He had once walked away from a campsite out of a valley and across a pine ridge, down an embankment to the foothills, where he awoke behind an Airstream in a designated vehicle area. Night rain on his skyward face woke him. He played back the image of the valley as it broadened and the tent receded. He had been forced to walk away from the few and only things he still possessed and they had taken on a value greater than any other man would have given them. The separation felt like heartbreak. He did not have the first hint how to return.
He searched for two days, and on the third day he started to withdraw from the medication, which was with his other things at the campsite. He became lightheaded and short of breath. He followed the arterial road into town and wandered around a Men’s Wearhouse where he sorted unhappily through the tie racks. He paid for a double-breasted suit and arranged for its tailoring in anticipation of an important meeting. He burrowed further into mental daze after returning to the park. He started talking to himself again. He scolded the other and prayed to God that the foot soldiers of His army would vanquish the chariots and trespassers of the enemy on the frontlines of battle threatening him with chaos and death. His steadiness defected on the rain-slicked switchbacks, and he was laid out on a picnic bench, soaked through and bleeding, when the ranger came upon him.
“We’ve been looking for you,” said the ranger.
“You have?”
“I’m with the angel mercenaries of God’s army and the bugle blowers leading the charge,” he said. “Here, let me help you.”
The ranger reached down and helped him to the station and presented him with every item of his illegal campsite, the tent and bedroll and backpack. He took his medication and slept on a cot in the back of the station and when he woke up the ranger spoke much more harshly to him, fined him for failing to obtain a backcountry permit and for camping outside the designated area, and never said another word to him about the army of God.
Thereafter he pitched the tent immediately after coming to the end of a walk, slept, and, upon waking, packed everything up again. To own something was to keep it on his back or risk losing it forever.
A sonic flock of stealth fighters zipped by overhead, the briefest of black apparitions. He walked past fields of mesquite and tract housing and came to a Verizon store where he bought the cheapest phone and a package of prepaid minutes.
He called her at least once a month, sometimes twice, to let her know where he was and that everything was okay, he was safe, and she called him, but his cell phone wasn’t always charged.
“We got twenty miles away from the Waffle House before I realized what a terrible mistake we’d made,” she said to him. “I told Fritz to stop the car and turn around, but you were already gone. Did we really think you knew better than we did what was right for you, that you even knew how to take care of yourself? We should have dragged you out of there. Anybody could see you needed help. I don’t know what we thought we were doing letting you stay there. I think we thought we were dealing with the old Tim. So I let twenty miles go by before I realized the old Tim was gone and that we had just abandoned a child. I stuck around after Fritz flew home and I drove around in the rental looking for you.”
He said nothing.
“I have looked for you from the window of a moving car for so long now, I still do it out of habit. Even now, even knowing you’re getting by, knowing you’re taking your medication, I still look for you when I get in the car. I think I always will. I do it hoping to find you and convince you to come home. I’m used to it now, not having you with me, but I still look out the window hoping to find you so I can follow you and we can start over. Is there some way of starting over, do you think, some way we haven’t thought of?”
He didn’t answer.
“I’m just glad you’re calling,” she said. “I’m glad you’re okay. You would like it here. It’s smaller than what we had, but for me it’s perfect. I could probably go smaller. Two hundred square feet maybe. I’m probably the only person in the city who wants a smaller apartment. Even Becka’s is bigger. People ask me where I live and I feel the need to lie. If they knew the truth I don’t think they’d trust my judgment as a broker. Sometimes I find myself describing the old house for them. I say I live in a house in the suburbs with my husband and they nod and don’t think anything of it. They look at me like of course you do, where else would you live?”
The free health clinic in a college town was in a squalid corner of hell. He was there for a simple refill. His neighbors in the basement waiting room looked drained and ghoulish in the fluorescent light. His name was called. He waited inside the exam room until the official walked in. The official had credentials that made him the nearest approximation to a physician in the building. He handed the official his medical file. The official asked him if he still believed that God was waging an insurgency on the frontlines of his mind to capture that territory for the soul. He was quoting from the file.
“I’m not so sure about God anymore,” he replied.
“It’s an interesting theory, though.”
“It wasn’t always a theory.”
The steady gaze that followed was unnerving. Silence filled the cubby in that warren of underfunded cubbies.
“God needs all the advocates He can get,” said the official.
The statement sounded like a challenge. There seemed a right reply and a wrong one. The official stared at him without blinking. He didn’t know if he was being tested for signs of continued madness or recruited to a cause.
“Of course He does,” he said finally.
“You can’t medicate the calling out of your life.”
“I never would,” he said.
He received his refills and took them to a pharmacy.
He passed up diners and hotels and the idle hour of rest in bars and bowling alleys because indulgence in the creature comforts during his downtime made him sluggish and contrarian when it came time to walk. He continued to think, “I’m winning,” or “Today, he won,” depending on how well his mind, his will, his soul (he did not know the best name for it) fought against the lesser instincts of his body. “He” or “It” or whatever you wanted to call it — but certainly not “I,” he thought — still bellyached for food, needed water, complained of soreness in the joints and muscles. He tended to its needs while trying not to spoil it. He made every effort to remember a time when he was not just the sum of his urges.
“I guess I don’t understand why it hasn’t gone into remission. It went into remission before. You’d expect it would go into remission again. And then you could come home and we could pick up where we left off.”
“That would kill me.”
“Why?”
“Because if it went into remission, it would come back, and I don’t want to have to do it all over again.”
“Do what?”
“Resign myself to it.”
“You wouldn’t have to. We’d make it work.”
“Go on with your life,” he said.
“And do what?”
“Sell houses,” he said. “Be happy. Remarry.”
There was a pause on her end. “I can’t believe you’d say that.”
“I’m out here now,” he said. “I’m doing what I have to do. You should do the same.”
He stood outside a big multiplex reading the listings and showtimes. He was not current with the popular reviews but he could distinguish from the titles the political thriller from the romantic comedy from the animated feature. He badly wanted to be inside. There was a comfy seat in there for him and plenty of warmth. The distraction of mindless entertainment promised to shuffle off a pair of hours that might have otherwise been spent dwelling dully on a bench.