The Unnamed (26 page)

“We’re nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“It hasn’t been an active case for a long time.”

“Why did I establish a trust, then?” he cried. “I made a specific provision in the trust for your firm to be paid so that the case would continue.”

“It’s not a matter of money, Tim. We got the money.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I refunded the payments.”

Tim leaned back in the booth and looked at Fritz confidently for the first time. “What the hell for?”

“We can’t find him,” said Fritz, leaning forward over his untouched coffee. “We’ve looked, Tim. We’ve looked everywhere. We can’t find him.”

“So you just quit?”

“It’s a cold case, man. I’m sorry. It’s been cold for years.”

“You can’t find one guy, big firm like yours and one guy eludes you, when R.H. is wasting away in his cell.”

“R.H. is dead, Tim. R.H. killed himself.”

“How hard can it be to find one guy?” he asked. “You found me, didn’t you?”

Tim sank down in the booth. His view now included the ill-swept tiled floor and the windowsill scattered with dead flies. Fritz looked at him intently, his elbows on the table, but said nothing.

“So if there’s no news for me,” said Tim, “why did you stop by?”

Fritz turned briefly to look out at the uneven slope of the parking lot, its potholes and crumbling blacktop. He turned back. Tim’s obdurate eyes remained under the table.

“She was worried,” he said. “She asked me to find you. She wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“She? Who’s she?”

Fritz pointed out the window.

“What?” said Tim. “What am I looking at?” He turned back to Fritz with an expression of outrage. “Oh, no, that’s unacceptable,” he said. “That’s totally unacceptable.”

“She’s your wife,” said Fritz.

“I’m working right now, goddamn it. I have work to do.”

“She just wants to know you’re okay,” he said.

She talked briefly to Fritz before going in. Tim kept his eyes focused outside the window as she entered the restaurant and approached him.

She came up close to him and reached out and touched his cheek. He didn’t want her to, but he did not move. He tried not to think of how he must look to her. He looked quickly into her eyes but then turned away. He did not want to read the emotion on her face. He did not want to see the particulars of her face again or how they came together to make her beauty. He did not want to know how she had or had not aged or what she wore, if it was something old or something he would not recognize. He did not want to be so close to her that he could smell her perfume. It was that faint but unmistakable scent and her pale eyes and her freckles that announced her inimitable self and called him back to everything he loved about the world.

“You haven’t been taking care of yourself,” she said. She glanced at the table for a plate that wasn’t there. “When did you last eat something?” she asked. “You’re too thin.” She smoothed down the hair on the back of his head. “Please talk to me,” she said. She stayed standing over him as if they had merely just finished eating and while he was collecting the change she was casually showing him affection in the instant before he stood, in the moment before they got back in the car together and returned home. “You need a wash,” she said. With patience she picked a nettle from his oily hair, a nettle from a tree he must have brushed past. “Where you’ve been,” she said, shaking her head. Her eyes filled with tears. She finally let her hand fall. “I’m going to sit down,” she said. She slid into the booth, opposite him. She wore a light pink blouse of crepe de chine with three-quarter sleeves. The color highlighted the fairness of her skin, that reddish tint that maintained without effort the youthfulness of her face. Her laugh lines and the crow’s-feet raying out at the corners of her eyes were an incongruity on that girlish face, like some unfair miscalculation. Her entire presence there was an incongruity. It brightened the dismal fluorescent brutality that such chain places wore like trademarks—unmistakable lighting from the highway, the national color of insomnia and transience. The hard booths were an insufferable yellow.

“Are you not going to talk to me?” she asked.

She reached out for him with both hands. He did not want her to touch his disfigured hands nor did he want to feel her touch, but again he didn’t move. He managed only to keep his eyes averted. His apparent indifference might have seemed to come from someone hardened past the point of having his heart moved. With her arms outstretched and her hands covering one of his, her silence grew out into the kind of delicate pause that is called for when the other person is in deep mourning and minor gestures are meant to offer some portion of an unattainable solace.

She looked at his hand in hers. “Your poor fingers,” she said.

He heard the quiver in her voice. He pulled away. He placed his hands together under the table, away. Soon he felt the phantom sensation of her hands. The advantages the other had over him, advantages that made hunger gnawing and pain vigilant and a touch from a woman bound up in memories of love more unbearable than all the other ills put together, were insurmountable. The senses were unvanquishable. He despised her for reminding him. There could be no stronger reminder. Hungry? Fuck you, two days without food. Hurting? Too bad, it’s your funeral. But Jane. Jane was different. He resided behind armed checkpoints and coils of razor wire and slabs of blastproof concrete, but her touch was a convoy.

“Becka misses you.”

“Please don’t talk about her,” he said.

She was silent. “I miss you,” she said. “Your apartment misses you. Tell me you don’t miss it. Tell me you don’t miss the muffins I make you. You try to find a muffin like that in here. Try to find one fifty miles in any direction. I don’t know how we’ll do it, Tim, but we’ll do it. And you’ll be there when the apartment fills up with the smell of muffins. Haven’t we done it in the past? We’ll do it better this time. We’ve learned some things. Tell me you don’t miss it.”

The ghost smell, triggered by his memory of her sweet baking, made his mouth water and brought on such a strong physical yearning that his body reasserted itself over his mind completely and he had to admit finally that he was not in the city and not at the office. He was in the front booth of a Waffle House on the unnamed borderland between two stagnating townships.

“Tell me you don’t miss sitting in front of me in the bath getting your hair washed,” she said. “Tell me that isn’t a better consolation for your sickness than this.”

“I have work to do,” he said.

“Tell me it’s not a better consolation,” she said. “Tell me you don’t miss my fingers in your hair. Let me show you.”

“No.”

“Let me remind you.”

“No.”

“Tell me,” she said, standing and moving with a fluid grace from her side of the booth to his, and lowering her voice so that it entered only his ear, “tell me you don’t miss your tongue in my pussy. Tell me you can make any sense of this world without that, without your lips on my pussy, making me come.”

Her words shocked him. They started an erection he didn’t want. He moved closer to the window to put distance between them.

“Tell me one of us should suffer without the other’s help. Tell me you’d let me wander off on my own, forget to eat, forget to bathe, forget the promises we made. I know you think you’re doing this for me. I know you think it’s saving me by freeing me up to live my life. But that’s not living. My life is you.”

So much of who he was was involuntary. The watering mouth, the stirring erection, the unbidden burning in his eyes. The only control over the coursing world that he retained in his littleness was his selfless refusal to turn.

“Tell me you don’t miss me,” she said. “Tell me honestly that this is working out for you, that you’ve found the best way to live with it, that of all possible solutions, this is the only one, and it doesn’t include me—you tell me that, Tim, and I’ll go away.”

He sat very still, like a sullen boy whose stunted brain lacked the resources to admit error and forsake the lost days for a better way.

With her arms around him, she pulled herself toward him, raising herself up a little on the hard bench so that her chin rested on his shoulder, and she fought her tears to speak as firmly as she had since entering, though he refused to turn to her even an inch.

“I’ve come a long way to find you,” she said, “and it took so much longer than I thought it would, too long, and the wait killed me, but I was patient, because I promised your daughter that I would find you and bring you home, and I promised myself that, too, no matter how you objected or what you said. And if I leave here without you, my heart will break. But if you tell me you don’t want me, if you tell me you still have to go it alone, then I will leave you alone.”

He sat silent and unmoving. Her chin was against his shoulder. He felt her hot tears.

She felt his reply in the vibrations of his body.

“I don’t want you,” he said.

She sat next to him for a while, unable to rise right away. Eventually she released him but remained in the booth beside him. Ella and the truckers glanced over at them. Angled away from each other as they were, he and Jane might have seemed enmeshed in some petty domestic squabble. Jane slipped a napkin out from under the silverware and wiped her face. Then she leaned back into Tim, put her arms around him and hugged him, kissed him on the cheek, on the temple, and stood up and left the restaurant.

Her embrace stayed with him. He remained sitting in the same position, unable to move. There was nothing he could do now to reclaim unawareness. He had lost to the other. The rest of the day was shot. He was just dithering now, waiting for the walk to take him, and, following hard after the walk ended, the struggle to find shelter. He was lost in this grim forecast when someone knocked at the window. At first he didn’t recognize her. She wore a simple red sundress and a pair of leather flats. The sundress was patternless and fell over her new figure. Her hair was long and layered and the natural chestnut brown it had been when she was a little girl. She was almost a different person, but he knew her. She stood close enough to touch. She waved at him. He looked at her, at his daughter waving through the glass, and without thinking of how ugly it might look to her, he raised his hand and waved back.

His condition never went into remission again, the walking never ceased. The nature of how he walked and his relationship to it as that thing which hijacked his body and led him into the wilderness (for everywhere was a wilderness to him who had known only the interiors of homes and offices and school buildings and restaurants and courthouses and hotels) changed over time, over a long adjustment and many misfortunes. The path itself was one of peaks and valleys, hot and cold in equal measure, rock, sedge and rush, the coil of barbed wire around a fence post, the wind boom of passing semis, the scantness and the drift.

He removed his medication from the labeled plastic baggies that had proven good for storage and transport. He placed the pills in a small pile on the floor of the tent. He poured water into the tin cup from the thermos and drank them down. Then he returned the baggies to the pack and rose to a squat. He released the air from the pallet and rolled it up and rolled up the bedroll and latched them tightly to the pack. Then he took down the tent. Finally it bulged fatly in its blue vinyl bag. He strapped it on top of the pack, so that as he walked, it hovered just behind his head. He loaded up the few essentials left by the campfire and doused what remained of the fire with creekwater. Then he set off under a full moon at the start of frost. He would look for some way to dispel his considerable energies in the downtime before a new walk began.

He came up from the arroyo and walked a mile down to an ATM. He withdrew enough cash to make it awhile. Then he walked across the street and ordered eggs and coffee. He stood up and took the newspaper from a nearby table, but none of it kept his interest. A strong breeze pressed against the plate glass and seeped diminished through the cheap glazing. Outside a woman was nearly halted by the wind and he heard a man’s laughter as he reached back for her arm. His food came. He ate a late breakfast as the cloudburst moved in. Then he was on the other side of the glass in his transparent poncho heading toward the coastal springs, into the wind.

In the past he could sleep anywhere, in the snares of frostbite and the hothouses of heatstroke, exposed to ticks, spiders, snakes, the insult of birds, the menace of authorities and of the evil intentions of men.

The decision one night to sleep on the side of the road had forced him into the back of a squad car and his God talk and end-of-days ranting combined with some old-fashioned disrespect ended him up in the psych ward under physical restraint. He was given a more effective cocktail of antipsychotics and forced to take it, daily, until his release, upon which time the importance of finding seclusion and providing protection for himself became intuitive again. That’s when he bought the tent, the bedroll and the new pack.

He established a rule never to linger too long at a campsite. He was not free to enjoy the ebb and flow of an hour, the leaves quivering in the wind, or the distant patch of drifting sky. Meditation and mindless wonder led to disaster.

He had once walked away from a campsite out of a valley and across a pine ridge, down an embankment to the foothills, where he awoke behind an Airstream in a designated vehicle area. Night rain on his skyward face woke him. He played back the image of the valley as it broadened and the tent receded. He had been forced to walk away from the few and only things he still possessed and they had taken on a value greater than any other man would have given them. The separation felt like heartbreak. He did not have the first hint how to return.

He searched for two days, and on the third day he started to withdraw from the medication, which was with his other things at the campsite. He became lightheaded and short of breath. He followed the arterial road into town and wandered around a Men’s Wearhouse where he sorted unhappily through the tie racks. He paid for a double-breasted suit and arranged for its tailoring in anticipation of an important meeting. He burrowed further into mental daze after returning to the park. He started talking to himself again. He scolded the other and prayed to God that the foot soldiers of His army would vanquish the chariots and trespassers of the enemy on the frontlines of battle threatening him with chaos and death. His steadiness defected on the rain-slicked switchbacks, and he was laid out on a picnic bench, soaked through and bleeding, when the ranger came upon him.