Joshua Ferris - The Unnamed

He left the office and walked to the printer. He didn’t want the printout sitting in the tray because he had not been authorized and he did not want Peter to think he was ignoring protocol. No one had even discussed the need for a motion for summary judgment in Keibler, at least not with him. But the time would come when submitting a motion for summary judgment would be the right strategic move. Then Kronish and Peter would get together to decide who to assign it to. Probably that kid Masserly. He was Peter’s favorite. Masserly would probably be asked to write the motion.

On his way back to the office Peter called out to him. Masserly was in there, sitting across the desk from Peter, probably not even thirty yet. Just a second-year associate, Masserly, but already with that air of entitlement that some junior associates acquire when they sense they are favored by one or another partner. His skin was dry and pink and flaked at certain termination points like his receding hairline and the curves of his knuckles. When Tim thought of him abstractly, he was reminded of one of those children who age rapidly and prematurely and die as old men at thirteen. Today he was wearing a pink buttondown with white collar and cuffs, silver cuff links winking from the armrests of the wing chair, and a long paisley tie draped down his shirtfront like a silky tongue. Every layman’s idea of the asshole lawyer. Peter offered another iteration in his blue pinstripes and bow tie. He should have worn knotted ties if he was going to let his gut go like that. As it was, with his belly drooping low and prominent, his neck appeared to have hold of a water balloon. A festive spirit animated the air between the two men. Tim held the printout close to his body. There were bees just outside Peter’s window, too.

“Masserly doesn’t know about the walking,” Peter said to him.

Tim stood in the doorway and said nothing.

“No, seriously. I just asked him and he said he’d never heard.”

“I doubt that,” said Tim.

“Tell him, Masserly.”

Masserly turned. “Never heard.”

“It’s sort of a private matter.”

“Private matter? You were profiled in the fucking New England Journal of Medicine, for Christ’s sake. He used to carry a copy of it around with him,” Peter said to Masserly, “to prove to people he wasn’t nuts.”

“That’s not why I carried it around.”

“He’d come in here with a bicycle helmet on his head, wearing a backpack.”

“I’m sure he’s heard this from somebody, Peter.”

“And he’d walk around like a schoolkid heading out for the bus. They were doing some kind of experiment. What was the point of that experiment again?”

“What’s the point of bringing it up?”

Peter shrugged. “We’re just talking. He showed up to court like that once. Judge comes in and he won’t take off the bicycle helmet. He’s got the chin strap all buckled in, wearing a suit. Judge asks him what’s with the helmet. You should have seen Kronish.”

“You can read about it in the New England Journal, ” Tim said to Masserly.

“I’ve never seen Kronish so pissed. I was just an associate then. I didn’t say a fucking word, did I, Tim? Did I say a word to you about that bicycle helmet? Not one fucking word.”

“You were a saint.”

“Hey, Tim, don’t be angry. We’re just talking here. Uncontrollable bouts of walking. Masserly, you gotta read the thing to believe it. And then you still won’t believe it.”

Tim wondered who had championed Peter for partnership. Was it Kronish? Personally he had not thought Peter had shown himself to be partnership material. Peter worthy of partnership at Troyer, Barr? He didn’t think so. “I’m going to get back to work,” he said.

“Wait, wait. I mean, it brings up questions. For instance, for instance. What would have happened to you if you had been blindfolded?”

“Hey, Peter. Have you and Kronish talked about a motion for summary judgment yet?”

He preferred to keep a low profile, but suddenly he was unable to hold back. Who had championed that bow-tied twerp to be a Troyer, Barr partner?

Peter cocked his head. “In what case?”

He damn well knew what case.

“Do you guys have any idea who you might assign it to?”

“A motion for summary judgment in what case, Tim?”

“The Keibler case.”

“Keibler?”

“I was just curious if you and Mike had discussed who you might assign it to.”

Peter looked over at Masserly. “Who in their right mind would submit a motion for summary judgment in Keibler?” he asked the kid.

He had complained of brain fog. Neither Jane nor Becka understood what brain fog was but neither did they disbelieve he was suffering from it. He had earned the right to say he felt a certain way and to be taken at his word. He said he felt mentally unsticky. The description was unhelpful, but he insisted that he suffered from a lack of mental stickiness. His nerves felt “jangly.” He told Becka to imagine a guitar whose strings had all gone slack. The image was vivid but she had trouble applying jangly to her own nervous system. The physical pain was easier to describe, but this, too, he did in a private way. His muscles felt hyperslogged. His left side was floaty. Some days his breathing was all bunched up. They could only approximate for themselves how those words made him feel when he translated them into metaphor, as with the guitar strings, but he insisted on identifying them in these nonmedical and not very useful ways because to him there was no adequate substitute. They offered the most precise descriptions, the ones that aligned best with his inner experience of being.

“So when you say all bunched up,” Becka had asked him, “you mean to say you can’t catch your breath?”

“No,” he replied. “I mean to say my breath is all bunched up.”

Jangly, hyperslogged, all bunched up — he spoke a language only he understood.

They read to him through the brain fog. He favored history and biography. He was worried that without stimulus he would shed IQ points as if sweating them off into the bedsheets. Not long after his sequestering, Jane had purchased a hospital bed with retractable sides and Velcro restraints at the wrists and ankles, an improvement over the headboard and handcuffs. Together with the bedpan and the bottles of skin ointment and antidepressants and the general stagnant smell of antiseptic and body sweat, the bed transformed the guest room into something out of hospice care. He was in one long nightmare of walking now: walk, sleep, wake up, wait for the next walk. His feet convulsed rhythmically against the restraints. Becka was narrating the Senate exploits of Lyndon B. Johnson when she discovered that he could fall asleep even as his body continued to walk.

“Dad,” she said. She shook him and he came to. “You fell asleep.”

“It’s hard to concentrate through the brain fog.”

“But you never stopped walking,” she said.

She thought that was all the evidence anyone would ever need to prove that what afflicted him was not “all in the head.” His body was not his own if it continued to labor without his conscious input. But he no longer seemed interested in debates. What caused it, mind or body, what it should be labeled, organic disease or mental illness, fell second to his immediate concern.

“You can’t let me fall asleep like that.”

“Why not?”

“Wake me up if I do it again. Keep me up, Becka. Keep reading.”

The next time she came home to relieve her mother, he stopped her before she could even start to read. “This isn’t working,” he said. “Get my things together. Unstrap me.”

“No,” she said.