Joshua Ferris - The Unnamed

He noticed an urn of coffee on a nearby table. He walked over and poured himself a cup and sat down on a padded chair with his legs outstretched. Contentment should have buffered him all around but the other kept moaning leg, leg — so eventually he pulled up the cuff of his chinos and looked at the leg. Something had torn right through. The cut was deep and clean, from shinbone to calf. He had no memory of it happening. Blood had dried down the leg. One of the bankers approached. The banker watched him, dressed in a soiled T-shirt and ripped chinos, peel the blood-stiffened sock from his skin. He looked up and saw the banker watching and clapped his hands on his knees and said, “I need to reallocate some funds and maybe establish a trust.”

“It looks like you might need stitches,” said the banker.

“I might go to the drugstore later,” he said. “Get some analgesics.”

When the banker took him back and accessed his portfolio with the various websites and passwords he’d been given, he saw an inordinate amount of money diversified across a wide spectrum of investment vehicles. This caused him to turn away from his computer screen and stare at the man across from him. His foot was perched on the edge of the desk and he was picking dried blood from his leg and collecting the flakes in the palm of his hand. The banker fished the garbage pail out from under the desk. “Do you need this?” he asked. Tim pocketed the flakes of dried blood as if they were so many nickels and dimes and settled back in the chair and looked past the banker. The banker returned the pail to his desk.

“Are those your diplomas on the wall?” he asked.

The banker turned to the wall and said they were.

“They’ll come down someday,” he told the banker.

When he finished banking, he walked out into a cold and still afternoon under solid ashen clouds. Cold pricked the insides of his nostrils. He wandered through a parking lot and then followed the exiting cars to the road where he walked along the curb to an intersection of three competing drugstores. He patronized the closest one. In the middle of the store he found a rack of sweatshirts. Among them was one of orange cotton with an iron-on decal of a cornucopia spilling forth with vegetables and rich with autumnal colors. It said Happy Thanksgiving. He bought it. He also bought some rope, a steak knife and a box of cookies. He threw his old belt away behind the drugstore, where his breath blew white, and with the knife fashioned a new one out of the rope.

He circled a downtown rotary. He fell asleep in the city square. In the morning he woke up to a young man squatting a foot away. The young man wore a blue polo with an official insignia visible between the flaps of an unzipped down jacket. He held a small cardboard box with a cardboard handle and fruit emblazoned on the sides. He had been trying to wake him without violating one of the first rules of training: never touch the Client. Sometimes the Client had bloodshot alcoholic slits for eyes and took a minute to orient himself, in certain extreme situations, like the victim of a car crash .

Tim clambered to a sitting position and leaned back against the gray stone of the city building.

“Good morning,” said the young man. “Would you like some lunch?”

He offered him the cardboard box. When he made no move to take it, the young man said, “I’m going to leave it here,” and set the lunch box just outside the perimeter of a circle of pigeon waste. “It has enough calories to keep you going for twenty-four hours.” He continued to squat. “It’s cold out here, you know,” he said. “You’re going to need more than just that sweatshirt.”

“Fuck him,” he replied.

The young man looked around, but there was no one else there. Finally he stood and walked away.

“Hey!”

The young man turned. The Client was holding the lunch box. “You have me confused with someone interested. Come back here and get this.”

The young man returned. If the Client refuses to accept the offered meal, gently encourage him to reconsider, while maintaining the appropriate distance. Do not insist if he continues to refuse. Always remain courteous .

“Are you sure you don’t want it?”

“The makers of our Constitution,” he replied, “undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness, conferring, as against the Government, the right to be left alone — the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man.”

The young man looked at him. “I’m not with the government,” he said. “I’m with Food Bank America.”

The lunch box remained suspended in the air between them. The young man took it and walked away.

Then the other started to howl with a kind of primal senescence. The pitch rose above Tim’s pride and forced him to call the young man back a second time. He took the lunch box and, in exchange, offered him a hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet. The money was a condition for taking the food, which the confused young man, more than surprised by the amount in the Client’s possession, finally agreed to accept, after much protest, as a donation to the cause.

On the state highway, drivers came around the bend erratic and unmindful. These were roads no one expected a pedestrian to walk down. The electricity poles all had a lean to them. A carload of teenagers passed by honking as if he were a night at the prom.

Clouds of broken granite covered the sky. He passed the Village Dodge and the Wonderland Farms Storage. He walked past rain-bleached boxes of cigarettes and what might have been the carapace of a sea turtle. He didn’t believe he was anywhere near the ocean.

He stood at the customer-service desk of a Barnes and Noble waiting for the woman at the computer to free up. In the meantime he bent to a knee and gingerly untied his shoestring, which had been double-knotted and made tight by water. The blisters of frostbite on his fingertips and the lost sensation in his hands made the action crude and slow. He pulled off the wet sock and saw that his remaining toes were also blistered and his foot was as white as the pallor of his hands. Removing the shoe momentarily eased the pulsating swelling caused by so much walking. His feet were like two engorged and squishy hearts.

He rolled up the cuff of his chinos to inspect the cut on his leg. There was weeping from the abscess. A halo of soft pink tissue surrounded it. The calf had ballooned. He had been confusing its stench for the MasterCard T-shirt. He removed dirt with his fingernail — not dirt, it turned out, but a trapped bug.

“Can I help you?” asked the woman.

He sprung up. “I’m looking for a book on birds.”

“Any particular title?”

“Something I can use to identify them in the wild.”

Name a bird and master the world. Reveal nature’s mystery and momentarily triumph over it. The fleeting containment within the mind of spotted flight, which has no name until you give it one. That was something the other could never do. He should buy a book on butterflies and trees, too. Trees would include flowers and shrubbery.

The woman stepped away from the help desk and quickly started on her way to Nature. He walked behind her with his cuff still rolled, holding his sock and shoe. It was only when she arrived at the section and turned to look at him that she saw his exposed leg, swollen like a goiter in the middle of the calf.

“Oh my God,” she said.

He read books on birding in the café. He warmed himself with cups of coffee and replenished on the baked goods under the display case. Then he was forced to move as quickly as possible through the store to the men’s room, where he remained a long time. A manager came in and said generally, “Is everyone okay in here?”