“What for?”
“To watch.”
“You?”
“There’s nothing else.”
He took it away with him, and a few minutes later she headed downstairs in her hoodie, David Bowie tee and black sweats, on her feet a pair of Sylvester the cat slippers, a holdout from childhood, in which she shuffled across the kitchen floor. Her father was in the middle of the first episode. She put two Pop-Tarts into the toaster and fixed herself a cup of coffee with cream and sugar. She placed the Pop-Tarts on a paper towel and walked over to the recliner and sat down. She ate her breakfast during the concluding five minutes of episode one and the opening minutes of episode two. She had seen the episode a thousand times but happily watched it again, surprised to be watching it with him and pleased to be getting paid for it. At one point he said, “What’d she just say?” and she repeated the line for him, and then they sank back into silence.
He forwarded through the opening credits and they watched the next three episodes. When they were through she got up to use the bathroom. He got up to change discs. She came out and he was waiting for her before starting the next episode. It was a favorite of hers and she wondered how well she knew the lines so she decided to repeat out loud a brief exchange between Buffy and her friend Willow, which caused him to look over. She continued to repeat their lines perfectly all the way to the opening credits and he continued to look at her as the theme song came on.
“My God,” he said. “How many times have you watched this?”
They finished another episode. Around one, he asked if she wanted lunch. They ate their sandwiches in front of the TV and when they were through she took the plates without disturbing him and put them in the dishwasher. She returned to the recliner as he got up to resettle the bedsheet under him and fluff up his pillow and then he started another episode.
“How many do we have left?” he asked.
“Like, five,” she said. “But I have the second season upstairs.”
“How many seasons are there?” he asked.
“Seven,” she said.
They repeated the routine the next day and the day after that. She watched the show, but she also watched him watch it, looking for signs of his nodding off or standing up. But he did neither. Except to replace the DVD or work the remote, he remained on the sofa. When he got off the sofa to replace yet another disc, she finally asked him, “What made you want to watch Buffy, Dad?”
Growing up, she had had all the posters on her walls. She bought every offer of merchandise, the comic books and the novelettes and the magazines, the T-shirts and patches, the notebooks, pens, and pencils. She belonged to the fan clubs and ordered autographed eight-by-ten headshots of the actors. He once sat on the edge of her bed when she was in the eighth grade and asked if there was anything, anything at all, that he could do to make her happy, and she said the only time she was maybe happy was when she was watching Buffy.
“I was curious about it,” he said to her now.
Within the week they had finished the second season. He asked her if she had the third. Between the third season and the fourth he didn’t need to ask. She just got off the recliner and brought the next season down from her bedroom.
They were in the middle of the sixth season when he unexpectedly sat up mid-episode and turned away from the TV. He looked straight ahead, toward the fireplace. He set the remote down on the coffee table. He unbuckled the chin strap and peeled the bicycle helmet from his shaved head. It was startling to see him bald. It was almost like he suffered from a real disease like cancer or something. He placed the helmet and its portable device next to him on the sofa.
“Should you really be taking that off, Dad?” she asked.
“Why am I not walking?” he asked, more to himself than her. “Where has all the goddamn walking gone?”
It was the very thing she had been asking herself for weeks.
22
Mike Kronish drove to the courthouse every morning with R. H. Hobbs in the back of a tinted SUV. He reassured his client, who had taken to calling him at home late at night, about the previous day’s proceedings, and then prepared him for what would likely happen during the day ahead. The driver let them off at the foot of the courthouse steps, which they climbed in the hundred-plus heat. By the time R.H. entered the grand echoing foyer and joined the line to go through security, perspiration was pouring down his face and he was panting. Mike Kronish had started to fear his client wouldn’t make it through trial without suffering a heart attack. He had appealed to the judge to give them a continuance on that basis, but the judge ordered a physical and reviewed the results and the motion was denied. He would grant it, he told Kronish, when R.H. was admitted to the hospital for chest pains.
They made it through security, where the marshals took away their cell phones and BlackBerrys, and they entered the courtroom together. The judge began the day’s proceedings promptly at nine thirty. Kronish and his client walked through the gate separating the gallery from the well at exactly twenty-two after. Peter was already present, managing the work of two junior associates and three paralegals. They were assembled now no differently from the way they had been every morning since the trial began, with one exception: to the right of Peter in Kronish’s chair sat a man in a gray suit with a bicycle helmet on his head. When the two men came into view, Tim turned and greeted them. He stood up and shook hands with Kronish and R.H. awkwardly, with his left hand. Though it was now summer, the effects of Tim’s frostbite lingered. Kronish asked him what he was doing there.
“I’ve just been getting the rundown from Peter,” he replied. “I’m ready to help any way I can.”
Kronish set his briefcase on the table. “What do you mean, the rundown?”
“I’m all caught up. Peter and I talked.”
“About what?”
R.H. interrupted them. “I thought you were supposed to be at the hospital,” he said. “If it was important to be at the hospital, why aren’t you at the hospital?”
Tim didn’t look at R.H. He looked at Kronish and reiterated that Peter had caught him up and that he was ready to get to work. He also wanted Kronish to know that he’d been reading the transcripts nightly and, frankly, no disrespect intended, they could use his help. Kronish did not want R.H. to know that they had just walked in on the greatest breach of professional protocol he could remember in all his years as a trial lawyer, but he was having difficulty seeing straight. He asked R.H. to have a seat.
“Why is he here?” R.H. demanded. Tim’s reappearance could mean only one thing to R.H.—that his trial was going worse than he suspected, and that they had had to call a man away from his wife’s deathbed in order to salvage it. “Where were you three weeks ago?”
“Have a seat, R.H.,” said Kronish.
“Why haven’t you been here from the beginning?”
Kronish gave Peter a look and Peter understood immediately. Peter jumped up, took gentle hold of R.H.’s arm and started coaxing him into his chair. R.H. went reluctantly.
“What is he doing here?” he asked Peter.
Kronish would have preferred to talk to Tim privately, away from R.H., the prosecution team, and all those looking on from the gallery, but the judge was expected in less than five minutes and would not be pleased to find the defense team’s lead counsel absent from the courtroom. He remained standing, as did Tim, and spoke to him in a soft whisper.
“What the hell? What the fuck? What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck?”
“Hey, Mike, go easy. I’m here to help.”
“Help how?”
“Any way I can.”
“There is no way you can.”
“Come on, Mike. I was the architect of the strategy, Peter’s got me all caught up—”
“Fuck caught up, Tim! We’re three weeks into trial. You’re the architect of a strategy that’s radically changed. Do you not see? Do you not understand the delicate dynamic? Look at the man. Look what you’ve done. The fucking p
rotocol, man!”
“Hey, Mike—”
“You arrogant bastard,” said Kronish. “This has nothing to do with R.H. and everything to do with you. And why are you wearing that fucking helmet?”
“Read this,” he said.
He handed Kronish a photocopy of an article from The New England Journal of Medicine. “John B.” was the pseudonym the authors had assigned him. The article detailed his condition and debated its causes. The psychiatrists believed his situation came from a physical malfunction of the body, something organic and diseased, while the neurologists pointed to the scans and the tests that revealed nothing and concluded that he had to be suffering something psychological. Each camp passed the responsibility for his diagnosis to the other, from the mind to the body back to the mind, just as they had done in private over the course of his endless consultations.
Kronish flipped through the pages he had been handed. “What’s this?”
“I’m John B.,” said Tim.
“Who?”
“The subject of that article.”
Kronish looked at him in disbelief. “Are you unaware of the fucking protocol, man?”
Just as he said this, the judge walked through the chambers door and the marshal called out for all to rise. Kronish was caught holding the article Tim had given him.
“Please be seated,” said the judge.
When Tim sat down, Kronish realized he intended to stay. He had no choice but to sit as well, if he wished not to draw attention to himself. As he did so, he considered rising again and asking the judge for permission to approach. He would ask for a fifteen-minute recess in which he would take Tim outside the courthouse and beat him behind a dumpster. But he preferred not to request permission to approach because R.H. worried about conversations he didn’t participate in. He was also loath to ask the judge for a recess before the day had even begun. Kronish was momentarily paralyzed. He was never paralyzed. He turned to Tim, who was sitting next to him, awaiting the resumption of a trial he’d been absent from since day one.
“Take that helmet off,” he whispered.
“What?”
“That goddamn bicycle helmet on your head. Take it off.”
“I can’t.”
Kronish stared. “Take that ridiculous fucking helmet off your head, Tim, before the fucking judge notices.”
“I won’t,” said Tim.
For a moment of blinding discomfort, the two sides of Kronish battled for primacy—reason, which knew any sudden movement would be bad for his client, and rage, which wanted to rip the helmet off Tim’s head and Tim’s head with it.
“When I get back this evening,” he said, “I’m calling an emergency caucus among the partners and I’m recommending that you be stripped of partnership.”
“I have a right to be here,” said Tim.
“You have no fucking right to be here!”
“Does the defense have something it would like to share?” asked the judge from the bench.
Kronish stood. “No, Your Honor.”
Members of the prosecution were peering over. Kronish heard the strokes of a sketch artist behind him and felt the gallery looking on.
“Is that Mr. Farnsworth?”
Tim rose. “It is, Your Honor.”
“You have arrived at your destination, Mr. Farnsworth,” said the judge. “Why are you still in your helmet?”
“He’s not staying, Your Honor,” said Kronish.
“I am staying, Your Honor,” said Tim. “I have not yet appeared before Your Honor during these proceedings, but I would like to request permission to appear now.”
As these words were making their way to the judge, Tim turned, grabbed his backpack, and began to walk out of the well.
“On second thought, Your Honor,” he said, turning his head around to address the judge as onlookers, seated on both sides of the gallery, watched from their wooden pews.
“What is going on here?” asked the judge.
Tim walked past the marshal and pushed the door open.
“Mr. Kronish, what is going on?”
Kronish had his back to the judge. He was watching Tim Farnsworth walk out of the room. Then the door swung shut and he turned around to face his inquisitor. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
He woke up in a booth at a KFC in Queens. He lifted his head off the table. A napkin stuck to his face. Becka reached out for it, straightening his helmet in the process.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
She had followed him from the courthouse steps across the Brooklyn Bridge. He shed his suit coat and his buttondown in the heat without stopping, without the least concern for how he looked to those he passed: a crazy man possessed. She picked up his discarded clothes and followed him into the heart of the borough. She trailed behind him, ready to seize on his first false move, at any subtle sign of fakery, but he never halted, he never paused. The city was a wading pool of cement heat. The buildings bleating with glare, the sidewalks pulsing with sunlight. The bus exhaust and the interminable miles made the long walk unbearable. But he never stopped. She watched him slog inside the KFC and collapse.
Now she looked at him with tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,” she said.
23
Wildfires burned across several square miles, closing highways and forcing evacuations. The rainless summer and the wind and the lightning had turned the brush border between counties into kindling. Flames left charred contrails in the land resembling the scars of comets running aground on the face of the earth. Emergency workers had corralled most of the fire into containment lines where they starved the blaze of the fuel it needed to burn. They called in backfire experts, leased Helitack helicopters, scheduled twenty-four-hour water drops to keep the fires from destroying forest preserves and the shockingly close residential homes. Golf courses were used as termination points in an art new to frightened cities that had just barely adjusted to the flash floods of a swift and freakish spring. Disaster once confined to the west had migrated, a wayward animal confused by scrambled weather. Reservoirs were poisoned. Pockets of fire continued to glow but eventually the expressways were reopened and most residents were invited to return.
He reached around the back of her neck and collected her hair into a ponytail as she eased into him. Their mouths met and pressed into each other. He cupped the small of her back in his hands and turned their bodies over and laid her down on the field. He removed her pants over her shoes, too impatient to bother with the buckles. She felt all along his lean walker’s body, the legs that were all muscle now and the torso that had slimmed down to the ribs as if he were a boy again. He took both her hands and stretched her arms as far as they would reach across the switchgrass as the hard soil began to skin his knees. They interlocked their fingers and squeezed as if to prevent death from separating them and they stared at each other under the smoke-fogged sky. They required almost no movement to be stunned again by something they had done so often, that had grown stale in the months before his recurrence but that now felt like the first time between them. They could smell the burn in the air and feel the heat on their faces. They were near a slowly dying outcrop of fire being tamped into embers by barely audible voices. Cows sauntered before a wooden fence in the distance.
They lay afterward, two bodies humming in a field. He felt bad that he had not been able to last. It had been a long time and after a minute or two there was no stopping what had taken over.
“It’s almost worth waiting when it’s like that,” she said.
“I’m sorry I didn’t last.”
“That’s the downside.”
They buttoned and zipped and got to their feet. They began to walk through the field to the car, tall steps through the high grass. It occurred to him that they were leaving too quickly. He wanted to reclaim that spent urgency, the irrefutable proof they both felt in their bodies that they needed each other for life. Had such a long and arduous walk out here to the middle of
nowhere, had the task of picking him up, which made his sickness seem to her but a common irritant of clocking miles in the sleepiest hours, really been the occasion for the best sex they’d had in years?
“We should go back,” he said.
“Back where?”
“Back there.”
She looked behind them and saw only the fenced borderland and dry expanse of grass. “What for?”
“To get that back.”
She seemed to get his meaning. “It wouldn’t be the same.”
All at once she jerked away. She did a kind of stutter-step, shrieking, and ended behind him gripping his arms with her claws.
“What is it?” he cried.
“A snake!”
He stopped still and held her behind him. He looked down at the grass. “I don’t see it,” he said.
“How could you miss it?”
“Well, it’s gone now.”
“It’s not gone. It’s just ahead of us. Ahead of us is not gone.”
“It’s more scared of you than you are of it,” he said.
“You talked to the snake?”
“Want me to carry you out, banana?”
“I don’t like snakes,” she said.
She walked the rest of the way with a mix of trepidation and resolve, eyes frozen to the grass, feet choosing the least dense spots. They climbed the wooden fence. The car was waiting for them on the far side of the road. A sign in front of the fence said No Trespassing—Stony Hold Farms.
They drove out of the back roads, past the same fire-damaged landscape she had followed him into. They entered an area more densely populated by single-family residences and there saw exposed houses flaking with ash, cul-de-sacs with pitted cars more fitting the scenes of a riot from a troubled city. Porch pillars burnt down halfway turned ranch houses into small sites of ancient ruin. Most of the houses stood unmolested. The individual damage seemed arbitrary, or perhaps singled out by an inscrutable fate.
“It’s even worse than what you see on the news,” she said.
“What do you make of it?” he asked.