Joshua Ferris - The Unnamed

Jane was standing with David on Greenwich Street just south of West 10th. She took her phone out of her purse and looked down at caller ID as David unwrapped his umbrella. He twirled it lightly with his wrist and the rainwater fell off in drops.

“Hello?” she said.

He kept silent.

“Hello? Tim?”

He didn’t want to tell her.

“Tim, are you there?”

Jane put up a finger and smiled at David. She repeated Tim’s name into the phone a third time.

Finally he told her. She was silent.

“Jane?” he said. “Are you there?”

“Come home.”

The next walk took him from the motel to a Home Depot to the McDonald’s to the strip mall with the Family Dollar store. He came to a stop outside a mall, specifically the long wall of glass doors leading into the Sears wing, locked that time of night. A stone ashtray and stone bench matched the plain stone arcade above the doors that extended twenty feet out toward the parking lot to keep the smokers dry and the old people safe from the treacheries of the curb while awaiting rides. He remembered all over again how pleasurable it was, arguably the most pleasurable physical experience of his life, to arrive at the end and, without giving a damn where, to lie down, the blood in his veins still walking, and to yield to the exhaustion. He fell asleep on the stone bench by a refugee tree in a metal grate and by the time mall security came around to run him off he’d gotten the sleep he needed and felt oddly cheery.

He walked to the fork in the road and went left and that road gradually curved around and followed the stucco wall of a private country club and then went up past the cemetery and a few miles later down a hill to a reservoir sitting beyond a bank of trees, which gave way to a public golf course, and then to a switching station humming menacingly behind a chain-link cage, and he continued onward to a town square, through the parking lot, and he walked the edges of gas stations hung with red and white flag bunting along another endless avenue until five miles later a writhing parabola of highway appeared and his body stopped under an overpass festooned with graffiti, where he lay down a few feet from the traffic rushing overhead and fell asleep.

He squatted at the top of the concrete ramp after waking. He could descend and go left or right or he could remain squatting. There were things he should probably do, like secure some kind of food before being forced to walk again. Usually he called Jane and she picked him up. He was either going to get picked up by Jane or from this point forward have a lot of time on his hands. He wasn’t good with excess time. He stopped breathing and had to remind himself to start up again. The traffic went by him overhead and one of the things he thought of doing was climbing up and throwing himself in front of the passing cars. But that was letting the son of a bitch off too easy. He decided to call Jane.

His BlackBerry was dead. He was going to have to stop squatting and make his way down the loose rock and broken glass scattered across the ramp to the shoulder of the highway and go back the way he came, where he would search out a pay phone.

A few miles down he found a convenience store. He went inside and microwaved some burritos. He ate outside, standing next to the ice machine. When he finished he walked over to the pay phone and pulled out some pocket change. She picked up on the first ring.

“Well, I’ve fed the son of a bitch,” he said.

“Tim?” she said. “Where are you? For God’s sake, it’s been almost twenty-four hours.”

The relief in her voice gave way to panic. He let her go on for a while longer. “I’ve fed the son of a bitch and now we’re standing outside the mini-mart where I bought the burritos.”

“What mini-mart?”

He didn’t reply.

“Tim, come home, you need to come home, tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up.”

“We’re feeling better,” he said. “I think maybe… maybe we’ll go over to that sporting goods store while there’s still time.”

“What sporting goods store?”

“Jane?”

“Yes?”

“Jane, you don’t have to worry about us. We’re going to be just fine.”

“Are you with someone?”

“We’re going to be just fine,” he said. “We’re going to go over to that sporting goods store and stock up on a few things.”

“Tell me where you are so I can pick you up.”

“That’s the operator, and I don’t have any more change.”

“Tim!”

“Don’t worry about us,” he said.

He supposed that decided it: he wasn’t going to be picked up. He walked over to the sporting goods store. Their winter offering was on display. They had fleece and spandex, neoprene and knit, polyester and cotton. He needed a different shirt. The one advertising MasterCard was dry now and the stench of rotted milk enveloped him. But to choose a size and a color and to do all that human business inside the fitting room was so exhausting. He needed boots and a coat as well, but that was also a pain in the ass. You had to hunt down a salesperson, give him your size, and wait for him to return from the back, where everything was kept, and then try on one of the boots — maybe both, depending on how the first one fit — and all the rest of it. What a pain in the ass. He didn’t want to make the effort. He refused to. He left the store and stood outside the automatic doors, just off to the side, where he remained standing a long time.

She did not say, she told Becka later, “Tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up.” As far back as Becka could remember, that’s how it was done. He called and told her where, what town, what gas station, what intersection, and then she and Becka got in the car and drove. Becka remembered the long drives. She remembered watching her mom get out of the car, walk up to him, and bend down and shake him gently. Her mom would tuck her hair behind an ear as she squatted beside him, waiting for him to come to. She remembered the car rides home, some tense and silent, others full of anguish and adult talk going nowhere. By the time she was old enough to better understand, she didn’t ride along as much. They would just suddenly return to the house together, or the phone would ring and wake her up and her mom would leave in the middle of the night. Her idea of family was bound up in those car rides and midnight runs, in her mom’s attempts to keep everyone together, everyone safe, and in the memory of her mom squatting patiently beside her dad as he slowly rose to a sitting position.

This time her mother didn’t have the energy. She didn’t want to get in a car and resume the ordeal. She told Becka about the art dealer named David she had just finished showing a listing to when she got the call and how she didn’t want to leave him. She wanted to hang up the phone and start a new life. So instead of saying, “Tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up,” she shifted the responsibility and the struggle to him: come home. As if that was such an easy thing to do when you were on foot, when you were lost and hungry and exhausted from walking so many miles.

“We had our heads in the sand,” she said. “We never talked about it. But I knew one day it would come back, and when it did, I promised myself I’d do it right. No drinking, no compromises. I would follow him everywhere, I would never let him out of my sight. Then he called and said it was back, and my first instinct was to abandon him.”

“But look where you are now,” said Becka. “Look at what you’re doing now.”

The two of them sat inside the lobby of a police department in western New Jersey. Behind them on the wall the authorities had posted profiles of wanted fugitives. Even in a sleepy town like Oldwick, the police station was a depot of the wayward and the deviant.