The Unnamed (6 page)

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

“I thought you wanted him gone.”

“Not anymore,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What walking thing?”

“From before,” said Frank.

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

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

“You can go back to your post now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your face,” she said.

“How’d you find me?”

“I made calls.”

“You always find me,” he said.

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

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

“Where’s your pack, Tim?”

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

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

“Frank Novovian gave me his cap.”

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

“All I had to do was ask for it.”

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

“I just went down the hall,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What way is that?”

“Without hope.”

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

“I must be crazy,” he said.

“Crazy?”

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

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

“Yeah, sick in the head.”

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

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

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

“Oh, banana,” she said.

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

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

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

“I don’t want you to quit,” he said.

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