The Unnamed (23 page)

On the state highway, drivers came around the bend erratic and unmindful. These were roads no one expected a pedestrian to walk down. The electricity poles all had a lean to them. A carload of teenagers passed by honking as if he were a night at the prom.

Clouds of broken granite covered the sky. He passed the Village Dodge and the Wonderland Farms Storage. He walked past rain-bleached boxes of cigarettes and what might have been the carapace of a sea turtle. He didn’t believe he was anywhere near the ocean.

He stood at the customer-service desk of a Barnes and Noble waiting for the woman at the computer to free up. In the meantime he bent to a knee and gingerly untied his shoestring, which had been double-knotted and made tight by water. The blisters of frostbite on his fingertips and the lost sensation in his hands made the action crude and slow. He pulled off the wet sock and saw that his remaining toes were also blistered and his foot was as white as the pallor of his hands. Removing the shoe momentarily eased the pulsating swelling caused by so much walking. His feet were like two engorged and squishy hearts.

He rolled up the cuff of his chinos to inspect the cut on his leg. There was weeping from the abscess. A halo of soft pink tissue surrounded it. The calf had ballooned. He had been confusing its stench for the MasterCard T-shirt. He removed dirt with his fingernail—not dirt, it turned out, but a trapped bug.

“Can I help you?” asked the woman.

He sprung up. “I’m looking for a book on birds.”

“Any particular title?”

“Something I can use to identify them in the wild.”

Name a bird and master the world. Reveal nature’s mystery and momentarily triumph over it. The fleeting containment within the mind of spotted flight, which has no name until you give it one. That was something the other could never do. He should buy a book on butterflies and trees, too. Trees would include flowers and shrubbery.

The woman stepped away from the help desk and quickly started on her way to Nature. He walked behind her with his cuff still rolled, holding his sock and shoe. It was only when she arrived at the section and turned to look at him that she saw his exposed leg, swollen like a goiter in the middle of the calf.

“Oh my God,” she said.

He read books on birding in the café. He warmed himself with cups of coffee and replenished on the baked goods under the display case. Then he was forced to move as quickly as possible through the store to the men’s room, where he remained a long time. A manager came in and said generally, “Is everyone okay in here?”

Eventually he reemerged. They asked if he needed an ambulance and he asked what for. He bought one of the birding books and left the store. When his walk started later that evening, he abandoned the book first thing.

Hands and feet are cold. Leg is hurting. Stomach is empty and would like some food.

He was assailed night and day by such complaints. They were crude and unimpeachable. He was accustomed to accommodating his body, so his defiance had to be deliberate, disciplined, as Zen-like as possible.

System is weak in general. Neck stiffness is never good. This dark road is scary.

He had tried to learn bird-watching because the other, despite his ability to detect light and color and movement, was too coarse for such refined activity as the appreciation of beauty and the translation of nature into names. Name a bird and master the world. It would be a victory over brute want and dumb matter.

But brute want was more powerful than he might have guessed. He knew more about case law than he did about bird-watching, so after discarding the burdensome book on birds he started reciting the better bits from famous decisions. The recitation of case law was refinement purely of the mind, many layers of sophistication above what the other could ever hope to achieve.

Fluid balance is essential to proper organ function. A fever indicates the need for medical attention. Would that not be a fine place to stop and rest?

“Law in its most general and comprehensive sense signifies a rule of action,” he said, “which is prescribed by some superior and which the inferior is bound to obey.”

McDonald’s is quick, tasty, and conveniently located. Everyone loves TV. Discharging semen is an unbeatable sensation.

“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women, and when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.”

Operations functioning below his reach were sending out distress signals. He ignored them as much as possible. He revolted against the disproportionate power enjoyed by chemical imbalances and shorting neural circuits. He could say the words “autonomic nervous system,” whereas the autonomic nervous system just was; therefore he was superior to the autonomic nervous system. He passed the Printing Plus and Pik-Kwik and the Wing Ting. All the driveways in the subdivision had pickups and one had a Corvette. “Corvette,” he said.

He climbed partway up the hill behind a Jiffy Lube, closed for the night, where he fell asleep. He woke with his head on the hard earth and for an hour or two listened to the hydraulic thunder of the mechanics’ instruments and to the banter of the men at their work.

Good shoes are not simply a luxury. Funny looks from male strangers are unsettling. A change in bowel habits is cause for alarm.

Later, when the day’s walk seized him, it was his turn to complain to the other. He passed billboards and stoplights and shopping centers. There were stop signs and rec centers and residential houses. There were train tracks and entrance ramps and signal towers.

“You go on and on about how cold and hungry you are,” he said. “The night is long, you say. Good shoes are not just a luxury. But then you’re off and there’s no appeal. There’s no explanation for your behavior and no memory of your complaints. Are you not still cold? Are you not hungry? What is your purpose, your aim, but to hurl us both into suffering and darkness? Speak to me! You destroy my life, you rob me of my will, you troll me through the streets like meat on a hook. You have laid plain all my limitations and my total illusion of freedom. To what end? What do you gain from this?”

The other limped along steadily, saying nothing.

They agreed on one thing. If he wanted to starve the other of all alimentation, if his only pleasure was a kind of a suicidal spite, he did a good job with shelter and a so-so one with food, but he failed every time to resist the call of sleep. When the other stopped, he could have kept right on walking and driven him into the ground. He could have drowned himself in a body of water or thrown himself in front of a car. But he was too exhausted. The body released him, and then he walked bareheaded to some hovel, to some dubious sanctuary, where they collapsed in a harmony of purpose. For a minute, he knew the meaning of bliss: oblivion. In oblivion, they were at peace.

He came out of the men’s room. The man who had been knocking swung wide to let him pass. He left through the side door where the drive-thru line had stalled and vomited up his lunch by the dumpster. He wandered off to a nearby patch of frostbitten grass between the McDonald’s and the Conoco and sat down there and perspired. The cars out on the road went by in slow motion.

He stopped in front of a display window in a downtown district recently renovated so as to better highlight its desolation. He stared through the glass of a sporting goods store at a pitched tent with a forest-green fly-sheet. Accessories surrounded the camp pastoral—a lantern and a canteen and a fire made of cardboard.

He lay down on a bench and took a nap. The city cop woke him by hitting his billy club against the wood.

“You got identification?” asked the cop.

He sat up slowly. He removed his wallet from the back pocket of his chinos. His insensate fingers made it difficult to remove the license. The cop looked it over and handed it back to him.

“No sleeping here.”

“Do you know your right-of-public-access laws?”

The cop looked at him. “You got some place to go, wise guy?”

With a crude and mechanical deliberation he opened the wallet in his lap and removed a crisp sheaf of newly minted hundred-dollar bills and made their edges flop between his fingers. “I can go anywhere I want.”

“Then get there,” said the cop.

“Your concern for my well-being is touching.”

The cop started to walk away.

“One might as well ask if the State, to avoid public unease, could incarcerate all who are physically unattractive or socially eccentric,” he called out. “Mere public intolerance or animosity cannot constitutionally justify the deprivation of a person’s physical liberty!”

He went back to sleep. When he woke up, he said no, he would not get up, no matter what, not now, no getting up, you are a fleshy weed for plucking. He said you are a feast for worms. You are a carping and hidebound bitch with your fevers and limps and predictable appetites.

Deficiency of copper causes anemia, just so you know. Which at this point is way down there on the list of concerns.

“A stench, a rotgut, a boil,” he retorted aloud, rising again on the bench. A woman stood nearby walking her dog. When his voice rose up she tugged at the leash to get the sniffing dog going again. “A gaseous blowhole. You are a blind clutch and claw. Go off. Go off and leave me alone.”

Can’t.

“You hang on the wheel of fortune. I rise upward on angel’s wings. You turn in the gyre. I dream of old lovers with youthful smiles.”

Sorry, pal, we’re in this together.

“Prove it!” he cried.

What is a wing? What is a smile?

“You can’t be smart,” he said. “Only I can be smart.”

I’m evolving, replied the other.

A crane and a tractor and a few smaller excavating vehicles sat as still as a display of dinosaurs in the man-made pit behind the convenience store. He took the access road down and sat in the cabin of the tractor as he ate a pair of hot dogs. He was able to keep them down, which he attributed to the other’s shrewd calculation for what nourishment a walk would require. “You are a wily cunt,” he said.

On the road that led out of town, a blackbird fell out of the sky. A second bird hit the shoulder and a third one landed in the far lane, followed by the rest of the flock. They hit with heavy thuds one after the other and lay scattered like jacks on the road. Then darkness fell and he was walking again.

He skirted the edge of a copse of trees that had been corralled at their trunks by orange plastic fencing and climbed the bluff that rose over the highway and traversed that weedy expanse that offered no purpose to commerce or settlement but a clear border. When he came down he diverted away from the highway into a neighborhood of half-finished Tudor-style homes on acre plots with dumpsters in the streets full of broken Sheetrock and mounds of rose-hued stone gravel in the driveways that with their air of thwarted expectancy accentuated the abandonment of the stillborn development. The freezing rain had soaked through his cornucopia sweatshirt and made it stiff. He was chattering and perspiring and raging like the fierce storm itself at the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of the other. His threats and accusations echoed in the ghost town as the icy pellets rained down white and round as balls of salt and soon he was gone from there, and the rooftops and windows froze over with a second skin of glass, and the trees and shrubbery looked part of some crystal city.

He was under the eaves of the highway oasis when the man with the garbage bag approached. It was a black industrial-strength garbage bag so old that its pale stretch marks had started to give way to holes, especially at the gathered neck, where the man gripped it to carry it over his shoulder. He set it down and then sat next to Tim on the stone bench.

“Why your fingers like that?” asked the man.

Tim was holding his hands in his lap. His curled and rigid fingers faced upward. The blisters had disappeared and much of the surface area had turned a dark purple that faded at the tips to pitch-black. He looked down at them. They resembled a carrion bird’s claws set by rigor mortis.

“He’s a wily cunt.”

“Who? You frien’?”

“He’s no friend of mine.”

“You ain’t got no frien’?”

He shook his head. They sat quietly. “You got the poison?” asked the man.

The question lingered between them.

“The poison?”

The man stared at him. Eventually he nodded.

“You be all right,” said the man, who looked off in the low visibility. People stood at the rear of their cars, filling them up at the Mobil station.

Before he stood again, the man said, “You oughta be thinking about getting yourself over to the shelter clinic on McAdams. Have the volunteer man check you out.”

Out on the old highway a man driving home steered his clattering pickup over to the shoulder. He pulled in twenty yards ahead of Tim and spoke to him through the passenger-side window when he caught up to the truck. The belly-white clouds foretold the coming blizzard.

“You look like you’re hurt,” said the man. “Do you need some help?”

He stopped before the window. He felt the hot blasts from the vents. They stung his benumbed skin and he took a step back.