The Unnamed (31 page)

When it came to God, she thought, ordinary people were at their most inventive.

God, if He was anything, was the answer to the mystery of why you got sick. She knew about the tree and the serpent and the temptation and the fall, but call that the broader cause. She wanted the revelation of the biological confoundedness. If He’s in the details, He should be able to explain them. Upon dying you get paperwork that takes you step by step—the reason for the first errant cell, the exact moment of its arrival on the scene, and then, and then—and when you finish reading, the coffin light goes out, and you roll over for your eternal rest. That was the extent to which she permitted herself to believe in the existence of God.

Before he suddenly walked into the room, she hadn’t heard from Tim. If he was dead, she wanted to believe that when his suffering ended, he was finally given an explanation, that his paperwork listed the cause or causes and unlocked the mechanics and offered a justification. That would be the least God could do for him.

Which was wishful thinking, no less than that of the conversion-through-cancer nutcase down the hall. Death was God’s secrets extended into eternity.

Her modest size could not afford the weight she had lost. The tendons in her neck showed when she strained to sit up. To touch her back was to feel along an exotic scale of ribs and spine. She kept her hair in barrettes as a way of doing something with her hair at least. So few people had sent flowers. Dr. Bagdasarian had stopped by with tulips, and Becka’s boyfriend had sent a mixed bouquet, and Michael, of course, who still loved her. She could not have made it any plainer to Michael and yet he would probably stand at her graveside as she was being lowered into the ground and profess his devotion once again. She didn’t want it. Yet she did want more flowers.

They were counting on something new, a clinical trial. She was in it for everything she had.

She hoped he’d died indoors. She didn’t think it was likely but the alternative was unthinkable, dying in a frozen field, or in some doorway in a distant city, alone until some inquisitive soul bent down, and the gapers started to cluster, and the cops found nothing, no wallet, no phone, nothing, and so had no next of kin to call. That was how they came to mourn him, she and Becka, without really mourning him, a totally unsatisfying way to mourn. Then he walked into the room, ravaged by the acts of time, thinner than she had ever known him to be, who knew every inch of him by touch, sundered from every appearance of happiness, suffering every ailment except immobility, and it took everything in her power to attribute his reappearance to the determination of a man who loved her, and not to a merciful act of God.

After Becka left with Jack, he drew a chair over to her bed and explained where he had been and how he had come to be there.

“I thought the worst,” she said.

“That I would be alive and look like this?”

The film of tears that glazed over her dark and hollowed eyes quivered as she smiled. She squeezed his few fingers, no less bony and fragile than her own. “I think you look devastating,” she said.

“Devastated?”

“As handsome as you ever were.”

“Now there is a tender lie,” he said.

They got reacquainted after so long a time apart. He said little at first because there was so little to say, confusing his experiences on the road for the ordinary banality of endurance. They came to know him at the hospital, where she referred to him as her husband again, and they adjusted to the sight of a man they would ordinarily expect to be tending to in a room of his own walking in and out of hers. He did not smile at them, at the nurses at their station. He hardly even cast them a glance. He said nothing unless it was to ask for something on her behalf, and he came and went like a tinker or beggar, in the same hitchhiker’s outfit, if not the very same clothes, and with a heavy backpack swaddling his skinny frame.

Though returned to her at last, his body continued its demands and he was forced to leave her at a moment’s notice. This was a new twist in an old cruelty, as time now meant so much more to him than those odious deposits of downtime and distant walks that had come to define these latter years. They could not say how much time she had left, and to leave under such circumstances was prodigal, ridiculing any sentiment of homecoming.

He discharged the walks with dutiful resignation, the way a busy hangman leaves for the day without scruple or gripe, and then he turned around and walked back.

“Where do you go when you leave?”

“I go lots of places.”

“When you left yesterday, where did you go?”

“Yesterday I went to the beach,” he said.

He removed from his pocket a smooth seashell with a swirl of brown leading into its dark hollow. The top of the shell spiraled to a sharp point. He put the shell in her hand and then sat down in the chair in the corner.

It was the perfect shell, exotic and intact. This was no Rockaway shell or Coney Island shell, not even a Jersey Shore shell. To get a shell like this, you had to walk to the Caribbean.

“Where did you get this? You can’t find a shell like this around here.”

“I told you. I went to the beach.”

“What beach? What was it like?”

“At the beach? It was cold.”

“What did you see there?”

“Well,” he said. “I saw nothing, really.”

“You walked and walked,” she said. “You must have seen something.”

“On the way I remember seeing an old woman. She was in her nightgown but with a heavy overcoat. She wore a pair of pink boots and she was raking leaves in front of a brownstone.”

“What else?”

“People leaving a building for the evening.”

“What else?”

“I ran my hand along a chain-link fence.”

“What else?”

“That’s it. That’s all I remember.”

“In all that time?”

“That’s it,” he said.

For the first time he began to pay attention to the things he saw on his walks, so that when he returned to her, he had observations of the outside world to share. They were fleeting, they were middles without beginnings or ends, but they were diverting—for him to witness, for her to hear. She soaked them up. They seemed just as much nourishment as whatever the doctors were providing.

He realized he might have been doing it wrong for years. He might have seen interesting things had he been able to let go of the frustration and despair. He wondered what kind of life he might have had if he had paid attention from the beginning. But that would have been hard. That would have been for himself. It was easier now, doing it for someone else.

“I saw a woman in a leather apron outside a beauty salon, smoking a cigarette. I saw two cops standing around the remains of an accident, broken reflector bits on the pavement. I heard kids running behind me and then they overtook me like a herd of cattle and they all wore the same school uniform but each one still looked so different. I smelled chocolate for almost a mile. I saw some men playing soccer and I thought I could even see the steam coming off their bodies. It’s getting colder.”

She interrupted. “When I get better, do you think it might be possible for us to go on vacation together?”

“Of course,” he said. “Of course that’s possible.”

They discussed different places. She offered a new country, and then he suggested another, and they grew more and more excited. There was nowhere the two of them would not have enjoyed. They agreed on the African safari they had planned many years before but had never taken.

He stood in the window holding the baby in his arms, rocking back and forth to keep Jack dozing happily against his body. The weight was a glorious burden. The little lumpy fellow and he each shared their body heat. Jane was asleep in the hospital bed. Becka sat against the far wall of the room, reading a magazine. They had worked out the procedure for what to do if he suddenly had to go, but for the moment, in that unlikely place, a wonderful peace was holding. He had even taken off his boots. The window was radiant with cold sunlight. The only noise was the imaginary one that came from dust motes slowly tumbling in the light.

He came into the room and pulled the chair close and sat down next to her.

“I saw a dog in a purse. I saw bread being delivered, loaves of bread in paper sacks, dropped off in front of an Italian restaurant. Later in the morning I saw a bodybuilder in nothing but a T-shirt and sweatpants, such an enormous pair of arms, leave a health club and trip over himself. He went down with his gym bag, and a woman with a baby stroller stopped to ask him if he was all right. I saw a quiet street where I thought you and I could live very happily, a street of brownstones with good little yards. I saw a man chipping the ice off his windshield with a butter knife. And it was working! I saw the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even at this time of year, people are sitting on the steps out front like it’s the Fourth of July. I saw the last of the last of the light. Should I go on?”

She had her eyes closed. “Close the door,” she said.

He stood up and closed the door. She took down her pajama bottoms. He saw what she was doing and reached out for a chair and placed it in front of the door. He turned off the light and walked back to her as shadows began to assert themselves in the room. He climbed on from the foot of the bed and pulled her to him until her head left the pillow. A small spray of hair still clung there. She began to unzip him. He wasn’t sure what to expect. He couldn’t rule out one final treachery of the body, which if it had its way, he thought, would crown its triumph of cruelty by depriving him—them—of this too. But he overestimated its power, or underestimated his own. Or did they both want the same thing? Now was not the time to wonder. Now was the time to forget his body and to look at her. He needed nothing but the look she returned. Then she shut her eyes, and he shut his, and they began to concentrate. He found more strength in her than he expected. She moved under him with an old authority. He listened as she began to come, as she was coming, as the coming wound down to a long final sigh that accompanied a burst of static from the nurse’s intercom above the bed. He used the pillow to muffle himself. It was a two-minute triumph for both of them, and afterward they calmly restored respectability to the room.

He was sitting in a booth in a gas station convenience store. In the booth ahead of him sat an old man drinking coffee and reading a newspaper.

He tapped one edge of the business card against the table until his middle and ring fingers reached the bottom edge. Then he flipped the card over and tapped it down again.

He stood up and walked outside. He crossed the lot to the pay phone and dialed the number on back of the card.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” he said. “I believe you came to see me in the hospital.”

They met at a diner on the Upper West Side. He sat at a booth with a view and while waiting watched a man on the corner, closer to the diner than the street, take a final puff from a cigarette and snuff it out under his shoe. It would have been unremarkable if not for the thin clear tube that ran from the man’s nose down to a portable oxygen tank. It caused him to look closer, and by the time the man entered he realized it was the same man he’d been waiting for, which should not have surprised him. He had been told to look out for the tank.

He stood up and waved. He didn’t think he’d be recognized otherwise.

“Hello.”

“Hello,” said Tim. They shook hands and the man sat down across from him.

“You’ve recovered.”

“More or less.”

“You were in a bad way there for a while. Taking care of yourself?”

“Trying to. Every day I feel about a year older.”

“Oh, I hear that. Try doing it all with emphysema,” he said, grabbing the clear tube that ran up to his nose. “That’s fun. Let me tell you. A-plus fun-o.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Fucking cigarettes,” he said, tapping the pack in his front pocket. “Fuck them to hell.”

They talked awhile longer. Then Tim said, “You said you had something to show me.”

From the inner pocket of his suit coat, Detective Roy removed the sketch from long ago that presented a likeness of the man who had accosted Tim on the bridge. It was quartered by heavy creases and he took care in unfolding it. Then he took out the photograph he had tried showing Tim in the hospital room. Tim patted his pockets in search of the eyeglasses he was still unaccustomed to having at his disposal. He removed the glasses from the case and gazed down at the sketch and the picture sitting side by side on the table. “What am I looking at?”

“This is your sketch. The sketch of the man you thought might have had something to do with the, uh—” He stopped and peered at Tim. “Sorry, do you remember… do you remember a man named R. H. Hobbs?”

Tim looked up from the table. He nodded.

“Sorry,” said the detective. “Stupid of me…”

“Why are you showing me this?”

The detective tapped the picture. “Is that the same man as in the sketch?”

Tim picked up the picture and studied it. “This is an old man,” he said.

“Taking that into account, do you see a resemblance?”

He stared hard at the photograph. It was taken at an office party. The man stood some distance from the camera in a huddle with six or seven others, among cubicle divisions and fluorescent lighting, holding a red plastic cup. The longer and more willfully Tim looked, the more distant his memory of what the man had once looked like grew. He looked frequently to the sketch for help. “Maybe,” he said. “The nose is the same, I think, with that knob in the middle. But it’s not a very good angle.”

The detective coughed violently. “Look harder,” he said, collecting himself. “Concentrate.”

“You don’t have any other pictures?”

“This one’s it.”

He looked back down at it. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

The detective resumed coughing. Soon his eyes were red and teary. His words issued out in the brief staccato pauses. “We want him for another murder… last year… victim like Evelyn Hobbs.”

“How?”

“Same pattern, same stab wounds… and there are others.”