10
Coffee and a powdered doughnut sat on his desk. 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 his 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 reentry 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 sizable 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.
He 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, Bagdasarian 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 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, increasingly 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 reenact 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 reentry.
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 theater 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 farther and farther 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.
“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 that 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. Strictl
y 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 he never displayed during drill time, as if now there were something to flee. He kept one hand on the railing. The orange stenciled 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 flare, 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 fiber 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.
Once 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.
The lobby of his office 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 humor. 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 in order 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 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 reenter 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?”
“Midthirties?”
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 in midsentence 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, especially 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 crossi
ng 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 anymore,” 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 favor,” 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 favor 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 favor 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.
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