The Unnamed

  “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 subu
rbia. 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 Ne
braska 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.