Joshua Ferris - The Unnamed

He was sitting in a booth in a gas station convenience store. In the booth ahead of him sat an old man drinking coffee and reading a newspaper.

He tapped one edge of the business card against the table until his middle and ring fingers reached the bottom edge. Then he flipped the card over and tapped it down again.

He stood up and walked outside. He crossed the lot to the pay phone and dialed the number on back of the card.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” he said. “I believe you came to see me in the hospital.”

They met at a diner on the Upper West Side. He sat at a booth with a view and while waiting watched a man on the corner, closer to the diner than the street, take a final puff from a cigarette and snuff it out under his shoe. It would have been unremarkable if not for the thin clear tube that ran from the man’s nose down to a portable oxygen tank. It caused him to look closer, and by the time the man entered he realized it was the same man he’d been waiting for, which should not have surprised him. He had been told to look out for the tank.

He stood up and waved. He didn’t think he’d be recognized otherwise.

“Hello.”

“Hello,” said Tim. They shook hands and the man sat down across from him.

“You’ve recovered.”

“More or less.”

“You were in a bad way there for a while. Taking care of yourself?”

“Trying to. Every day I feel about a year older.”

“Oh, I hear that. Try doing it all with emphysema,” he said, grabbing the clear tube that ran up to his nose. “That’s fun. Let me tell you. A-plus fun-o.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Fucking cigarettes,” he said, tapping the pack in his front pocket. “Fuck them to hell.”

They talked awhile longer. Then Tim said, “You said you had something to show me.”

From the inner pocket of his suit coat, Detective Roy removed the sketch from long ago that presented a likeness of the man who had accosted Tim on the bridge. It was quartered by heavy creases and he took care in unfolding it. Then he took out the photograph he had tried showing Tim in the hospital room. Tim patted his pockets in search of the eyeglasses he was still unaccustomed to having at his disposal. He removed the glasses from the case and gazed down at the sketch and the picture sitting side by side on the table. “What am I looking at?”

“This is your sketch. The sketch of the man you thought might have had something to do with the, uh—” He stopped and peered at Tim. “Sorry, do you remember… do you remember a man named R. H. Hobbs?”

Tim looked up from the table. He nodded.

“Sorry,” said the detective. “Stupid of me…”

“Why are you showing me this?”

The detective tapped the picture. “Is that the same man as in the sketch?”

Tim picked up the picture and studied it. “This is an old man,” he said.

“Taking that into account, do you see a resemblance?”

He stared hard at the photograph. It was taken at an office party. The man stood some distance from the camera in a huddle with six or seven others, among cubicle divisions and fluorescent lighting, holding a red plastic cup. The longer and more willfully Tim looked, the more distant his memory of what the man had once looked like grew. He looked frequently to the sketch for help. “Maybe,” he said. “The nose is the same, I think, with that knob in the middle. But it’s not a very good angle.”

The detective coughed violently. “Look harder,” he said, collecting himself. “Concentrate.”

“You don’t have any other pictures?”

“This one’s it.”

He looked back down at it. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

The detective resumed coughing. Soon his eyes were red and teary. His words issued out in the brief staccato pauses. “We want him for another murder… last year… victim like Evelyn Hobbs.”

“How?”

“Same pattern, same stab wounds… and there are others.”

“How many others?”

The woman in the booth behind them turned to see if the detective was going to be all right.

“Do you want some water?” asked Tim.

He dismissed him with an abrupt shake of his head. “And he harassed the lawyer.”

“Harassed?”

“Provoked… as he did you…”

“How?”

“On the street… knew the details. It’s how we got on to him.” Now the detective was having trouble breathing. When he wasn’t coughing, he was wheezing to take in air.

“Do you have him in custody? I could take a look at him, maybe then—”

“Can’t locate him… he might have fled…” The detective stopped talking and abandoned himself entirely to coughing. He was barely able to say he needed some air before standing and walking out of the diner, trailed by his oxygen tank.

Tim waited for the waitress to bring around the check. He paid up front and then joined the detective outside. He found him smoking a cigarette. His coughing was all cleared up. Tim handed back the photograph and the sketch.

“I can’t tell you one way or the other,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

The detective looked down the avenue and exhaled before returning a baleful gaze. “Right now he’s just a person of interest in a single murder. But if we can tie him to Evelyn Hobbs, we can maybe tie him to the others. There are six, maybe as many as eight. And people, family members, who need to know what happened.”

“You were adamant,” he said. “Remember? Only one suspect.”

“I know.”

“He hanged himself in prison.”

“I know,” said the detective. “I know.”

The detective thought he knew something but he knew nothing. What did it matter, these other people? R.H. would never know the details. He would never know the name of the man who might be responsible. That was the travesty. This death-sealed ignorance, and the indifference to that ignorance by any power higher than man.

The detective snuffed his cigarette out under his shoe. “You’re the only one we’ve got,” he said. “The one guy in the world if we’re going to get anywhere on this.”

“Don’t pin that on me,” he said. “You’re the one who didn’t believe my client.”

“And I feel awful about that.”

“Awful enough to kill yourself?”

The detective was taken aback. “To kill myself?” He had fired up a new cigarette and now blew out a dismissive stream. “No,” he said. “Not to kill myself.”

“Then you should feel indifferent,” said Tim.

His departures from the room were peremptory. A sudden movement, a glimpse of him passing through the doorway, and he was gone. “Going now,” he might say. He might be in the middle of recounting for her things he’d seen. “Back soon.”

If they were lucky, he had time to turn his head so that she saw he was addressing her and not some ghost standing before him.

Some days he left, and as he walked, he brooded that his final words to her one day might be, “Going now.”

He did not want his final good-bye to be a hasty good-bye.

He returned one morning smelling of fresh snow and brick mortar, car exhaust and woodsmoke. Was that all in her head? She wanted him to resume telling her what he’d seen. He brought the world inside for her. He stood over the bed.

“I want to say good-bye” he said.

“But you just got here.”

“I mean as if it were for the last time.”

“Why do you want to do that?”

He explained. They had the opportunity, before it was too late, to preempt the regret that nothing or too little had been said between them. She agreed that that might be important. He assumed a serious expression. He did not have anything prepared. He took her hand, kissed it, and said good-bye. She thought there would be more to it, but nothing more came. She started to laugh.