“Is it the walking thing again, Mr. Farnsworth?”
Astonishment wiped his face clean of expression. No one at the firm knew—that he had made sure of. That had been the first priority. He had elegantly explained away his two earlier leaves of absence: everyone knew about Jane’s struggle with cancer. But now he wondered: did others know the real reason, and how many? Or was it simply true what they said, that Frank Novovian in security knew everything before anyone else?
“What walking thing?”
“From before,” said Frank.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Frank.”
“Oh,” said the security man. “Never mind.”
“You can go back to your post now.”
“Okay, Mr. Farnsworth.” But Frank kept walking beside him. “Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Farnsworth?”
There was never anything anyone could do. Jane could handcuff him to the headboard until his wrists couldn’t take another day, and Becka could feign understanding until she could flee the room again, and Bagdasarian could revisit the medical annals and run another MRI, and Hochstadt could design another pharmacological cocktail, and the Mayo Clinic could follow him with furrowed brows around the outskirts of Rochester again, and Cowley at the Cleveland Clinic could recommend psychiatric evaluation based on his patient’s “health-care-seeking behavior,” and Montreux’s Dr. Euler could throw up his hands again, Yari Tobolowski could prepare another concoction of bat-wing extract, Sufi Regina could smoke him with the incense promises of a spiritually guided life-force energy, his channels could be reopened and his mind-body connection yoga’d and Reiki’d and Panchakarma’d until he was as one, as a rock is as one—but the goddamned thing was back. Hope and denial, the sick person’s front and rear guards against the devastation of another attack, were gone.
“You can call my wife,” he replied at last, “and tell her to expect a call from me.”
The bodhisattva had encouraged him to look deeply into his reliance upon technology. Email and PDA, cell phone and voice mail were extensions of the ruinous consuming self. They made thoughts of the self instantaneously and irrepressibly accessible. Who’s calling me, who’s texting me, who wants me, me, me. The ego went along on every walk and ride, replacing the vistas and skylines, scrambling the delicate meditative code. The self was cut off from the hope that the world might reassert itself over the digitized clamor and the ego turn again into the sky, the bird, the tree.
He didn’t touch mouse or keyboard, keypad or scroll button all the months of his previous recurrence, and it had thrived then, and now it was back, so so much for the bodhisattva.
11
She said his name three times into the phone, each time louder than the last. The other brokers in the open plan looked up from their preoccupations. “You have to concentrate, Tim,” she said. She stood up and her chair rolled back to tap the desk behind her. The person sitting there exchanged a look with his colleague across the aisle. “What’s the name of the road, can you see a name?” It was impossible for anyone to ignore her. “But what town? What town?” She seemed to regain some measure of control. She sat back down and issued careful instructions, as specific as they were mysterious. “You have to call nine-one-one. Are you listening? If you can call me you can call nine-one-one. But if they can’t locate you—Tim? If they can’t locate you, you have to walk into that subdivision. I know you’re tired but you don’t have a choice if they don’t know where to pick you up. Move away from the main road. Are you listening? Move into the neighborhood. Go to the first house and ring the doorbell. Stay awake until somebody opens the door. If nobody opens the door, go to the next house. You tell them to call nine-one-one. Then you can fall asleep. Somebody has to call nine-one-one before you fall asleep. I know you’re tired, I know you’re tired, but are you listening?” She stood again. “Tim, are you awake?” She waited for him to reply. “Tim, wake up!” Everyone was silent. The only sound in the office now was of telephones allowed to ring. “Go into the subdivision! I will find you!”
He walked from the main road to the subdivision. His body trembled with cold. It had let him know, five minutes earlier, that the walk had come to its end. He wore his suit coat backward, the back in front, which did better against the wind, and his hands were wrapped in plastic bags. He had swooped down during the walk and plucked them from the icy ground, one hand in a black plastic bag and the other in a white one.
The first house was circumscribed by a chain-link fence. He forced the latch up and stumbled to the door. He tried to think of what he might say. The right idea wasn’t coming. The words behind the idea were out of reach. He was at one remove from the person who knew how to form ideas and say words.
He fell to his knees before he could ring the doorbell. He put his bagged hands on the storm door and rested his head there. The metal was cold against his cheek. He fought with angry determination for two or three seconds. If he could defy the tidal fatigue, his body wouldn’t win, and he might still learn that someone had discovered him and would see him to safety.
She made calls from her desk, starting with the easternmost hospitals and moving west. She left her name and number in case he should be admitted later. She was not unfamiliar with the patient voices of the operators, their assurances that she would be contacted immediately should his name appear in the computer. Colleagues came up to ask if everything was okay. Sure, sure everything’s okay. You’ve done this yourself, right—searched random hospitals for the one you love? Again she stared at the blank wall of explanation. She could have asked have you ever heard of… but there was no name. She could have said it’s a condition that afflicts only… but there were no statistics. “Everything’s fine,” she assured them. She turned back to the phone and dialed another hospital.
The call came in around five, perfectly timed for rush hour. Better late than never. Better than going to identify his body at the morgue. Still, she was angry when they told her he had been admitted two hours earlier. Nothing like wasting time making fruitless calls when she could have been on her way. That was always the impulse when she finally located him: I have to get to him. And when she got to him: never let him go.
She left the office to sit in traffic and didn’t reach the hospital until quarter to seven. He was in the waiting room of the ER. She moved past shell-shocked people and children playing on the floor. He sat against the far wall covered in a blanket, wearing a black wool cap. His face was windburned that distinct pink color two shades lighter than damage done by the sun.
“Your face,” she said.
“How’d you find me?”
“I made calls.”
“You always find me,” he said.
“It’s easier when you have the GPS with you.” She sat down next to him. “Where’s your pack?”
“They’re worried about my toes. The blisters are bad.”
“Where’s your pack, Tim?”
“I had just gone down to Peter’s,” he said. “But when I left I went in the opposite direction.”
“I asked you to always have the pack,” she said.
“Frank Novovian gave me his cap.”
She had to remember who Frank Novovian was. “The security guy?”
“All I had to do was ask for it.”
“You promised me you would carry your pack with you wherever you went.”
“I just went down the hall,” he said.
They drove into the city to retrieve the pack and then they headed home. She drove. He sat gazing silently out the window at the nothing scenery passing them in the night. He turned to her at last and announced that he hadn’t bothered to explain to the attending doctor what he was doing out in the cold for so long.
“You didn’t tell the attending?” she said. “Why wouldn’t you tell the attending?”
“Those band-aid scientists,” he said, “don’t get to know about me anymore.”
This alarmed her. They had always had faith, bot
h of them, in the existence of the One Guy, out there somewhere, living and working with the answer. It was the One Guy they sought in Rochester, Minnesota, in San Francisco, in Switzerland, and, closer to home, in doctors’ offices from Manhattan to Buffalo. Time was, he would stop anyone, interns and med students included. Time was, he would travel halfway across the world. Now he couldn’t be bothered to so much as state the facts to an attending?
“One of those band-aid scientists may have the answer, Tim. You might be surprised someday.”
“What surprise?” he said. “There are no more surprises. The only way they could surprise me is if they gave up the secret recipe to their crock of shit.”
They pulled off the highway, went under the overpass and down Route 22, where the stoplights and shopping centers of their life together greeted them from both sides of the four lanes. His frostbitten hands were wrapped in something like Ace bandages intended to insulate them from the cold, a pair of taupe and layered mitts.
“I don’t like the way you’re talking,” she said.
“What way is that?”
“Without hope.”
They started up the hill that led into the neighborhood, headlights illuminating clumps of days-old snow formless as manatees, dusted with black exhaust. The blacktop glowed with cold, the salted road was white as bone.
“I must be crazy,” he said.
“Crazy?”
“I’m the only one, Jane. No one else on record. That’s crazy.”
“You’re not crazy,” she said. “You’re sick.”
“Yeah, sick in the head.”
He was a logical man who believed, as the good lawyer, in the power of precedent. Yet there was no precedent for what he suffered, and no proof of what qualified as a disease among the physicians and clinical investigators: a toxin, a pathogen, a genetic disorder. No evidence of any physical cause. No evidence, no precedent—and the experts could give no positive testimony. That left only the mind.
“I wish you would call Dr. Bagdasarian,” she said.
He didn’t reply, and they reached the house in silence. She took the driveway slowly as the garage door pulled up. She put the car in park and opened the door. She turned to him before stepping out. He stared through the windshield. Tears fell down his face into his day’s growth of beard.
“Oh, banana,” she said.
She turned in her seat and placed a hand on his chest. She felt his staccato breathing, the resistance as he inhaled to letting himself go further than he already had. He didn’t like to cry. He was fighting it the way a boy fights sleep, the mind pitted against the body and proving weaker. He cried so seldom that tears instinctively sprung to her eyes, too, the way they had when she was a girl and sympathy was as natural as breathing.
That night in bed she made him an offer. She would dress according to the weather, follow him as he walked, and watch over him as he slept. To make it possible she was going to quit her job. How could she be at work with any peace of mind when he might be anywhere at any moment, lost in the city and scared as a child?
“I know you won’t go back in the cuffs,” she said. “So the only solution is for me to quit.”
“I don’t want you to quit,” he said.
She had been able to take care of him when he required cuffing to the bed only because she wasn’t working. Then—poof! It disappeared. Her relief was enormous. She looked back on those barren days in the bedroom with a hazy feeling of house arrest. Once or twice she drove Becka to her violin lesson after too much wine. But her efforts had been so consuming that his life, his sickness, had in many ways become her own, and until she started selling real estate, she was at sea.
“We don’t need the money,” she said.
“But you enjoy your work. You’ve made a life for yourself these past couple of years.”
“You’ll find this hard to believe,” she said, “but you and Becka, you are my life.”
He was quiet in the dark. A peeled, flat moon cast some light through the bedroom’s open windows, just enough to make their breath visible. He was on top of the bed; she huddled beneath the covers. “Why would I find that hard to believe?”
“Because your life is your work.”
“Is that what you think?”
There was silence. “Listen to me,” she said. “You need someone to watch over you. You’re going farther away than ever before.”
She had no idea, no idea, how badly he wanted to consent. He was scared. He wanted someone to safeguard him.
“It’s too much to ask,” he said. “I don’t want it to be like last time when I recover and go back to work and you get depressed.”
“I wasn’t depressed,” she said. “I just had a hard time finding my old self again.”
“It’s too much to ask,” he repeated.
And she was silent then because she was relieved.
12
Mike Kronish appeared in Tim’s doorway. Even from that distance the man seemed to hover. Proximity to him felt like sudden contact with a grizzly bear risen up on its hind legs. His broad suited figure was an American corn-fed miracle. He made his own weather in hallways and conference rooms and was legend for screwing paralegals.
Kronish was the managing partner of the litigation department, a five-year position to which he’d been elected. He assigned new business to the other partners, set policy for the department, and ran the caucuses and litigation committees. He also served internally as the voice of the firm. There were no official hierarchies among partners at Troyer, Barr, but the managing partner had certain political obligations that involved keeping important matters under control. “Knock knock,” he said.
“Hey hey,” said Tim.
Kronish came in and sat across from him. A delayed tide of aftershave, masking any hint of flaw, floated over the desk. “So let me just come right out with it,” said Kronish. “R.H. called. He’s unhappy.”
“He called you?”
“You missed a meeting with him yesterday.”
“No, no,” said Tim. “I talked with Peter. Peter should have met with him. Where the fuck was Peter?”
“Tell me, Tim.”
“What?”
“Who’s the partner on the case? Is Peter the partner?”
“And whose case is it, Mike? If I want Peter to take the meeting.”
“Your case, your case. But when I get a call—me—from the client.”
“Then if it’s my case, I take the meeting or I tell Peter to take the meeting.”
Kronish pinched his nose twice quickly and then resettled his hand on his folded leg. He sat back in the chair. A moment passed.
Kronish was famous inside the firm for once having billed a twenty-seven-hour day. This was possible only if you plied the time zones. Kronish worked twenty-four hours straight and then boarded a plane for Los Angeles, where he continued working on West Coast time. When he filled out his time sheets later that week, he rightfully attributed more hours to that day than technically possible. This made Tim want to leap across the desk and eat his lucky, healthy heart. “Fucking guy needs a babysitter,” he said, breaking the silence.
“Fucking guy needs an acquittal,” said Kronish.
“Which is my entire fucking point as to why I wasn’t in that meeting. Why am I working this hard? And it wasn’t a meeting, it was a hand-holding. Look, Mike, butt out, with due respect. I can handle my client.”
“You know all he brings in on the corporate side.”
“I need reminding?”
“So you skipped the meeting to work the case?”
“Butt the fuck out, Mike.”
There was a momentary stare-down between the two men. Then Kronish’s eyes wandered. Tim followed them over to the wall, where the backpack leaned. “What’s with that?”
“What?”
Kronish gestured with his chin. “The backpack.”
“What, it’s a backpack.”
“Have I seen you walking the halls with that?”
>
For a moment he thought, I’ll just come clean. I’ll show Mike The New England Journal of Medicine article and I’ll detail the frustration of fighting the label of crazy and I’ll say, ultimately, Mike, they don’t know if it’s a medical condition or a psychiatric disorder. I’ll be honest, and Mike will respond in kind with a show of sympathy he’s never demonstrated because we are both human beings slated to fall ill and die. “All right, all right,” he said. “Look.” He was quiet, letting the moment build. “We’ve had some bad news.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
He took a deep breath. “Jane’s cancer’s come back.”
Kronish’s demeanor changed. He leaned forward in the chair and steepled his hands as if to pray, never letting his eyes stray from Tim’s. Soon he wore a duly woeful and theatrical frown. “Shit,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“That is bad news.”
They sat in respectful silence.
“Anything the firm can do?”
That’s what he wanted to hear. He let the pause linger. “Just let me work my case.”
Kronish put up his hands. “Your case,” he said.
He left soon after. Tim realized that Jane’s supposed cancer in no way explained why he should be carrying a backpack around the halls of the firm. Kronish, with his shrewd legal mind, should have seized on that. Maybe he had by now. The strands of his story were easy to take apart. But for the moment, Kronish had only heard the word cancer. Everything else went out the window. That was the power, the enviable, unlucky power, of a fatal and familiar disease.
13
Overcast was riveted to the sky as gray to a battleship. The footpath of the Brooklyn Bridge matched the color of the day, as did its intricate spiderwebbing metalwork. He went up the incline and under the first arch. The East River was scalloped white from the wind as it coursed south into the harbor. Believing he was alone, to vent his anger he cried out into the consuming gust, only to turn the corner of the arch and find two bundled lovers taking self-portraits. Startled, they backed up against the brickwork to give him a wide berth.
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