Notes from the Fog: Stories

Critique

In the year of I Can’t Breathe, a hospital occurred on the island. The building was fashioned, rather quaintly, of matter. Bricks, windows, smoke. The hospital used flesh traditionally—draped over the anguished little need machines we call people. Space was pushed through rooms, to keep them from collapsing, or so it seemed. In truth, no one understood how such a spectacle could remain stable. Religion and science broadcast a distant wisdom, no different from birdcalls, and actual birds policed a space the size of the whole world.

The air was breathable. The scale, despite appearances, was one to one.

One commends the level of detail in this realistic hospital. Even the most advanced scrutiny did not reveal rigging. Blood tended to be housed inside puppets, who, in a surprising touch, were represented by actual people, pulled into the space and dosed with purpose. Traces of bone were found in the air, a dust misting over the island. The use of bone in such a way felt far too obvious, almost embarrassing. In other words, this spectacle was supposed to seem like it was taking place right now, in our own world. A full set of chemical tests were not conducted, but one felt, after witnessing the hospital and the elaborately created area around it, a strenuous petition to exist, as forceful as any area anywhere, ever.

Part of the suspense, in participating in this hospital and its surroundings, involved the mystery of who would do what and what would happen. The hospital neither increased nor decreased one’s curiosity. If mood alteration was at work, or indeed any manipulation of emotion, it was being done environmentally.

The buildings behind the hospital, in an interesting touch, were real. In the distance beyond the island loomed another island, attached to a skyline of actual buildings, many of which must have taken years to erect, and beyond that, a vague landscape was inferred, a possible continent, as if this was all taking place in a kind of world. Even different weather erupted in these other areas. A tremendous amount of care was taken to create details in the very far distance beyond the hospital, as if the materials elsewhere, in a space that was days away on foot—not that we could ever travel there—were just as important as the materials right in front of us. One heard reports of people perishing hundreds of miles away. Real people were born and lived out their lives never hearing of the hospital. Even the waterway bordering the island was fabricated with real water. Such a democratic approach to detail is troubling. It amounts to a celebration of technique, suggesting a creator slightly too satisfied by method, showcasing a skill, as if the making of something mattered more than that thing’s purpose.

Is not real water a dull choice here? Water, perhaps the most overused substance of our time. And so much of it. Actual water even at the greatest of depths, surrounding the island, running under it. It is not clear who is meant to appreciate such effects, or why, more importantly, a valuable resource is made so glaringly inaccessible. One senses a kind of hostility in the gesture. A taunt.

Even after we have gotten the point, the point keeps getting made.

The hospital staged a series of exhibits, punctuated by intervals called the workday, evening time, the shadow, and a fourth category of time that would seem to have never been named. Night and day occurred on schedule, but something felt wrong, as if the whole notion of time had simply been given too little attention in the first place, unless its very design was meant to cause deep ambivalence and dismay.

At the hospital, for instance, the day might feel too long, the night too short, or the night was too long, followed by a series of short, secondary nights and then a sudden flash of day, which seemed to never end. People expired at a steady rate, regardless of the time, but for some reason, one could not hear little popping noises each time someone died. It would have been so easy to implement such an effect, a little popping noise when someone died, so that to live and to sleep and walk the earth would be to listen to a steady stream of popping noises, marking death in the vicinity.

Sometimes at the hospital, just when night would seem to have expired, night continued to deepen instead, achieving levels of darkness heretofore thought impossible, with the hospital presumably hidden inside this purely dark fold, operating as usual, even while night kept bursting deeper, with people now expiring at an accelerated rate, faster than they were being born. An accurate measurement of the true passage of time could not be obtained. The fourth interval was determined to go unnamed. The people, too, if that’s what they really were—a definitive test was impossible—would be unnamed. That whole part of the world could feel likewise unnamed. On a map the area would be blurry, never quite coming into focus.

It is hard to escape the feeling that this is a weakness of the project, no matter how profoundly ambitious it is to create a world, build things in it, and then allow life to bloom. It is a clear weakness to create an erratic, confusing experience out of time, to give each creature an apparently unique perception of time, and then to make time itself inconsistent, poorly designed, and finally simply too hard to believe. An unfortunate weakness in an otherwise intriguing project.

Moving inside, the hospital featured people bent over each other in postures of carnage. These exhibits did not expire, which makes it awkward to comment on them now. One must believe that nothing of interest will ever happen again in order to declare anything of substance now. The trick behind work like this is how foolish it makes you feel for trying to observe anything about it. To be invited to the exhibit, you had first to fall ill, then be carried there in an ambulance. Or you needed to apply for a job and then actually perform it, which guaranteed a bias that prevented lucid reflection on the hospital itself. To join the exhibit was to recuse yourself from a rational state. This would explain the long lines, the carefully constructed illness narratives, the displays of frailty. It is perhaps no accident that leaving one’s home is also called “joining the exhibit.”

Attention to detail on the island was staggering. An actual landscaping firm had been hired to produce what was probably considered actual landscaping. Grass and pavers, shrubbery patterned after a shield. From high above, the topography achieved a devastating insignia, most awful to behold, but no one was privileged to this view. As with many buildings, something unbearable was inferred. You didn’t need to see or even know about it. It was inferred, and that was certain.

The streets surrounding the hospital, themselves authentic in materials, were given actual names, and the names were ratified through constant use. Advanced surveillance revealed significant adoption of the streets, with a troubling degree of realism. Pedestrians questioned there showed no sign that they were aware of being part of the exhibit. In some ways, these pedestrians were perhaps the exhibit’s most striking feature, a clear sign of the new kind of work being done today. Certainly a trend can be observed in which the civilian members of an exhibit insist that they have arrived under their own power, pursuing tasks they are sure they thought of themselves. Very few of these civilians seem aware of their true purpose. Dissection revealed otherwise, of course. Dissection revealed a clear program carried out at what can only be called the cellular level.

Testing revealed that the inhabitants of the island came from all over the world. They had been born into different families, grown with food, sometimes managed by handlers, other times left alone. Some of them actually existed. No real pattern in their origins could be detected.

The doors to the hospital operate just as one imagines real doors should. Inside, a series of smaller exhibits takes shape as you approach them, then vanishes from view when you turn your back. This effect—objects vanishing if you are not looking at them—is ingenuous, and so easy to take for granted.

In one piece, set inside an authentic-looking room, a man in a doctor’s costume approaches the sickbed. This is not a painting. The man seems made of a soft, fleshy substance. You have this feeling, looking at him, of wanting to touch him, but not romantically. Actual vocal noises emerge from this piece. Heaps of cloth surround the sickbed, faces buried inside. These are ostensibly the loved ones of the patient, collapsed in postures, one must guess, of grief. The cloth would appear to be real cloth. It’s uncanny. Even the bed seems fabricated of actual material: steel, plastic, and cotton. One is impressed by the trouble such fealty must have taken. The hospital makes a mockery of convincingness. The hospital achieves believability so easily, with such facility, it seems to suggest that believability is a terrible criterion for our daily lives, one we would do well discarding, and yet everywhere throughout the hospital believability seems to be what matters most. Perhaps the hospital satirizes the idea of being alive. Certainly there is a critique, in this piece, of waking up, of bothering to live.

So much of the piece is well made, not in the classical sense, but in the brutal, violent sense. It looks as if it was made by skilled craftspeople at gunpoint. The hospital looks like it was built at gunpoint. The people inside the hospital look as if they were born at gunpoint. The hospital looks as though it was positioned on the island at gunpoint. Even the island, when one examines its undercarriage, when one swims its circumference, seems to have been assembled, piece by piece, at gunpoint, dropped from the sky at gunpoint, made to decay just as real things decay, at gunpoint. One looks at such a hospital at gunpoint, then one walks away at gunpoint, travels home and goes to bed at gunpoint, only to wake up years later with the same awful gun held to one’s head.

The hospital is deliberately made to outlast us, to still be standing when we’re gone. There is a clear critique of the ephemerality of people, the way they reliably perish. The hospital would seem to gloat; not in the personified sense. Can a piece like this be faulted for its desire to feel more lifelike than we do? One pleasing feature of the piece is that you can reach into the space surrounding the bed. You cannot touch the bed itself, for some reason. The bed is off-limits. But you can handle the space around the bed, digging your fingers into the cloth where the patient’s loved ones are hiding their faces. With practice and focus, you can feel the faces inside the cloth, and they seem to actually respond to your touch. One has one’s hand kissed. One feels tears against one’s palm.

Years later, as the piece ages, the room and the bed and the cloth are gone. We do not see them removed, they never appear to decay. But they do not survive the passage of time. What remains of the piece are the lifelike bodies—living bodies, one surmises—hovering in space. The floor is gone. What remains of the hospital is too little to remark on. It would seem that the entire hospital has been removed with surgical precision. The area where the hospital was is brighter than what surrounds it, as if a piece of furniture has been moved across a wood floor, exposing an unlived area just waiting to catch up to the rest of the world.

In the piece, the man who once wore the doctor’s costume but is now incomplete (“naked” would seem to be the wrong word, since he lacks finer detail) approaches the patient who, years ago, because of his bedclothes, was not visible whatsoever. Now we can see him and the effect is terrible. The patient’s loved ones, no longer hidden in cloth, but not naked either—unborn is how they also seem, their mouths unfinished, their hair not quite resolved—exist in a tangle on the side of the patient’s bed. The hospital and its host island are gone. The nearby island, tethered to a possible continent, is gone, and the extreme distance yields nothing to the observer. All that remains are the few people in what was once a room but is now nothing, even as these people begin to fade and soon leave just pale shapes, themselves dissolving slowly into nothing that can be named.

The hospital recalls a time when the entire world was referred to as Potter’s Island. A certain era is evoked when we lived on the graveyard. The hospital suggests that it is a myth that there are zones of earth in which bodies are not buried. It is a myth that some areas of the world are graveyards while some are not. One might accidentally, and infrequently, walk across a plot of earth in which, upon which, people have not been smeared away, hidden in soil once their time finished, but the chances are small. The chances may be nonexistent. The dead are beneath us, but the air contains the dead as well.

One strains not to be too judgmental of such work. While the project is ambitious, it is deeply imperfect. It celebrates the sorrow of knowing nothing. It revels in bafflement. It asks us to admit that we might not really be living. It seems to invite us to die without understanding even the most basic principles.

Perhaps we might be more sympathetic to the creator. Water is so hard to get right. It is difficult to do shorelines. The horizon is next to impossible. Horizons have never been done well. They cannot be forced, but so often they are forced, and then they are disgraceful. Hospitals are tricky, but not just hospitals. The people in them. The people outside them. People, in or out of buildings, on the ground, floating, at rest. People conjoined, people alone. Such a disgrace when they are not done right and they have never been done right. They are done badly, all the time, and then soon that is simply the way people are always done—with bodies and eyes, with feelings, so finally conventional, so deeply unimaginative—and something disgraceful becomes the norm. The norm is the hospital. The norm is people on their beds, having trouble breathing. Not breathing, in truth, is the norm. If a true norm must be spoken of, it would have to be not breathing, not moving, no longer living. Taking into consideration all the people who have ever lived. The norm would be to be dead. One must admit that being dead has become the norm.

A vacant hospital might have been easier for this artist, set in a vacant lot, itself situated in an empty space free of obstacles, a space so pure that no one could enter it. Perhaps no one could even know about it. A smaller, contained project, through which this creator could test out ideas more safely. Vacant vehicles to flow in and out of the empty hospital, across transparent roads, discharging vacancy, creating no impact whatsoever on the surroundings, which has never been achieved. That might have been a better apprentice work. Or simply the hospital itself, without a lot, without a site, absent a landscape. A real hospital for today, satisfying all of today’s true needs, if that’s not too much to ask. A hospital twisting in space. Less complicated. But space is hard. Rarely has depth been done well, for instance. Ever? Often it seems so melodramatic. One cannot recall a time when space has been done well. Sometimes evening is believable. Sometimes. Should one—one must ask—stop desiring what has never been achieved? Is this hospital, in its near miss of authenticity, meant to remind us how finally unreal everything will always feel, or is such an effect simply too old-fashioned to commend?

One thing this piece does impeccably well is to use wind to create feeling. On the island a wind, created in the usual way, travels around objects, cooling them, but that’s not all. The wind is not created with any special technique. It is as technologically simple as it ever was, but this creator has a special feel for the use of wind. This creator is, without question, a genius in the use of wind in spaces both outdoors and in, a wind that follows one home from the hospital, across the realistic waterway, back to the adjacent island, itself so deeply real one feels an enduring confusion, a confusion one must now conclude is wind caused. This creator has fashioned a wind that does not leave you alone, even as you enter your home, which was created especially for this project, and even as you crawl into your highly vivid, full-scale bed made of real materials, this wind follows you, encircling you, holding you rather coldly as you wait, perhaps forever, for more understanding. Even if one will never arrive at this fuller understanding, this wind makes one certain that such an understanding is out there, however finally unavailable to people like us.

Lotion

A child was sick in Kansas. He had fever. His father prodded him awake, dressed him, led him outside in the dark morning for chores. The child slumped and the father raised him upright, propped him on the machine. When the father turned away the child fell, seemed to die. The father drove the child to water and sank him at the head, lowering his body into the cold lake, but the child sputtered and cried. Back at the house, in the front yard, the father warmed the child’s body in the sunshine, shook him to rouse him. The father slapped the child, as he’d seen done to other children who would not respond, and the child sat up and cried, looking at his father with fear. The child’s sister came and struck her father, climbed on his back. She was too small and could not stop her father and yet he stepped away. He was afraid now.

The doctor came in the evening and measured the child’s temperature, tested his limbs for heat, for bloat, drew a vial of blood. There was a fever, but no infection, no mistakes heard in the child’s cavity. The boy was tired and should rest. Yet something other was afoul. Had the child, the doctor asked, been down a well or in a cave by the lake, or had the child tasted something dead. What is this, the doctor asked, scraping something from the child’s body. The doctor wiped the child’s mouth with a rag, then sniffed the rag. He questioned the child and the child grew soft and loose in his arms. There was no indication of poison’s nine signs but there was the listlessness of the child, its cold body. There was the unidentifiable paste the doctor had removed from the child, a whitish glue, a tacky gum. Had something been scraped on the child or pierced him or had the child been operating any of the yard machines without his mask, breathing too much of their smokes and fumes? The father did not think so but he agreed with the doctor that they would treat the child as though he’d been harmed from the outside. They took him to his room and they waited each day for the child to rise as ever, to commence his day’s chores, but the child kept to his bed and took no food and allowed himself only enough water to soothe his mouth. He would not read and he no longer sang in the morning, before his family had woken. When his family visited his room, the child did not look at them. He no longer spoke. At times, from downstairs, they thought they could hear him speaking, in the voice of an older man, calm and mature, but when they arrived in his room the child was silent and perfectly still, staring at the wall, hardly breathing.

The doctor had heard of this, or something like this, and he thought he might know of someone. He made a call to a colleague in Chicago who had returned some children from spells and coldness, and the colleague telephoned a contact of his own, along a chain of professionals threading into ever more mysterious illnesses. A week later, a specialist from North Dakota arrived at the child’s house in the early morning. He rubbed a cream on the child. The child thrashed when the cream touched him, clutched at his own throat as if to choke himself. The specialist asked that no one watch. By nightfall the child sat up. He got dressed in his best clothes and tidied his room. He sang one of his old songs, but coldly, a march he learned at the nursery. He spoke it like a foreign language. He combed his hair wet, posed at the mirror. He appeared cured, but when he spoke, to his father and the onlookers—the doctor had asked his colleagues to come view the techniques of the specialist—his message was not kind. First the child told them that they would die. He told them where and when. Sometimes he mentioned how, and he smiled, his boyish mouth pale, his teeth yellow from the illness. The child touched each of them at the face when he sentenced them. There seemed to be no possibility that he was wrong. They stayed perfectly quiet, receiving their dates, blinking with the new information. To his sister the child announced a date of death many years distant, more than a hundred years away, and her face was small and serious as she tried to count out her dying age in her head, so far in the future. She seemed to know she could not live that long and she laughed, hoping her brother was joking. Her brother, unsteady on his feet, spoke in whispers, moving through his room. It took all of his strength to speak. Some spots of blood were seen at his eyes. The specialist flinched each time the child spoke, as if he’d be harmed. He put more cream on the child and the child staggered back, falling to his bed, only to rise up again, speaking in the calmest voice of matters none of them cared to hear.

The child was dead the next morning, his body small and cold. The specialist went home. In his lab he extracted water from the cream until it thickened into a salve. He booted the cream in a charger. He ran softeners along the underside to raw out the hardness. From his cabinet he selected finer ingredients, to support knowing, thinking, remembering. He used a cooling herb for a skin, then peeled it back leaving only a membrane. The water that he would add back to the salve, to cream it, could only be water extracted from the human being. Then the product passed through a purifier and, to be sure, the specialist tested it on himself, using the cream over his torso, documenting his own fevered speech, days of it, on the machine.

Over the years the specialist visited similar patients in the western states, in the heat-blackened towns. He worked the neighborhoods of Chicago. Children stricken with fever. Children too cold to think or move. Adults who’d gone quiet. He spread salve on the children from a metal tin and before they passed away the patients grew calm and sometimes spoke. Sometimes they wrote. Messages of demise, usually, predictions of peril. Medically induced prophecy. A prophecy cream is how it came to be understood. It was requested and dreaded. As they spoke the children postured at wellness, arranging their rooms just so, tidying their possessions. In flat, slow voices, they spelled out sorrow, pointing out the doomed persons in the room. Then they died.

The specialist explained to the families that he needed to study these cases in order to possibly save some other boy or girl, some man or woman whose lights had burned out. The specialist pressed the speeches onto filament, parsed them for meaning, and set the deathbed claims on a pinned grid. He compiled a truth map, finding it faulty. The auguries of the children obeyed a pattern outside reality, surpassing sense. People lived beyond their predicted dates, or perished sooner. The cream-induced prophecies were not accurate. The cream yielded mainly mistaken claims.

The specialist ceased his practice of applying cream to the ill. He desiccated the cream again, removing the human water. Then he spread the resulting salve on people who were well. He used it over and around his own body, on his clothes, in the rooms he visited. He tried and failed to atomize the salve into a mist. With volunteers at his lab, the specialist initiated a revised cream at their necks, in varying dosages, a cream debased by earth sugars. Then the specialist migrated across the body of the volunteer. He spread a weaker cream over one leg, the other, a hand, a fist. He had parents hold down their own children while he spread the cream on their backs. A cream was used inside clothing, slurried into cones through which the volunteers, in weak voices, commenced to sing.

Each application of each revised cream produced fits of speech. A literature ushered from the mouths of the volunteers. Prophetic, cream induced, forgotten later by the speakers, sometimes denounced. In content the language extractions were plain, banal, riddled with fear, without clear meaning. The specialist transcribed them all, logged them into English text, released them back into the world under different names, different titles. Documents from the salve. Provoked by cream.

Late in life the specialist gave up his practice. Many years after he died, the specialist’s daughter, now a young doctor herself, discovered samples of the darkened cream in his lab, maturing in a cabinet, a crust of sand along its surface, along with a notebook recording his results. She broke the cream down, ripped toxins from its core, added back salves. She kept the skeleton of the cream and built over it a new body. Her father’s patents for each medical bolus he produced were rogue, indicating a larger plan, to which the salve was only a small feature, a lubricant. Each portion of salve, released from its tin and rolled thin into ropes, was meant, according to a diagram she found, to join together, serving as a kind of circulatory system for a machine that did not exist yet, or for a machine, she later came to think, that was hiding in plain sight, a machine we could not see properly because we wore it. She could not picture what machine this salve would enable, what contraption it might grease, other than a human body, an animal body. She sensed a criminal component, a kind of weapon latent in the salve. At each site of fever, each home of a child who spoke ill and died, an unknown paste was found, sometimes inside the child’s body, predating any illness in the area. Implicating her father as the bringer of fever, only to test his prophecy cream. Her father would have seemed to be designing a weapon all along, using plant and chemical products together in a balm to bring a violence on the body. A body in fever will not keep its secret, was one of the notes she found. And other such claims. The specialist’s daughter found references to grave site applications. A cream rubbed on stone. On trees. A cream—this one an early iteration of her father’s product—spread over roads. Applied to the wheels of cars, which rolled through a territory. He called it, at times, a privacy cream. Batches of it were manufactured at Thompson, each tin numbered, the numbers etched free, indicating the properties of mind the cream would give or remove. Sometimes indicating nothing.

The rest is history, just not the kind that comforts. By the time of the specialist’s daughter’s death, creams of understanding were no longer new. Lotions smart and otherwise. Fortifying pastes across the torso, or in skins hovering at face level. Surrogate torsos made of lotion. A cosmetic fore-face that hung in liquid suspension in front of the real face, which turned as old and muddy as a coin. Bodies of cream worn like clothing. And so decorated. Foreign-language creams at the throat, to make speech plain. A cream at the back of the neck to release secrets. A salve for the mute and a salve for the tongue. A swishing lotion for inside the mouth, to protect the speaker from cream-induced prophecy. An unwitting release of secrets, compelled forth by perfect application, unbeknownst, of a cream. Applied in the woods. In the home. At work. Underground. On people, things, and space.

Omen

It was April 29 and the streetlights were flickering in and out. And yet—little miracle—power was still on at Fowler’s house. Barely. He still had water. Heat. The clock on his stove was blinking, so at some point in the night he’d lost electricity. Briefly. His house might go dark again. It was out of his hands.

The flood had come on hard yesterday, the answer to a season of mountain rain. They’d seen it coming, and all the clay-faces had been crying about it on the news. Whimper whimper out of their omen holes. Everybody run for the hills. But you couldn’t force people from their homes. Yet. You could scare them to higher ground, another town, a school gymnasium outside the flood zone. You could conjure the odds of survival, showing the footage of past disasters, a child’s sock in a ditch, the imprint of a little person in the grass. Most people would scatter.

Most people. Excepting his truly. Fowler the Last. There would be no heirs. He’d waited out the evacuation because certain projects flourished in an empty neighborhood. Houses hollow. No people around to see. Most of what was really urgent to do necessitated a near-total absence of the living. Hell yes, he was relieved, but there was a sack of undesired emotion inside him. Instincts boiled up, even in idiots. His blood was on notice. His body could be scared and so what. Death to all feeling soon, right? RIP and whatever, because darkness forevermore. He wasn’t in charge of his feelings. It was kind of a relief. Just see where the secret engine pulled him, and don’t show your goddamn cards.

From his doorway Fowler could see a distant light burning in the hills. Given what he knew about the terrain, a light of that sort didn’t compute. There were mud barriers up there, rock dams, and lookout blinds, sometimes with little huts attached. There was what was called a sluice. He’d been to a few of the huts. He knew the hills pretty well. You could enter a hut, go to sleep. No one bothered you. You could think of it as your own home when you wanted to.

But there were no power lines at that elevation. Not even animals, really. The word “hideout” had obvious problems. Connotations. You pictured a shoot-out. You pictured an old dirty bed with handcuffs on the floor, a shit stain on the wall. But he used the word privately as a kind of code. He knew what it meant. He could call it whatever he liked.

He found it hard not to worry. A light pulsing in the hills as if someone had just plugged in the eye of God. Was there a work crew dug in up there, and did that mean there’d been a significant mudslide, bringing a hut down with it? With some daylight he’d have perspective. Shapes would come out and show themselves.

He held something of value in the hills, is why he cared. That was a safe way to think about it. Holdings. A lien. A claim. Nothing on paper, of course. Never that. You had to keep yourself from even thinking of these things in any detail. In case of what? Men, women, and children, first of all. Spies of varying skill sets, which was more or less the entire human race. People who were not whole. Certain citizens, just a mush of sadness on the inside, ached and pined and agonized unless they could lick your insides for whatever you knew. They had to sniff you over like you were a dog bowl and tear off a piece of your special core and just rub it all over themselves. Your own true water. Not that there were people who could stethoscope your thoughts. He wasn’t stupid. But the operating wisdom now, in the year of all hell breaks loose, was that you didn’t know who could hear you, see you, know you. Weren’t you the ultimate fool if you thought you had a secret that was yours alone?

At sunrise Fowler stepped outside his house, closed the door gently so as not to disturb his wife. It would be pretty hard to wake her, he laughed to himself, because she wasn’t home. Hadn’t been for a good while. How funny that he kept doing that, tiptoeing around, being so careful, so quiet, because she always said his steps were too heavy. She could hear him breathing in the next room. She told him he coughed too loudly, and once she said that when he coughed like that, with such a rumble, she felt threatened.

Threatened like, what, he was going to hurt her?

She wasn’t sure. She said she didn’t control her own reactions. How was she supposed to just pretend it didn’t scare her? Did he want her to do that? She could try to do that. Would that make him happy, she asked, if when he did something she found frightening, she kept quiet and calm and acted like it did not upset her?

He didn’t want to smash her head in. Nothing like that. He would know if he regularly had thoughts like that. He wasn’t really that way. She wasn’t here, anyway. He couldn’t get to her if he tried.

Fowler wandered the waterlogged neighborhood, mud spilling over his Bogs. What a strange vacancy all around him, like everyone just had to get off the planet.

He wanted to be able to look up into the sky and see a stream of people, just slashes and dark marks, shooting off and away from here. A proper evacuation. A full-on abandonment of the world. That wasn’t something you often got to see. The word “evacuation” should be held in reserve for such an event.

From Burdock Road to the Deering radial there were uprooted trees drifting by like canoes. The people who had left yesterday had left badly. Doors to some houses were still open, lights shining inside, which, if he didn’t have something else to take care of right now, he could be a good neighbor about. He bet there were cats. People often left a cat behind. During calamity, Fowler could pick a house, and go on in, and run into a cat or two. See who wore the crown then, who owned the planet. He didn’t really know who kept cats. You had to be a regular in someone’s house before you knew if they kept a cat.

He got the occasional invite, but mostly he knew these houses from the outside. Sometimes the cats never appeared when someone strange was over. The cats had an idea of their own safety and they practiced it carefully. People less so, which, well. A different attitude toward safety. Someone comes to your house, and you happen to be in the other room, you come out. You don’t crawl under your couch. Mostly because of being polite. That would be a good chart to look at. Just all of the creatures and how they supervised their own safety. Strategies against harm, real or imagined. Accurate or inaccurate view of a threat. Good choices, bad choices. Success rates. How was the species doing overall, in relation to its enemies? So many charts he’d like to examine.

Anyway, if this all kept up for a few days—rain in the hills, loosening slabs of earth—he’d start to know who kept cats, and had left them. He’d hear them.

It was funny. To have waited so long for this opportunity, a time when no one was around and he could do as he pleased, go straight to the designated location, which he would not name to himself, and grab those items of interest, which he would neither name nor picture.

But the going was hard outside in the water. And something seemed wrong. Which, well, of course.

Waders. He had them at home. Walking through dark water, you had no real idea what you kept running up against, what was under your feet, what bumped your legs. Half of your world was blind. In reverse, that would really be something. A sheer darkness above the belly. Moving through a cold, thick mass, unable to breathe or see, your legs kicking freely below as if dangling in space. That’d be a ride he’d pay for.

Maybe he should return home, have lunch, and think through his plan again. He pictured himself at the table, his waders folded over a chair in the mudroom. Half a person with the bones removed. If only he’d already taken care of his errand, crossed it off his list. Screw it, screw it, screw it. There was so little time.

Slowly he aimed himself toward the girl’s house.

It was at the block party a year ago when his plan started to grow a sort of awful hair, and leak, and sort of slobber on him no matter what he did or where he went. Regarding the girl. The girl, the girl, the girl. Who created this inadequate language that rubbed all of the detail off a thing and still ruled supreme as the primary currency people hurled at each other to make themselves known and whatnot?

A block party last year. Of all things. There was a fire engine parked on the street, and there were food tables, and the neighborhood association had rented a dunk tank.

Every so often, a great big splash sent water hurtling over the crowd, and a fat, shirtless man climbed out of the dunk tank, laughing.

Fowler came around to talking with some of the men gathered in the street. First he waited in line for a sausage roll. The one they gave him was sweaty and soft in his mouth. Something like a bone seemed to run the length of it.

“You caught yourself a beauty, there,” one of the men said to him.

Fowler looked down at it. In these situations, you could eat, and people understood you wouldn’t be answering right away.

Men were easy, in that as long as you showed you’d heard them, you could go a very long time without saying anything back. It was a mercy.

He knew that it was a little bit of an accident that he was a man. It would have been an accident of a different kind had he been a woman. It was a small accident, really, that he was a person in the first place. A chart of all those little accidents, along with drawings of his bones, adding up to who he was—that’d be worth looking at.

In his little group, the men were talking about hunting, even though only one of them seemed to do it. The others got by on saying how much they would like to do it, or intended to try it, once certain conditions were met. A season was beginning, the hunter was saying, or a season was ending, and then something else about traps. Where you put them, when you checked them, and how you baited them.

“Really, now,” the hunter said, “I just load the fuckers up with candy.”

The men all chuckled.

Fowler looked at them, one by one, and very nearly saw through their faces into something more. Punishing insights. Understandings. But it clouded over. He lived in an unpromising time; that was just a fact. A time of terrible ignorance. Too little information about what mattered the most. There wasn’t, as yet, a good tool to get a clear picture of exactly what others were thinking. This ability was probably on its way for people, a hundred years out, maybe. One hundred and fifty. Things would open up, in all sorts of ways. A method of getting in there and really knowing something. But Fowler would be dead before such technology came along.

He wondered if, on his deathbed, he’d want to be told what was really in store. Deathbed. That was a joke. There’d be no bed. Fowler could picture himself, all too convincingly, running through trees, scrambling up a hillside, taking bullets to the torso. They’d itch going in, he figured. Itch and burn. He hadn’t been shot before, but it didn’t tax the imagination to picture it. It came to him sometimes almost like a memory.

The hunter went on about traps. You had to clean them after each use, and the process sometimes needed a hose, or even this thing, and he tried to make a drawing of it with his hands. He said one thing he saw in a trap was something he’d not forget. An animal eating candy with a jaw-clamp of knives sunk into its haunch. Almost happy. Going through the candy pretty slowly, sort of relaxed.

You heard a version of this story as a kid. Animals caught in traps chewed off a leg to escape. Fowler had to wonder. Obviously it hurt a little bit. That wasn’t something anybody would really want. But if you did have to do it, and you found yourself, as an animal, chewing into your own flesh, tearing it away, trying to gnaw through the bone, which was when the project got serious, was there ever a moment, even just for a second, when you felt like you’d been born to the job? A kind of pure calling? The slow destruction of oneself with one’s mouth? You’d be smart leaving room around categories like that, he thought. Not to believe that you know what there is to be known. You don’t.

They were standing in a circle, eating. Some of the men held little glass jars of beer. Fowler kept away from that. He took in all the liquid he needed at night.

The kids were out today, because everybody said that the block party was really for them. You did this kind of thing for the kids. And then you also took part in it for the kids. You went to work for the kids. You cooked dinner for the kids. You cleaned up for the kids. When you had kids, according to the people who blasted Fowler with their views, what you did you did for them. Even when you had more kids, you did it for the kids you already had, and when you struck one of them in the face, everyone should know whose good it was for. Whereas if you didn’t have kids, like Fowler and his wife—despite a verbal project that circled the possibility, but had long since faltered—what you did you apparently did for yourself. Or maybe for no one. To hear the parents talk, without kids you were nothing, a quarter person, a kind of costume that could be hung on a hook. You powered down in the evening and your body deflated in the corner. Someone could kick you down the street like a trash bag.

Some young people at the block party were making a disturbance. Fowler caught sight of the girl pretty quickly. The girl—this wasn’t really how he would come to think of her. It was just that the usual words were not ideal. They didn’t fully seem to function. There was too much slippage, like an electric short that kept them from sticking. He would learn her name, and wish he hadn’t. In Fowler’s view the name didn’t suit her. It was like a small lie that needed to be owned up to. He would come to an arrangement with himself not to use it. He would go to her house, watch her sleep, but this first time, out in the wild, was different, and he’d never see her that way again.

The girl had on what looked like men’s pants and a sort of circus sweater. The pants were high-waters and the sweater, too, but on her arms, like maybe she’d gone swimming and her clothes seized up, tried to vanish off her body. A creature who fell asleep for a very long time and woke up too large for her clothing. Her hair was piled in some kind of bundle as if her crafter had dropped it on her head from the sky. Because she was not ordinary. She had not been made in the normal way.

She was singing or she was shouting, and maybe what was making all of her friends laugh is that they weren’t sure which one. In a group of creatures, regardless of the species, there is sometimes one who seems to control the blood of the others.

Fowler tucked deeper into his sausage roll and saw all the men looking at her, not hiding it, their faces made of rubber and their eyes scratched from their heads, like in a picture.

As the girls walked by, the men turned small and strange. No one breathed. They just waited for the girls to get clear and then you could feel them catching up on their breath.

They again gave each other glances. Just a significant exchange of silence, trying not to break into pieces.

“Well, thank god I don’t shit in my own backyard,” one of them finally said, shaking his head.

“Hell, I don’t shit in my own toilet,” someone replied, and they all laughed.

Fowler would see her asleep in a month. You didn’t keep records for things like that, because of course. He would stop in, take a look, gather some items, and truck them up to the hut, where a certain kind of situation was taking shape. A residence, a place, a grave. Today her face seemed filled with air. He squinted so she could be blurry.

A bit more chatter, everybody silently agreeing that they wanted to destroy what they’d seen, that they could remove the small parts of their bodies and make a pile there in the street. For someone to find later. Someone smart, a sort of scientist, who could look at it, throw his hand into it, and have a close enough idea of just what had happened in this place.

Then the men tensed up. “Shut up, shut up,” someone said, “here they all come.”

It was the wives, bombing at them from the other side of the street. They closed in pretty fast and acted like they’d missed all the fun.

“What are you all laughing about?” One of the wives turned to Fowler.

The Shebster wife, the Coramper one. He didn’t remember. Those sounded like fake names to him, like they had all lied about who they really were. He wanted to keep eating. A tough bit of cartilage was lodged in his mouth. He was almost done chewing. He’d do anything not to look at the girl. You had to follow a ration.

This wife was really on him.

“Tell us what these guys said or we will torture you,” she shrieked.

Fowler saw where this woman would be buried and he saw the weather for it, her children crying at her grave. If he really strained he could see the children themselves get old and bloat with fluid until they burst.

She touched him and he stopped eating. “Are you ticklish?” The men all watched.

Fowler was occupied with the larger question of how many ways the girl could look, doing different things, even long after she’d died. As bones, as powder, at night, having all of the different feelings, and if any of those ways would change what he felt should happen—that she and Fowler should combine themselves in a remote location. Even the girl’s father, whom Fowler had seen, and once spoken to, had, buried in his face, something that drew Fowler in.

So it wasn’t the girl in particular, was it? Maybe the father would do, or the mother, or, if it were possible, ancestors going back further, if you could arise out of where you lived and drift into the past, to make selections. Because the attraction—even though that was the wrong word, really—was just the cells, and the blood. A precise arrangement of them, regardless, really, of the carrier, rendering her face and body just so. Maybe the girl herself didn’t matter, even if she seemed to hold a more concentrated level, as if a strong dose of it had funneled down into her for the time being. He couldn’t ignore that. He’d be lying to himself. What would he want from her as an old woman? It was a problem.

The tools didn’t really exist for him to scrape what he needed into a bottle.

“Marjorie,” the woman called over to Fowler’s wife. “Hey, Marjorie, I caught myself a big one!” She’d grabbed Fowler now and he started to sway, eating his sausage again, trying to smile in just the right way for the guys.

The other wives looked down and laughed. The laughing had changed. It didn’t make him feel good to hear someone say his wife’s name. It never had. Early on, when they were first just getting to know each other and he hoped to show her some of the paths in the foothills, before they had embarrassed each other with nudity, he wondered if that meant they should not be married. Her name wasn’t entirely her fault.

Marjorie was nearby, in a circle of people, and she didn’t seem to immediately notice she was being called out. When he saw her he could tell she didn’t want to look up—she had on her do not disturb face. She’d be gone in three months, leaving with no argument, the two of them nearly shaking hands. He wanted to keep these people from bothering her. But she looked over at them anyway.

“What do you say?” the wife asked, pointing her finger right into Fowler’s body. “Is this one ticklish? Your husband! Is he?”

Marjorie shrugged, and it was like they all suddenly felt the same thing, with this woman’s finger pressing into Fowler, as if she knew what she was looking for, when really she had her hand in something she should not be touching. The group quickly fell quiet. Maybe each of them, in their own way, was picturing themselves being launched off the street, as Fowler was, and propelled high up into the air, then rapidly hurtling through space. Their faces spreading in the wind as it rushed by them, and all of them looking down at their whole neighborhood, where everything had turned so small. Killable, dismissible, unreal. There wasn’t really such a good word for how it all looked from up there where he was.

Now Fowler was out in the neighborhood, just where the block party was a year ago, and everyone was gone, evacuated. He could do what he liked. The streets were empty. Yesterday some vehicles had lifted in the muck and floated off. The biggest things, in the right weather, were suddenly weightless, beautiful. Should not people, on occasion, float past one another, weightless and rolling? The problem with the laws of physics was repetition, dullness. There was a kind of deep insult buried in the way the world was designed.

Pretty much everything was hidden by a rumbling flow of mud. Some houses were seeing damage.

Mud, they all knew by now, because you heard it on the news every time the rain started, slid down from Moyer Creek, which nearly ringed the town from above. Nearly. From space the creek might look like a broken circle, a circle with a tear in it, where some beast had maybe broken through. But today you couldn’t really look into the hills and think the mud was coming from just one place anymore. Someone long ago had named the area a basin. Not a scientific term. In the neighborhood they called it a bucket because it did fill right up.

Stupid to put houses in it. Stupid to put people there. True of any place if you took the long view. Pretty much any location anywhere featured its own notable extinction. Sudden death. But people did not exactly get to see a list, for example, of all the people who had died in the place they were thinking of living. Plus how they died, going back a good enough ways to give them the picture they really were entitled to have. Probably it would be unbearable to know. Who died here. And here. And here. How they died. When they died. Probably no one would care to know. But still, freedom of information. If you felt yourself to be strong enough, you should be allowed to know.

There was probably an ocean here long ago. And before that, what, maybe hot plains, they said, too hot even to stand on. Jungle, too. Sharp beds of coal. A meadow of knives, Fowler had read somewhere.

Fowler had to figure that, throughout history, one animal had hunted another in this very spot. What were the larger observations one could make, in terms of who escaped, who was caught, who was eaten? You could think that you walked down the street in your town, but you didn’t. You participated in something else entirely.

A chart depicting every creature who passed this way, going back to the beginning. Did they know they were in danger? Did they intend harm to others?

When he got to the girl’s house, it didn’t take him long. Her bedroom was off the kitchen, and not upstairs with the other bedrooms. Nobody was home, but Fowler couldn’t help calling out. He instantly regretted it. What if there was a recording instrument? They’d have captured his voice. Except, nonsense. That was nonsense and he knew it. In the entryway, dripping mud, he debated between boots or socks. Which sort of footprints were called for? A pair of clogs in the shoe rack solved the problem. Belonging to the girl’s father, no doubt, owing to their size. Perhaps for gardening, or cooking. He pushed his mud-caked feet into them, then clomped to the girl’s bedroom, the same way her father must have done many, many times.

It had taken a little bit of hiding to be able to stick around yesterday, when the patrols came through on bullhorns. Men at the door pounding away. Everyone barking in animal voices. You shouldn’t have to take cover in your own house. But the county had learned its lesson from last time, when no one got out, no one was scared enough, no one wanted to be troubled.

It was last year’s flood that had them all crazy. The bunch of little people they’d lost to it, just around the corner from here. The Larsen boys and their friend whose name Fowler always forgot. Everyone acted like their own children had died. You had to be prepared to discuss the matter, and be silent about it, too, when that was called for. So no one was fooling around this time. They were going to scoot off and play it safe.

Not him, though. A couple of items could get scratched off his to-do list if he sat this one out and had the place to himself. He’d squatted under a window for most of the day, crawling here and there for supplies, and clocked a good bit of the mayhem going on outside.

Today at the girl’s house Fowler found a backpack to stash the stuff in. If the girl cared for the backpack, which he figured she must, since it was on her bed, then that was one more thing she’d be pleased to see.

If he got her up to the hut, if that was something that would ever really happen. After he’d solved some of the logistics. Acquisition. Transport. If the hut was even there anymore. So far, when he pictured it, he could not summon any shapes out of the darkness. The visualization was proving difficult. One’s imagination often failed.

Fowler walked home, the backpack raised over his head. He was careful not to get anything dirty, impossible as that was. If anyone came along, it’d be a sorrow, but he could sink the backpack into the mud. Objects like that seemed to reappear in the girl’s room over time, in different colors and shapes, so he could always fetch them again, but, well.

At home, Fowler peeled off his mud-stiffened clothing and dropped himself into the hot bath. He warmed a soup for lunch, then dialed into the news. A water-volume report was coming up later in the hour. Numbers on the flood so far. How much of it there still was to come down. To rise up. That would be a good number to know.

The news never reported on the mountain roads. Too few people lived up there. Possibly no one. A crushed hut wouldn’t make the news.

The girl’s diary listed her top ten favorite things. Some of them were people. Her mother and dad. But they weren’t invited. They had spent enough time with their daughter. Time’s up. Other items could be crossed off the list. If a hut came down, and its contents spilled, what would they find? A girl’s pillow. A basket of stuffed animals. In the backpack today was a poster he’d had to fold. When it went up in the hut, with a thumbtack, it would have creases. There were four little guys in the poster. They had grown-up hair. No names. They looked stunned, like they’d opened the wrong door. One of them held a raccoon.

A set of markers and a pad. A blanket with a picture pattern of some people Fowler couldn’t place. Certainly they were famous. More stuff from that top dresser drawer. He would just reach in and see what came back out. What you did on a dig was you collected artifacts and kept your own ideas out of it. Your own ideas almost always led to trouble.

He could just as well take a sliver of wood from the floor in her room. A divot of Sheetrock from inside her closet. All throughout the house, her yard. He could scrape enough pieces. Where did it stop, and why not her father, her mother, her friends? All of them brought, in pieces or whole, to the hut, which could never hold it all. It was getting too crowded already, but there was no way to know where it ended.

What you’re trying to do is make yourself whole. Which it’s stupid to think another person’s bones can’t help you with.

In the same way it didn’t pay to say the girl’s name, it didn’t pay to think about her. It didn’t pay to go into her house. It didn’t pay to know where she went to school and what her schedule was each day of the week, when school let out and practice began. Band or sport. Musical instrument or study group. Nothing paid. You got an answer and nothing broke open.

Two creatures, built of cells, fueled on blood. A system of bones at the core. If they died in the same area, or were buried together, and then, hundreds of years later, were found by archaeologists, the archaeologists might easily think that they had stumbled across the remains of a single creature. There would be a way to reassemble these bones, of him and the girl, for instance, if they had died or were buried together in the same area, into one beast on their wire frame. There would be redundant bones, two of each, but a bigger and a smaller, and it would be just as easy to tell a story about this creature, to create an exhibit, to show it to children, or whatever they called their young, who could stand and look at it in awe.

The carcass of a single creature. It was just that the bones of this creature had gone into scatter, and they needed to be gathered up. Put back together.

At around dinnertime, a trooper came to the door.

The sun was going down. An unpleasant spectacle. It wasn’t a given that the sunset would be something universally considered beautiful. At the outset of things, when that feature was put into place, he didn’t think it was a given. It could just as easily have become something that routinely horrified the citizens of the world. Made them crazy. Made them ill.

There were two troopers when Fowler opened up. One right there on his doorstep, the other leaning against a Jeep down in the street. Water to his knees.

“Evening rounds,” said the trooper. “Safety check. Passing through. Saw that your lights were on.” The trooper squinted past him into the house.

“Okay,” said Fowler. “All’s well here. We’re doing fine.”

Lots of lights on all over the neighborhood. Was the trooper going to every house?

They stood talking on the steps.

A bad spot of weather, they agreed. Too much rain collected in a place that couldn’t hold it. So down it came. Pretty fast, actually. The trooper had once used his speed gun on a flash flood, he told Fowler. Clocked it faster than a car. And if the ground was too warm, and too goddamn loose, then forget it. Too much of the mountain peels away and you can’t stop it.

Fowler agreed. He had often stood with another person, discussing recent phenomena, and found agreement on everything that could not be done. It was shameful to bond over powerlessness. Shameful. Here he was engaged in it again.

“Anyone else home?” asked the trooper. “Wife?”

“No, sir,” said Fowler. “She’s up in Rooneville.”

“No kids?”

“Not yet.” Fowler crossed his fingers and held them up. I wish I may I wish I might.

Just words in his head he would not share.

“Okay, well,” said the trooper. “I’m supposed to do my best to talk you folks out of your houses. That’s my best. I’ve done it.”

“Oh yeah, other people stuck it out?” Fowler asked, looking up the street. He’d seen no one today. Heard nothing.

Witnesses, was the worry. Except what had he really done? Just the one home invasion, although that was a strong way to name it, with no one being home. Wasn’t every bit of motion, anywhere, an invasion? You invade a room, you invade the street, you invade your own bed.

“A few folks. Here and there. Holed right up like you, no doubt. But look, we could get you to dry ground, no charge. Pack a bag real quick. Better safe than sorry.”

“Right. Or both.”

“What’s that?”

“Safe and sorry.”

Well, he should not have said that.

“Sorry about what?” asked the trooper.

He couldn’t find an answer. This man sure could talk and now here Fowler was, answering.

“Just a lot of suffering,” Fowler said finally. “For the people who suffer. I’m sorry about it.”

The trooper gave Fowler a pretty long look.

“Anyway, good thing you’re up here on this rise.”

“Good luck for us,” agreed Fowler. “Plus the stilts.”

“What’s that?”

“Got the house up on stilts. Even last time with, what was it, six feet of it coming right through town, we kept it pretty dry in here.”

“Good for you,” said the trooper. He looked around. “You’ve got a nice little situation. You all take care.”

“We had the work done when we bought the house. Never could have gotten a mortgage without it.”

Stupid to keep talking. When someone leaves the conversation, you let them go. Never keep talking. Just let them go. If he ever had to write a manual for how to be a person, that would be in there, right at the top. Just look for the silence and be the first to practice it.

The trooper turned back. “So, no children in the house, huh?”

That seemed to be a funny way to ask. Fowler looked at the trooper and tried to make the question go away with his face.

“No,” he said. Simple was best. It also happened to be true, which made him more uneasy. That’s where they got you, when you said the truth but did so falsely, nervously.

Fowler saw himself doing unspeakable things. That didn’t mean he’d do them. He’d come to terms with that difference a long time ago.

“I had to ask,” explained the trooper, waving as he left.

Had to ask. Fowler knew the feeling. He thought of all the things that he had to ask, too, and that he never would ask. The things he wouldn’t say. The things he wouldn’t think. Statements waiting inside him, if only the right listening device were deployed. Mostly you walked the world in a kind of lockdown. Mostly.

He couldn’t sleep so well that night. Rain and mud and rain again, and then thunder shook the house. Weather like this could peel back a mountain. A hut had no foundation. It sat on rocks. When the soil softened and the rocks shifted, then the hut was merely another grave, unearthed, sliding off, with no bodies in it yet.

No one questioned an empty grave. It was often just mistaken for a hole. No one noticed that empty graves were everywhere, inside houses and out, on mountains and right in town. Areas being readied for the dead. All areas. You more or less could not occupy an area, anywhere, that was not once, or would not soon be, a fairly ample grave.

Fowler had to feel it didn’t matter. He was in his grave already. He and the girl. Their graves were on the move. The question was how best to fix them in place. Get the thing formalized.

When he finally got out of bed, in pure darkness, he confirmed that his power was down. Streetlights, too. Nothing in the hills. No light. Too little sound. Water and heat and everything, finished for a while. How he had kept power this long was a mystery.

How big the outage was, along with its long-term forecast, would remain unknown for a bit. He had a radio that took batteries, but the men who spoke on the overnight broadcast had little to say. Farmers and thinkers and worriers. Sensibilities from another time. Imaginary creatures with old sad voices whose message, perhaps, had never been clear. If they ever had information he could use, he’d found, they withheld it from him, in ways that could seem intentional. A promise of what they might be discussing, which they never did in fact discuss.

He had a flashlight. He had a telephone landline that used to work, though he hadn’t checked it in a while. Phone calls were not his specialty, though he was capable of receiving them. Should one come along, he’d be ready.

Probably he had candles and matches if he wanted to go and look. This was the sort of thing you did when you had a partner in the darkness, a blackout friend, Marjorie used to say. Light up some candles and make a home out of it. Marjorie had always been pretty good about keeping a kit. She’d get him to fill the tub with water, to help the toilet along when the pump was off. You’d want to move that water out of your home. Keep a little bucket by the tub. Sometimes the bustle and panic was for nothing, and sometimes he was grateful that she’d thought of it.

For a minute he wondered if she was out of power wherever she was, too, but then figured that it wouldn’t be too likely. Not that he knew for sure. Rooneville was just a town name he’d given the trooper. There were lots of good town names, each of them as likely as the other. Each the name of some place you went to die. You could give them out and they seemed to work. She was asleep somewhere, he would bet, unless she’d gone and leapt a time zone, which wasn’t really like her. She was safe and warm. He could hear her voice anytime he wanted to. She would wake up soon and make tea.

Probably what he would do was sit up and wait for morning. The time right now was unclear. It could be midnight or it could be 4 a.m. Something might have happened and he would not know it. Something big. He hoped it was closer to day. Waiting wasn’t his specialty. From his kitchen window he could look to where the sun would be, expecting advance notice of some kind, but right now there was nothing out there, no lights in the hills, none in the sky. The power outage would seem complete. From far away was the whole planet dark? Maybe, if things seemed stuck out there, in terms of the sun, some kind of rupture, he’d move his chair to where he wouldn’t even have to get up. He could sit there looking for it, be the first to see it, a front-row seat for when the world turned back on.

Some people, apparently, suffered a disturbance where they were afraid the sun wasn’t going to come up. It was a fear and it had a name. His wife had read about it. She said these people had to be consoled at night, but you couldn’t console them. There was a kind of therapy for it, but she didn’t remember what it was. Supposedly it didn’t much help. They were as certain as you could be about anything. They fought you off and yelled.

Fowler pictured these people in a dark house, holding each other, trembling. When the sun finally came up they stood and shook themselves, relieved. They’d be embarrassed, apologizing to everyone. What a lot of fuss over nothing. They kept looking out the window to make sure the sun was still there. Weeping and hugging each other, shaking their heads, feeling foolish, foolish. Then the day, of course, advanced, took a left turn, deepened, the afternoon came on strong, and they felt a pull again, a terrible suspicion. They went outside, staring and pointing. They watched and wept, holding each other as tightly as they could, as the sun went down again, for what genuinely felt like the last time on earth.

A fear like that doesn’t just come out of nowhere. Some people always know, ahead of all the others, what to be watching out for. One day, sooner or later, those people wouldn’t be wrong.

And where would he be? he wondered. Would he be complete? Would he have done whatever it took, no matter what, to make himself whole?