Within the week they had finished the second season. He asked her if she had the third. Between the third season and the fourth he didn’t need to ask. She just got off the recliner and brought the next season down from her bedroom.
They were in the middle of the sixth season when he unexpectedly sat up mid-episode and turned away from the TV. He looked straight ahead, toward the fireplace. He set the remote down on the coffee table. He unbuckled the chin strap and peeled the bicycle helmet from his shaved head. It was startling to see him bald. It was almost like he suffered from a real disease like cancer or something. He placed the helmet and its portable device next to him on the sofa.
“Should you really be taking that off, Dad?” she asked.
“Why am I not walking?” he asked, more to himself than her. “Where has all the goddamn walking gone?”
It was the very thing she had been asking herself for weeks.
22
Mike Kronish drove to the courthouse every morning with R. H. Hobbs in the back of a tinted SUV. He reassured his client, who had taken to calling him at home late at night, about the previous day’s proceedings, and then prepared him for what would likely happen during the day ahead. The driver let them off at the foot of the courthouse steps, which they climbed in the hundred-plus heat. By the time R.H. entered the grand echoing foyer and joined the line to go through security, perspiration was pouring down his face and he was panting. Mike Kronish had started to fear his client wouldn’t make it through trial without suffering a heart attack. He had appealed to the judge to give them a continuance on that basis, but the judge ordered a physical and reviewed the results and the motion was denied. He would grant it, he told Kronish, when R.H. was admitted to the hospital for chest pains.
They made it through security, where the marshals took away their cell phones and BlackBerrys, and they entered the courtroom together. The judge began the day’s proceedings promptly at nine thirty. Kronish and his client walked through the gate separating the gallery from the well at exactly twenty-two after. Peter was already present, managing the work of two junior associates and three paralegals. They were assembled now no differently from the way they had been every morning since the trial began, with one exception: to the right of Peter in Kronish’s chair sat a man in a gray suit with a bicycle helmet on his head. When the two men came into view, Tim turned and greeted them. He stood up and shook hands with Kronish and R.H. awkwardly, with his left hand. Though it was now summer, the effects of Tim’s frostbite lingered. Kronish asked him what he was doing there.
“I’ve just been getting the rundown from Peter,” he replied. “I’m ready to help any way I can.”
Kronish set his briefcase on the table. “What do you mean, the rundown?”
“I’m all caught up. Peter and I talked.”
“About what?”
R.H. interrupted them. “I thought you were supposed to be at the hospital,” he said. “If it was important to be at the hospital, why aren’t you at the hospital?”
Tim didn’t look at R.H. He looked at Kronish and reiterated that Peter had caught him up and that he was ready to get to work. He also wanted Kronish to know that he’d been reading the transcripts nightly and, frankly, no disrespect intended, they could use his help. Kronish did not want R.H. to know that they had just walked in on the greatest breach of professional protocol he could remember in all his years as a trial lawyer, but he was having difficulty seeing straight. He asked R.H. to have a seat.
“Why is he here?” R.H. demanded. Tim’s reappearance could mean only one thing to R.H. — that his trial was going worse than he suspected, and that they had had to call a man away from his wife’s deathbed in order to salvage it. “Where were you three weeks ago?”
“Have a seat, R.H.,” said Kronish.
“Why haven’t you been here from the beginning?”
Kronish gave Peter a look and Peter understood immediately. Peter jumped up, took gentle hold of R.H.’s arm and started coaxing him into his chair. R.H. went reluctantly.
“What is he doing here?” he asked Peter.
Kronish would have preferred to talk to Tim privately, away from R.H., the prosecution team, and all those looking on from the gallery, but the judge was expected in less than five minutes and would not be pleased to find the defense team’s lead counsel absent from the courtroom. He remained standing, as did Tim, and spoke to him in a soft whisper.
“What the hell? What the fuck? What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck?”
“Hey, Mike, go easy. I’m here to help.”
“Help how?”
“Any way I can.”
“There is no way you can.”
“Come on, Mike. I was the architect of the strategy, Peter’s got me all caught up—”
“Fuck caught up, Tim! We’re three weeks into trial. You’re the architect of a strategy that’s radically changed. Do you not see? Do you not understand the delicate dynamic? Look at the man. Look what you’ve done. The fucking protocol, man!”
“Hey, Mike—”
“You arrogant bastard,” said Kronish. “This has nothing to do with R.H. and everything to do with you. And why are you wearing that fucking helmet?”
“Read this,” he said.
He handed Kronish a photocopy of an article from The New England Journal of Medicine. “John B.” was the pseudonym the authors had assigned him. The article detailed his condition and debated its causes. The psychiatrists believed his situation came from a physical malfunction of the body, something organic and diseased, while the neurologists pointed to the scans and the tests that revealed nothing and concluded that he had to be suffering something psychological. Each camp passed the responsibility for his diagnosis to the other, from the mind to the body back to the mind, just as they had done in private over the course of his endless consultations.
Kronish flipped through the pages he had been handed. “What’s this?”
“I’m John B.,” said Tim.
“Who?”
“The subject of that article.”
Kronish looked at him in disbelief. “Are you unaware of the fucking protocol, man?”
Just as he said this, the judge walked through the chambers door and the marshal called out for all to rise. Kronish was caught holding the article Tim had given him.
“Please be seated,” said the judge.
When Tim sat down, Kronish realized he intended to stay. He had no choice but to sit as well, if he wished not to draw attention to himself. As he did so, he considered rising again and asking the judge for permission to approach. He would ask for a fifteen-minute recess in which he would take Tim outside the courthouse and beat him behind a dumpster. But he preferred not to request permission to approach because R.H. worried about conversations he didn’t participate in. He was also loath to ask the judge for a recess before the day had even begun. Kronish was momentarily paralyzed. He was never paralyzed. He turned to Tim, who was sitting next to him, awaiting the resumption of a trial he’d been absent from since day one.
“Take that helmet off,” he whispered.
“What?”
“That goddamn bicycle helmet on your head. Take it off.”
“I can’t.”
Kronish stared. “Take that ridiculous fucking helmet off your head, Tim, before the fucking judge notices.”
“I won’t,” said Tim.
For a moment of blinding discomfort, the two sides of Kronish battled for primacy — reason, which knew any sudden movement would be bad for his client, and rage, which wanted to rip the helmet off Tim’s head and Tim’s head with it.
“When I get back this evening,” he said, “I’m calling an emergency caucus among the partners and I’m recommending that you be stripped of partnership.”