Joshua Ferris - The Unnamed

She reached out for him. She was wobbling and he held her in his arms trying to contain her. “On and off in the bathroom,” she said.

He returned to the living room with beers and Frank announced that he wanted to make a toast. “To your house,” he said. They all clinked frosted mugs and drank to Tim’s house. Then Tim broke the news that Jane wasn’t feeling well and had gone upstairs to lie down. She might be out for the night. Frank and Linda expressed concern.

“We should go then, maybe,” Linda said to Frank.

“No, please,” said Tim. “I’d hate—”

Jane walked into the room. “You must be Hank,” she said.

Tim turned around as Jane came forward to shake Frank’s hand. She tripped on the rug, steadied herself and looked down at her feet. Then she turned and left the room.

All three of them stared with great stillness at the doorway. Tim stood. “She must be feeling better,” he said to his guests. Then he almost collided with her as she came back in. “I forgot my drink,” she said, flicking spilled wine from her hand as she transferred the glass.

“His name is Frank, ” he whispered fiercely.

As they ate appetizers, Tim and Frank made small talk about TVs and appetizers in general and then, for some reason, and for a long time, Chex Mix in particular. He didn’t want to talk about Chex Mix. He wanted to share with Frank, a man who could be trusted, the physical and psychic toll of all his recent months in the room.

“Yorba Linda,” he overheard Jane say to Frank’s wife. “Where Richard Nixon was born.”

“Yorba Linda?” said Frank’s wife.

“Because I was thinking, Linda, Linda, because of your name, and then I thought, Yorba Linda.”

Her lamb managed to be edible. By then she wasn’t saying much. She had sunk down into herself far below the frequency of conversation. Tim took charge of the ordeal by summoning his resources as a former Troyer partner and bored his two guests all night with stories of famous cases. They listened politely while sipping their wine. When the monologue was over, they left.

He left Peter and Masserly and returned to his office. The motion for summary judgment in the Keibler case was still warm from the printer. He sat down behind his desk and opened the bottom drawer and filed the motion away just as he had planned to do. He tried to recapture the purer impulse that had prompted him to write it and the nourishment the writing itself had offered him during the long and lonely weekend. But now only the sad diminishment of the final product’s destiny meant anything to him. Into the drawer, what a waste. Peter and Masserly together couldn’t formulate half as cogent an argument against the plaintiffs in Keibler if they spent six months knocking their simian brows together, and he’d done it in a weekend. It pissed him off, Masserly’s sense of entitlement and Peter’s unmerited partner status.

He shut the drawer and then rested his arms on the desk and looked through the doorway, burdened and discontented. He tried to think an appropriate thought, something ennobling and proud. Staff attorneys are people, too, he thought. Then he thought, Oh, fuck that.

He took the motion with him down to Mike Kronish’s office. Empty. That was a good thing. He didn’t think he could do it if he had to hand it to Kronish in person. He set the motion on Kronish’s desk and wrote a quick note. He departed with renewed hope and a bad case of butterflies. He was halfway down the hall when he started fretting that he’d done the wrong thing.

Twice a day during his time in the room they unstrapped one hand and turned him to prevent bedsores. They did this when he was sleeping. They applied antibiotic ointment to the backs of his legs where the skin had rubbed away.

Becka unstrapped him one night and walked around the bed for the ointment when he grabbed her hard at the wrist with his one free hand. She let out a startled cry.

“Don’t unstrap me again,” he said, his grip tightening.

“You’re hurting me, Dad.”

“If you unstrap half, I will unstrap the rest.”

He let go of her.

“I won’t make it,” he said. “I’ll walk out and I won’t come back.”

They had to find a new way to prevent bedsores. Bagdasarian prescribed a liquid sedative they administered by needle, which toward the end, when he was more or less incoherent, was no longer necessary.

Within the hour he was refreshing his inbox every ten seconds in expectation of an email from Kronish. He was watching his phone for it to ring. By half past eleven the wait was killing him and he had to leave. He programmed his office phone to forward all calls to his BlackBerry, and he strode down the hall toward the elevator, wary of being seen.

Frank Novovian stood at his post in the lobby like a raw blister. Coming in or going out, he tried to avoid Frank at whatever cost, but there was little maneuvering with the security man so close to the escalator. He often hid himself in a pack of lawyers but it wasn’t quite lunch hour yet and he was alone. Frank looked up as he approached, and they locked eyes.

“Hey, Frank.”

“Mr. Farnsworth.”

“Getting some lunch,” he said. “Can I pick you up something?”

“My wife packs a lunch for me,” said Frank.

“She does?” He casually walked over to the security post.

“Every day.”

“That’s nice of her. How’s she doing?”

“Loves her new job.”

“She changed jobs, did she?”

“Well, same job, different bank.”

Tim had not recalled, perhaps had never known, that Linda worked at a bank. “Good for her. Wish her luck for me.”

“And how’s your wife doing these days, Mr. Farnsworth? If you don’t mind me asking.”

Tim lowered his voice and peered at Frank across the lobby post.

“Let me tell you something,” he said, almost in a whisper. “I sure appreciate your discretion on that subject.”

He nodded to Frank to lend his words some definitive thrust of body language, as if he had actually told the man something about how Jane was doing. Then he drummed his knuckles on the marble counter.

“Now I’m going to get something to eat,” he said.

He checked his BlackBerry going down the escalator and all across the lower lobby. Jane was fine. Jane came home from the treatment center tomorrow. But Tim didn’t know what business that was of Frank Novovian’s.

Jane was asleep on the chair next to the bed. He called out to her and she stood up and turned on the lamp. His eyes adjusted, and he saw that it wasn’t Jane but Becka. She waddled back to the long-suffering La-Z-Boy and flopped down on it as if she were stuffed with plastic beans, invertebrate and sprawling. The jaunty springs died quickly. Her settling might have indicated a day’s honest labor, the spent effort of a middle-aged waitress come home to her lonely recliner, but she was instead a young student exhausted by the inconvenient hour and the simple upkeep of this arid and stuffy vigil she brokered when her mother was not around.

“Becka,” he said, “where does she go?”

Becka yawned and shook her head. “I don’t know, Dad. If I knew, I would tell you.”

“I don’t ask her,” he said.

She yawned again.

“You’re tired,” he said. “You should go to bed.”

She didn’t move. He watched her closely. It wasn’t morning as the clock determined it but it was morning to him — the one time in the cycle when for an hour or two he was capable of engaging as nearly a full human being again. If she stood and walked out of the room, kissing him good night before she left, he would lie awake in the dark, and his desire to engage would give way to despair. He had to have this one hour.