The Unnamed

  The path flattened out between the first arch and the second. He became aware then of someone keeping pace with him. He thought nothing of it until the man looked over and said, “Aren’t you the attorney defending R. H. Hobbs?”

  He turned. Where had the man come from? He looked behind him. The picture-takers were gone.

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “Am I right? You’re the man defending R. H. Hobbs.”

  That someone would address him out of the blue halfway across the pedestrian walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge was surprising. That that same someone identified him as R.H.’s attorney was alarming. The murder had been mentioned in the papers once or twice, but nothing since the early days. The case lacked a celebrity pedigree, and Tim felt sure that no one outside the legal world would have recognized the lawyers involved.

  “Do I know you?”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” said the man.

  He was about Tim’s height, of a slim build under the winter layers. He was dressed in a camel-hair coat with collar raised. Out of it blossomed the black folds of a cashmere scarf covering his neck. An enormous sable hat was perched on top of his head. The fur quivered in the wind like a patch of black wheat. He had a long pale solitary face, too pale to grow whiskers, bloodless in the cheeks even on so cold a day, with a dimple in his potbellied chin and a long pinched nose that accentuated the bone in the middle, as prominent as a knuckle.

  “How do you know me?”

  “I followed you from midtown,” said the man. “You work in midtown?”

  “That doesn’t answer my question,” he said. And then: “You followed me all the way from midtown to the Brooklyn Bridge?”

  “It’s a beautiful day for a walk.”

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “It’s well below freezing. What are you doing following me?”

  The man continued to keep pace a little too close for comfort. “That was one vicious murder,” he said. “Stabbed his wife like she was a piece of art. Almost beautiful, looked at in a certain light. But monstrous for sure. How can you defend a man like that?”

  “Who are you? I’ll call the police.”

  “Have you seen the crime-scene photos? Very premeditated cuts. He didn’t just pound away, not after the first couple of stabs. He is one sick bastard, your client.”

  “I will call the police.”

  But he hadn’t even taken out his phone. He was afraid the man might swipe at his hand. He didn’t want to lose the new BlackBerry as he had lost the old one. He would need it to call Jane when the walk ended.

  “And why Staten Island?” asked the man. “Why dump her body in that old Staten Island landfill that’s been closed forever?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Your client lives in Rye. Why go all the way to Staten Island?”

  “How do you know what you know?”

  “Want to know what I know?” the man asked. “What I really know?”

  The man came to an abrupt halt. Tim was forced to keep moving. They were quickly separated by a number of paces. He turned his head and watched the man recede. The man looked surprised that Tim would continue walking.

  “Don’t care to know?” said the man.

  “What do you know?” Tim hollered.

  “Your client’s innocent, Mr. Farnsworth,” he cried above the wind. “R. H. Hobbs is an innocent man.”

  The man removed a Ziploc bag from his coat. Inside the clear bag sat a butcher’s knife. The man held the bag up by the seam and gently shook the knife inside the bag. Then he turned and walked away.

  14

  The cemetery had been retired under a white sheet. Darkness now settled over it like dust. A black Mercedes threaded its way through the maze of winding streets.

  Jane followed the Mercedes in her car. She pulled up to the curb and stepped out. She hurried through the snow.

  He was lying on a cleared bed of granite. He sat up at her touch with a mortal start, as if she had jolted him out of another dimension. His eyes darted wildly in the holes of his ski mask. His unsheltered sleep had put him again at the mercy of an unknown world. He felt the approach of some violent reckoning.

  “There was a man on the bridge,” he said.

  “What man?”

  “He knew who I was.”

  His attention was drawn away by the slamming of a car door. He watched a man in a long charcoal wool coat approach them slowly through the crusted snow. Even from so far a distance he could make out those familiar Picasso features—the skewed nose, the plump lips, one eye bigger than the other.

  “What is he doing here?”

  She was also watching the man come forward. “I called him.”

  “I said no doctors.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “He can’t help me, Jane.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “None of them can help me.”

  “Hello, Tim,” said Dr. Bagdasarian.

  They sat in the doctor’s warm Mercedes as halos of glowing halogen began to shine from the lampposts across the cemetery. Tim disliked Bagdasarian the least of all his doctors. He had been the recipient of many funny looks over the years, but Dr. Bagdasarian’s was due to the fact that he was born that way, not because he questioned Tim’s sanity or doubted the severity of his suffering. One look at Bagdasarian and the assumption was that God had deprived him of all beauty and vanity so that he could better dedicate himself to the puzzle of men’s afflictions. The doctor was learned and eloquent with his singsong accent and carried the aura of a polymath.

  Yet Tim was not pleased to see him. Before he got sick, he was under the illusion that he needed only to seek help from the medical community, and then all that American ingenuity, all that researched enlightenment, would bring about his inalienable right to good health. At the very least, he thought, there would be one person, one expert in the field, to give him some degree of understanding, solace and action. But by now he had abandoned his search for the One Guy. The One Guy was dead, the One Guy was God, the One Guy was an invention in the night when he was bottomed out and desperate to believe in something. He was sick of searching for the One Guy and sick of having his hopes dashed. He would not let himself believe in the One Guy anymore.

  And anyway, who the fuck needed the One Guy? He was still alive, wasn’t he? He could beat this thing on his own, couldn’t he? Fuck the One Guy. Fuck the One Guy’s answers and the One Guy’s hope.

  Bagdasarian spoke over their heads for twenty minutes about advances in brain imaging technology. He discussed radioisotopes and motion degradation and atomic magnetometers. Considerable progress had been made, he said, since Tim’s last extended medical examination. In fact there were some very cutting-edge developments that allowed a clean image of the brain to be taken in situ.

  “In other words,” the doctor said excitedly, “in other words, we no longer require complete immobility, you see. We can capture what’s happening in your brain when you’re walking, at the very moment it’s changing. In neurological circles, this is extremely significant. No one dreamed we could be where we are at this moment for another fifty, sixty years. I know some who said we would never get there. But it’s true. We no longer need to lay you out on a slab and push you inside a tunnel to get a very good idea of what’s going on inside your head.”

  To his dismay, as he listened to the doctor, he couldn’t prevent a little bit of renewed hope from belly-flipping inside him.

  “What does that do for me?” he asked.

  “What does it do?”

  “Where does it get me? Does it get me a diagnosis? Does it get me a cure?”

  “Well,” said the doctor, “no, not a cure, certainly. It is only a tool, but a more refined tool than we’ve ever—”

  “Not interested.”

  “Not interested?” said Jane.

  She hung between the two men in the backseat. Tim pivoted to look at her.

  “Why would I do that to myself, Janey?”

&nb
sp; “Do what?”

  “Allow myself to hope again, when it’s really only another opportunity to be disappointed?”

  “How do you know you’ll be disappointed when you haven’t tried it?”

  “You just heard the man. It’s not a cure, and it’s not a diagnosis.”

  “But,” said Bagdasarian, “it still might be of some comfort to you, Tim.”

  He turned back to the doctor in the dim light.

  “I know how you’ve struggled to validate your condition,” said the doctor. “I know you’ve fallen into depression because no empirical evidence has emerged to exonerate you—I use your word, which I have remembered many years—to exonerate you from the charge of being mentally ill. You hate it when people say this is something all in your head. You place great importance on having your condition regarded as a legitimate physical malfunction, something that members of the medical establishment like myself must take seriously. That is the very prerequisite of a real disease—that it’s taken seriously. We have a few new tools to do that now—possibly, possibly. Wouldn’t it be satisfying to prove to the world that your unique condition is as you insist it is, a matter of organic disease, and not something—a compulsion, or a psychosis—for which you, for personal reasons—and perfectly naturally so, Tim, perfectly naturally—feel you must be ashamed of? Wouldn’t that be, in its humble way, some measure of progress?”

  Bagdasarian was good. Tim could feel himself getting sucked in again. “What would I have to do?”

  The device Bagdasarian had in mind would be a prototype made to order. As such it would not come cheaply. Because his was a disease of one, they did not have at their disposal prefab medical supplies. Tim told him not to worry about money, they could afford it. In that case, the doctor resumed, he would approach one of the two private biomedical firms he knew capable of engineering the kind of thing he had in mind, an ambulatory helmet of sorts. It would take snapshots, so to speak—some before he walked, some during his walk, and some after. From that they would be able to reconstruct a full picture of what was happening inside his brain during a typical episode.

  “I’d have to wear this device before walking?”

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “To get the before-and-after story, you’d need to wear it day and night.”

  The doctor had spoken eloquently and empathetically of Tim’s despair. Why should it be so important to him to prove that he was suffering from a legitimate medical disorder and not a mental illness? He didn’t know, except to say that it was. It meant all the difference in the world somehow not to be lumped in with the lunatics and the fabricators. He wanted to prove it to Jane, who needed no proof, and to Becka, who looked at him suspiciously, and to the medical establishment, who made a cottage industry out of dismissal, and to people at the firm who might doubt him with a lawyer’s inborn skepticism. Most of all, he wanted to prove it to himself.

  But the doctor had stopped speaking, and Tim recalled the many tests he’d already endured, the hard exam beds and cold paper gowns, and the thousand times that hope had belly-flipped inside him before. And he thought about Troyer, Barr. There was already a backpack over his shoulder when he walked the halls. What would they make of him on the day he showed up wearing a made-to-order brain helmet?

  “I’ll have to think about it,” he said.

  “You’ll have to think about it?”

  He turned back to Jane. “What if he doesn’t succeed?” he asked. “I get my hopes up again and nothing comes of it. What then?”

  “But this is what you’ve wanted from the very beginning,” she said. “Proof. Evidence.”

  “Where’s the guarantee of that?”

  “And what’s the alternative?” she asked. “Give up? Lose hope?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said to the doctor. “It’s something I’ll have to think about.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” said Bagdasarian.

  15

  She ran into the grocery store to pick up dinner. She was waiting at the meat department for the butcher to come out with her veal chops when she turned and saw the man standing next to her. Her heart leapt.

  It was a girl’s heart. She couldn’t explain what made her, even now, forty-six and twenty years married, want him. He was in a suit and tie and overcoat and his designer eyeglasses marked him as a man who loved jazz and art magazines. He went to the gym and pressed weights and his lovely sweat dripped down his neck. He couldn’t be a day over thirty-five. It was unkind of the universe to make a man so finely match her ideal of physical beauty and to place him a few feet from her at the moment she was trying to buy veal chops for her family. If she inched a foot closer to him, people passing by would think they were a couple. If she inched over, people would think they had a place in the city set high above the noise where music played across the open loft and the walls were hung with contemporary art. Maybe he had two kids, maybe he abused cocaine in club stalls—she didn’t know the first thing about him. It only made her want him more. She kept desire down and kept it down because of vows and obligations and an entire moral structure that could not collapse at the sight of one man in a grocery store, but it had collapsed.

  She couldn’t recall the last time a person affected her so painfully. He turned to her and she quickly lost her nerve and faced the meat again. She turned back eventually. He was still looking. He smiled at her. It wasn’t one of those firm-lipped hellos with a polite little nod. It was a smile with locked eyes. He was flirting. She wanted to cry out. She wanted to wrap his tie around her hand. She wanted contact information.

  What was it? Something encoded in her genes? Something reaching all the way back to the primates? The body talking. She disliked it intensely. The man’s smile was a totally negating force. It stirred complete abandon in her. It tapped into what was reckless and selfish. She saw herself stealing out of the store with him and getting into a different car and being driven past the car she shared with Tim where he sat in the passenger seat with his eyes closed, listening to public radio. A different life, a totally different life. How easy it would be. They would arrive at the man’s place and she would never leave. Give him to me and I will change. I will see the point again. I will discern the code. I will laugh into the pillow at my unbelievable luck. I will inhabit a bed for hours with a fullness I thought gone forever. I will not look at anything as a chore again. I will smile unprompted. I will be in love. I will have boundless energy. I will not complain. Get me out of my life and I will wax again. I’ll make trips to boutiques in SoHo and pick out garter belts and babydolls, and as the clerk wraps them in tissue, it will take every possible restraint not to cry out with happiness.

  The calls in the middle of the night, the long car rides out to God knows where. The worry, the frustration, the uncertainty, the sacrifice. Let Becka pick him up from now on. Make him take cabs.

  She left the meat counter and walked to the far end of the store. She walked down the wine aisle. She chose the most expensive bottle. She left and then returned to the aisle for a second one.

  “Where’s the food?” he asked.

  She shut the door. “The line was too long. I thought we could pick up something on the way.”

  “I was looking forward to veal,” he said.

  She set the two wine bottles in back.

  “You could buy wine but not veal?”

  “I bought the wine at the liquor counter. There was no line there.”

  “You couldn’t buy the veal there, too?”

  “You know, it really pisses me off that you won’t let Bagdasarian try to help you,” she said. “With the exception of me, he’s the only one who hasn’t accused you of being crazy. I mean, he’s gone out of his way to argue that this is a real disease, and now he has something that might offer some evidence, some hope, to do for you what you’ve wanted, what you have searched and searched—what you have begged for, Tim—he says to you here it is, possibly, maybe, can’t guarantee it, but hey, it’s more than we’ve ever had.
Good news, right? Exciting stuff! And you look away and say, let me think about it? What the hell is wrong with you? How many times—”

  “Hey,” he said, “where is this coming from?”

  “How many times have I sat with you in waiting rooms? How many specialists have we seen? I have flown to Ohio, to Minnesota, to California, to The fucking Hague! to be with you while you track them down. All the big names, all the experts. I have been there. Do you remember the chart, Tim? The log? What did you call it? Every day. Every day we recorded what you ate, what you drank, how you slept, how many hours, on and on… when you had your bowel movements, what change in weather that day, the temperature, the barometric pressure, for fuck’s sake. What else? Every insane insignificance! I kept a map full of pushpins! Here’s where you walked to on Monday. Here’s where you walked to on Wednesday. I listened to your rants, your rage, your frustration—”

  “Can I get a word in?”

  “And after all my struggle and all my patience, you can’t make one—more—fucking—effort?”

  “Don’t you understand that if he comes up empty, I’ll want to kill myself?”

  “You said you’d never do that.”

  “But I would want to, Jane.”

  “So that’s it? That’s the final word?”

  “I said I would think about it.”

  “And I get no say in it? After everything, I get no say?”

  “It has to be my decision,” he said.

  “Don’t think I don’t know why,” she said. “You’d have to wear that helmet at work. Don’t think I don’t know that’s your thinking.”

  She threw the car in reverse, then suddenly slammed on the brakes. She had come close to hitting a mother and daughter as they passed by.

  They drove home in silence and did not stop for dinner. On their way up the drive, they saw the lights from Becka’s Volvo coming down. The two cars edged into the snowy margins. They rolled down their windows.

  “Where are you going?”