Joshua Ferris - The Unnamed

He called Detective Roy from time to time, and Fritz Weyer to see what progress had been made on his end. Fritz had calls in to friends at the department and one of his guys searching databases for a possible match on the face in the sketch. Maybe they’d get lucky.

He was at the firm again, dressed in suit and tie and standing before his fellow partners. R.H. was there, as were Jane and Becka. He had to campaign for his job. He said he should not be blamed for R.H.’s conviction because R.H. was guilty. Detective Roy began to applaud. Tim looked at R.H. sitting at the defense table, attempting to conceal his weeping. He approached R.H. and whispered to him, “Don’t worry, I know you’re innocent.” R.H. thanked him. The assistant district attorney who had tried the case was now itemizing all of the infractions Tim had committed: the internal lies, the false statements to authorities, the unprofessional conduct. She concluded with a passionate plea to the jury that they expel him from the firm. The judge stood up and poured sand from his shoes. It was Sam Wodica in a black gown and sun visor. He peered over to the other partners in the jury box and gave them a big thumbs-up. Jane was at the defense table comforting R.H. Mike Kronish entered the courtroom and tried to yank Tim’s pants down. Tim grabbed at his pants to keep them up because he did not want his pants to go down when he was fighting for his job. But Kronish was strong. He wanted everyone to see Tim with his pants down. Tim tried to push Kronish away but Kronish was now on top of him on the courtroom floor in front of Judge Wodica while a sketch artist documented the scene. Kronish gripped the back of Tim’s neck to make it easier to take his pants down. Tim lost track of the people in the room because his head was pinned to the ground and little courtroom rocks were digging into his skin. He was trying to swat Kronish away. It was hard with Kronish on top of him. It was only when Kronish succeeded in getting his pants down and exposing Tim that Tim woke up and realized that his pants were really down and that his head was pinned against crumbling blacktop.

He was in Newark behind a boarded-up Safeway. Shattered glass and strewn garbage were illuminated by a single security light off in the distance. Some encampment of derelicts was living out of an abandoned semitrailer.

He used both hands to try and pry the man’s grip from his neck but the angle was awkward and the man punched him in the head with his one free hand. Tim’s skull dug into the blacktop. In the stunned minute that followed, the man got Tim’s pants off entirely. Tim swiveled under him, so that he and the man were face-to-face. A terrible burn had melted the man’s eye into his cheek and shriveled his right ear. Tim reached up and grabbed his neck. He dug his fingers into his windpipe as if to pull it out and at the same time grabbed hold of the man’s balls and squeezed, and the man’s horrible animal noises careened off the side of a dumpster. Tim kept squeezing while struggling to his knees. He got to his feet and kicked the man in the head as if punting a football. The man’s head hit the side of the dumpster and he fell back on his knees. Blood poured from his nose like some weak fountain. Tim could have walked away then but he couldn’t stop. He took up an empty forty-ounce bottle and beat the man over the head. The man’s blood jumped out of him and splattered the pavement. Tim fled without his pants.

He waited for Jane to pick him up in a public park full of dead trees and flitting shadows, in the dugout of a baseball diamond where trash had accumulated ankle-deep. He followed the car as the headlights turned in the parking lot. He crept out across the shadows. He hurried toward her in his underwear.

She saw him coming across the dead field and opened the door. “Where are your pants?”

“Stay in there.”

“Is that blood?”

“Not mine,” he said. “Janey, get back in.”

He stepped inside the car and they drove out of the park.

She put his bloodied clothes in the washer and then walked up from the basement. Over the kitchen sink she opened a bottle of white wine and poured herself a glass, drank it down, and poured herself another. She took the second glass and the bottle over to the kitchen table. It was two thirty in the morning.

He came downstairs after his shower in sweatpants and T-shirt. He saw how tired she was. The bags under her eyes had never been more pronounced. He was ruining her.

“I can’t keep doing this to you,” he said.

He saw it written on her face. She had had enough. No one could blame her.

She poured herself a third glass. “Sit down next to me,” she said. He did as he was told. “You’re going farther and farther away. You call me, it’s midnight, you’re in Newark. In Newark with the murder rate and the ghosts drifting across the street.”

He mumbled a tired apology.

“Listen to me,” she said, finally feeling the effects of the wine. “You’ve lost more weight. You’re depressed. You ran out of that dugout naked, blood all over you. If the walking doesn’t kill you, something else will. Is that how you want to go?”

“What’s the alternative?” he asked.

“I’m quitting my job. And you’re going back in the cuffs. No more midnight trips to Newark. No more somebody else’s blood.”

They say it takes a long time to really get to know somebody. They say a good marriage requires work. They say it’s important to change alongside your partner to avoid growing apart. They talk about patience, sacrifice, compromise, tolerance. It seems the goal of these bearers of conventional wisdom is to get back to zero. They would have you underwater, tethered by chains to the bow of a ship full of treasure now sunk, struggling to free yourself to make it to the surface. With luck he will free himself, too, and then you can bob along together, scanning the horizon for some hint of land. They say boredom sets in, passion dissipates, idiosyncrasies start to grate, and the same problems repeat themselves. Why do you do it? Security, family, companionship. Ideally you do it for love. There’s something they don’t elaborate on. They just say the word and you’re supposed to know what it means, and after twenty years of marriage, you are held up as exemplars of that simple foundation, love , upon which (with sweeping arms) all this is built. But don’t let appearances fool you. That couple with twenty years still fights, they still go to bed angry, they still let days pass without—

The trouble with these cheap bromides, she thought, is that they don’t capture the half of it.

He spent an entire day walking, only to arrive at the back of a grocery store. He woke up to a man attempting to rape him in his sleep. He beat that man to within an inch of his life.

When that’s your husband, who’s the right counselor to see? What episode of Oprah will be most helpful?

She would have liked to know if the man he beat was dead or alive. She didn’t ask and he didn’t offer. He just said, “It was in self-defense, Janey. I did it in self-defense.”

She would have liked him to show some greater agony over the beating and less certainty that he had done what needed to be done.

But then she hadn’t been there. How could she know what he needed to do, any more than he could know what she needed to do?

Which was, simply put, to leave him.

I dare you to leave him.

The timing was right. Becka had started college. She made good money on her own. She was still beautiful. She could start over. She had half a lifetime remaining.