Joshua Ferris - The Unnamed

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.

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?