Tim Farnsworth, a partner in a New York law firm, suffers
from bouts of the ultimate wanderlust.
When the urge to walk hits him, he can’t stop until he drops. He eventually falls asleep in his tracks,
even if he is in his bathrobe and barefoot in a snowstorm. This affliction has his doctors baffled and
his wife, Jane, at her wit’s end. She
has tried handcuffing him to the bed, but that solution is just as impractical
as insisting that he keep a backpack of warm clothing with him at all times. As he embarks on one of his unplanned
excursions, he encounters a man who claims to have the knife with which a woman
was murdered. Tim is defending the man
charged with the murder but can’t interrupt his walk to get more info from the
man with the knife. This failing is
almost as crushing for Tim as the effect that his walking has on his family. His compulsion is not entirely believable and
is no doubt a metaphor for something I can’t identify, although drug addiction
comes to mind. Equally unbelievable is
the fact that his episodes do not elicit the harassment that vagrants often
endure or the pilfering of his wallet while he is sleeping in inconvenient
places. In fact, his odysseys are
largely uneventful, except for the toll they take on his body. Still, the issues with his job and his family
keep this unusual story from seeming too outrageously absurd.