Joshua Ferris - The Unnamed

The alternative to leaving him was sitting at his bedside for who knows how long, waiting on the whim of an unpredictable illness to lift, at last, and allow them to resume some measure of real life.

And what if it didn’t lift? And what did real life mean but the struggle to get back to zero?

Did she need him? She didn’t think so. Was there really only one person for you, one man, the one? She didn’t think so.

She would sit with him if he was wasting from Parkinson’s. If he was wasting from cancer or old age, she’d sit with him. If he just had an expiration date, of course she’d sit with him.

But this thing, this could go on forever. Is that how she wanted to spend her life? Tethered alongside him to that bed…

I dare you.

She pulled the cork out and filled the glass and downed it quickly. She needed a second one and poured it out and drank that one at the table waiting for him to come downstairs. He shuffled into the room.

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

He looked contrite and sad and ten years older. He was thin and desperate and as needy as a child. She poured herself another glass.

“Sit down next to me,” she said.

Bagdasarian came in and removed two toes. Tim screamed despite the anesthetic that dulled what surrounded the dead nerves and he thrashed futilely against his restraints. After fierce refusal he had capitulated again to being so narrowly confined, and now it felt like waking inside a coffin six feet under.He cursed the doctor angrily and his curses were mixed with personal insults aimed at the doctor’s ugliness and his medical impotence and the recklessness with which he offered hope to the sick. Dr. Bagdasarian said nothing but commented to Jane, who stood horrified in the doorway, that Tim was very lucky to suffer only the loss of two more toes, and that the absence of gangrene was nothing short of a miracle. Tim continued to scream, and his screams could be heard beyond the window, picked up by the breeze and spread throughout a neighborhood that otherwise knew only calm and prosperity.

Jane saw the doctor out. Before leaving he gave her two letters. He explained that the first was a letter to Tim from a friend of his, a renowned neuroscientist who had authored many books on medical curiosities. He said she might even have heard of him. The second was from a woman from an institute. The doctor didn’t know what to make of it. He told Jane that she’d have to decide for herself.

Dr. Bagdasarian reached out gently and put a hand on her shoulder. “Try your best that he doesn’t forget what it means to be human,” he said.

“I’m trying,” she said.

He opened the door. They shook hands and she thanked him. “You’ve been so helpful,” she said.

Dr. Bagdasarian smiled. “I’ve been no help at all.”

She walked through the house to the kitchen. She read the letters at the table. The first, from the neuroscientist, was a letter of introduction. She recognized him, as Dr. Bagdasarian had suggested she might, having read his articles in popular magazines. He explained that part of his goal in life was to give voice to strange cases. In his letter he wrote compassionately and without condescension, and she thought how heartened the letter and its tone would have made Tim even a short time ago. The second letter was from the executive director of something called the Endocrine Disruption Prevention Alliance, a loose affiliation of science groups based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The writer introduced herself and explained that Tim’s condition had come to her attention.

… and I am one-hundred percent certain that the cause is endocrine disruption, a phenomenon that results from the intake of chemicals extremely hostile to the human endocrine system. These chemicals, released in huge quantities into the environment, can fundamentally change how an individual functions, how he or she thinks, even — as in your case — moves. Here is the frightening truth: clinical trials have proven that a chemical agent no bigger than two benzene rings, or one-trillionth of a part of the human body (to put that in perspective, that is one second over the course of three thousand centuries) can take total control over our bodies. I am writing to you today to educate you, but more importantly to persuade you that your condition is caused by—

She stopped reading.

There was a time when receiving a letter like this one, no matter how odd its message, would have restored their faith in a flawed system. He had been forced to seek out the opinion of specialists, who sent him on to other specialists, who made him stand at the mercy of ever-more-refined specialists, who referred him to the specialists they most admired. Now a specialist was coming to him. The executive director of a medical alliance was telling him once and for all what ailed him. “Endocrine disruption.” It would not have mattered that he had never heard of it before. It would not have mattered if the science was debated, if the evidence was still outstanding, if the experts had been debunked. He would have been instantly on the phone. He would have flown anywhere, stayed any length of time. And she would have been there beside him.

Now she walked the two letters over to the sink and disposed of them in the trash.

Tuesday morning he returned to work and read over the motion for summary judgment he’d written for the Keibler case. He’d started it the week before, wary at first. Typically you wait for a partner to assign the motion. But five days ago he found himself clearing through a thicket of case documents and juggling a few arguments in his head, just for the fun of it. When he began the outline, a certain heat flashed across the desk, and it jolted the small office with an iridescent energy, a magnetic field inside of which he moved throughout the day. By the time he began to write the introductory paragraph, his mind was alight with radiance.

Outside the window, bees were trying to get in, a dozen or so sideswiping the pane, for reasons you had to be an expert on bees to understand. He thought they should be long dead, or still hibernating in one of their combs, if hibernate was what they did — anything but dipping and hovering in the wintry light so many floors up. Outside the window, the city stretched north before him with its sleek towers and squat, box-top buildings of different sizes and shadows, all bound by the two rivers whose edges were just in view. He had reconciled himself to no longer having a view of the park, just as he had reconciled himself to the smaller office, the scarred desk, and the downgraded chair. The amenities mattered less now. He had not bothered to bring in the canted standing globe or the Tiffany desk lamp or the degrees and certificates that had adorned his previous office. The bareness of this new approach suited his austerity of purpose. He was there to work, and when work was over, to leave the office and resume life.

He stood up to get a better look at the bees. They were really winding back and slamming themselves against the window. He thought they must be knocking their little bee brains out. They hit and rebounded and fluttered up and returned to hit the glass again. Maybe they were in the very process of dying. Or maybe they were just doing what bees did when they got separated from the hive. Did they travel in a hive? Or was that called a swarm? He knew so little about bees.

He returned to his desk. There were problems with the draft, gaps in his argument, a few structural missteps. He spent the next hour patching things up and the following hour doing a cite check. He thought he’d print out the draft and read it at his desk a final time and then file it away in a drawer before doing the work that had actually been assigned to him. He had not been asked to write a motion for summary judgment. By doing so he was disrespecting the protocol and flouting the conditions of his employment. He wrote it as a kind of hobbyist, with the greatest purity of intent. Millions of motions had been written over the course of the law’s centuries, but they had been written with a court in mind, objects of utility and persuasion, while it was possible that until today, not a single one had been composed for the simple satisfaction of the writing itself. He had spent hours working on it over the weekend, happy to have it as a distraction. The house could be a thundering vacuum of quiet when there was no one there to rifle through a kitchen drawer or to lay out the makings of a sandwich on the counter.