again. I’ve got credentials, I’ve got experience. I just want to know it’s something possible.”
Kronish’s silence on the other end was a torment.
“You say you know Keibler, is that right?”
“Back and front, Mike.”
“Not if you’re writing a motion for summary judgment you don’t,” he said. “Let’s stick to the game plan, Tim, okay?”
He sat for a long time at the flimsy green table in Bryant Park. He wasn’t disappointed. The more he thought about it, the more he was relieved. He recalled the old bodhisattva he’d seen years ago who had warned him against too much focus on the incoming message. He had given over his entire morning to waiting for word from Mike Kronish about a motion he’d never meant to show anyone, whose purity was now compromised. A morning of utter anxiety, stealing right from under him the pleasures of the day. His anxiety had taken him out of the world when one of the things he was trying not to forget, as the memory of his time in the room faded and his old ambitions and preoccupations reasserted themselves, was how to remain in the world. Giving that motion to Kronish and awaiting word of his benediction by way of the BlackBerry had thrust him into the ether of anticipation, a cyberstate where time passed unattended and the world, so long denied during his recurrence, was discarded for the dubious reward of a phone call or email that couldn’t arrive soon enough and would deliver only grief when it did. He had to have resolve. He couldn’t let himself get bogged down again. Jane was coming home tomorrow. She needed his help. How could he give her the attention she deserved if Kronish had called and made him a partner on the spot? He’d be checking his BlackBerry five hundred times a day. What kind of life was that?
As these thoughts came over him, he started paying attention for the first time that day. The wind had picked up and he suddenly felt his frostbitten nerves start to ring in their sheaths like cold bells. The neutered sun cast shadows and just as quickly took them away. My God, he thought, it was already half past one.
He stood and began to walk, once again crunching his way through dead leaves, but now, his attention restored, he saw his error. They weren’t leaves at all but rather a thin blanket of dead bees. He lifted his feet as if to avoid stepping on them, but they were everywhere. They thinned out only when he reached the street. He looked back in amazement—at the hundreds, the thousands of delicate brown and yellow carapaces. In a city of odd sights, it took the prize.
11
Not long after his return to Troyer and on the heels of inviting Frank to dinner, he visited R.H. in prison. It was the one thing he wanted to do least and the most pressing of all the business that had awaited his recovery. It did not go well.
The prisoner, stripped of suit and tie and looking old beyond his years, did not speak. For the longest time R.H. simply remained silent behind the wire-reinforced glass that separated them. He wore an orange jumpsuit with short sleeves. Tim saw the hair on his arms, prominent swirls of gray hair that had been covered over by bespoke suits for all the years he had known him. This small laying-bare pierced his heart. Another noticeable change had taken hold of the hair on R.H.’s head. The dye had washed out, leaving the hair a dull gray. It wavered thin and airy like a loose clump of field pollen. With a regal reluctance R.H. picked up the phone. He held it to his ear and stared at Tim with a kind of catatonic intent, sitting forward and saying nothing. Tim began to speak. Trying to interpret how his words were being received, he was not encouraged. Was R.H. angry at him past reclamation, or was he simply traumatized by his circumstances beyond the niceties of human interaction? He found he had no choice but to put the question out of mind and persevere, knowing that such perseverance was itself a kind of penance.
He admitted that Jane was not ill and never had been. He had lied about her sickness to cover up his own. He had fallen ill just prior to the trial, and the instinct that came naturally to him as a man too proud for his own good