Joshua Ferris - The Unnamed

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.

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.

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.