Authors: Joshua Ferris
“You have no fucking right to be here!”
“Does the defense have something it would like to share?” asked the judge from the bench.
Kronish stood. “No, Your Honor.”
Members of the prosecution were peering over. Kronish heard the strokes of a sketch artist behind him and felt the gallery looking on.
“Is that Mr. Farnsworth?”
Tim rose. “It is, Your Honor.”
“You have arrived at your destination, Mr. Farnsworth,” said the judge. “Why are you still in your helmet?”
“He’s not staying, Your Honor,” said Kronish.
“I am staying, Your Honor,” said Tim. “I have not yet appeared before Your Honor during these proceedings, but I would like to request permission to appear now.”
As these words were making their way to the judge, Tim turned, grabbed his backpack, and began to walk out of the well.
“On second thought, Your Honor,” he said, turning his head around to address the judge as onlookers, seated on both sides of the gallery, watched from their wooden pews.
“What is going on here?” asked the judge.
Tim walked past the marshal and pushed the door open.
“Mr. Kronish, what is going on?”
Kronish had his back to the judge. He was watching Tim Farnsworth walk out of the room. Then the door swung shut and he turned around to face his inquisitor. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
He woke up in a booth at a KFC in Queens. He lifted his head off the table. A napkin stuck to his face. Becka reached out for it, straightening his helmet in the process.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
She had followed him from the courthouse steps across the Brooklyn Bridge. He shed his suit coat and his buttondown in the heat without stopping, without the least concern for how he looked to those he passed: a crazy man possessed. She picked up his discarded clothes and followed him into the heart of the borough. She trailed behind him, ready to seize on his first false move, at any subtle sign of fakery, but he never halted, he never paused. The city was a wading pool of cement heat. The buildings bleating with glare, the sidewalks pulsing with sunlight. The bus exhaust and the interminable miles made the long walk unbearable. But he never stopped. She watched him slog inside the KFC and collapse.
Now she looked at him with tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,” she said.
Wildfires burned across several square miles, closing highways and forcing evacuations. The rainless summer and the wind and the lightning had turned the brush border between counties into kindling. Flames left charred contrails in the land resembling the scars of comets running aground on the face of the earth. Emergency workers had corralled most of the fire into containment lines where they starved the blaze of the fuel it needed to burn. They called in backfire experts, leased Helitack helicopters, scheduled twenty-four-hour water drops to keep the fires from destroying forest preserves and the shockingly close residential homes. Golf courses were used as termination points in an art new to frightened cities that had just barely adjusted to the flash floods of a swift and freakish spring. Disaster once confined to the west had migrated, a wayward animal confused by scrambled weather. Reservoirs were poisoned. Pockets of fire continued to glow but eventually the expressways were reopened and most residents were invited to return.
He reached around the back of her neck and collected her hair into a ponytail as she eased into him. Their mouths met and pressed into each other. He cupped the small of her back in his hands and turned their bodies over and laid her down 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.
“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 he took the bicycle helmet out of Bagdasarian’s hands, yet the disappointment, so familiar, felt brand-new. He had no idea to what extent he’d allowed his hopes to rise once more. What a fool he was, an inveterate and self-punishing fool. He felt Jane and Becka looking at him. He turned to them and smiled.
The doctor made an effort to qualify these indeterminate test results. He cautioned again that the device was a prototype, that the sensors picked up only neural activity, and that a second-generation helmet might be made not only to improve the sensitivity of the readings, but to include electrical and hormonal changes, the flow of blood and other biological currents. He suggested they go back to the drawing board for a better device.
Jane shook her head. “This has been a mistake. I’m sorry I encouraged it.” She turned to her husband. “Tim, I’m sorry,” she said. She reached out for his hand.
“We’ve come this far,” said Bagdasarian.
“No, Doctor, thank you,” she said. “I think we’re through.”
Tim turned to her. “Why not give him another shot?” he asked. “See what improvements can be made?”
That night he went down to the basement after Jane and Becka had fallen asleep. He sat on the weight bench and put the barrel of the gun inside his mouth. The cold metal made him salivate. He angled the barrel up toward his brains.
He had told Dr. Ditmar, the psychologist beloved by
New York
magazine, that he would prefer the diagnosis of a fatal disease. Ditmar bluntly stated that he was being excessive and naive. Compare his situation to someone with Lou Gehrig’s, Ditmar suggested, dead within three months. Wasn’t it better to be on a walk than in a grave? “No,” he said. “I’d rather have something I understand.” To which Ditmar replied: “Do you think you’d understand Lou Gehrig’s?”
He had perfect conviction that killing himself was not only justified now but necessary, that the relief of death was the only reply to the torment of a life that had to be lived as a lost cause, and his mind told him to pull the trigger. But his body, which spoke a persuasive language of its own, singular, subterranean, objected with the most fundamental repulsion, and while he sat with the gun in his mouth, nearly gagging on the barrel, these two opposite wills worked to gain the better of each other in a struggle so primitive that it could not be named. And finally he removed the gun and set it back in the standing toolbox behind the blunt hammers and screwdrivers and returned upstairs. He lacked the courage and the will—although perhaps he had astonishing amounts of both and was simply defeated again, if barely, on a playing field most people never realize exists until the final days and moments of their lives.
Mike Kronish wouldn’t even deign to pick up the phone when he called. Sam Wodica broke the news. The caucus had convened, a vote had been taken, and his partnership was thereby revoked.
“It wasn’t just your appearance at trial, Tim,” said Wodica. “Your wife?”
“She’s not dying.”
“No shit.”
He thought he should have been present for the caucus. He should have been allowed to defend himself. They were lawyers. Weren’t they familiar with due process?
“Does R.H. know about my wife?”
“For fuck’s sake,” said Wodica. “You don’t just want us to lose the revenue? Let’s open ourselves up to malpractice, too?”
“I don’t see how what I did constitutes malpractice.”
“Just what the fuck did you do, Tim? Huh, please allow me to ask. Just what the fuck did you do?”
It settled in, the enormity of a crumbling life. Twenty-one years. The firm had been a second home. Now Frank Novovian would not even be required to greet him. Maybe Frank would look at him and say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Farnsworth. I’m not allowed to let you up.” And he might say, “Twenty-one years, Frank.”
He and Wodica briefly discussed R.H.’s conviction. The only good news was that New York State didn’t allow the death penalty. The presentencing report was due in a few weeks, and then R.H. would be sent off. How would R.H. have fared if Tim had been able to see his case through to the end? If Tim had been allowed to finish the pretrial preparations, to help in jury selection, to argue and object? He was certain that right now they would be celebrating R.H.’s acquittal.
He called Detective Roy from time to time, and Fritz Weyer to see what progress had been made on his end. Fritz had calls in to friends at the department and one of his guys searching databases for a possible match on the face in the sketch. Maybe they’d get lucky.
He was at the firm again, dressed in suit and tie and standing before his fellow partners. R.H. was there, as were Jane and Becka. He had to campaign for his job. He said he should not be blamed for R.H.’s conviction because R.H. was guilty. Detective Roy began to applaud. Tim looked at R.H. sitting at the defense table, attempting to conceal his weeping. He approached R.H. and whispered to him, “Don’t worry, I know you’re innocent.” R.H. thanked him. The assistant district attorney who had tried the case was now itemizing all of the infractions Tim had committed: the internal lies, the false statements to authorities, the unprofessional conduct. She concluded with a passionate plea to the jury that they expel him from the firm. The judge stood up and poured sand from his shoes. It was Sam Wodica in a black gown and sun visor. He peered over to the other partners in the jury box and gave them a big thumbs-up. Jane was at the defense table comforting R.H. Mike Kronish entered the courtroom and tried to yank Tim’s pants down. Tim grabbed at his pants to keep them up because he did not want his pants to go down when he was fighting for his job. But Kronish was strong. He wanted everyone to see Tim with his pants down. Tim tried to push Kronish away but Kronish was now on top of him on the courtroom floor in front of Judge Wodica while a sketch artist documented the scene. Kronish gripped the back of Tim’s neck to make it easier to take his pants down. Tim lost track of the people in the room because his head was pinned to the ground and little courtroom rocks were digging into his skin. He was trying to swat Kronish away. It was hard with Kronish on top of him. It was only when Kronish succeeded in getting his pants down and exposing Tim that Tim woke up and realized that his pants were really down and that his head was pinned against crumbling blacktop.