Joshua Ferris - The Unnamed

“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 protocol, 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.

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.