Joshua Ferris - The Unnamed

Eventually he reemerged. They asked if he needed an ambulance and he asked what for. He bought one of the birding books and left the store. When his walk started later that evening, he abandoned the book first thing.

Hands and feet are cold. Leg is hurting. Stomach is empty and would like some food.

He was assailed night and day by such complaints. They were crude and unimpeachable. He was accustomed to accommodating his body, so his defiance had to be deliberate, disciplined, as Zen-like as possible.

System is weak in general. Neck stiffness is never good. This dark road is scary.

He had tried to learn bird-watching because the other, despite his ability to detect light and color and movement, was too coarse for such refined activity as the appreciation of beauty and the translation of nature into names. Name a bird and master the world. It would be a victory over brute want and dumb matter.

But brute want was more powerful than he might have guessed. He knew more about case law than he did about bird-watching, so after discarding the burdensome book on birds he started reciting the better bits from famous decisions. The recitation of case law was refinement purely of the mind, many layers of sophistication above what the other could ever hope to achieve.

Fluid balance is essential to proper organ function. A fever indicates the need for medical attention. Would that not be a fine place to stop and rest?

“Law in its most general and comprehensive sense signifies a rule of action,” he said, “which is prescribed by some superior and which the inferior is bound to obey.”

McDonald’s is quick, tasty, and conveniently located. Everyone loves TV. Discharging semen is an unbeatable sensation.

“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women, and when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.”

Operations functioning below his reach were sending out distress signals. He ignored them as much as possible. He revolted against the disproportionate power enjoyed by chemical imbalances and shorting neural circuits. He could say the words “autonomic nervous system,” whereas the autonomic nervous system just was; therefore he was superior to the autonomic nervous system. He passed the Printing Plus and Pik-Kwik and the Wing Ting. All the driveways in the subdivision had pickups and one had a Corvette. “Corvette,” he said.

He climbed partway up the hill behind a Jiffy Lube, closed for the night, where he fell asleep. He woke with his head on the hard earth and for an hour or two listened to the hydraulic thunder of the mechanics’ instruments and to the banter of the men at their work.

Good shoes are not simply a luxury. Funny looks from male strangers are unsettling. A change in bowel habits is cause for alarm.

Later, when the day’s walk seized him, it was his turn to complain to the other. He passed billboards and stoplights and shopping centers. There were stop signs and rec centers and residential houses. There were train tracks and entrance ramps and signal towers.

“You go on and on about how cold and hungry you are,” he said. “The night is long, you say. Good shoes are not just a luxury. But then you’re off and there’s no appeal. There’s no explanation for your behavior and no memory of your complaints. Are you not still cold? Are you not hungry? What is your purpose, your aim, but to hurl us both into suffering and darkness? Speak to me! You destroy my life, you rob me of my will, you troll me through the streets like meat on a hook. You have laid plain all my limitations and my total illusion of freedom. To what end? What do you gain from this?”

The other limped along steadily, saying nothing.

They agreed on one thing. If he wanted to starve the other of all alimentation, if his only pleasure was a kind of a suicidal spite, he did a good job with shelter and a so-so one with food, but he failed every time to resist the call of sleep. When the other stopped, he could have kept right on walking and driven him into the ground. He could have drowned himself in a body of water or thrown himself in front of a car. But he was too exhausted. The body released him, and then he walked bareheaded to some hovel, to some dubious sanctuary, where they collapsed in a harmony of purpose. For a minute, he knew the meaning of bliss: oblivion. In oblivion, they were at peace.

He came out of the men’s room. The man who had been knocking swung wide to let him pass. He left through the side door where the drive-thru line had stalled and vomited up his lunch by the dumpster. He wandered off to a nearby patch of frostbitten grass between the McDonald’s and the Conoco and sat down there and perspired. The cars out on the road went by in slow motion.

He stopped in front of a display window in a downtown district recently renovated so as to better highlight its desolation. He stared through the glass of a sporting goods store at a pitched tent with a forest-green fly-sheet. Accessories surrounded the camp pastoral — a lantern and a canteen and a fire made of cardboard.

He lay down on a bench and took a nap. The city cop woke him by hitting his billy club against the wood.

“You got identification?” asked the cop.

He sat up slowly. He removed his wallet from the back pocket of his chinos. His insensate fingers made it difficult to remove the license. The cop looked it over and handed it back to him.

“No sleeping here.”

“Do you know your right-of-public-access laws?”

The cop looked at him. “You got some place to go, wise guy?”

With a crude and mechanical deliberation he opened the wallet in his lap and removed a crisp sheaf of newly minted hundred-dollar bills and made their edges flop between his fingers. “I can go anywhere I want.”

“Then get there,” said the cop.

“Your concern for my well-being is touching.”

The cop started to walk away.

“One might as well ask if the State, to avoid public unease, could incarcerate all who are physically unattractive or socially eccentric,” he called out. “Mere public intolerance or animosity cannot constitutionally justify the deprivation of a person’s physical liberty!”

He went back to sleep. When he woke up, he said no, he would not get up, no matter what, not now, no getting up, you are a fleshy weed for plucking. He said you are a feast for worms. You are a carping and hidebound bitch with your fevers and limps and predictable appetites.

Deficiency of copper causes anemia, just so you know. Which at this point is way down there on the list of concerns.

“A stench, a rotgut, a boil,” he retorted aloud, rising again on the bench. A woman stood nearby walking her dog. When his voice rose up she tugged at the leash to get the sniffing dog going again. “A gaseous blowhole. You are a blind clutch and claw. Go off. Go off and leave me alone.”

Can’t.

“You hang on the wheel of fortune. I rise upward on angel’s wings. You turn in the gyre. I dream of old lovers with youthful smiles.”

Sorry, pal, we’re in this together.

“Prove it!” he cried.

What is a wing? What is a smile?

“You can’t be smart,” he said. “Only I can be smart.”

I’m evolving, replied the other.

A crane and a tractor and a few smaller excavating vehicles sat as still as a display of dinosaurs in the man-made pit behind the convenience store. He took the access road down and sat in the cabin of the tractor as he ate a pair of hot dogs. He was able to keep them down, which he attributed to the other’s shrewd calculation for what nourishment a walk would require. “You are a wily cunt,” he said.

On the road that led out of town, a blackbird fell out of the sky. A second bird hit the shoulder and a third one landed in the far lane, followed by the rest of the flock. They hit with heavy thuds one after the other and lay scattered like jacks on the road. Then darkness fell and he was walking again.