The Unnamed - By Joshua Ferris Page 0,78

control of my powers—rhetorical, argumentative. Don’t ask me how. There should be docket numbers to our conversations.”

“Is the voice still there, louder, fainter?”

“Fainter. He makes it known when he’s angry or wants something, but it’s quieted down since you patched me up.”

“That’s good.”

“Don’t be fooled. He’s just lying in wait.”

“But if you keep taking the medication, there should be no problem.”

“Pharmacology is only one tactical maneuver in a protracted war.”

“What war is that?”

“The one we’ve been fighting for centuries. The one we’ve always lost, so far as anyone can tell.”

“Sorry, I’m not sure I understand.”

“Death. The will to live versus inevitable decay. What’s not to understand?”

“Were you trying to kill yourself?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘yourself,’ ” he said.

He resumed eating voluntarily. He got up and voided himself of his own accord. He was quiet in the evenings. They gave him donated winter clothes and released him.

He walked out in a gray hunter’s cap with fur brim and earflaps, a winter jacket. He stood just beyond the automatic doors where he had fallen to his knees almost two months earlier. He was trying to decide whether to go right or left, his breath visible in the cold. He had no impulse to undress and wander off into the winter. Ascension through annihilation wasn’t his immediate concern. The other was happy. The other liked the warmth, felt a little hungry. He knew his first task was to get his personal details in order—to call a private banker he knew in New York, who’d help him restore his identification and credit cards. He had these clerical impulses. The good hospital staff had restored him to the land of the pragmatic. In his pocket sat several prescriptions, some of which he even thought worth filling. Pharmacology was a legitimate tactical advantage. Eventually, he decided to turn right.

She let go the second she heard his voice and for the first minute of the call she cried with an abandon that he, on the other end, did not entirely comprehend. “Oh,” she said. He listened to her let out a heavy sigh in sobbing degrees. “Oh, Tim.”

“I’m not dead,” he said. “But I do have to take medicine.”

“Oh,” she said again. “I’ve been so…” She tried to collect herself. “Tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up.”

“But there’s one I just don’t take because it’s probably better to be dead than to go around feeling like that, all zombie you know, just totally whacked out and exhausted and who gives a fuck you can’t even think—I have two like that, actually—”

“Where are you, Tim? Please tell me.”

“—but the second is for the seizures and I probably shouldn’t, I don’t know—”

“Seizures?”

“Probably shouldn’t give that one up, I guess, even though I haven’t had one since I was in the hospital so maybe they’re gone now. I wouldn’t put it past him to make something just—poof!—you know, disappear. He makes his own rules and what the fuck am I supposed to do if they keep shifting? It’s like I told the doctors. Medicine can secure a base here and there but there will always be a battle going on somewhere else.”

“Tim, please tell me, please tell me where you are,” she said.

“I try not to pay attention and I do a pretty good job, too, when you consider how demanding he is, like I’m torturing him, you know, like I’ve taken him captive. For a while there we were trading retaliations in a zero-sum game. The chain of command was in constant flux. I thought I was winning but he changed the rules on me and that’s when he got the upper hand, when I went down, and that lasted for, I don’t know. I was under maybe three weeks?”

“Under?”

“Three weeks of torment. I was defenseless. He just had the run of me. He doesn’t think much about God. I’ve come around on that matter. I believe in God now. Isn’t that something?”

“Tim, please listen to me. I want to say something to you.”

“Do you remember that doctor one time, he told us about the blood-brain barrier? Now, that’s a distinction. On the one hand you’ve got the blood, just dumb as a train full of rocks, important rocks but dumb dumb dumb, and on the other hand the brain, which is where, you know, the me and the you, where the me and the you come from, and with this barrier in place, you keep the bastard out, you see. Integrity is maintained.