The Unnamed

  Tim thanked him and turned to leave. Then he remembered that he had something of Frank’s. He pulled the wool cap out of his coat pocket.

  “I owe you a hat,” he said.

  Frank took the cap.

  “I can’t thank you enough for that. It saved my life.”

  “Anytime, Mr. Farnsworth.”

  18

  He was prodded awake by a billy club. He sat up in the leather seat and blinked down at the cop, who stood on the blacktop at a defensive angle. He was shining the flashlight in Tim’s eyes. Tim had no idea where he was. The cop asked him to step out of the vehicle. Softer security light streamed through the broad windshield. The steering wheel in front of him was a big round toy. The van or truck had no door. He stepped down the single stair as the cop backed up to keep some distance. There was another cop on the other side of him with his hand at his holster. The three of them stood between the truck he’d slept in and another just like it. It said Utz Potato Chips on the side. A foggy memory of having slipped inside the fenced lot when there was still a little daylight remaining now returned to him.

  The cop asked him what he was doing there. He said he didn’t know, which was the undeniable truth, but the cop didn’t care for honest answers.

  He had been in the middle of witness prep. There was nothing more important prior to jury selection than readying R.H. for the possibility of putting him on the stand. It would not be without risk but Tim was leaning toward it. He thought it would be good to let the jury hear from the man directly. How many times had R.H. said he had nothing to hide? His protestations of innocence would be genuine, and therefore well received. But it would require damn good coaching. Tim considered it one of the more purely enjoyable aspects of going to trial. He was prepping his witness and loving it. Then he walked out.

  By now he figured Peter and probably R.H. himself had alerted Kronish to his abrupt departure. There had been no incoming call that might have explained it, no urgent message. Tim just grabbed the backpack and fled. Kronish had probably marched the episode down the hall to Wodica. How was he going to explain this one? They were lawyers, these fellows, A-game litigators with suspicious dispositions and the professional training to detect a wide array of bullshit. Jane’s cancer wasn’t going to take him much further.

  For the first time since this latest recurrence, Tim didn’t want to return to the office.

  At the station, the lieutenant apologized for any rough treatment. Government trucks were parked in that lot and there was always the fear of terrorists.

  “Terrorists?”

  “Who knows,” said the lieutenant. “By the way, you ever try a sleep clinic? My brother-in-law walked in his sleep terrible. He went to a sleep clinic in Boston and now my sister tells me you can’t get that son of a bitch out of bed with a Hyster.”

  “I’ll have to try that,” said Tim.

  Outside the station he called Dr. Bagdasarian and got his service. He told the woman it was an emergency and she woke the doctor up. When he came on the line, Tim told him that he wanted to give the new technology a try. He no longer thought he had anything to lose.

  “Just out of curiosity,” said Bagdasarian. “What made you change your mind?”

  He told him nothing about walking out of witness prep or the increasing challenge of explaining himself at the firm. He just wanted something to show people, he said. He wanted to return to the firm with evidence that he was not crazy but sick, deserving of understanding, even sympathy. And he was doing it for Jane. He had to recognize that his sickness was not his alone. She had followed him down the dark and narrowing tunnel. How could he abandon her at a possible point of light?

  He waited on the bench to be picked up. He waited and he waited, never having waited so long.

  She pulled up and he got in. On the drive home he told her where he’d woken up and about the Utz trucks and the lieutenant who told him to go to a sleep clinic. “Like we haven’t been to sleep clinics,” he said.

  Jane didn’t respond.

  “Jane, are you listening?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You haven’t said a word.”

  “It’s three in the morning,” she said. “I’m tired.”

  During his last recurrence he had agreed to go into handcuffs not only to save him from such episodes as being arrested in a parking lot three villages over from his own, but to spare her calls from arbitrary places at all hours, the chore of picking him up that grew more draining as the days and weeks passed.

  “I called Dr. Bagdasarian,” he said.

  She didn’t respond.

  “I can’t keep waking up in potato chip trucks.”

  “No,” she said. “I guess you can’t.”

  They drove in silence the rest of the way home.

  19

  Dr. Bagdasarian removed the improvised device from a small shopping bag. Tim held it in his hands and said nothing, for there was little to say about a common bicycle helmet. It had been retrofitted to perform an extraordinary purpose and manufactured exclusively and at great expense, but he wondered how such an everyday object could serve to advance an understanding of his mystery. He doubted it could, and with that doubt, as he placed it on top of his head and buckled the chin strap, futility made off with his heart. The biomedical firm had installed sensors up and down the helmet’s foam-cushion lining. The wireless device that captured brain activity clipped easily to a belt. This silly and makeshift heroism of Bagdasarian’s, which he had encouraged in a moment of vulnerability, was all just so much overreaching, and nothing brought that home more than the snug feel of the chin strap pinching his skin and Jane’s sudden laughter at the sight of him across the table. He would try it, he would wear the helmet and hope for the right reading, but this felt like the last possible desperate grasp before the root to which he clung gave way and he plummeted down the sheer cliff. He had gone from MRIs and the Mayo Clinic to a trial made possible by sporting goods, with no guarantee of a success that was itself of questionable value. No diagnosis, no cure—what was the point again? Jane continued to laugh in a tenderly mocking way, tickling the doctor into a smile, but Tim despaired and felt the urge to cry. This was it, this little piece of medicalized headgear, and beyond it, he saw the hell of a permanently compromised life whose once-healthy past tormented him as the plain earth does a man passed over by the grace of God.

  “Will it work?”

  “We’ll find out,” said the doctor. “But remember to keep it on at all times. And you should also shave your head. It will read better that way.”

  He sheared the bulk of his hair with clippers, then let the mirror guide him as he ran the blade over his knobby bumps. Creamy water dripped from his chin. The stark pale surface that emerged startled him. He didn’t know he had this look, hiding all this time beneath a civilized trim. He was menacing or ailing or just hatched from an egg.

  He dressed and strapped his skull into the helmet and joined Jane in bed.

  “I’m happy you changed your mind,” she said.

  He was thinking about the consequences. He could not go in to work now, and he didn’t think it was an equitable trade-off, his life in exchange for a shot in the dark. But the choice had been made, and so it had to be said that above all, above living itself, he just wanted some measure of understanding, some small answer that might stand in for the clarification of all the mysteries in the world.

  “I don’t have much confidence that it’s going to tell us anything.”

  “Maybe that’s for the best,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “You won’t feel disappointed if it comes to nothing.”

  He turned to her in bed. “I want to say something,” he said. He looked at her with a quiet, shamed temerity. “I know we haven’t had sex in a long time.”

  She was silent. There was still the silence that an unexpected swerve toward sex in a conversation could provoke, even after twenty years married.

  “And I’
m sorry, banana,” he said. “It just lowers my libido. I don’t know why.”

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “Walk walk walk walk walk,” he said. “And then it’s the last thing on my mind.”

  Time passed. She changed the subject. “The doctor thinks you should be on an antidepressant,” she said.

  “When did he say this?”

  “When I walked him to the door.”

  It was true he was depressed. Depression followed in lockstep with each recurrence, a morose inwardness with which he tyrannized whatever room he happened to drift into and glaze over, waiting for the next walk to take him. But it wasn’t a permanent, abiding depression. Sadness always gave way to a bout of pugnacity in which he thought again, I’m going to beat this thing. He was tough and he was special and he had inner resources, he had many things going for him, and others had seen much worse, time was precious and things happened for a reason and there was always an upside, and it only took a good attitude to fight and win and nothing was going to stop him and tomorrow was another day.

  Then suddenly he rose off the bed. He grabbed the pack on his way out. Eventually she leaned over and turned off the light.

  Better luck next time, she thought in the dark. Better luck making the stars align. Wouldn’t it have been a luxury to have some crystal ball into which a diviner gazed to map for the young couple their future in sickness and in health, the specifics therein. This one—pointing to the man—is no good for you. Not too far down the line, sweetheart, he will break, and you will be left carrying the load. And a heavy load it will be. Abort the union now while you still have the chance, or accustom yourself to the short end of the stick. Because a failing body is no grounds for divorce. A failing body and not even your own becomes your personal cross to bear and how fair is that? How desirable?

  She hated these thoughts. They stole over the better part of her in the weakness of the night. She was waiting in half sleep for the phone to ring. She hated herself for imagining the concept of medical prenuptial. You are free to go if he turns too human too quickly. If his body derails, save yourself the grief and heartache of being nursemaid and watchman. Take intact your health and your future and go. You have a life to live. Unburden yourself.

  20

  A few weeks later he lay on the sofa, watching reruns of shows he’d only heard about. He watched Oprah and info-golf and C-Span and Seinfeld. He flipped channels to avoid commercials. Commercials were poignant reminders of what a waste of time it was to watch TV. He didn’t feel his life wasting away so much when he was inside a show, but when the show’s spell was broken by a message from the sponsor he was quick to change the channel. Changing channels distracted him almost as much as being inside a show.

  He thought about the case and the man on the bridge. He returned to the day of their encounter and replayed events. He called Detective Roy to see what progress he’d made in tracking the man down, but there were only so many ways the detective could express his skepticism, sarcasm and apathy. Finally he told Tim not to call anymore. He would call if he had news. When Tim called anyway, the receptionist sent him directly to the detective’s voice mail and the detective did not call back.

  Kronish took over the case. He supposed Peter would do his best to get Kronish up to speed, but the trial was soon to start and there was no way Kronish could learn everything. They thought Jane was in her final days.

  Sometimes he walked around the house with the chin strap dangling.

  Becka called to him from upstairs. It was the summer before her first semester at college and she was home during the day. He was sleeping off a walk in a gas station bathroom when she took the stage to receive her high school diploma. She called out to him as she made her way through the house. She appeared at the foot of the sofa. “Dad!” At last he looked at her. “Didn’t you hear me calling?”

  “What is it?”

  “Phone for you.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Mike Kronish.”

  “Tell him I’ll call back,” he said.

  She reappeared a little later, holding out the cordless. “Dad, I don’t answer this phone,” she said. “I only answer my cell.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Someone named R.H.”

  “Tell him I’m at the hospital.”

  “The hospital?”

  “Tell him I’m at the hospital and just let it ring from now on.”

  He discovered watching TV on DVDs, which eliminated the commercials, and after that he rarely went back to cable.

  When the trial began, he called Fritz Weyer, an old friend and former associate who had moved to a corporate investigations firm some years ago and now did occasional work for Troyer. Tim explained over the phone that he was calling on his own behalf and not the firm’s and asked Fritz if he’d mind stopping by to discuss a few things. Fritz showed up in the afternoon and asked about the shaved head and bicycle helmet. Tim mumbled something about a mild case of vertigo and Fritz didn’t pursue the matter. He asked how Jane was doing, which seemed a pleasantry more than anything, so Tim presumed that he knew nothing about her fatal cancer and answered that she was just fine, selling houses and enjoying life. Jane had brokered the deal for Fritz and his wife when they bought their house in Scarsdale, and now the two couples went out from time to time.

  They sat down at the kitchen table across from each other. Tim began with a vague description of his personal health problems, quickly segueing into his leave of absence, his abandonment of his client at the moment of trial, and his misgivings concerning the readiness of the defense team. The associate, he said, was a moron, and the partner was ill informed. He wanted to track the trial as it progressed by getting the rough transcripts each day, but he was more or less confined to the house and needed someone to get the roughs for him. Fritz said he could get the roughs, no problem, but he was a senior investigator at an expensive firm. Tim would be paying a lot of money for what was essentially a courier service.

  “That’s fine, I don’t mind paying. I need somebody I can trust. I want to know when they fuck up. There are going to be fuckups and I have to catch them before they turn fatal. I’m the only one who can try this case and you understand now that that’s not possible, so having the roughs every night and reading through them is really the only way I can keep up with what’s going on.”

  “Done,” said Fritz.

  “There’s something else.”

  He brought out a copy of the artist’s rendering of the man he encountered on the Brooklyn Bridge. In some way or another, he told Fritz, this man was connected to the murder of R.H.’s wife. He might even have the murder weapon in his possession. Tim believed R.H. was innocent but that he might nevertheless be sentenced to a punishment he didn’t deserve. His fading hope was that Fritz might find the man in the sketch.

  “This is all you got?” said Fritz.

  “That’s it.”

  Fritz made a fleeting face of doubt, big eyes and a twisted mouth, and then took a deep breath. “That’s not a whole hell of a lot, Tim.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve got people at the NYPD who will let me have a look at the case file,” he said. “But this, man…” gesturing with the sketch, “this is thin. I’ll be looking for one man among eight million.”

  Tim asked him to do the best he could.

  21

  Jane woke Becka up before she left for work and Becka hung around all day while her dad watched nonstop television in his bicycle helmet. Her mom paid her as much as she would have been paid at Starbucks or wherever, and now she didn’t have to get a crappy part-time job for the summer. She just had to hang around waiting for him to leave and to follow him if he did. Her mom hadn’t quit her job to follow him around but she still picked him up and took care of him when she wasn’t working. But she still wanted someone to look after him during the day, so when the summer came around, she offered to pay Becka to keep an eye on him.

  “How come he doesn??
?t just hire somebody? Like a bodyguard or something. It’s not like we don’t have the money.”

  “He doesn’t want that.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s too independent.”

  “He doesn’t seem independent when he calls you at three in the morning and you have to pick him up in Queens.”

  “Do you want the job or not?” asked Jane.

  Her mom told her not to be too obvious about it, because it was more or less like she was babysitting him. And it was a little weird to babysit your dad, the man who makes you do chores and punishes you and tells you over and over again all the ways there are to be happy. He told her about more ways to be happy than you could ever try out even if you had twenty lives. But watching him was better than some crappy part-time job. Except that, day after day, he stayed on the couch and never moved. The whole point to the helmet was to record his brain waves or whatever, the whole point to babysitting him was to follow him wherever he went, but he wasn’t going anywhere but the couch and his brain waves weren’t doing anything but watching TV. Becka still thought her dad was mental. She didn’t want to think of it that way but who ever heard of what he had? Not even the Internet.

  She couldn’t be downstairs with him all the time. Sometimes she took little breaks, as you would at Starbucks or wherever, and went upstairs to lie on her bed or check her email or play the guitar. She checked on him from time to time to make sure he was still there. Sometimes she found him dozing on the sofa with the bicycle helmet gone a little cockeyed. She thought if he wasn’t mental he was at least really strange.

  One morning she woke up and he was sitting on the edge of her bed holding her DVD box set of the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

  “Can I take this?” he asked.