The Unnamed (22 page)

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.

He had called Jane three times, once from a motel in Newark, once from a pay phone in Chatham, and then once from Potters-town, nearly fifty miles away. They learned these town names by taking down the area codes from caller ID and looking them up on the Internet. Eight days had passed since his last call.

“What does he say when he calls?” Becka had asked.

“Not a whole lot that’s coherent,” her mother replied.

The rides out to New Jersey reminded Becka of the ones she took as a kid. Except now her mother was going ninety miles an hour and they had no idea of a final destination. They just got in the car and drove, wandering around New Jersey, aimless and on edge, their eyes everywhere but on the road. Usually, as now, they ended up at one of the police stations.

An officer came out to talk to them. He took the flyer with Tim’s picture and all of Jane’s information and then he assured them that if anyone from the Oldwick police department ran into him, they’d contact her right away. She and Becka walked out into the start of another long night inching toward winter.

On the interstate Becka’s eyes moved back and forth from the median to the side of the road, squinting for her dad through the gloaming. She gazed up underpass ramps and turned her head to peer back at the concrete pylons. She saw nothing up the exits and no human shape or color among the clusters of trees. He was nowhere. Or he was standing right at the point she had just turned away from an instant earlier. She felt the deep deficit of not being omniscient and the insecurity of human limitations that a time of crisis lays bare. They’d never find him. They had already passed him. He was standing in front of them mile after mile but they were too blind and frantic to see.

She let her eyes drift from outside the car to her mother, who was holding herself together, all things considered. Her mother’s eyes were also moving from road to median to rearview mirror. Becka had her hand on the parking brake between them, and for an instant she had a familiar urge to yank it up with everything she had. They would then skid safely to a stop and take a big collective sigh and turn to each other and abruptly burst into laughter. Then her mom would undo the brake and drive them home. They would eat together somewhere in the Village and Becka would finally open up about all the boys she had had crushes on since the third grade, all the secrets and vulnerabilities that she had kept from her mom first and foremost, for some obscure reason, and her mom would be able to share a bottle of wine with her without consequence. They would embrace outside the subway station before Becka went back to her apartment in Brooklyn, where she worked as a bartender and played in a band. Once a week they would get together to do something like that, and their conversation would never, or almost never, touch upon her father, whom she had known only as either absence or sickness. They might mention him in passing with some sadness or toast him in memoriam on his birthday. They would not talk about the nights they each spent alone in their separate beds, sobbing for a memory or simply staring blankly in the dark, wondering why and never receiving an answer.

The phone began to ring on the windowsill, where Jane had not intended to leave it. She leapt up from the sofa and studied the caller ID. She glanced away, defeated. Becka listened as her mom told the party on the other end to call the main office, she wasn’t showing at the moment. She had to repeat herself. “I said call the main office,” said Jane. “The main office!” She paused.
“Then look it up in the fucking phone book!”

She stabbed the phone long and hard and it issued a discordant tone change, a small chaotic noise. She walked back to the sofa.

Becka had a feeling that he wasn’t coming home. She didn’t know how she knew this. It was an intuition brought on by the memory of the misery he suffered strapped to the hospital bed and a certainty that he would not willingly repeat it.

“Are you prepared for him not to come home?” she asked.

“He has to come home,” Jane said. “What other option is there?”

She told Becka about the man who had tried to rape him behind the grocery store in Newark. “It’s not safe. There’s only one place for him.”

The phone rang again. Jane answered and turned to Becka, nodding. It was him. “He won’t stop talking,” she said. She listened awhile longer. “I can’t make sense of it.”

“Tell him I’m here. Tell him I want to know where he is.”

“Tim? Tim, Becka’s here. She wants to know where you are.”

She could hear her dad’s voice, muffled inside the phone, breathlessly spilling out word after word as her mom’s face grew increasingly blank. She looked at Becka and shook her head almost imperceptibly. “This is what I mean,” she said, and handed the phone to Becka.

“Dad?”

“—cruel, and dumb. Like those idiot kids from the high school, you see them in the movie theater, you can’t understand their speech. You don’t know, maybe they’re going to follow you out into the parking lot and jump on your car and then pummel you to death with a baseball bat. He doesn’t know reason—”

“Dad—”

“What sort of life is that? He belongs in an institution, but what institution would have him? There’s nothing specially designed, there’s no expert on hand. Oh, I know, they’re all experts, we’re nothing but a country of experts. But this one? This one’s an idiot. So treat him like an idiot. I don’t just mean restrain him. I mean subdue him, electrify him. Electrify him at the highest voltages, and beat him, they should beat him with batons, they should withhold food from him, starve him into submission, starve him within an inch of his life. They really should just abandon the hope of reform and work on him and work on him like cult leaders do, you know, like how political torturers do, really work him down until there is nothing left, he will never walk again, there is just a mad little smile maybe, maybe every once in a while he opens his eyes or remembers a little bit of song
… news guy wept and told us… earth was really dying… cried so much his face was wet—
I’d be happy with that,” he said, and then the phone went dead.

You go on and on. Your one note gets repetitive, it’s taxing. The crying, the lowing, the constant me me me. Do you know what you’re missing? The color of birds, a vibrant spectrum. The moon. The, the… a lot, let’s just say you’re missing a lot. Some very interesting people, opening their eyes to the wonder of the world, responded by taking voyages across the ocean, setting up easels on mountaintops. You, on the other hand, you hum. You vibrate with cold pain. You moan dumbly of want and complaint. Your steady low register, it would have driven them mad. They would have jumped overboard if their souls had been saddled with you.

“You are a hominid,” Tim said out loud.

Food!

Thunder was rattling in the distance and the lightning cut a vein of silver across a cloudy opaline sky.

“You have walked backward three million years. You are a branch of ancestors fallen extinct.”

Food! replied the other mutely.

“Food!” Tim cried out above the thunder.

People packing up their trunks and returning their carts stopped to look.

Food food food! the other howled.

“FOOD FOOD FOOD FOOD FOOD!” cried Tim.

And within the minute they had walked the rest of the way through the parking lot of the supermarket.

He waited out by the pine tree under the eerie light of dawn. When the Dunkin’ Donuts opened he walked across the street and brought back a dozen doughnuts and set them on the ground and ate them by the pine tree. The other stopped saying food, food, and started saying leg, leg—but he continued to eat the doughnuts and ignored him. One by one the bankers showed up and filed into the bank. He crawled out from under the pine tree and went inside. He was tightening his belt in the lobby when a woman came forward and greeted him. He told her he needed to reallocate some funds and maybe establish a trust. He really didn’t want to deal with the belt anymore. The far notch was too tight but the near notch was not tight enough. The woman stared at him while he debated which notch. He finally settled on the near one.

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.