The Unnamed - By Joshua Ferris Page 0,107
of sport, or a supply of bullets greater than hooks and nets.
By then he had remembered the morning he returned to her hospital room to tell her he worried about the insufficiency of the final words they would say to each other. They had an awkward ceremony that made her laugh. “Good-bye, then!” she had said to him. He could not forgive himself that he had urged her to cook a meal as she was dying, so he clung to the memory of that morning.
By then he had given up everything but his need for shelter and nourishment, but there had been afternoons he spent in community libraries, reading books he would not finish and sending and receiving email. That was how he learned one day that Becka had married. She sent pictures of a small outdoor ceremony. He had never seen her look so healthy or beautiful, or so old. He was sorry that neither of her parents were in attendance. He wrote back to congratulate her. “How big Jack has gotten!” he said in response to seeing the little man in his tuxedo. He left the library with an uncertain heart, grateful that he had been spared the disappointment of anticipating an event he could not attend, but hopeful that she had done so out of mercy and not forgetfulness.
By then they wondered if he had the money for the things he brought up to the counter. He was a certain type, mute and suspect. Some contrariness kept such old men moving, as if to stop and settle would be to fall back into the human business of bickering and violence. Better for all if he was on his way. They watched him leave the store with his small bundle and stand on the other side of the road packing as if for some journey by foot, and they wondered if he knew which passes to avoid, what roads closed at the start of November, and if his permits were in order. They predicted some quarrelsome run-in or tragic end. He had a whippy sort of strength and an old rapport with his pack, which he shouldered on with a burdened grace. They watched him walk along the side of the highway, asking nothing of the passing cars and leaving town without having uttered a word.
He wanted a drink of water. It was deliciously painful, his thirst, a thought to relish quenching.
He had yet to open his eyes. He was lucid and alert as he usually was in the first few minutes after waking. He heard the wind outside, sonically layered and multidirectional, and he heard the crackle of descending snow and the slight sizzle of one flake as it caught hold of the combed bluffs accumulating against the side of the tent, shaped by the wind. His thirst persisted beautifully. What gratification would come when he finally rose and poured a cool cup into the lid of the thermos.
He made no effort to move, though, so content in the bedroll, so warm and easeful, while the wind howled madness outside and drove the snow to frenzy.
A similar feeling had overtaken him the night before. He had pitched the tent at the end of his walk and climbed exhausted inside the bag, expecting to fall quickly into a long and satisfying sleep. Despite the severity of the weather, he liked it up here almost better than any other place in the world. The bustle and tempo of people proceeding with their eventful lives could not cripple him with longing here, and it was unlikely that he would be awakened by a meddlesome authority or a group of noisy jerks. He relaxed into the warmth of the bag and felt his body, still humming with the jangle of his recent walk, wind down into a stillness that eventually made its way into his deepest interiors. The wind was just then starting to pick up, but beneath its bellowing he became aware of his heart whispering listen… listen… listen.… He heard the blood pump out of his chest and flow down his arteries to pulse faintly at his wrist and in the hollow beside his anklebone, and his breathing lifted him up and down, up and down, and he heard the calmness, like the coals of a settled fire, of his rested bones. He luxuriated in his exhaustion. The weariness was inseparable from pleasure. He half struggled to stay awake just to stretch the moment out for as long as possible.
Now it was morning. It was wrong to dawdle like this. Wake up, pack up—that was the protocol. This sort of indulgence could be dangerous.
But was there anything comparable to a languorous morning in bed, under the warm confines of a blanket, while you kept the vicious cold at bay another minute, and then stretched that one minute out to five? It was only a bedroll set on top of an inflatable pallet inside a makeshift shelter, but he didn’t open his eyes. He listened to the wind. He heard other sounds, too: a clock ticking in a warm kitchen, the coffeemaker sucking and percolating on the counter, Jane treading lightly across the floor, gathering the cups, opening the refrigerator for the milk. “Tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up,” she said from somewhere in the distance.
Five minutes gave way to ten, and ten to twenty. There was no question now that he was starting to press his luck. He had to rise and dress. He had to break down the tent. He still had to find food for the day. There were many things that awaited his command, not least the pleasurable taste of the water he promised himself as a reward for disturbing such a delicate peace.
He languished another twenty minutes. Then he absolutely insisted that he rise that instant and take care of business or else he might find himself wandering out there in the blistering snow, fighting the wind with his bare hands. But just then he realized that, at some point during his sumptuous idling, he had stopped hearing the wind. He didn’t suppose that it could have died completely and so quickly, recalling the terrible fury it was kicking up. He expected the vinyl to whip taut again in its stitching any second now, or at least to hear a few high-pitched, snow-borne whistles of the storm departing, but time marched on and there was nothing. He thought he might open his eyes to see if the silhouette of the falling snow continued to dapple the skin of the tent, but he decided not to exert himself unnecessarily. Instead he chose to do as he had done the night before: settle deep inside himself and listen to the strange, subtle operations going on inside his body. He listened for his heart to whisper its soft word. He listened for the breathing that lifted him up and down inside the bag. But listen… listen… listen was gone. His quiescent nerves gave no signals and received none. He detected nothing but an enormous, gentle stillness from the things he could name and those he couldn’t inside him, the organs and muscles, the cells and tissues. He never had to rise again, the silence informed him. Never had to walk, never had to seek out food, never had to carry around the heavy and the weary weight, and in a measure of time that may have been the smallest natural unit known to man, or that may have been and may still remain all of eternity, he realized that he was still thinking, his mind was still afire, that he had just scored if not won the whole damn thing, and that the exquisite thought of his eternal rest was how delicious that cup of water was going to taste the instant it touched his lips.
Special Thanks:
Reagan Arthur, Julie Barer, Marlena Bittner, Abbie Collins, John Daniel, Willing Davidson, Hilary Gleekman-Greenberg, M.D., Robert Howell, Daniel Kraus, Greg Lembrich, Thornton Lewis, Chris Mickus, Dave Morse, Mary Mount, Ravi Nandan, Sheila Pietrzak, Grant Rosenberg, Karen Shepard, Matt Thomas, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, the Ucross Foundation, and Elizabeth Kennedy: IALYAAT.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOSHUA FERRIS’S first novel, Then We Came to the End, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and it was a National Book Award Finalist. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Tin House, among other publications. He lives in New York.