The Unnamed

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

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

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

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

  5

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

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

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

  “What does that mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You shut up.”

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

  “Shut up!”

  —the folk mass and evensong—

  “SHUT UP! SHUT UP!!”

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

  “Food!” he cried aloud.

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

  6

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

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

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

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

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

  “What’s this for?”

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

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

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

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

  “Hi, Tim.”

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

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

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

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

  “Am I interrupting?”

  “No, no, it’s not you.”

  “Do you know what you want?”

  “Not now,” he told the secretary.

  “Just some coffee,” said Fritz.

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

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

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

  “With the man. What progress?”

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

  “Busy, you know.”

  “It took me a long time to find you.”

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

  “R. H. Hobbs is dead, Tim.”

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

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

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

  “No, he’s not.”

  “He hanged himself in December.”

  “When did he get out?”

  “Out?”

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

  “He was serving a life sentence—”

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

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

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

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

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

  “What about the man?”

  “What man?”

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

  “We’re nowhere.”

  “Nowhere?”

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

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

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

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “I refunded the payments.”

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

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

  “So you just quit?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “She? Who’s she?”

  Fritz pointed out the window.

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

  “She’s your wife,” said Fritz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Becka misses you.”

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

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

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