Joshua Ferris - The Unnamed

“You can call my wife,” he replied at last, “and tell her to expect a call from me.”

The bodhisattva had encouraged him to look deeply into his reliance upon technology. Email and PDA, cell phone and voice mail were extensions of the ruinous consuming self. They made thoughts of the self instantaneously and irrepressibly accessible. Who’s calling me, who’s texting me, who wants me, me, me. The ego went along on every walk and ride, replacing the vistas and skylines, scrambling the delicate meditative code. The self was cut off from the hope that the world might reassert itself over the digitized clamor and the ego turn again into the sky, the bird, the tree.

He didn’t touch mouse or keyboard, keypad or scroll button all the months of his previous recurrence, and it had thrived then, and now it was back, so so much for the bodhisattva.

She said his name three times into the phone, each time louder than the last. The other brokers in the open plan looked up from their preoccupations. “You have to concentrate, Tim,” she said. She stood up and her chair rolled back to tap the desk behind her. The person sitting there exchanged a look with his colleague across the aisle. “What’s the name of the road, can you see a name?” It was impossible for anyone to ignore her. “But what town? What town?” She seemed to regain some measure of control. She sat back down and issued careful instructions, as specific as they were mysterious. “You have to call nine-one-one. Are you listening? If you can call me you can call nine-one-one. But if they can’t locate you — Tim? If they can’t locate you, you have to walk into that subdivision. I know you’re tired but you don’t have a choice if they don’t know where to pick you up. Move away from the main road. Are you listening? Move into the neighborhood. Go to the first house and ring the doorbell. Stay awake until somebody opens the door. If nobody opens the door, go to the next house. You tell them to call nine-one-one. Then you can fall asleep. Somebody has to call nine-one-one before you fall asleep. I know you’re tired, I know you’re tired, but are you listening?” She stood again. “Tim, are you awake?” She waited for him to reply. “Tim, wake up!” Everyone was silent. The only sound in the office now was of telephones allowed to ring. “Go into the subdivision! I will find you!”

He walked from the main road to the subdivision. His body trembled with cold. It had let him know, five minutes earlier, that the walk had come to its end. He wore his suit coat backward, the back in front, which did better against the wind, and his hands were wrapped in plastic bags. He had swooped down during the walk and plucked them from the icy ground, one hand in a black plastic bag and the other in a white one.

The first house was circumscribed by a chain-link fence. He forced the latch up and stumbled to the door. He tried to think of what he might say. The right idea wasn’t coming. The words behind the idea were out of reach. He was at one remove from the person who knew how to form ideas and say words.

He fell to his knees before he could ring the doorbell. He put his bagged hands on the storm door and rested his head there. The metal was cold against his cheek. He fought with angry determination for two or three seconds. If he could defy the tidal fatigue, his body wouldn’t win, and he might still learn that someone had discovered him and would see him to safety.

She made calls from her desk, starting with the easternmost hospitals and moving west. She left her name and number in case he should be admitted later. She was not unfamiliar with the patient voices of the operators, their assurances that she would be contacted immediately should his name appear in the computer. Colleagues came up to ask if everything was okay. Sure, sure everything’s okay. You’ve done this yourself, right — searched random hospitals for the one you love? Again she stared at the blank wall of explanation. She could have asked have you ever heard of… but there was no name. She could have said it’s a condition that afflicts only… but there were no statistics. “Everything’s fine,” she assured them. She turned back to the phone and dialed another hospital.

The call came in around five, perfectly timed for rush hour. Better late than never. Better than going to identify his body at the morgue. Still, she was angry when they told her he had been admitted two hours earlier. Nothing like wasting time making fruitless calls when she could have been on her way. That was always the impulse when she finally located him: I have to get to him . And when she got to him: never let him go.

She left the office to sit in traffic and didn’t reach the hospital until quarter to seven. He was in the waiting room of the ER. She moved past shell-shocked people and children playing on the floor. He sat against the far wall covered in a blanket, wearing a black wool cap. His face was windburned that distinct pink color two shades lighter than damage done by the sun.

“Your face,” she said.

“How’d you find me?”

“I made calls.”

“You always find me,” he said.

“It’s easier when you have the GPS with you.” She sat down next to him. “Where’s your pack?”

“They’re worried about my toes. The blisters are bad.”

“Where’s your pack, Tim?”

“I had just gone down to Peter’s,” he said. “But when I left I went in the opposite direction.”

“I asked you to always have the pack,” she said.

“Frank Novovian gave me his cap.”

She had to remember who Frank Novovian was. “The security guy?”

“All I had to do was ask for it.”

“You promised me you would carry your pack with you wherever you went.”

“I just went down the hall,” he said.

They drove into the city to retrieve the pack and then they headed home. She drove. He sat gazing silently out the window at the nothing scenery passing them in the night. He turned to her at last and announced that he hadn’t bothered to explain to the attending doctor what he was doing out in the cold for so long.

“You didn’t tell the attending?” she said. “Why wouldn’t you tell the attending?”

“Those band-aid scientists,” he said, “don’t get to know about me anymore.”

This alarmed her. They had always had faith, both of them, in the existence of the One Guy, out there somewhere, living and working with the answer. It was the One Guy they sought in Rochester, Minnesota, in San Francisco, in Switzerland, and, closer to home, in doctors’ offices from Manhattan to Buffalo. Time was, he would stop anyone, interns and med students included. Time was, he would travel halfway across the world. Now he couldn’t be bothered to so much as state the facts to an attending?

“One of those band-aid scientists may have the answer, Tim. You might be surprised someday.”

“What surprise?” he said. “There are no more surprises. The only way they could surprise me is if they gave up the secret recipe to their crock of shit.”

They pulled off the highway, went under the overpass and down Route 22, where the stoplights and shopping centers of their life together greeted them from both sides of the four lanes. His frostbitten hands were wrapped in something like Ace bandages intended to insulate them from the cold, a pair of taupe and layered mitts.

“I don’t like the way you’re talking,” she said.

“What way is that?”

“Without hope.”

They started up the hill that led into the neighborhood, headlights illuminating clumps of days-old snow formless as manatees, dusted with black exhaust. The blacktop glowed with cold, the salted road was white as bone.