“It’s sort of a private matter.”
“Private matter? You were profiled in the fucking New England Journal of Medicine, for Christ’s sake. He used to carry a copy of it around with him,” Peter said to Masserly, “to prove to people he wasn’t nuts.”
“That’s not why I carried it around.”
“He’d come in here with a bicycle helmet on his head, wearing a backpack.”
“I’m sure he’s heard this from somebody, Peter.”
“And he’d walk around like a schoolkid heading out for the bus. They were doing some kind of experiment. What was the point of that experiment again?”
“What’s the point of bringing it up?”
Peter shrugged. “We’re just talking. He showed up to court like that once. Judge comes in and he won’t take off the bicycle helmet. He’s got the chin strap all buckled in, wearing a suit. Judge asks him what’s with the helmet. You should have seen Kronish.”
“You can read about it in the New England Journal,” Tim said to Masserly.
“I’ve never seen Kronish so pissed. I was just an associate then. I didn’t say a fucking word, did I, Tim? Did I say a word to you about that bicycle helmet? Not one fucking word.”
“You were a saint.”
“Hey, Tim, don’t be angry. We’re just talking here. Uncontrollable bouts of walking. Masserly, you gotta read the thing to believe it. And then you still won’t believe it.”
Tim wondered who had championed Peter for partnership. Was it Kronish? Personally he had not thought Peter had shown himself to be partnership material. Peter worthy of partnership at Troyer, Barr? He didn’t think so. “I’m going to get back to work,” he said.
“Wait, wait. I mean, it brings up questions. For instance, for instance. What would have happened to you if you had been blindfolded?”
“Hey, Peter. Have you and Kronish talked about a motion for summary judgment yet?”
He preferred to keep a low profile, but suddenly he was unable to hold back. Who had championed that bow-tied twerp to be a Troyer, Barr partner?
Peter cocked his head. “In what case?”
He damn well knew what case.
“Do you guys have any idea who you might assign it to?”
“A motion for summary judgment in what case, Tim?”
“The Keibler case.”
“Keibler?”
“I was just curious if you and Mike had discussed who you might assign it to.”
Peter looked over at Masserly. “Who in their right mind would submit a motion for summary judgment in Keibler?” he asked the kid.
2
He had complained of brain fog. Neither Jane nor Becka understood what brain fog was but neither did they disbelieve he was suffering from it. He had earned the right to say he felt a certain way and to be taken at his word. He said he felt mentally unsticky. The description was unhelpful, but he insisted that he suffered from a lack of mental stickiness. His nerves felt “jangly.” He told Becka to imagine a guitar whose strings had all gone slack. The image was vivid but she had trouble applying jangly to her own nervous system. The physical pain was easier to describe, but this, too, he did in a private way. His muscles felt hyperslogged. His left side was floaty. Some days his breathing was all bunched up. They could only approximate for themselves how those words made him feel when he translated them into metaphor, as with the guitar strings, but he insisted on identifying them in these nonmedical and not very useful ways because to him there was no adequate substitute. They offered the most precise descriptions, the ones that aligned best with his inner experience of being.
“So when you say all bunched up,” Becka had asked him, “you mean to say you can’t catch your breath?”
“No,” he replied. “I mean to say my breath is all bunched up.”
Jangly, hyperslogged, all bunched up — he spoke a language only he understood.
They read to him through the brain fog. He favored history and biography. He was worried that without stimulus he would shed IQ points as if sweating them off into the bedsheets. Not long after his sequestering, Jane had purchased a hospital bed with retractable sides and Velcro restraints at the wrists and ankles, an improvement over the headboard and handcuffs. Together with the bedpan and the bottles of skin ointment and antidepressants and the general stagnant smell of antiseptic and body sweat, the bed transformed the guest room into something out of hospice care. He was in one long nightmare of walking now: walk, sleep, wake up, wait for the next walk. His feet convulsed rhythmically against the restraints. Becka was narrating the Senate exploits of Lyndon B. Johnson when she discovered that he could fall asleep even as his body continued to walk.
“Dad,” she said. She shook him and he came to. “You fell asleep.”
“It’s hard to concentrate through the brain fog.”
“But you never stopped walking,” she said.
She thought that was all the evidence anyone would ever need to prove that what afflicted him was not “all in the head.” His body was not his own if it continued to labor without his conscious input. But he no longer seemed interested in debates. What caused it, mind or body, what it should be labeled, organic disease or mental illness, fell second to his immediate concern.
“You can’t let me fall asleep like that.”
“Why not?”
“Wake me up if I do it again. Keep me up, Becka. Keep reading.”
The next time she came home to relieve her mother, he stopped her before she could even start to read. “This isn’t working,” he said. “Get my things together. Unstrap me.”
“No,” she said.
“This room is death, Becka. Let me out.”
“It will run its course. You have to be patient.”
“It would have done so by now, goddamn it. Let me out of here! It’s death in here!”
How easy it would have been to leave the room and plug his screams with headphones. He was locked away as well as any lunatic on suicide watch. But with her mother gone and she alone to care for him, abandoning him was not an option. Her three or four days with him were always a rigorous and continual effort to keep him focused, somehow keep him connected.
She bought an iPod and filled it with music. “I want you to try something, Dad.”
“Where is your mother?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Where does she go when she leaves the house?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lying.”
“Stop straining your neck. Relax.”
She placed a noise-canceling pair of headphones over his ears, hopeful they would eliminate the rustle of his legs as they struggled against the sheets. Then she introduced him to some of the music that had been her own solace for as long as she could remember.
3
He had sat before the panel trying not to cry. Whatever you do, don’t cry. Just keep talking. His desperation was like a pheromone secreting itself into a room full of wolves. He appealed to them on the basis of over twenty years of impeccable service and the many millions of dollars he’d made the firm. You thankless sons of bitches! he wanted to scream. You ruthless bureaucrats! You’ll all get sick one day, too! This flinty nerve vied in him against total supplication. Oh, please, please take me back! Grant me the full measure of life again. On hand and knee, peering up at formidable and unmoving faces: I will be good, will do as told. No more breakdowns, promise, promise.
“Tim, I think we’ve heard all we need to hear,” said Kronish.
He was jabbering on, making a case for himself, trying not to cry.
“Tim, Tim—”