Neither of them saw the little girl. She broke away from her mother and went sidewise straight into Tim. The impact of his leg threw her to the ground. He skittered to avoid stepping on her and had difficulty regaining his balance. Everyone — Frank, the girl’s mother, bystanders — stopped, some to stare, others to bend down to the girl who, after a second of stunned silence, began to wail on the sidewalk. Tim kept walking.
“You looked back at me terrified,” Frank told him. “And I looked at you wondering why you weren’t stopping. I mean, you’d told me you couldn’t stop. I just didn’t understand until then that what you meant was, you really couldn’t stop.”
“I have no memory of this.”
“I remember it like it was yesterday.”
“But we’ve never talked about it.”
Frank shook his head.
“You just believed me?”
“You would have come back to make sure that girl was okay if you could have,” he said.
He had moments of doubt, yet he always returned to the belief that he was sick in body and not in mind. But for whatever reason his memory of knocking that little girl to the ground had been erased. Could anything in his mind — indivisible, complete — be erased, or otherwise go haywire? What confidence did that give him in the permanent thing called the soul?
Tim thanked him and turned to leave. Then he remembered that he had something of Frank’s. He pulled the wool cap out of his coat pocket.
“I owe you a hat,” he said.
Frank took the cap.
“I can’t thank you enough for that. It saved my life.”
“Anytime, Mr. Farnsworth.”
18
He was prodded awake by a billy club. He sat up in the leather seat and blinked down at the cop, who stood on the blacktop at a defensive angle. He was shining the flashlight in Tim’s eyes. Tim had no idea where he was. The cop asked him to step out of the vehicle. Softer security light streamed through the broad windshield. The steering wheel in front of him was a big round toy. The van or truck had no door. He stepped down the single stair as the cop backed up to keep some distance. There was another cop on the other side of him with his hand at his holster. The three of them stood between the truck he’d slept in and another just like it. It said Utz Potato Chips on the side. A foggy memory of having slipped inside the fenced lot when there was still a little daylight remaining now returned to him.
The cop asked him what he was doing there. He said he didn’t know, which was the undeniable truth, but the cop didn’t care for honest answers.
He had been in the middle of witness prep. There was nothing more important prior to jury selection than readying R.H. for the possibility of putting him on the stand. It would not be without risk but Tim was leaning toward it. He thought it would be good to let the jury hear from the man directly. How many times had R.H. said he had nothing to hide? His protestations of innocence would be genuine, and therefore well received. But it would require damn good coaching. Tim considered it one of the more purely enjoyable aspects of going to trial. He was prepping his witness and loving it. Then he walked out.
By now he figured Peter and probably R.H. himself had alerted Kronish to his abrupt departure. There had been no incoming call that might have explained it, no urgent message. Tim just grabbed the backpack and fled. Kronish had probably marched the episode down the hall to Wodica. How was he going to explain this one? They were lawyers, these fellows, A-game litigators with suspicious dispositions and the professional training to detect a wide array of bullshit. Jane’s cancer wasn’t going to take him much further.
For the first time since this latest recurrence, Tim didn’t want to return to the office.
At the station, the lieutenant apologized for any rough treatment. Government trucks were parked in that lot and there was always the fear of terrorists.
“Terrorists?”
“Who knows,” said the lieutenant. “By the way, you ever try a sleep clinic? My brother-in-law walked in his sleep terrible. He went to a sleep clinic in Boston and now my sister tells me you can’t get that son of a bitch out of bed with a Hyster.”
“I’ll have to try that,” said Tim.
Outside the station he called Dr. Bagdasarian and got his service. He told the woman it was an emergency and she woke the doctor up. When he came on the line, Tim told him that he wanted to give the new technology a try. He no longer thought he had anything to lose.
“Just out of curiosity,” said Bagdasarian. “What made you change your mind?”
He told him nothing about walking out of witness prep or the increasing challenge of explaining himself at the firm. He just wanted something to show people, he said. He wanted to return to the firm with evidence that he was not crazy but sick, deserving of understanding, even sympathy. And he was doing it for Jane. He had to recognize that his sickness was not his alone. She had followed him down the dark and narrowing tunnel. How could he abandon her at a possible point of light?
He waited on the bench to be picked up. He waited and he waited, never having waited so long.
She pulled up and he got in. On the drive home he told her where he’d woken up and about the Utz trucks and the lieutenant who told him to go to a sleep clinic. “Like we haven’t been to sleep clinics,” he said.
Jane didn’t respond.
“Jane, are you listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“You haven’t said a word.”
“It’s three in the morning,” she said. “I’m tired.”
During his last recurrence he had agreed to go into handcuffs not only to save him from such episodes as being arrested in a parking lot three villages over from his own, but to spare her calls from arbitrary places at all hours, the chore of picking him up that grew more draining as the days and weeks passed.
“I called Dr. Bagdasarian,” he said.
She didn’t respond.
“I can’t keep waking up in potato chip trucks.”
“No,” she said. “I guess you can’t.”
They drove in silence the rest of the way home.
19
Dr. Bagdasarian removed the improvised device from a small shopping bag. Tim held it in his hands and said nothing, for there was little to say about a common bicycle helmet. It had been retrofitted to perform an extraordinary purpose and manufactured exclusively and at great expense, but he wondered how such an everyday object could serve to advance an understanding of his mystery. He doubted it could, and with that doubt, as he placed it on top of his head and buckled the chin strap, futility made off with his heart. The biomedical firm had installed sensors up and down the helmet’s foam-cushion lining. The wireless device that captured brain activity clipped easily to a belt. This silly and makeshift heroism of Bagdasarian’s, which he had encouraged in a moment of vulnerability, was all just so much overreaching, and nothing brought that home more than the snug feel of the chin strap pinching his skin and Jane’s sudden laughter at the sight of him across the table. He would try it, he would wear the helmet and hope for the right reading, but this felt like the last possible desperate grasp before the root to which he clung gave way and he plummeted down the sheer cliff. He had gone from MRIs and the Mayo Clinic to a trial made possible by sporting goods, with no guarantee of a success that was itself of questionable value. No diagnosis, no cure — what was the point again? Jane continued to laugh in a tenderly mocking way, tickling the doctor into a smile, but Tim despaired and felt the urge to cry. This was it, this little piece of medicalized headgear, and beyond it, he saw the hell of a permanently compromised life whose once-healthy past tormented him as the plain earth does a man passed over by the grace of God.