The Unnamed - By Joshua Ferris Page 0,81

at the crumpled bill.

“What’s this for?”

“An hour,” he said. “An hour to work in peace, no interruptions, no inquiries. Surf the Internet, take a long lunch, talk to your kid on the phone. Whatever—for one hour.”

She pocketed the hundred. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll surf the Internet.” She shambled away.

Glare penetrated the window as cars went by. Semis with heavy loads rattled the plate glass. He kept his head down and slowly worked himself, word by word, back into communion with the other hours, days, years—there was in fact no name for this particular unit of time—that together formed a continuum of unawareness that was as close to transcendence as he would come. He was working himself, as if with a spade in a tunnel that finally yields to light, out of the physical world. Rested, at ease, contented by the coffee, the other had no complaints. He would get hungry soon, but with cunning, careful focus, Tim might have another hour to himself.

But before that hour was out, someone knocked gently on one corner of the desk. It was a visitor, and he had not had a visitor in a long time.

“Hi, Tim.”

Fritz’s tie was loosely knotted and his sleeves rolled up. He had dragged in with him a measure of the heat. “May I sit down?” he asked.

“Fritz?” He began to collect the work laid out before him into tidy piles. “Did we have an appointment? What the hell time was our appointment?”

Fritz climbed in across from him. “We didn’t have an appointment,” he said.

“Well, that’s okay, hell. I’m just writing a brief. When I’m not being interrupted.”

“Am I interrupting?”

“No, no, it’s not you.”

“Do you know what you want?”

“Not now,” he told the secretary.

“Just some coffee,” said Fritz.

Tim’s hands returned to fussing with the loose-leaf paper. His eyes refused to meet Fritz’s. Fritz noticed his missing fingers.

“Now’s as good a time as ever,” he said. “So where are we?”

Fritz looked up from his friend’s hands. He hadn’t known what to expect, but it wasn’t this. “Where are we?” he asked.

“With the man. What progress?”

Fritz looked at him. “Nobody’s seen you for months, Tim,” he said. “We’ve been worried about you.”

“Busy, you know.”

“It took me a long time to find you.”

He stopped fussing with his papers and sat up straight. “Now, look. We’ve been after this guy and after this guy, and while you guys are supposed to be the best, you still haven’t found him. And every day we don’t find him is another day an innocent man wastes away in that jail cell of his.”

“R. H. Hobbs is dead, Tim.”

The woman reappeared. Fritz turned his coffee mug over and set it right side up on the lacy paper doily. “Thank you,” he said, and the woman departed.

“Do you know how long I’ve been petitioning to have secretaries phased out of this firm?” he said to Fritz. “What do they do? They fetch coffee. That’s it. You want something done, you ask a paralegal. The only thing a secretary can do is fetch coffee, because fetching coffee is beneath a paralegal.”

“Tim,” said Fritz, “did you hear me? R. H. Hobbs is dead.”

“No, he’s not.”

“He hanged himself in December.”

“When did he get out?”

“Out?”

“Of prison. When did he get out of prison?”

“He was serving a life sentence—”

“I know what his goddamn sentence was, goddamn it,” he said. “I know what he was serving.”

His raised voice caught the attention of the two truckers sitting at the counter. Ella stood across from them, smoking and staring. One of the truckers turned and said something.

“I’m asking a simple question,” said Tim. “When did he get out?”

“I’m afraid he didn’t get out,” said Fritz.

Tim remembered sitting on the sofa watching TV with Becka when R.H.’s trial began. He was unable to leave the house for some reason. Why was that? He couldn’t recall. Uninterrupted doses of Buffy, like an IV drip, kept the guilt at bay. After he went into remission, he went to see R.H. in prison. He sat across from him and noticed the gray hair on his arms. He had never really seen him until that day, an aging man in a prison jumpsuit.

“What about the man?”

“What man?”

“The man. The man, Fritz, who I saw on the bridge. And at the baths. At the baths, too, when he attacked me. Where are you with him?”

“We’re nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“It hasn’t been an active case for a long time.”

“Why did I establish a trust, then?” he cried. “I made a specific provision in the trust for