The Unnamed - By Joshua Ferris Page 0,36

on the field. He removed her pants over her shoes, too impatient to bother with the buckles. She felt all along his lean walker’s body, the legs that were all muscle now and the torso that had slimmed down to the ribs as if he were a boy again. He took both her hands and stretched her arms as far as they would reach across the switchgrass as the hard soil began to skin his knees. They interlocked their fingers and squeezed as if to prevent death from separating them and they stared at each other under the smoke-fogged sky. They required almost no movement to be stunned again by something they had done so often, that had grown stale in the months before his recurrence but that now felt like the first time between them. They could smell the burn in the air and feel the heat on their faces. They were near a slowly dying outcrop of fire being tamped into embers by barely audible voices. Cows sauntered before a wooden fence in the distance.

They lay afterward, two bodies humming in a field. He felt bad that he had not been able to last. It had been a long time and after a minute or two there was no stopping what had taken over.

“It’s almost worth waiting when it’s like that,” she said.

“I’m sorry I didn’t last.”

“That’s the downside.”

They buttoned and zipped and got to their feet. They began to walk through the field to the car, tall steps through the high grass. It occurred to him that they were leaving too quickly. He wanted to reclaim that spent urgency, the irrefutable proof they both felt in their bodies that they needed each other for life. Had such a long and arduous walk out here to the middle of nowhere, had the task of picking him up, which made his sickness seem to her but a common irritant of clocking miles in the sleepiest hours, really been the occasion for the best sex they’d had in years?

“We should go back,” he said.

“Back where?”

“Back there.”

She looked behind them and saw only the fenced borderland and dry expanse of grass. “What for?”

“To get that back.”

She seemed to get his meaning. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

All at once she jerked away. She did a kind of stutter-step, shrieking, and ended behind him gripping his arms with her claws.

“What is it?” he cried.

“A snake!”

He stopped still and held her behind him. He looked down at the grass. “I don’t see it,” he said.

“How could you miss it?”

“Well, it’s gone now.”

“It’s not gone. It’s just ahead of us. Ahead of us is not gone.”

“It’s more scared of you than you are of it,” he said.

“You talked to the snake?”

“Want me to carry you out, banana?”

“I don’t like snakes,” she said.

She walked the rest of the way with a mix of trepidation and resolve, eyes frozen to the grass, feet choosing the least dense spots. They climbed the wooden fence. The car was waiting for them on the far side of the road. A sign in front of the fence said No Trespassing—Stony Hold Farms.

They drove out of the back roads, past the same fire-damaged landscape she had followed him into. They entered an area more densely populated by single-family residences and there saw exposed houses flaking with ash, cul-de-sacs with pitted cars more fitting the scenes of a riot from a troubled city. Porch pillars burnt down halfway turned ranch houses into small sites of ancient ruin. Most of the houses stood unmolested. The individual damage seemed arbitrary, or perhaps singled out by an inscrutable fate.

“It’s even worse than what you see on the news,” she said.

“What do you make of it?” he asked.

She drove in silence before answering. “It’s either the world just doing its thing,” she said, “or something we’ve never known before.”

They drove a long time. He sat in the passenger seat with the helmet on, the monitor in his hands, wondering what it might have recorded over the course of a walk they were driving miles to erase.

24

“Nothing,” said Dr. Bagdasarian. “I’m sorry, Tim.”

The scans had revealed nothing. That was neither positive proof of mental illness nor the negative confirmation of a medical disease. It was more of the same, exactly what he feared—greater inconclusiveness, additional absence of evidence, the final barrier removed from boundless interpretation. He was anything anyone wanted him to be—a nutcase, a victim, a freak, a mystery. He’d known to expect it from the moment