The Unnamed - By Joshua Ferris Page 0,58

conceivable watering hole, including the convenience stores where they made your beer portable with a paper sack. All of them had remained just out of reach. The people he had passed in their windows, with their coats off and half-finished pints in hand, how he had despised them.

A day laborer was drinking down the way, smoking a cigarette in violation of city ordinance and talking with the bartender, who leaned in close to him. Eventually she ventured down the bar to ask Tim what he wanted. She leaned in while he looked over the tap. After he’d made up his mind, she lifted off the bar as if it were a final push-up and poured his beer. It was garnet-colored, shot through with its own light. Tiny bubbles made a half-inch head of foam. He put the beer to his lips and drank.

This was more like it. This was being in the world.

When the bartender returned to see if he wanted another, he asked her, “Have you seen all these bees around lately?”

“Bees?”

“Honeybees.”

“I haven’t seen any bees.”

“I saw a bunch of them dead in Bryant Park just now. Do you know if bees are supposed to be around this early in the spring? Or if they hibernate?”

“I know nothing about bees,” she said. “Steve, do you know anything about bees?”

“Bees?” said the man at the end of the bar.

“Like honeybees.”

“I know they make honey,” he called down to them.

She turned back to Tim. “Charmer, isn’t he?”

She drifted back down the bar.

When he and Jane talked about her drinking, they were free of the recriminations that might have taken hold of them over some lesser matter. This only seemed to make it harder to talk about. A strangeness lay coiled in their domestic familiarity. They lay in bed in anticipation of talking but remained silent for long stretches of time, as if the subject under discussion were not the self-evident steps they would have to take to address her willful drunkenness but the unimaginable ways they might resolve his involuntary walking. They stared into the essential mystery of each other, but felt passing between them in those moments of silence the recognition of that more impossible mystery—their togetherness, the agreement each made that they would withstand the wayward directions they had taken and, despite their inviolable separateness, still remain. It had nothing to do with how age and custom had narrowed their circumstances or how sickness had shaped them outside of their control. It was not a backward but a forward glance.

“I don’t want to go,” she had said.

“It will go by fast.”

“What will you do?”

“Wait for you. Visit you.”

“I don’t see why,” she said.

She hated herself for having failed him. Becka had done it better, she said. He would have done it better by an order of magnitude. He interrupted her. If she was going to assign blame, he would have to take his share. He never intended to bring this on them, no, but intention, or the lack of it, could not grant a full pardon. He could not escape blame even if it was the faultless blame of being born and falling ill, blame that was also Jane’s, that was anyone’s, really—everyone’s price to pay for being mortal.

“We’ll take a vacation afterward,” he said. “Where would you like to go?”

“How often will you visit me?”

“As often as they let me.”

Visiting hours were from six to nine. He often left work early to spend a few hours with her before returning home.

The ring of his BlackBerry brought him back to the bar and the barstool.

From the moment Masserly began to speak, with his clown’s voice that seemed to suggest the arrival of puberty any day now, Tim forgot his resolution to remain in the world and resumed a bitter longing for his old job. He didn’t even mark the transition. The pockmarked bar smooth to the touch, the mahogany details, the bottles arrayed before the distressed mirror like all the king’s men—they faded the moment of the phone call. “Tim, it’s Kyle Masserly.”

“Yeah?”

“This motion for summary judgment in Keibler.”

“How do you know about that?”

“Didn’t you get a call from Kronish?”

“How do you know about my motion, Masserly?”

“They gave it to me.”

“They who?”

“They want me to clean it up. Not that it, you know—”

“Clean what up?”

Tim listened intently. He had his finger drilled into his opposite ear to block out the music from the bar, and for a quick second it sounded as if Masserly had hit the mute button.

“Did