The Unnamed

The first time, he woke with a start in deep night. Jane was asleep beside him. He was forced out of bed and down the stairs and into the backyard. He was disoriented by sleep and time of night and walked unevenly through the uneven yard, quiet but for the rustle of grass beneath him. Spring had barely arrived. The nights were still cold and this one was no exception. He sat down on the bench in the backyard gazebo and became tired, so tired he couldn’t move. In the morning he woke up and walked back inside. Jane was in the kitchen making coffee. She stopped and turned, startled, as the glass door slid open. He walked in, pale with cold, shaking, confused. ‘What were you doing out there?’ she asked.

‘There is no laboratory examination to confirm the presence or absence of the condition,’ he was told by a doctor named Regis, ‘so there is no reason to believe the disease has a defined physical cause or, I suppose, even exists at all.’

Janowitz of Johns Hopkins had concluded some compulsion was driving him to walk and suggested group therapy.

Klum dubbed it ‘benign idiopathic perambulation.’ He’d had to look up idiopathic in the dictionary. ‘Adj. – of unknown causes, as a disease.’ He thought the word, divorced of meaning, would have nicely suited Klum and her associates. Idiopaths. He also took exception to the word benign. Strictly medically speaking perhaps, but if his perambulation kept up, his life was ruined. How benign was that?

The internists made referrals. The specialists ordered scans. The clinics assembled teams.

He saw his first psychiatrist reluctantly, convinced as he was that his problem was not a mental one. Dr Ruefle began their session by asking about his family history. He offered what little he had. His grandparents were dead; he knew their occupations, but nothing more. His father had died of cancer when he was a boy. On the twentieth anniversary of his death, his mother had been struck by a mirror, beneath which she had been sitting in a restaurant, when it came loose from the wall, and she died of blunt trauma to the head. Dr Ruefle was never able to make sense of these facts or anything else. Tim lost the last of his patience with her when she suggested he see a genealogical healer, on the chance that something tragic had taken place in his past – an ancestor lost in a death march or some other forced evacuation. He had no idea what ‘genealogical healing’ might entail and dismissed the idea as quackery.

He walked past the reception desk and through the glass doors, beyond the elevators and into the echo chamber of the emergency stairwell, where fire drills were conducted. He took the stairs with a determination never displayed during drill time, as if now there were something to flee. He kept one hand on the railing. The orange stencilled floor numbers, the fire extinguishers. The toes of his dress shoes hit one note twelve times, reached the switchback, started the note again. He avoided the vertiginous glimpse down the rabbit hole of diminishing floors.

For some people the depressing setback was a return to the hospital, it was some migraine holocaust, lower-back blowout, inconsolable weeping, arthritic flair, new shadow on the CT scan, sudden chest pain.

Hobbs was coming in today?

Twenty floors down he encountered a black man. The man sat on the landing beside the painted piping that emerged from the wall. A thick coiled fire hose was encased in glass above him. He wore a winter coat, black but for the places where the white synthetic fibre cottoned out from tears in the shell. A collection of wrinkled shopping bags was arrayed around him. He had removed his shoes, a pair of high-tops gone brandless with grime. He was inspecting the brick-red bottoms of his feet.

‘What are you doing here?’

The man looked up with a foot in hand. ‘Huh? Oh. Yeah, just…’

‘What?’

‘Looking for cans.’

Tim walked past him and continued to descend. He was forced to turn his head in order to stay in the conversation. ‘How’d you get past security?’

‘It’s my brother,’ said the man.

‘What?’

‘My brother.’

‘Who’s your brother?’ He reached the next landing and within a few stairs lost sight of the man. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he cried up.

‘What?’

‘I said I don’t think you should be sitting in our stairwell!’ His voice echoed through the upper stairs. The man no longer responded. The clop of dress shoes filled the silence. In no time he descended past the twenties and the teens and entered the lobby.

O nce he ran with the goal to exhaust himself. Maybe there was no slowing down, but he could speed up. He could move his head, his limbs – hell, he could dance so long as he kept moving forward. Like a stutterer in song. He juked and huffed around casual city walkers until he was in New Jersey and his lungs hit a wall and he stopped. But his legs, he realized at once, had every intention of continuing, and continue they would until they were through. He couldn’t believe what he had inflicted on himself, his muscles quivering with fatigue, every step like lifting out of quicksand.

He had Jane lock him inside the bedroom. The tidy circles he was forced to walk made him dizzy and half-mad.

He had Horowitz pump him full of a powerful muscle relaxant. Which worked for the time he was out. But after the medication wore off he was out walking again, this time drowsy and nauseous, his longest and most miserable walk, and he swore never to do that again.

They bolted an O-ring into a stud in the wall and tethered him with a chain and a belt made of leather. After a couple of days, that sort of containment was just too barbaric.

When the illness returned a second time, he thought of the treadmill. He’d beat his body at its own game, outwit dumb matter with his mind. But every time chance permitted him to have his body on the treadmill during an episode, he found himself stepping right off the revolving belt, into freedom. His body wouldn’t be contained or corralled. It had, it seemed to him, a mind of its own.

He told Dr Ditmar, the psychologist beloved by New York magazine, that he would prefer the diagnosis of a fatal disease. Ditmar bluntly stated that he was being excessive and naive. Compare his situation to someone with Lou Gehrig’s, Ditmar suggested, dead within three months. Wasn’t it better to be on a walk than in a grave?

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’d rather have something I understand.’ To which Ditmar replied: ‘Do you think you’d understand Lou Gehrig’s?’