Joshua Ferris - The Unnamed

Five minutes gave way to ten, and ten to twenty. There was no question now that he was starting to press his luck. He had to rise and dress. He had to break down the tent. He still had to find food for the day. There were many things that awaited his command, not least the pleasurable taste of the water he promised himself as a reward for disturbing such a delicate peace.

He languished another twenty minutes. Then he absolutely insisted that he rise that instant and take care of business or else he might find himself wandering out there in the blistering snow, fighting the wind with his bare hands. But just then he realized that, at some point during his sumptuous idling, he had stopped hearing the wind. He didn’t suppose that it could have died completely and so quickly, recalling the terrible fury it was kicking up. He expected the vinyl to whip taut again in its stitching any second now, or at least to hear a few high-pitched, snow-borne whistles of the storm departing, but time marched on and there was nothing. He thought he might open his eyes to see if the silhouette of the falling snow continued to dapple the skin of the tent, but he decided not to exert himself unnecessarily. Instead he chose to do as he had done the night before: settle deep inside himself and listen to the strange, subtle operations going on inside his body. He listened for his heart to whisper its soft word. He listened for the breathing that lifted him up and down inside the bag. But listen… listen… listen was gone. His quiescent nerves gave no signals and received none. He detected nothing but an enormous, gentle stillness from the things he could name and those he couldn’t inside him, the organs and muscles, the cells and tissues. He never had to rise again, the silence informed him. Never had to walk, never had to seek out food, never had to carry around the heavy and the weary weight, and in a measure of time that may have been the smallest natural unit known to man, or that may have been and may still remain all of eternity, he realized that he was still thinking, his mind was still afire, that he had just scored if not won the whole damn thing, and that the exquisite thought of his eternal rest was how delicious that cup of water was going to taste the instant it touched his lips.

Special Thanks:

Reagan Arthur, Julie Barer, Marlena Bittner, Abbie Collins, John Daniel, Willing Davidson, Hilary Gleekman-Greenberg, M.D., Robert Howell, Daniel Kraus, Greg Lembrich, Thornton Lewis, Chris Mickus, Dave Morse, Mary Mount, Ravi Nandan, Sheila Pietrzak, Grant Rosenberg, Karen Shepard, Matt Thomas, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, the Ucross Foundation, and Elizabeth Kennedy: IALYAAT.

JOSHUA FERRIS’S first novel, Then We Came to the End, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and it was a National Book Award Finalist. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Tin House, among other publications. He lives in New York.