Joshua Ferris: 'The Unnamed'

Granta brings you a sneak preview of our next issue: an extract from Joshua Ferris’s upcoming novel, The Unnamed, which will be published by Reagan Arthur Books next month.

Coffee and a powdered doughnut sat on his desk, the morning offering. He might have thought to get something more substantial but he didn’t care to interrupt the flow of work. Night after night, he sat at this desk just as a sphere of oil sits suspended in dark vinegar – everything blotted out but his own source of light. To save on energy costs, Troyer, Barr and Atkins LLP had installed motion sensors on the overhead lights. From six in the morning until ten at night, the lights burned continuously; after ten, the sensors took over. He worked past ten most nights, and most nights found him sufficiently absorbed in something that required only the turn of a page or the click of a mouse – too little activity for the sensors to register. The lights frequently switched off on him. He’d look up, surprised again – not just by the darkened office. By his re-entry into the physical world. Self-awareness. Himself as something more than mind thinking. He’d have to stand, a little amused by the crude technology, and wave his arms around, jump up and down, walk over and fan the door, sometimes all three, before the lights would return.

That was happiness.

Twenty-five years ago he had decided to go to law school. It offered interesting study and good career prospects. He made it to Harvard and quickly learned how to chew up and spit out the huge green tomes on civil litigation and constitutional law. He summered at Troyer, Barr and they asked him to return after graduation. But first there was a clerkship with a judge on the Second Circuit. A year later he was married to Jane. He worked hard at Troyer. Document production for the first couple of years, boring as hell, but then junior status gave way to opportunity. He started taking depositions. He showed a gift for strategy in both civil and criminal cases, and a rare composure in the courtroom. He impressed the right people and when his seventh year came around they voted to make him partner. He sat in the best restaurants and ordered the best wines.

But that was never the point. The point was Houston, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Orlando, Charleston, Manhattan – wherever the trial was. The trial, that was the point. The clients. The casework. The war room. He took on a few pro bono causes. And he worked in midtown amid the electricity and the movement. And his view of Central Park was breathtaking. And he liked the people. And the money was great. And the success was addictive. And the pursuit was all-consuming. And the rightness of his place was never in doubt.

Now it was morning, and he was preparing for trial. The case involved a client named R. H. Hobbs who had been accused of stabbing his wife in a methodical way and dumping her body in a decommissioned landfill on Staten Island. The evidence against R. H. was entirely circumstantial. There was a blood-soaked bedsheet with no trace of a third party’s DNA, his thin alibi of being stuck in traffic at the time of the murder, and a sizeable life-insurance policy. The district attorney had managed to bring charges against him only by the skin of his teeth. Grand jury testimony revealed a case fraught with uncertainty, and the consensus among Tim and his team was that R. H., despite a loveless marriage, had not committed the crime he had been accused of. R. H.’s private equity firm generated an enormous amount of business for Troyer, Barr, and no one wanted a guilty verdict to interfere with that relationship.

Tim ate the doughnut over a napkin to catch the powdered sugar and recalled a time when he had watched what he ate. Not as a dieter, not with his daughter’s sad South Beach struggle, but with a fanatic’s vigilance for good health – for Bagdasarian had suggested that it might be dietary. Cut out the caffeine, he told him, the sugar and the nicotine, and consult a naturopath. And so he did. Because nothing had shown up, repeatedly, on the MRIs, because he was on his third psychiatrist, because the specialist in Switzerland had thrown up his hands, he saw a Trinidadian in Chelsea with golden tubes and magic roots for seven days of colonics and grass-and-carrot smoothies. Jane drove and waited in the naturopath’s living room among primitive wood carvings and bright tropical art. They took the highway home, and for the first couple of days there was this breathless, anxious hopefulness. Then he walked right out of the house. Jane picked him up six hours later behind a Starbucks in New Canaan. Nothing came of the marmalade fast or the orange juice cleansings except another possibility to cross off the list, though he could move his bowels again like a ten-year-old.

His office was calm and pleasant. The early winter sun brightened the window behind him. Yet as every minute he remained in place moved effortlessly into the next, that new minute came with the increased anxiety that it might be his last. The wonderful warmth, his comfortable chair, the lovely rigor and stasis of practicing law were growing, with time, more and more impossible to enjoy. He almost believed Naterwaul could be right, that worry alone could cause the attacks. Of course Naterwaul was also the moron who suggested that SoCal yahoo who had him re-enact his birth. Those were some dim, desperate days. He’d be goddamned if he was returning to that giant foam womb and working to cry during re-entry.

DeWiess, the environmental psychologist with the desert retreat, blamed urban air, cell phone radiation, and a contaminated water table, and gave him a sheet of paper with the names of everyday toxins listed front and back.

At ten he rose to walk down to Peter’s office. Standing was hard. His legs were eighty years old again. His first steps were stiff and careful, an easing back into fluid motion that stunned the cantankerous joints. He limped down the hallway.

‘Knock knock,’ he said at Peter’s door.

‘Hey hey,’ said Peter.

He entered the office and sat down. Peter was the senior associate on the R. H. Hobbs case. Tim didn’t think much of him.

‘Maybe I’m in and out these next couple of days, Peter. Maybe, maybe not.’

Peter demonstrated the lack of curiosity required of associates when something personal appeared to be driving a partner’s decision. His blank expression conveyed the theatre of total understanding. He didn’t even lean back in his chair. ‘Sure, Tim.’

‘We’re under the gun, yeah. This thing is pressing down on us. But you don’t make a move without me. Understand?’

‘Tim, who—’

‘Not one move.’

‘Who am I?’

‘You call me, understand? I don’t care what it is. I’m always on my cell.’

‘Of course. Of course.’

‘From this point forward I’m on my cell. No Kronish. No Wodica.’

‘No, no way. What for?’

‘They don’t know the case. You know the case better.’

‘I’ll call you, not a problem.’

‘And you, I mean this with all due respect.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re just not ready yet.’

‘No,’ said Peter. ‘No. I’m happy to call you, Tim.’

Tim nodded and stood. Halfway down the hall, he heard his name being called. He looked back at Peter, who stood in the doorway, but his body kept moving forward.

‘Hobbs is due in today, right?’

‘Today?’

‘Just wondered if you’d be here for that.’

‘He’s due in today?’

He was getting further and further down the hall.

‘I thought you said he was coming in.’

‘I said that?’

They had to talk louder.

‘Tim?’

‘You call me Peter! Understand? You don’t make a move without me!’

He turned the corner and disappeared.

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?’

The lobby of his building was set on a mezzanine. To access the street, one still had to ride down the escalator.

Frank Novovian looked up from his post, his eyes burdened with ripe bags, his cold-clock gaze greeting the world without humour. Yet he was deferential to the right people. ‘Good morning, Mr Farnsworth,’ he said.

‘Frank, can I have a word?’

‘Of course.’

Tim stepped onto the escalator. His feet continued to walk. He was forced to turn his head to further address the security guard. ‘Will you walk with me?’

Frank got off his stool and caught up with Tim long after he had stepped off the escalator. He was halfway across the lower lobby by then. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Farnsworth?’

‘There’s a man in our stairwell.’

‘What man?’

‘A homeless man.’

‘In our stairwell?’

‘Know what he’s doing there?’

He entered the revolving doors. He gestured for Frank to follow as he fought the wind pushing against the glass.

The uprush of city life, always unexpected. A far cry from his time behind the desk. Taxis heading past, cars, supply trucks, bundled men on bicycles delivering bagged lunches. Faces were as varied as the flags of the earth. A Hasidic Jew pushing a dolly in front of him weaved quickly between blustered walkers. The sidewalks were salt-stained; the cold swallowed him up. He walked into the wind, north, toward Central Park, a wind shaped materially by pole-whipped newspapers and fluttering scarf tails. The fabric of his suit snapped behind him angrily. His teeth were already rattling. Poor Frank, forced out in nothing but his standard-issue security man’s blazer. Yet Frank followed him dutifully into the crystal heart of the season.

Could he send Frank for the pack? Frank would have to re-enter the building, wait for the elevator, walk the hallway, head back down again. By then he’d be searching for one man among eight million.

‘Frank,’ he said, ‘R. H. Hobbs is expected later today.’

‘Do you remember the floor the man’s on, Mr Farnsworth?’

‘Mid-thirties?’

Frank unclipped the walkie-talkie from his belt. ‘Two minutes and he’ll no longer be a problem.’

‘Thank you, Frank.’

Frank cocked the walkie-talkie sideways at his mouth and radioed inside. A voice crackled back. He was mid-sentence when Tim reached out. ‘Wait,’ he said. Frank cut himself short and lowered the walkie talkie in anticipation of further instruction, continuing to walk alongside him. ‘Wait a second, Frank.’

They approached an intersection clustered by pedestrians waiting for the light to change. He turned down the side street, walking opposite the one-way traffic he was inexplicably, almost mystically spared from throwing himself in front of, and Frank followed. Some failsafe mechanism moved him around red lights and speeding cars, moved his legs with a cat’s intuition around any immediate peril. Dr Urgess had once pointed to that reprieve as proof he was in control at some conscious or at least subconscious level, although Dr Cox later claimed that the body’s involuntary systems, including its sense of self preservation, were powerful enough to override and even determine specific brain mechanisms. One located the disease in his mind, the other in his body. First he had believed the one doctor and followed his instructions, and then he had believed the other and followed his instructions. Now he was crossing the street with Frank after the last car in line had made it through the light, and neither Urgess nor Cox had managed for all their curiosity and wisdom to bring a single thing to bear on the problem itself. Thank you for your beautiful theories, you expert professionals, thank you for your empty remedies. Frank kept peering over.

‘I’d like you to leave the man alone,’ said Tim. ‘Let him stay where he is.’

‘I thought you wanted him gone.’

‘Not any more,’ he said.

He was thinking of the way he’d been treated at African Hair Weaving the day before. White man walks in and asks for shelter, black women point to the folding chairs. Same white man walks past a homeless man seeking the very same shelter, has black man thrown out into the cold. Dharma guru Bindu Talati’s long-ago suggestion that some karmic imbalance might have caused a material rift that provoked his walking had claimed his imagination again, but partly he was just trying to be decent. ‘As a personal favour,’ he said.

He looked over to drive the point home and saw that by some miracle a black wool cap had materialized on Frank’s once-steaming, egg-bald head. ‘There are perfectly good heat shelters in the city, Mr Farnsworth.’

‘There are, that’s true,’ he said. ‘But by a strange coincidence I know the man, Frank. We went to high school together. He’s fallen on hard times. Will you do me the favour of seeing he stays put as long as he wants? And also make sure no one else harasses him?’

‘I didn’t know he was a friend of yours.’

‘A friend of sorts. From a long time ago.’

‘Consider it taken care of then, Mr Farnsworth,’ said Frank, cocking the walkie-talkie at his mouth again.

‘And Frank I have to ask another favour of you,’ he said. ‘Would you let me borrow your cap?’

With no hesitation Frank handed him the hat. Handed it off as if that had been the point of bringing it outside with him, its brief respite on top of his head merely a convenient place to store it until the request was made. Tim put the hat on and tucked in his singed ears, pinning them between warm scalp and rough wool. ‘Thank you, Frank,’ he said.

‘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 ‘healthcare-seeking behaviour,’ and Montreux’s Dr Euler could throw up his hands again, Yari Tobolowski could prepare another concoction of batwing 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 voicemail 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 clamour 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.

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 neighbourhood. 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 away 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 picked 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 OK. Sure, sure everything’s OK. 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 dialled 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 wind-burned that distinct pink colour 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 any more.’

This alarmed her. They had always had faith, both 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 some day.’

‘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 centres 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 neighbourhood, 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 talk to 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 the park and opened the door. She turned to him before stepping out. He stared straight ahead 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.

T hat night 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 further 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.