around the heavy and the weary weight, and in a measure of time that may have been the smallest natural unit known to man, or that may have been and may still remain all of eternity, he realized that he was still thinking, his mind was still afire, that he had just scored if not won the whole damn thing, and that the exquisite thought of his eternal rest was how delicious that cup of water was going to taste the instant it touched his lips.