Notes from the Fog: Stories

Stay Down and Take It

James is home early saying that goddamnit we really seriously need to pack. Hup hup, time to go. It’s the weather, again, and it bores me so. We live where the water loves to visit. Just a little bit of rain off the coast, that’s all, and it will try to flood into our home. It loves to soak our rug and rise up the walls, and once it loved to seep into our electronics, inside the TV cabinet, and destroy our precious entertainment center, which keeps us, or me anyway, from raiding the medicine cabinet at night for other pleasures. Otherwise, well, we have brilliant sunsets and the kind of grass that is absurdly tall, taller than you or me. I don’t know how it doesn’t just fall over. You’d think it had a long slender bone in it, in each blade. Some original, beautiful creature that needed no limbs or head, because it had no enemies. Who knows.

James bustles around the house, grabbing what he can. He says to pack light and to pack smart. I like this military side of him. I almost feel charmed. The evacuation is mandatory this time, something nasty and mean and serious is barreling down on us, and I almost wish we had a pretty siren in our little community for occasions like this one. A siren adds a feeling of gravity—to an evacuation, to a catastrophe. Just a feeling that something important is happening, which one so often does not get to feel. James says that he’ll grab our “go” bag, which I didn’t even know we had. Does it have pears in it, and medical marijuana, and Percocets, and frozen Snickers bars? Something tells me it’s more of a batteries and rope and candles and matches kind of bag. James is huffy and swollen and red as he loads the car. This is a little bit much for him. Still, it’s nice to see him excited, in charge, alive. It’s been hard to watch a man his age slowly lose his purpose, as he’s been doing, shuffling around the kitchen trying to perfect his long-simmering sauces, which only get poured out on the back lawn when he’s done, since how much gravy-drenched flesh can the two of us reasonably consume?

There is just one road out of here, and everyone we know is on it, moaning silently, I imagine, gently rending their summer linens at this unwelcome disruption. It gets tiring waving at them all—stressed-out wrinkled accidents of the human form, with white hair, or no hair, or nubby yellow sun visors. Grimacing, hunched over their steering wheels, as if they are being chased by men with guns. We know these people by their cars, which are long and dark and quiet, just like ours. We could all just call each other, share information and prop up each other’s nervous systems with voice-based medication, but people are saving their cell phone batteries. We’ve been through this drill before. Who knows where we’ll all be tonight. James also prefers me not to talk on the phone when he’s driving. He does his best to tolerate it, bless him, but he tenses up so terribly that I fear he will break open and spill everywhere, even while he insists, sometimes angrily, that he really doesn’t mind. Really really really, with spit fluffing out of his mouth and a look of pure murder in his eyes. I feel that he is daring me to make a call, but when I consider the risk, I sort of daren’t. After all, I am also a passenger in the vehicle that he is driving, and I must consider my own safety as well.

“This is the hardest part,” says James. “Just getting out of here.”

Well put, and doesn’t that just apply to any old situation: a meeting, a party, a relationship, a life? Always that sticky problem of the exit and how to squeeze through it.

When I don’t respond, James says, “Do you agree?” It’s what he often wants and needs. Assent. I tend to pay out as much as I can, with my mouth and otherwise, but always one must monitor the personal cost, careful not to add to the deficit, which can swell up and trigger a low-grade rage. Not my prettiest style. I never knew that I would be called on so relentlessly to agree with someone. Mother never said. Ask not, I guess, and I sort of haven’t.

I touch his leg. “Oh I do. I was just thinking, in fact, how right you are. This is the difficult part. This right here.” I would so love to point at the two of us, the fact of us, here in this car, on this road, on this day with a storm coming, in this particular life, just to say that this is the difficult part. Because, well. But the precise gesture eludes me. Hands can only signify so much. Usually they should just rest in one’s lap, sneaking beneath the garment now and then for a wee scratch at the tuft. This is possibly why one is supposed to use one’s words. I think. Plus, James is focusing all of his energy on the road ahead, which is really just an endless line of cars pointing west, away from the storm, away from home. We will be here a while. We might as well table any immediate feelings.

“This is about the only time I hate this island,” James says. “When it keeps us prisoner.”

“Yup,” I say. “Me too.”

It’s not really an island that we live on, or it wasn’t until some developers got clever. Because people love an island. I guess we love an island. I’m told they used explosives. They bombed a little spit of land that connected two bigger blobs of coastal blah, then built a baby road over the obliterated spit, the road we are now stuck on. So, poof, our little town became an island, and the houses suddenly cost more. The wind was arguably sharper and cooler after that, the light more intense, more knowing and intimate. More light-like. According to the marketing, anyway. Oh it was instantly spectacular, and all it took was some dynamite stuffed into the gaping pores of an old, rotted peninsula. Blowing your way to beauty might have been a nice slogan. One’s whole attitude to life was said to deepen, thoughts and feelings growing ever more rarefied and special. Island life. Too bad we can’t all die here, too, just to sustain our purity, but the island has a rule. You can die here, sure, and many of us have, spectacularly and otherwise, usually otherwise, but you must be buried across the sound, where the regular dumb folk reside and perish, and where the ground will open up for any old dead person, no questions asked. Even a living one, maybe, although who can say? Of course cremation is, as the saying goes, a workaround. A fine one. You can come home again—in a jar—and some of us have, but the victory seems small. I look at certain old friends, rendered to dust in their tureens, placed on various island mantels, and it is hard to feel just what it is they’ve won.

“What’s strange,” I say, as we idle in traffic, “is that the sun is out. It’s such a fine day. So weirdly beautiful.”

James cranes his neck to look out the window, trying maybe to be fair, and he has that expression, as if he’s evaluated all of the evidence but still, he’s very sorry to say, he just cannot bring himself to agree. It would violate his delicate moral compass to cede any ground here. “I’m not sure that’s so strange,” he says, as if there’s a superior adjective he’s reluctant to share. “Quiet before the you know, and all. Plus I see some…” And he points into nowhere, where there is maybe nothing, and I’m sure I don’t even need to look.

Oh, he’s probably right. What do I know when it comes to strange? Gosh knows I’m no expert in the uncanny.

“Yes, well, should we have music, or just listen to each other’s bodies complain?”

“You think I’m complaining?” says James. “Because I’m not. This is a little bit stressful. I’m trying to get us out of here.”

“I understand,” I say. And I do. It needn’t be said aloud, but I was referring to the sounds we make, each of us, which are whorishly amplified in the car, and not exactly my preferred music. Sounds of hunger, sounds of anxiety, sounds that have no explanation whatsoever—just the body at work, leaking and churning, groaning at a frequency no one was ever meant to hear. Live with someone long enough and you learn all of their gruesome lyrics, memorize all of the squishy instrumentals that gurgle out of them, note by note.

I click on the news and for a little while it’s just the sound of the storm elsewhere, where it’s ripened into a roar. We are to believe that the storm has paused in the lee of a mountain up north, where it’s gathering strength, pawing at the dust like a bull. They have a microphone penetrated deep inside this poor storm, I guess, and I’d give anything to sound like that. So sweet and angry and brand-new, a kind of subvocal monster simply cooing at the pain and pleasure of life. It’s perfectly beautiful and soothing, on such a nice day, until people start talking over it, explaining where this storm is from and where it might go, what it could do along the way, and then saying just how this storm makes them feel. Feelings! Every one of them would seem to be stirred up by this storm, by every kind of person. When it’s over, I’m exhausted and confused. I examine myself for feelings, carefully checking in the usual hiding places, and there are simply none to be found.

We aren’t kids anymore. We are old. Older. Nearly dead, really. My husband, James, is nearly dead, at least. He shows it. When he went to the doctor recently he hid the results from me, and I didn’t really ask, because we have to ration our concern. We can’t waste it on false alarms, and even if it’s a genuine alarm we must, I have come to believe, enact a protocol w/r/t what we feel. James shows his feelings so liberally that they come at a discount, and their value diminishes. When he says he loves me, usually in a threatening way, it always seems to beg for reciprocation. I guess he cries wolf. More or less sobs it. One could argue that whatever James says is merely the word “wolf” in one language or another. If he loves me, it is because that might open the portal for more cuddles and touches. That’s all. He needs to be swaddled and I just happen to often be in the same room. If I ever dare to walk past him without touching his hand, or his head, or stopping to outright kiss him, he pouts all day and looks up at me with mournful eyes. A husband, these days, is a bag of need with a dank wet hole in its bottom. The sheer opposite of a go bag. I comply with James’s wishes when I can, but the day is long and I have other projects.

I guess I want James to die. Not actively. Not with malice. But in a dim and distant way I gently root for James’s absence so I can see to the other side of the years I have left, get to what happens next. For a good while, James was what happened next for me. As a person he was a sort of page-turner. I moved through parts of him and made discoveries, large and small, and he led me to places and ideas I’d not seen or heard before. This looked and felt like life. And then, and then—even though I don’t think it happened suddenly—the story died in my old, tired husband. It ended. I knew everything there was to know: what the nights would be like, how the morning would feel. What he would say. What he wouldn’t. How I would think and feel around him. How I wouldn’t. Knowledge is a lot of things, but it definitely is not power. Dread is the better term, I think, though I do understand how that ultimately fails as a slogan.

The hotels inland are full so we follow the endless line of cars to the shelter. We are shown to two cots in the center of a high school gymnasium. There must be five hundred beds here, scattered out in a grid. At midnight the sleep sounds must be symphonic, particularly with the soft lowing arising from the pornless apertures of the elderly. The scoreboard is on in the gym, but it seems that no one has scored yet. Zero to zero. I’d like to feel that there is meaning in this, but I am tired and hungry. “Voilà,” says the volunteer, who has a walkie-talkie on his belt that squawks out little birdcalls. He is a handsome young man and he seems unreasonably proud to be playing this role today. I picture him unplugged, powered down like a mannequin, maybe sitting in a small chair in a room with sports banners on the wall. James and I stare at the cots as gratefully as we can, and for a moment I wonder if we are meant to tip the volunteer, because he stands there expectantly as wild children rocket past our feet.

“Just let us know if there’s anything we can do for you,” he says.

Anything? What a kind offer. A softer mattress, I think, and bone-chilling privacy, and a beef stew made with red wine. Some sexual attention would also be fine, if not from you specifically, because I fear you are too polite. Maybe you have a friend? After drives like that I often crave a release. But only a particular style of lovemaking will do. I have evolved a fairly specific set of requirements. If you don’t mind reading over these detailed instructions, briefing your friend, and then sending him to meet me in the janitor’s closet, that would be fine.

We tell him thank you, no, and we wait for him to run off before we start whispering our panic all over each other.

“Yeah, no,” says James, looking around, fake smiling, as if people were trying to read his lips. “No fucking way.”

“Maybe for a night?” I offer. I would like to be flexible. I would like to bend myself around this situation, which is certainly not ideal and is almost laughably experimental. One imagines doctors behind dark glass somewhere, rubbing themselves into a scientific frenzy over the predicament they’ve designed for us—two aging soft-bodies forced into an open-air sleeping environment. Maybe we are tired enough, and armed with enough pharmaceutical support, to render ourselves comatose on these trim little cots until it’s safe to go home. But wouldn’t people fuss with our inert bodies? Wouldn’t they see that we were so heavily tranquilized as to be unresponsive and then proceed to conduct whatever procedures they liked upon us? I only surrender myself to all my sweet medicines when I can lock a door, because I hate the thought of being fiddled with when I’ve brought on elective paralysis and can’t exactly fiddle back.

“The storm hasn’t even touched down on the island yet. We are talking days, maybe,” says James, rubbing his face. He rubs it with real purpose, pulling the skin into impossible shapes, before letting it not exactly snap back onto his head, taking its time to retract like the gnarled skin of a scrotum, and I fear for him a little bit, as if his hand will drag too far and pull his face free. I can’t really watch. If he must dismantle himself, piece by piece, I wish he would do it in private. Together we look around, as we might if we’d just entered a party. There’s no one here we know. It’s just a crowd of ragged travelers, forced from their homes, with far too many children running free. The children seem to believe that they have been released into a kind of cage match. Kill or be killed, and that sort of thing. The cots, mostly empty, are simply launching pads for child divers, exploring their airborne possibilities. They leap from bed to bed, rolling into piles on the floor, whooping. A style of topless nudity prevails, regardless, it seems, of age. Certainly there is beauty on display, but it’s ruined by all of this noise. One might reasonably think that there should be a separate evacuation receptacle for children. A room of their bloody own. Answering their special needs. Relieving the rest of us from the, well, the special energy that children so often desire to display. Lord bless their fresh, pink hearts.

I text Lettie, because there’s no way she and Richard would put up with this sort of bullshit. Are they here? In what quadrant? Could they issue a specific cry, maybe holler my name?

Airbnb! she texts back. Headed to Morley’s for clams and bloodies. Where r u?

Oh Jesus, right. People made plans. People thought ahead. I think it’s best not to mention this to James, because that’s something I could have been doing while he drove, securing our safe, private, cozy lodging and making dinner rezzies and otherwise running advance recon for this sweet adventure of ours.

James has curled up on the cot, and he’s staring into space. He looks tired. His color is James-like, which is never so great. I’m not sure how to monitor a change. I worry that he’s parked for good now, that the powerful laws of the late afternoon, which seem to visit men of a certain age, will be pulling him down into some bottomless, mood-darkening sleep, from which he will wake crankily, trumpeting his exhaustion, denying that he ever slept.

“Are you going to be napping?” I ask him, as neutrally as I can. “Because…”

“No, I’m not going to be napping. Are you kidding me? Here?” He has a way of shouting in a whisper. It’s his evacuation shelter whisper, I guess, although it has caught the attention of certain of our neighbors, who might want to scooch their cots somewhere else, come to think about it.

Yes, I want to assure them. We will be like this all night, whispering our special brand of kindness at each other, so pull up a chair and put your heads in our asses. That’s where the view is best. Perhaps that’s one way to secure our area and erect a kind of privacy barrier.

“Maybe you should get up?” I say.

“Jesus, Alice, I’ve been driving for hours. I can’t relax for a minute?”

“Yes you can, and even longer. Take all the time you like. I would just like to know your plans so I can plan accordingly.”

“What,” he hisses. “Are you going to go out and meet some friends? Go out to lunch, maybe?”

We have a different strategy when it comes to the timing of our emotional broadcasts. James buckles in public, and a hole opens in his neck, or whatever, and out comes his sour message for me and the world. One feels that he is emboldened in a crowd. It is possible that he does not see them as human, and thus fails to experience shame when he debases himself in their midst. Like masturbating in front of a pet. Whereas I frequently wait until we are alone, and then I quietly birth my highly articulate rage in his direction, in the calmest voice I can manage. I certainly have my bias, but it is possible that neither style is superior, and that a level silence in the face of distress or tension is the ultimate goal. Silence, in the end, is the only viable rehearsal for what comes after, anyway. I mean way, way after. And one certainly wants to be prepared. One wants to have practiced.

“Not here, James,” I say, as brightly as I can.

“What you mean is not anywhere, right, Alice? Not anywhere and never?”

Not bad. He is learning. Although I do not doubt that he will share his feelings with me when we find some privacy.

We head out to the car and talk this through. The cots will be here as a last resort, although it feels odd using the word “resort” with respect to such a location. James feels that we should start driving because there will be plenty of other people with our same idea, all of them racing to find the closest hotel room. It’s kind of the plot of Cannonball Run, except the people are old, they drive very slowly, and some of them just might die tonight. Eventually, James explains, if we go far and fast enough, we should find some part of this hellish country not affected by the storm, with plenty of empty beds. He would like to express confidence now, I can see that. I imagine that he wants me not to worry. If only he could do it without making me worry so much more.

The roads might still be packed, he says, and who knows about the weather. Around us there’s a fringe of rain and the sky is black and there’s that sound, a kind of pressurized silence, as if the orchestra is just about to start playing. The conductor will tap his baton and all hell will break loose. We figure we should get out of here, head further inland, and maybe there will be some food and a nice clean bed in a room where we can lock the door. It sounds decadent to me, and delicious, and I sort of cannot wait. We are a team, and it feels like we’ve just broken out of jail together.

We pull onto the highway and I check the news on my phone. “They are calling this storm Boris.”

“Boris,” he says flatly, as if I’ve just told him the name of a distant star.

“What’s the thinking there?” I wonder.

“They needed a B name.”

“Yes, well then, Boris, of course.”

“And they practice a kind of diversity.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure they want to be inclusive.”

“Not to trigger anyone by using a regular name?”

“Boris is a regular name,” says James. “In several parts of the world. With massive populations. Possibly more regular than John, worldwide.”

“Then let the storm go bother them.”

“I’m sure there are people named Boris over here.”

“Oh I’m sure. I bet their cocks stink.”

“What is wrong with you?” James is grinning. I don’t think he minds my moods when they’re not directed at him.

“Plenty. I’m hungry and you won’t let me eat. We just have to drive and drive. I’m going to hurl myself from the car.”

James smiles, and he pretends to do math, wetting his finger and tabulating an imaginary problem in the air in front of him. “Fifty,” he says.

“What?”

“I definitely think that’s at least fifty times that you’ve threatened to jump from a moving car. At least since I’ve known you. I can’t be sure about the time before that, but something tells me you had a penchant for it in your early years, too.”

He may be right. I don’t care to reflect too far back, particularly on the threats I may have needed to utter in certain stifling situations as a youth, which, one should not be surprised, very often occurred when I was a passenger in a car. I used to think about it more seriously, imagining myself rolling like a weevil, but finally free of torments. And of course the most delicious part of the fantasy was what would happen in the car after I ejected. The shock, the panic, the deep, abiding respect. Even the jealousy. Someone had finally done what everyone else could only dream of.

“Boo-ya,” I say. “Perhaps a more intuitive name.”

“Beelzebub.”

“Bitch face.”

“Bronwyn.”

“Bald Mountain.”

“Boredom.” And we both laugh.

“Boredom the storm is barreling down the coast. Boredom brings destruction in its wake. Coastal villages still recovering from the deadly effects of Boredom.”

The road is kind of gross. There’s a wild, erratic rain, as if some man with a bucket, hiding in a ditch, is occasionally hurling water at us, like from an old film set. We have the news on, and we’ve texted some friends. Everyone is everywhere. A few of them did opt for the cots back at the shelter. What could it hurt, they wrote. And they’ve come around with snacks! Our plan is to push to the next town, but it’s hard to see how that happens in this rain, in this darkness. It’s two hours or so in normal driving conditions, and looking at James, squeezed into an awful, tense ball behind the wheel, gnashing his teeth like a cartoon character, it’s hard to feel that he has two more hours of driving left to give. Poor thing. This is the statistic that is looking to claim our aging, musty bodies: the danger that befalls people in flight from other danger.

“I’m happy to drive,” I say.

“You don’t like how I’m driving?”

Okay, well, see. “I’m offering to help.”

“I’m good. I’m great.”

Sure you are. James is like some harassed sea creature, hiding behind a rock. I rub his neck, smooth down the back of his hair. I need my driver alive. My poor, poor driver. By taking care of him I take care of myself.

“Thanks,” he says. “That feels good. If only I could see. I mean, right? I feel like I’m playing a video game. What you could do is call some hotels or motels up ahead, to see if we can get a room.”

There’s a Holiday Inn and a Motel 6 in the next town. Both lines are busy when I call. I keep trying, and meanwhile I pull up the map on my phone, but my signal is getting spotty, a single bar flickering in and out, and the image of where we are never quite comes through. It’s loading and it’s loading and it’s loading. I see our blue dot, moving slowly over the screen, but there’s no terrain beneath it, just a gray block, as if we’re floating in space over some bottomless void.

James pulls over at a gas station and we get chips. Lots of them, the sort we rarely allow ourselves at home. All bets are off. I would inject drugs into my face right now. I would drink gas from the car with a straw. Inside the store, the single-serving wine bottles look exceptional to me—golden bottles in their own gleaming cooler, a shrine to goodness—but it’s not fair to James, who has to drive. I don’t want him drooling. I don’t want him jealous. I’d prefer to keep his feelings to a minimum.

We can hardly see anything save the lights and the black slashes of rain streaking past, but the same sign keeps appearing on the side of the road, every mile or two: Exit 49 Food. The third time it crawls past, close enough to grab and shake, to possibly dry-hump, I start to salivate. I picture plates of unspecified steaming goodness. Salty, crunchy objects littered over wet mounds of something achingly delicious, with sauce, with sauce, with sauce. Polenta with stinking gorgonzola, maybe, and a fork-tender bone of meat from some brave animal. A shank, a leg, a neck, cooked for four years in a thick mixture of wines. With tall drinks that fizz a little and work directly on quieting down one’s noisy little brain, perhaps even a warm cloudy drink you pour directly into your eyes. James seems to register my reverie and insists again that we keep driving. Have to have to. He slaps the steering wheel. That’s why we bought chips, he cries, trying perhaps to sound like a real human being who feels enthusiasm. It’s sort of awkward. We have chips, he says more quietly. If we stop now we are doomed, goners.

“It’s just that it’s already kind of late, and I’m pretty hungry,” I tell him.

“What are you saying?”

“That it’s late and I’m hungry?”

“If you’re not prepared to offer a solution then maybe you should not speak.”

Well, it’s an interesting rule, and I do enjoy constraints around what can and cannot be said. The deepest kind of etiquette. But if you applied such a standard to everyone, the world over, there’d be very little speech. The world would undergo a near-total vow of silence, with a few exceptions. Perhaps that would be a desired outcome. Perhaps a special island could be set aside for the solution-proffering peoples, who would slowly drive each other to murder.

“Okay, sure, I will restrict myself to a solution-based language. Here’s a solution. Let’s go to a restaurant. That would solve so many problems. The problem of hunger, the problem of exhaustion, the problem of claustrophobia in this goddamn coffin, and the very real threat of escalating discord between two individual passengers.”

“Go to a restaurant and then what? Eating will make us tired. Where will we sleep? I hate being the only one who thinks about these things.”

“Oh, is it not fair?” I say. And I will admit that my voice dips into a pout here.

“That’s right,” says James. “It’s not fair. I didn’t want to put it that way.”

“Because it makes you sound like a sad baby?”

“You’re the one who said it. You said it. How does it make me sound like anything?”

“Yes, let the record show that I controlled your words and rendered you helpless and unaccountable. I am all-powerful.”

James is quiet for a while. The rain is thundering down on us. The wipers are going so fast across the windshield it seems they might fly off the car. When exit 49 suddenly appears, James veers cautiously down the ramp and pulls the car over in the grass of an intersection.

“The record won’t show anything, Alice, because there is no record. It’s just us. I’m worried about getting stuck out here. That’s all this day has been about. I’m trying to get us somewhere so we can get a room and then we can worry about everything else after that. Could we maybe fight later, when we get home?”

“Oh, I’d like that.”

“I mean, I don’t really feel well, and the fighting is not helping.”

I look at him. So much of our relationship depends on him being alive. Almost all of it.

“Darling,” I say. “Let’s just go sit and eat and relax for a minute. We can still drive after that. We just have to get out of this rain for a minute. And after dinner, I’m driving. No arguments.”

We find the restaurant and get a table near the fireplace, which turns out to be just a storage nook for old copper pots. The waiter is a boy. Not an infant, and not exactly a man. “Are you all weathering the storm okay?” he asks, grinning.

Can one say no? I wonder. No thank you, we are not. We have failed to weather it and now we are here, in your restaurant.

The food that comes out is not disgusting. Sweet and hot and plentiful, moist in all the right places. It goes down pretty heavily, though, and I feel the day starting to expire, begging to end. James was right. The druggery of road food. We eat in silence, listening to the rain. Both of us look forlornly at the bar, thinking probably that we shouldn’t, we mustn’t. On the other hand, we could simply pass out drunk here and maybe they’d take us to jail. There are beds in jail. Soap. New people to meet.

A television above the bar shows a woman in a raincoat being blown off her feet. The clip must be on a loop, or else she keeps getting up, saying something desperate into her microphone, and then falling back down again. I’d like to tell her to stay down, just stay down and take it while the wind and rain lash at her flapping back, but she gets up again and the wind seems to lift her. For a moment, as she blows sideways off the screen and surrenders herself to flight, her posture is beautiful, so absolutely graceful. If you were falling from a cliff, no matter what awaited you, you might want to think about earning some style points along the way, just turn your final descent into something stunning to watch. On the TV there is nothing to learn about the storm, nothing to know. The numbers that scroll across the bottom of the screen are long, without cease, maybe the longest single number I’ve ever seen. Does this number describe the storm? What are we to make of it?

In the car we think it over. We are too far from a hotel, and plus, the hotels aren’t answering their phones. The driving is dangerous, if not impossible. It’s not really even driving anymore, it’s like taking your car through one of those car washes. We are exhausted beyond belief. I suggest, as tentatively as I can, that it is not unreasonable to think that we could sleep in the car. Each of our seats reclines, like an easy chair, and if we found somewhere safe and quiet to park, we could ride this out until the morning, maybe even sleep well. Then we could drive all day and maybe get somewhere where they have rooms. We’d be rested. The sun might be up. The world might have ended. But at least it would be tomorrow. Tomorrow seems like the only thing that will solve anything, ever. Along comes tomorrow, with its knives, as someone or other said. That’s not the exact quote, I’m sure, but the gist of it sounds true.

James seems like he may have given up. “Is that what you want to do? Sleep on the side of the road? In the car?”

“What I want to do is to be alone in a hole, covered in dirt. But sleeping in the car is the next best thing right now.”

“Yes, that often is the second choice after live burial.”

It starts to sound nice to me, really appealing. Like going to the drive-in, but without the movie. Like going parking, which we must have done once, in another life, before our bodies took on water and started to sink, before the spoil grew like a mold in the back of our mouths. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with sleeping in the car,” I say. “It’s going to be more comfortable than a motel, that’s for sure, not that there even is an available motel, and plus we won’t have to worry about the cascade of ejaculate that’s been literally sprayed from human appendages around every single motel room in the country. Purportedly.”

James seems to think about it. “When I stay in a hotel,” he says, “I do my best to ejaculate on the walls. It’s a civic obligation. You have to pull your weight.”

“That’s a lot of pressure for a man.”

“Sometimes I’m not in the mood. I’m cranky and I’m tired.”

“That’s when you bring out the jar from home?” I ask.

He laughs. “It’s good to have it with me. Who’s going to know, you know, if the product is older.”

“More mature, in some ways.”

“Must. Broadcast. Seed,” he says, like a robot, and then he mimes the flinging of the jar, splashing its imaginary contents out into space.

It’s not really a rest area that we find. It’s a scenic turnout, and the view—of the black, bottomless abyss—is pristine. You can see all of it, every dark acre, and if we don’t see our own ghostly faces by the end of the night it’s because we’re not looking hard enough. We park a bit out of the way, under the branches of a mammoth tree, and when we quickly realize that we’ve just increased our risk of death—because trees seem to seek people out in these kinds of situations—we move over to an open parking space, with nothing threatening above us.

“Fuck that tree,” I say. “Way to try to hide your intentions.”

We put our seats all the way back and James pulls out a bar of chocolate from the go bag. I want to rub it all over my neck.

“Oh my god, oh my god. You are a genius,” I say. “Certifiable.”

“I like to think that I have an elusive, almost unknowable sort of intelligence.”

“What else is in there?” Now I’m excited.

James peers into the bag, rummaging around with his hand. “That’s the end of it,” he says. “The rest is just sadness. Sadness and real life.”

This is my sweet man. So weird sometimes. So uncommon. And he steered us here, to safety, where we can eat our sweets and surrender to the night and everything will be so goddamn swell in the morning. Even as the rain literally seems to be crushing the car, one hard bead at a time. Not the rain. Boris. Boris is doing this to us, the motherfucker.

The seats are a little bit divine when you tilt them all the way back. A little bit like first class on an airplane, which we only did once, and by accident, because of a mistake by the sweethearts at the gate. It remains a sort of benchmark for comfort outside the home.

“I’m sorry you don’t feel well,” I say. “Is it related to…”

“What?”

“I mean, is it related to anything? I know you went to the doctor.”

“I did go to the doctor.”

“And?”

“It was really interesting. Really surprising. I found out that he thinks that I am still alive.”

“He sounds like a smart man. I would like to meet him. Maybe shake his hand.”

James is quiet and I’m not sure I really like it. I listen to his breath and it sounds fine. But then he coughs, and it’s such a feeble cough, as if he barely has the energy for it. I don’t like it.

“But now?” I ask. “Are you still not feeling so…”

James laughs quietly. “Oh, now. I’d like to say that I’m fine now.”

“Well, don’t hold back, mister. Say that. Make it so.” I take his hand.

“I’m fine,” he whispers. “I feel wonderful. Better than I have felt in a long time.”

His voice is too quiet for me. The fight has gone out of him. Maybe he’s just tired.

“Well, don’t go and die on me tonight,” I say, and I kind of want to punch him.

“Okay.”

“You know that’s what everyone’s thinking, right. Everyone who’s watching this at home? That the couple who has been bickering all day will start to get along, but it will be too late, and then the man will die. That’s such a classic plot.”

“Oh is that what they’re thinking?”

“That’s what all the betting sites say. That’s where the odds are.”

“Does the woman ever die?”

“In situations like this?”

“Are there any other kinds of situations?”

We settle in, and I guess we are maybe trying to fall asleep, but I feel too vigilant. James’s hand is warm in mine. It doesn’t feel like the hand of a man about to die. It is big and soft and I pull it over to me, get it in close against my chest.

“I can’t see you, James. What is the look on your face? What are you thinking?”

“No one is watching this but you, Alice. You’re the only one here. No one knows about us. People can’t really know.”

“Sweetheart, are you okay? Should I be calling someone?”

“I guess I’m a little more tired than I thought I was.”

“You must be. You’ve done all the driving. You got us out of there. You saved us.”

He must think I’m joking with him. I wish I knew how to say it better. How come so many things can sound mean and nice at the same time?

“Could we lie together?” he asks.

I crawl over the seat, wrapping up against him. “Yes of course. I mean, in the end it will be more of a his-’n’-hers sleeping arrangement, just because of these weird beds, but let me settle in here with you for a bit. Why not?”

It feels good to snuggle him. Warm and just right. James is thinner than I remember. I can feel his bones.

“Why don’t we do this more often?” I say, nuzzling against him.

“Because we haven’t wanted to?” James says. He’s drifting off. I can hear his voice grow thin. I’m not ready to sleep. Not ready to be alone.

“Hey,” I say to him.

“Yeah?”

“Stay awake with me for a little bit.”

“Okay.”

“Breast cancer.”

“What?”

“Breast cancer is picking up speed. Landfall is expected at twenty-one hundred hours.”

“Oh. Ha. Yeah. I almost forgot about that. Boris. So weird. Boris.”

When James is silent for a while I nudge him. “Your turn,” I say.

“Okay. It’s so hard to think.” His voice trails off and I nudge him again. Then he says, “Maybe we’ve thought of the best ones already.”

“No, we haven’t, we haven’t. I swear. There are so many more.”

“Okay,” he says. “But this one isn’t so great. Are you ready?”

I say that I am. I lean in close.

“Balls.”

I squeeze his hand. “There you go.”

“Balls is blowing at forty-eight mph.”

“They sure is,” I say. “Hurricane Balls rolled in this morning and people are afraid to leave their homes.”

James doesn’t laugh. I need to leave him alone. He needs his space.

“Beloved,” James whispers, and it’s the last thing I hear him say to me before he falls asleep. “Beloved is coming,” I say to no one, listening to his breathing slow down. “Close your windows. Go down into the basement and don’t come out until she’s gone.”

The Trees of Sawtooth Park

Dr. Nelson wanted me to feel something. In the palm of his hand was a pale yellow mound of powder. He proposed to puff this powder, with his medical straw, into my face. A precisely regulated expulsion of air, he called it. To exhale just so until I was caked in it.

“Just take it passively, if you would, Lucy,” Dr. Nelson said. “Relax your face. If possible, relax your head.”

“You take it passively.” I was so not in the mood. I pictured him shamed by animals, dogs with pants at their knees lining up to defile him.

“Too late for me, I’m sure,” Dr. Nelson said, touching his face as if he’d just discovered it. “I’ve had my hand in the cookie jar so much on this one that I can’t feel the effects anymore. I can’t feel anything, really. I need more subjects.”

So do we all, I thought, but tough luck and boo-hoo.

Dr. Nelson was speaking in a high, shitbird whisper, but no one in the office bothered to look. Because ho-hum. Because who really cared? If a so-called scientist hadn’t approached you directly at your cubicle for a turn on his chemical merry-go-round, you kept your head down. Otherwise we were just too used to these eureka freaks sprinting through our wing, spritzing us with boutique medicines. Dr. Nelson was just another white coat haunting the office, with scarcely a body beneath. I called him Half Nelson, because he lacked a badge, had no ID, and worked so far off-book that he hardly seemed to exist. Just a little boy in a sweater, with a huge, grotesque brain pulsing behind his dear, dear face.

“Are you ready, Lucy? Sweetheart?” He brought the straw to his lips, poised to administer a puffback.

I wasn’t ready, not really.

“There’s not a pill or just, maybe, a lotion?” I asked. I so preferred the cold lotion they’d been deploying recently in the drug trials. Cold lotion was better than human touch by a pretty far cry. A kind of finer boyfriend. With one of these newer lotions, applied just so, I could see myself living alone, feeling loved, feeling complete, in the mountains somewhere, very far from here.

“Nope, there is not,” he said, speaking around the straw. “And now I’m going to count to three.”

I closed my eyes and relaxed as the sandstorm hit, jagged crumbs pelting my face. Holy holy holy it hurt. Some of it went up my nose. It smelled of flowers, but the sweetness turned rancid and started to burn inside my face. It was like I was smelling myself get cooked.

“Jesus, was there glass in that? Did you just fucking spray glass on me?” I groped for my water.

“Hardly,” Dr. Nelson mumbled. He always seemed surprised to find that his subjects weren’t corpses. That they could speak or shout. He wiped his mouth. “That’s just the coarseness of the grit, so that it doesn’t spike too soon on you and blow out your levels. We ground it at forty-one on the, uh.” And here he whispered something in German. I think. His speech sounded laced with ancient obscenities. He made a gesture to indicate a large machine, pointing to a room down the hall I had no clearance for. I knew the door that led there. It had no handle. It had no code box. No retina thing, either. It was just a slightly cleaner slab of Sheetrock. But what wasn’t, when you thought about it.

Dr. Nelson had a big smile on his face. A shit-eating scientist smile. Whatever he blew into me didn’t seem to have much of an opening act. I wasn’t seizing, and I wasn’t writhing on the ground in some kind of unbearable euphoria. My levels, whatever that meant, were pretty much unblown. I felt the same as always. The same, the same, the same. Fuck it all.

I picked some crumbs out of my hair. They were moist, like bread chewed by a baby. “You’re such an asshole, Nelson. That was like the least professional medical trial I’ve ever been a part of. You don’t just. That’s not how. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

“It’s not a trial, Lucy, and this isn’t really happening,” he said. “You were just sitting at your desk when you felt a breeze. Maybe there was dust in it. It could have been anything. It was anything.”

Good grief, the caution we endured. It was hard not to read it as extreme self-importance. Did anyone anywhere, in the entire world, have a hard-on for corporate espionage when it came to our doomed and mildly illegal experiments?

“Right, of course, right. I just mean that you have no idea what dosage you gave me.”

Nelson had his little phone out, which looked like a soft, baby bird, and was already lost in numbers. “I don’t want to argue,” he said without looking up, stroking the swollen body of his phone with a finger. “Mostly because you’re wrong and it would be boring and exhausting to explain why. But I know the dosage down to the milligram. The puffback is actually a precise delivery system, and that’s the go-to-market play, anyway.”

Dr. Nelson turned theatrically covert. He shaded his mouth with a hand as if he had a secret that people might lip-read from the surveillance cameras. “Ah-choo,” he whispered.

“Uh, bless you?” For, like, the fakest sneeze ever?

“No,” he said. “Jesus. I mean the sneeze. That’s the delivery system. This drug will be delivered via sneeze. Or maybe a yawn. Something that one person does to another. Because, well. Beyond that I can’t say. You can probably figure out the rest.”

Right. I thought about it, and I thought about it, and I absolutely couldn’t figure out the rest. The rest was an unwritten world I was not invited to. I was too far down the chain in this puzzle, another mule without the code. Whatever. It hardly mattered. I was talking to a ghost.

“So what will I be feeling?” I asked, and I must have sounded too eager. Mommy just wants new feelings. Please, please, make Mommy feel something.

“Probably we don’t want to give you any help with that. Don’t want to game the books or whatever they say.”

“They don’t say that. That’s not a saying. Cook the books, game the system, queer the pitch. Anyway, are you that insecure about your work that you can’t tell me anything about it?”

He just blinked.

“Medical pathway? Part of brain targeted? Side effects? Give me some crumbs so I can at least make a goddamn biscuit.”

I knew his rules. I knew his life. It was pointless to ask. The secrecy was so bone deep here at Thompson that a false narrative of this bit of medical terrorism, him standing at my desk blowing powder over my head, had already been scripted. The dailies, when they came in, would reflect a different scenario entirely, one in which I had not been medically sneezed on by a hulking gray skeleton. Dr. Nelson looked like he didn’t eat, and didn’t sleep, and didn’t really breathe. So much abstention. What, really, was there left to erase except the idea of the man?

“How about you just tell me what you feel whenever you have a minute. Use the logger on the…” He pointed at my terminal. “I added an identity for you.”

He told me the name of the experiment. It had the word “bear” in it. It had a longish number, with some letters, too, and I instantly forgot it. He told me the name I’d be logging in with: Terry Corbin. For the purposes of the experiment I was a fifty-three-year-old woman, with no medical issues, and a family history of depression. Not so far from the truth. He told me that my fictional background was necessarily scattershot, because he didn’t have time to flesh out a real and believable past for me. Because why bother, and bleh, and gross?

“The system requires medical subjects to have a past, as such, but that level of information has no technical bearing.”

I blinked at him. When the scientists spoke that way I tended to turn to ash.

“The past isn’t interesting. It doesn’t matter. Sentimental value only, if that. Legacy software demands it and we comply, but we phone it in and that’s been approved all the way at the top. We’re not going to make a fetish out of stuff that has already happened. I sort of actually hate the past.”

Like, he hated the past on principle, or certain specific things that had happened in the past? And did he hate his own past, which would be understandable—I imagine he was a small, unnoticed figure in his childhood, perhaps frequently set upon by larger children who tried to drink from his body—or was it the past of the entire world that troubled him?

“Thanks for the sexless name,” I said. “And the age. Nice. I can practically smell my coffin.”

We did this sometimes. We took on guinea personas for Nelson and his crowd before we romanced the FDA with our product. How did we put it when we congratulated ourselves about the work we did? We inhabited nascent identities to spread the data to a broader population. Maybe this was deceitful but it felt scarcely more problematic than using a real person. Scarcely. Crowdsourcing worked really well when you could handpick your crowd and rename them at will. You know, like drafting a football team or casting extras in a gladiator scene. It also saved some pennies on testing and it gave all of us in data collection a chance to sample how people would be feeling in the future, if any of this ever, ever, was approved and came to market. Yeah, if. And if and if and if. It was the unspoken word before a good deal of the sentences we punted at each other. And it was usually the last word, too. Along with many of the words in between.

The burning eased off in my nose and I’d shaken the crumbs free. I still felt nothing from the dose. No rush, no sudden clarity, no blast of sorrow. I was not high and I was not sleepy and I had not been put on some teetering edge that could only be soothed with sex or violence or kindness, which was good, because I wasn’t sure what the likely outlets were. This chemical friend looked like a quiet actor. Maybe an out-of-work one. The subtler drugs were always harder to bear, ha ha, because they triggered a bottomless disappointment. In me, anyway. Which I was arguably on the verge of feeling anyway, and who wanted a spotlight on the real? Ever. At times like this I realized how much I wanted out of myself, how blitzed and bored I was by my own thoughts and feelings, my own little story. Terry Corbin could have licked me into some new, intriguing shape, but she was turning out to be a fucking dud with limited powers of rescue. I kind of hated her already.

The other option was a placebo. It could always be that. Maybe it always was. In which case I’d just been sneezed on by a creepy man for nothing.

Just then there was an intercom announcement. Possibly in French. I looked at my coworkers, who all groaned at once. People reached for their coats. A crowd started to gather at the window.

I had questions, even though my heart wasn’t in it. My heart wasn’t really anywhere.

“What’s the time frame on this, or whatever? What’s the onset and then how long will this shit last?”

Dr. Nelson looked at his watch. “Yeah, uh. Onset is, you know… now.” He looked at me and blinked. Still nothing on my end, although I hated evaluating my feelings. It was like looking into an empty room, trying to see if the walls were breathing. Sometimes when I scrubbed in as a monkey for these experiments I was already shaking with the blast of the initial dose by now, quivering under my desk, running for the toilet. For some reason, experimental medicine often led to a thunderous shit. Today was different. This drug might as well have been called Status Quo. Who was going to pay for more of the same?

“As far as duration, this one might be pretty long term. We’re working on something sustained, and, uh.”

“Sustained?”

“Pretty much. That’s how we refer to it. It’s one of the words we’re comfortable with. But I’m not going to get too involved with language right now. The language for this experience will come last.” For some reason Dr. Nelson gestured out the window, as if that was where the language would be coming from. I looked in that direction, right into the sun, and for a moment forgot myself, who I was, where I was, what I was doing. Jesus it felt good.

“So this will last a full day? Two?”

Nelson just stared at me. I was playing cat and mouse with a dead man. Both of us were dead, maybe. Which explained the lack of repartee.

“Or what, like, a week? I should have probably asked you that. I have things to do at home. Stuff I have to take care of.”

There was, really, nothing of the sort. There was simply a man named Richard at home, my betrothed, and then the two children we had fashioned out of wedlock, using techniques we’d long since forgotten. These days I bent over a chair to receive his anxiety, but this happened merely monthly, and was marked by a great fatigue. The children walked the rooms of our home collecting food. Sometimes they left for long periods of time and returned home, silent and unchanged. They still called it school but Jesus Christ. When the kids slept I thought of examining them, but for what? From time to time I grabbed them and held them and sometimes they grabbed me and held me. I felt very little when I did this, so I did it more, and the children grew quieter and more remote, hanging from my arms like ornaments on a tree. You could almost hear a bell go off when we hugged, as if we were all good little subjects in the great experiment that was our family. You didn’t need special glasses to see where it was all going. You could watch a movie in which people like us were burned alive. We had just slightly more agency than stuffed animals. I’m sure there was more to it, but I didn’t know what it was.

Dr. Nelson touched my face. “Lucy, sweetheart.” He was one of those men who talked this way, applying human touch that felt both deeply inappropriate and entirely welcome. I allowed it, however cold his hand felt, however much I shivered. Maybe he could undress me. Maybe he could cut into me with a knife and it would seem like chivalry. I think I am only half kidding. There was a funny way that human law seemed kind of arbitrary when it came to the doctors on our wing. Human law, in the end, would have a short half-life—human law could seem so overwhelmingly polite sometimes. He was always kind enough, but in an overcompensated way, as if he’d just come from the killing floor somewhere up north, freshly showered, blood free for the first time in months. Whatever nice thing he did for you was out of guilt for something especially heinous he’d done literally seconds before. Sometimes in the break room we discussed the various doctors, and we had silent ways of singling out the creeps and corpses among them. The ones who were so recently dead that they twitched just enough to seem functional in the world, tripping and stumbling through rooms on their way to the burial pyre.

“It’s a moon shot,” Dr. Nelson said. “But we’re going really more sort of long term with this one. ‘Indefinitely’ is one of the words we might use. Maybe. We don’t know. I mean, we do know, but we also are not saying that we know.”

“So the dose of nonsense you just gave me, with mysterious effects that you won’t reveal, you’re hoping it will last, maybe, forever? That wasn’t worth mentioning, as a courtesy?”

Dr. Nelson smiled. “You’re welcome,” he said.

What we were doing that year in St. Louis—it sounds odd to call it that—was tagging the major feelings, sub-tagging the minor ones. This was the mandate at Thompson Lord, the company where we died a little bit every day. Even on the weekends, when we didn’t go to work. Because it taunted us on the horizon, brown and long and suspiciously moist. More of an animal reared up on its hind legs than an office building, even though up close it resolved into brick and glass and was just another future pile of rubble for the end-times.

We were giving order to the interior weather system, and whatnot. Telling a story about our moods. The thousand shades of disquiet, was what we called it in the pale halls of Thompson. A system of classification for all the ways to feel. But because the names of feelings are just so unpleasant, destroyed forever by poets and shameless emoters, we swapped in animal names. Bear and wolf and whatever. It was easier. A Noah’s ark of the possible tantrums, freak-outs, and moods. With such an approach, we wouldn’t box ourselves into some classification corner, or get lost in a subjective hell farm, and anyway it was better to be on the same page with Dr. Nelson and his team, and the middle geeks at the chem lab who had to conjure hormone equivalents of these feelings, using the ass glands of snakes and whatever.

It sounds a bit highbrow, but it was just an intellectual property land grab on the part of Thompson. They were boiling over with money, and as such were obliged to own what could be thought or felt, even if it could not yet be, well, done, by which I mean: sold. Because usually that was just a matter of time.

So, own the moods. Break all possible emotions down into chemical states, and simulate those states with drugs. Pretty simple. Then, curate the hell out of people’s days. Feed them their feelings second by second, like a DJ. The drugs would have names like Tuesday, Thanksgiving, First Day of School. We’d lose the animal branding and tag the chemical helpers with super-obvious monikers. Then we’d get into blends. Then we’d get into mods and hacks. The word “smoothie” would not be inappropriate. The horizon on all of this was pretty and it was filled with cake.

Except, of course, the tech sucked balls, and there was no agreement whatsoever in the so-called scientific community—“community” is the wrong word for what happened when these cretins got together in an auditorium—over what even constituted a particular emotional state. You wrote a protein poem for this shit, and you sidecarred a timeline of hormones, but the result too often wobbled when you squirted it into a live human body and eventually everything fell out of focus. People bled, they wept, they shat. Human ignorance turns out to be pretty durable, and it played a starring role in our work. The moods, in the end, were like ghosts. Not even. Less credibility.

And if 2014 really was the year of the sensor, as they kept saying on NPR, it had turned into a pretty long and terrible one, approaching one thousand days now. Maybe more. Who was counting? I was, along with lots of people I knew. Sensors in the trees, on the roads, slapped onto buildings, drinking from our necks, sucking up data on us. Sensors on our bodies, in our clothing. Sensors in our face cream. Sensors, yeah, in the water, finally, because water, really, has the broadest access in the world, inside our bodies and out, and how dopey we all were not to see it sooner. Water as the ultimate delivery system for that final frontier of surveillance—the inside of the human body. The data that came back was mountainous. It was crushing. Did the sensors work? Was the data sound, or even remotely reliable? Yeah, no. I mean, no one knew for sure. Or of course we did, and the answer wasn’t good.

It sounds pretty high tech, maybe, and it might have been, if it worked. These were the 2010s, after all, a time of hypotheticals and wish enterprises, when people still needed to eat, and the sun still behaved itself.

We fed this data, big and hairy as it was, to a crew over in a building we called the dorm, where beaver-faced children worked the curation. I mean worked the shit out of it. Maybe these wet beasts were of age, but just. And maybe they were human, but, well, also just. And that’s being generous. I don’t think they slept, and if they ate it must have been liquid food through a very thin straw, or the tiniest nibbles of mush, because their mouths were disturbingly small. Like, how did these kids really breathe out of such pinholes, at least without causing a balloon squeak? How did they stick a toothbrush in there to clean their teeth, let alone administer oral deliciousness to some hulking uncle who needed his emerson drained? Maybe the kids at the dorm were just, uh, small people, horrendously gifted with numbers, but there was something off in their appearance. Everyone kept reasonably quiet about the whole thing, though. Given the speech protocols at Thompson, not to mention elsewhere, you just didn’t really say what you were thinking. And if you could help it, you didn’t really think what you were thinking, either. I got good at that. My thoughts were going to die with me, whenever that day came. Or maybe my thoughts already had, preceding me to the grave. I wasn’t going to get caught out. I wasn’t going to get listened in on. I had a few tricks to protect myself.

The house was dark when I got home. Another cold St. Louis afternoon. There was going to be snow, supposedly, and there was going to be a lot of it. Maybe we’d all be buried alive. Everything would freeze and in hundreds of years they’d find us, chilled in position as we tended our homes or pursued our craven desires out on the street, and the story they would concoct—of who we were and what we were doing—would be so splendid. It would be majestic. Everything so small and remote in our lives—our handbags, our kitchen tongs—would be rescued from their current uses and gifted with tremendous, almost unbearable power, united to a meaning we could never even imagine. We’d be gods and we’d be animals, we’d be uncanny accidents in the larger trajectory of the universe, anomalies of light. It would almost be worth it, to die that way, and then to be understood through such a profound, new lens. To be upgraded and romanticized and lifted up. Weren’t we all just caught in a rehearsal for our fossilization? Stories would be written. Songs would be sung.

I called out into the house. Richard was usually back from work by now. He’d be up to something desperate in the kitchen. A cooking project from one of his books. Save your relationship with this brilliant stew. That sort of thing. The result was usually a cozy bowl of something to eat, and we’d sit together looking out the window at our favorite tree, trying not to argue. The children would be home as well, for sure. They’d be upstairs in their rooms, polishing their privacy until it glowed. You could sometimes see the light under the door. It stood for everything you’d never know about them. Everything you’d never understand.

But there was no one home. No one anywhere. Quiet in the streets and quiet abroad. Quiet inside the home. A pretty quiet world tonight overall maybe. I had the sense that if I turned on the TV it would not be able to penetrate such profound silence. It’d be no match for this hushed world. I’d just see the strange faces on the screen as if they were trapped under water, shouting silently behind the glass. For a moment I thought that if I cut myself open, there’d be no noise in there, either. Just the silent rush of blood, all perfectly muzzled, even as my body hurried about its business, working so tremendously hard, which you rarely got to see, just to keep me alive.

I slept forever. I slept and slept and slept. And I woke to a different world. The snow was piled high up on the windows. Plows rolled down the street pushing so much snow that the parked cars on each side were covered in it, perfect white mounds with nothing visible underneath. I went to wake the kids, but they’d come and gone already. Richard, too. They must not have wanted to disturb me. I was still in my clothes from yesterday. I needed to shower and eat and get the hell back to work.

The phone rang as I was making breakfast.

“How are you holding up?” the caller asked.

“Who’s calling?” I said.

“Is this Terry?”

“No.”

“Terry, I just wanted to be sure you’re okay. With the storm. If you need anything.”

I told them it was a wrong number, and they didn’t apologize, or say anything. They just held the line and listened. I said that I was hanging up, and they yelled that name again, Terry, just as I disconnected.

At work we were on lockdown, of sorts. Not everyone could make it in. I wasn’t going to let some weather stop me, plus Dr. Nelson would probably worry if I didn’t show up. He’d think I’d died. He’d send a team. They’d need to collect me, clean up, hide the traces. Whatever. None of that was relevant. The buses were running, and all I did was bundle up like crazy, with so many layers that you could have thrown me from a building and it wouldn’t have hurt when I landed. “Unbreakable” was the word I kept saying to myself. Unless a car got to me. Unless someone used fire. I pictured myself flung from a window and falling gently into the snow. I’d be fine. I’d stand up and walk it off. Maybe I’d even ask to do it again, just one more time, because you don’t get to feel that way very often. You rarely get to feel that you could fall forever, without harm, as the world rushes by you.

In any case, nothing short of a family emergency was going to keep me from going to work. I took the bus with a few other cozy folks, and it was no big deal. Yes, the walking was slow, and yes, you could not hear a thing, not your feet on the ground, not the cars rolling by, but it was gorgeous and I think we should feel lucky when our world is transformed so wholly before our eyes, when everything is changed just by some snow. You live for things like that, and you don’t even know it. Then they happen and you almost want to lie down in it, roll around, and pray that it doesn’t go away.

They were calling me Terry at the office, and what a big goof that was. They must have seen the name in the logger, and then why not haze the mule with a bit of nicknamery? I smirked at them. I didn’t give a shit. Their names were worse. They were lucky if they even had names. I’d seen their bodies hung with needles. I’d seen them breathing through masks, crying at their desks. These were people who were drowning, who would be dead soon. I walked past their cubicles and saluted. Here’s to you, people of the grave. Sleep well, my friends.

There was a book of photos on my desk, which I assumed had been left by Nelson. In this stage of a trial he was always showing me pictures and whatnot, and I guess I was supposed to log my reactions.

I looked through the photos, and it was sordid and strange and not at all pleasant, a book of sorrows and loss and mostly unspeakable desolation. Nelson must have been wondering what I could handle, how low he could go. Unbreakable my ass, maybe he was thinking. Would I give in and buckle? I wasn’t going to try to control my reactions. It wasn’t as if you walked around deciding how to feel. That’s not how it worked. You don’t have your feelings, they have you.

The pictures were of people with hair, people licked clean. People with faces you wanted to set fire to. People you would fight on the street if you saw them, even if you loved humanity, even if you did not believe in death. However peaceful you think you are, however sweet and nonviolent and angelic—you have a fight in you if only it can get unlocked, and that’s what these pictures were doing, testing one’s absolute limits, tearing thresholds, one by one. A kind of violation of your own moral line. Pictures, horribly vivid, of people who couldn’t smile without showing who they really were, and it wasn’t pretty. Just a way that they opened their mouths and showed too much. People with obvious secrets. People with no inner life. And then people with no outer life, either, because they were just dead. Shots of corpses galore, although just before, moments or days or weeks or maybe years before death, but it’s all the same in the longer view. Pictures of children. Babies. Landscapes. Parts of the world that could not have existed. Made-up scenery, not just too good to be true, but too horrible to be true. A good deal of that. Someone’s nightmare of the world, the sort of thing that makes everyone wish there were no such thing as the imagination. And then more people, especially ones who could not have existed, which was the worst. Realistic in their features, and all of that, but clearly unreal all the same. Someone’s sick idea of what a person looks like. Perversion everywhere, as if we’d only been born to feel the very worst things, and it all begged a pretty big question about why one had to be a person in the first place.

I’d had enough. I looked over to where Nelson usually came from, the hallway, the wall, his whole mysterious wing, but I didn’t figure I would see him today. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t watching.

One time they strapped me to some sensors and the screen lit up with bright bursts of dots not when I spoke, but when I didn’t. So I talked and talked, because I didn’t care for those points of light. I could go my whole life without seeing them again. So who cares if I had to talk to keep them gone? I’d say what I needed to. We all do things to keep the wolf away.

The rest of the day was mostly chopped up into the usual workaday carcass: lots of data to wing around, and lots of filing. I pounded away at my terminal and I filled the screen with meaning. Lunchtime came and when people asked if I was going to eat I dragged myself after them and sat through the awful, wet gnashing, holding my breath. Later we heard on the intercom that more snow was coming, and it seemed that a decision went around to let us all get the hell out of there early. People cheered, and afterward it was like they’d forgotten to close their mouths. They were showing teeth, walking around, getting their things, bundling up, all the while showing teeth as if they were about to tear something apart with their mouths, if only no one was watching. I kept my head down because after a little while you can’t look at people like that. It starts to unravel you. It starts to be too much.

It was early enough in the day that I thought I could catch the kids coming out of school. Surprise them maybe. I stood at the fence with the other parents, and it wasn’t clear who was in jail, us or them. We clung to the fence and we watched the door of the school. We looked at our phones. For a moment it seemed that anything could come out of that door: water, mud, animals.

When the bell rang and the children poured out, the parents pressed against the fence, hollering and waving. The children rippled into the playground, scanning the world for their makers. How did you know, looking at these children, some of them so truly lifelike, which ones were yours? The problem wasn’t that none of them were familiar, it was that they all were. I knew all of these kids. Their faces, the little way they ran. Some of them fell over and righted themselves and ran on and my heart ached. I stood there as they paired off and ran to hug their parents, and after the dust had cleared none of them had run to me. Not even one. They’d all been spoken for. I was standing here in plain sight and my own little ones were nowhere to be found. I watched the door and waited. The school had gone quiet. Everyone was shuffling away.

There was a man at the fence who widened his eyes at me, as if I was too big to see in one look, too complicated.

“Hey Terry, don’t see you here much anymore. How are the kids?”

What did you ever say when people asked you shit like that? You don’t say help me I’m dying. You don’t say hold me because I’m going to fall. You don’t say I cannot really speak to you right now, because if I do the blood will come out and I won’t be able to stop it and then we’ll all be in trouble. I guarantee it. You just don’t do that.

What I did say was that everyone was swell, in their way, and I rolled my eyes, and what a day and wasn’t it beautiful, the snow? The man looked around as I pointed, but you didn’t need to look around. It was on us, covering us up, and if we stood still any longer we’d be buried for good. I said, wasn’t it the most extraordinary thing he’d ever seen?

There were cops at my house when I got home. Outside of the old rotted house, looking in the windows. A couple of young men in uniform. What was my protocol here? Keep walking and circle back around? But didn’t that leave my house vulnerable and should I not be protecting the inner contents? Who else would guard the place if not me?

When I walked up, they took off their hats, called me ma’am.

Did I live here, they wanted to know, and what was my name and would I be so kind as to show them some identification?

They came in and we talked and it was not at all unpleasant. This was routine, they said, they were checking in. They were seeing that people were all right. Did I live alone? Was there anyone else in the house?

I offered them tea and apologized. There was just nothing to eat. Nothing nothing nothing, never, no matter how much I shopped. Trucks rolled up and offloaded food, I explained, and the little ones upstairs sucked it down, spitting out not even a bone. There was no way to keep up.

They were okay, they didn’t care, they weren’t hungry. They just had a question for me, if I didn’t mind. Just a question and then they’d be on their way. Was I okay? Did I feel okay? What did I feel?

What did I feel? What a funny thing for a police officer to ask. I half expected a question along the lines of, where were you when, and I was worried a little bit. I thought I might not know. I thought I might not remember. Who doesn’t feel that in some tiny, forgotten part of their day they might have done something truly horrible? And then the cops come, and then, well, you find yourself confessing.

But what did I feel? What I felt was old, and I shared this with the officers. I cried a little bit right in front of them, and I’m not really bragging. I felt dead. I felt tired. I felt unattractive. I felt no longer intelligent. I felt slightly horny, but in such a nonspecific way that it might just be an allergy, an illness, an excitation of the skin. But really, I asked them, why was anyone ever expected to report accurately on their own feelings? Could either of them do it? If I were to pin them down and ask them to report the truth of themselves? Would they be able to perform? They shouldn’t trust me, I said, finally. I was not a reliable source. If they really wanted an answer, they should ask my doctor.

The car that we rode in had a nice comfortable seat in the back. It was more like a bed. We drove through the sweeter part of town and it was almost like we skirted the perimeter of a plunging cliff. You know that feeling—that the car and the road beneath it are themselves just delicately suspended in space, poised to fall? It’s like you understand that the road is holding the car up, and the earth is holding the road up, but it’s not clear what’s holding up the earth itself, and if you pay attention, really really pay attention, you can feel it, the falling. Certain people are terribly attuned to it, and they can’t bear it. They try to escape the world as soon as they can. Scientists try to explain this, but you can see it on their faces, the doubt, the sadness. They are more afraid than we are. I looked out the window and only saw sky, the sort that bends into finer clarity where it meets the horizon. A sharpening of the lens, just where you most need it. Where, if you look carefully, and really study it, you might see something important in the distance, something that has been kept from you your entire life.

I knew where we were going. I’d driven this same route myself, many times. It was my favorite part of town and I’d never get tired of it. I got a little bit emotional, I must admit, when I looked at the long, thin trees in Sawtooth Park. I’d seen these things planted when I was a girl. There had been a fire. Nothing serious, but part of town was blackened. The parks were scorched. It wasn’t a big deal. Anyone with a computer could look up the details. From space, maybe, it looked like nothing. But for those of us down below it was not nothing. And then they chose a species of tree that was controversial, I guess. Because these trees grew taller without getting thicker, and after a little while they curled, maybe like hair would. And so from above this park was supposed to really look like something. People oohed and aahed over it. People said it was indescribable, amazing. But who got to look at the park, or really anything, from above? What population took to the air to see the world? A mistake had been made. Our world had been designed for birds, and the people had been forgotten. What about the people? I always wanted to ask. We will never know how beautiful our own world is if we’re stuck down here.

In the car, I asked if I could go ahead and lie down all the way. I wasn’t tired. It wasn’t that. It was mostly because I did not think I could keep looking out of the window, at the people on the streets, marching off the end of the planet. I couldn’t do that without really starting to have some feelings that I was fairly sure would not soon go away. Permanent feelings? Maybe not. I don’t think there are such a thing. I think that we die, and the feelings go on, they find a new person, and so on, moving from host to host, destroying bodies and soaring away to the next fellow. But probably not forever. That’s too big a claim. I’m not comfortable going out on that sort of limb. We just don’t know enough.

Dr. Nelson had another clinic, I guess. The secrets people kept! They had beds there. It was all super professional, a real building in a real place with people as real as can be scurrying around looking busy. Sometimes Nelson brought his subjects in, during a trial, for closer study. That is what I figured when I saw this place. The experiments needed to be controlled. You couldn’t blame him. You have a subject who’s out at large in the city, and how can you possibly begin to collect any reliable data? If you put them in a bed, in a room, with nurses and the whole shebang, your experiment gets tighter. You narrow down your variables. It’s just good doctoring, is what it is. Dr. Nelson knew how to swim in this world. He wasn’t going to go over the falls. He knew how to keep from disappearing.

They made me comfortable, which I appreciated. It was only late afternoon, but who doesn’t like slipping on some pajamas and getting into bed early now and then? Who would really complain about a luxury like that? Especially when it’s snowing. To get into bed and be cozy while the world is turning to powder outside. I was in good hands.

This was the part of the study where they sent in people who pretended to know me. I had to hold my ground. They found an older couple, gray-haired and shriveled up. They played a certain role. They showed off a certain kindness. You’ve seen it before. Compassion and concern, faces twisted into sympathy. Straight out of central casting. I always loved that expression: central casting. Didn’t that just mean the whole world, every fucking person? Anyway, here came the two, sweet-faced old-timers. The name “Terry” was on their lips. Of course it was. They’d obviously been briefed. I didn’t mind. They approached my bed, smiling, melting with concern, and took my hand. Even fake feelings can feel good when they come down on you—you know there’s very little difference. I’ll take a hug when it comes. I’ll hug right back. I’ll feel the warmth of a body, even the bodies of those two old-timers, who got pretty worked up. I’m really not picky. Does it matter if it’s a stranger? What I would like to know is who isn’t a stranger? Name one person.

The man they called Richard was the biggest stranger of all. My soon-to-be husband. They sent him in and he said his words. He wore a familiar body but it was big on him. It didn’t fit. You could see him squirming inside it, trying to get out. Unless you can rip apart someone’s body and finally know their secrets, then they are a stranger. It’s fine. It’s how things are. Stop crying about it, is what I think. You should, you know, hug them, too. Hug whoever you can. You should live with them. You should spend your whole life with them if you want to. Answer to whatever name they call you—does it finally matter? Put down roots and hand over your money and take off your clothes when they snap their fingers. Just don’t forget. Don’t take your eyes off them for even one second.

The next thing they did was pretty clever. They had two people come at me masked up perfectly. A young man and a young woman, as if someone had taken my kids and rubbed them in life, in time, in years and years. Maybe someone dragged these people from a truck, sprayed them with oldening, and just pulled on them longwise until they grew and were disfigured and were just some typical, sad-looking adults. But with the faces of my children. The unmistakable faces. And someone made those faces cry as they hugged me. I hugged them and they hugged me and I held my ground. It was easy. Someone peeled them away and they sobbed and said goodbye and I said goodbye, too. It was easy.

It got a little bit late, and it got a little bit dark. For a while when it was snowing it was like the snow was so white and so abundant that it would hold the light, well after sunset, and into evening, radiating it back, so the night never got dark. But that didn’t last. It couldn’t. That was just a fantasy, because the world doesn’t work that way. You have to be realistic.

Most of the people cleared out of my room, but the two old-timers stayed, sitting in chairs, keeping their distance. I didn’t want to admit it, I didn’t want to tell anyone this, but I was getting tired and I wasn’t sure how long I could hold on. Maybe if I wasn’t in bed, and maybe if that bed wasn’t so goddamned comfortable, and maybe if out my window I couldn’t see some lights—of the city, speckled and flowering outside—maybe then I wouldn’t feel so drowsy. But I was determined to stay vigilant. You have to stand guard. You have to hold your weapon high. I was thinking that even your enemy has to sleep. Your enemy gets tired, too. You can count on it.

They kept trying to offer me water, but what was I, a moron? Water. Did they know where I worked? Did they know what I did? Water. I remember when I drank water, just a little girl who didn’t know better, unlocking the gates myself, pouring it right in. Come and get me! Holy Christ. Here, have some, they kept saying, just a sip, you’re thirsty, you must be so thirsty, Terry, and I wanted to reply, Why not just cut me open. Let’s dispense with ceremony. I’d hand you the knife myself, if I had one. Just don’t treat me like a fool, please. Treat me with dignity. I’m a human being. Have you ever heard of that? Do you know what a human being is? Well, here’s a real one, right in front of your face. Stand back and bow down and show some fucking respect. If there’s something you want to know, get out your knives and come at me. I’m ready.

Notes from the Fog

My wife, Gin, once knocked gently on my head, as if it were a door. “Hello,” she kept saying. “Hello. Who’s in there?” She and our therapist, Dr. Sherby, laughed a little about this, so I did too. What fun. Keep knocking on my head like that, like it’s a door, or an egg. I wasn’t going to be the only one not laughing. That’s Human Survival 101. Not that survival is such a prize. But, still, you might as well control your exit. Put your own little spin on how you step away from the show once and for all. I laughed as Gin kept knocking on my head, and I said, as if I might really be answering the door, “Just a minute, I’m coming. Hold your horses. No need to break the house down.”

We all just looked at each other. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be in on the joke. Gin stopped knocking and tucked her hands in her lap.

“I’ll be right there,” I said, in the most distant voice I could manage, as if I were many rooms away—underwater, overseas—crawling toward them as best as I could.

There was nothing wrong with us. We were sweet. We were great. Friends, if that’s what you wanted to call them, said we were the perfect couple. To me that meant we were alive. We hadn’t died. We hadn’t bled out in the streets. We didn’t drag each other by the hair from room to room. We observed holidays and put food on the table and hadn’t been pushed from a cliff yet. We couldn’t fly, we couldn’t live forever, we couldn’t fight off disease when it came. But we lifted the kids into the air and let the wind shape them. Not really, not really, but it could feel that way, and who really knew how the kids had ended up so kind, so free of murder in their hearts? It wasn’t because of us. Certainly not me anyway.

Those friends, all of them, went the way of the drain. They floated out of their homes and turned to smoke. They rotted in place. None of them lived long, because nobody does. They wandered off into the sunless afterlife, sooner, later, eventually. You can look up their names and you won’t learn much. They packed no bags. Their stuff was probably just thrown away.

It was late April, the eleventh year of my marriage, when I was fired from my job as a teacher at Foley Parochial. Mr. Rubins, the chief anxiety machine at the school, called me into his office. Given the hour, lunch, and his initial silence when I walked in, I knew it could not be good. When is it ever good when someone says they need to talk to you? We should all know better. We should run for the woods when our name is called.

At Foley I was a floater. I roamed the lower grades, preaching the sort of science that doesn’t involve the human being. It’s a personal preference, a diversion from the official curriculum. The human being is a walk-on player in a spectacle that is none of its damned business. Even though we get our hands on everything. Crumple it up, try to mate with it or destroy it.

I taught chemistry, specializing in the wrong turns of science, the shit-crazed detours. You dive for knowledge, and the dive is long. It might take a lifetime. You come up empty at the end, but along the way you’ve shaped some brains, you’ve campaigned pretty hard to seat your error deep in the minds of others. It’s something I discussed with my students—the little, scrubbed, colorless beings who hated the planet, themselves, each other, and me especially. How every great insight is something to be embarrassed about later. The shelf life of truth, if it even gets on the shelf. What to do with all of our wrong ideas about the world and ourselves.

At Foley I never had my own homeroom group, thank god. A little fake family of sweating puppies who thought I could lick their wounds and vomit food into their mouths. Which is not to say that I do not care for some young people in this world. It is just a question of the role one plays. The costume worn. I had my own young people at home. I poured myself into them when I could.

At Foley I never struck a child, I hurt no one, I said nothing untoward or incorrect, so far as I know. It was my policy to do my job to the letter, then return home. At home I would rest up and restore myself to power, then rinse and repeat. Forever, if need be. Or that was the plan. I had it charted far into the abyss: how I’d survive my sweet term on the planet, gathering spoils and repelling misfortune, how I’d hit my marks and keep from breaching etiquette, hugging Gin close to me all the while. Because without a religion one must have a code. Without a code it’s like piloting a body with no bones through life, which some people do, god help them. Dragging a heap of skin from room to room, hoping people see you as a human being when you are only a spill. You’ve leaked from something larger that is gone now, not even a shadow, and you are all that remains. In the end it is too exhausting to approximate a real person. You deflate. Where your body was there is barely a face. Your skin gets kicked from room to room. Some child wears it, calls it his “shirt.”

Mr. Rubins sat me down, offered tea. He spoke of the world. He called it a place for feelings, for fun. He called it a room waiting to be filled by children. A system of linked rooms. Every so often these rooms empty out, and new children flood in, he explained. Some of us work to keep the rooms clean, well decorated, and ready for the next contenders.

The metaphor was problematic, of course. Worrisome. A poet I otherwise do not understand once said that we are disloyal to both things when we say that one is like the other. It is a kind of treason against difference. I hid my concern. It was fine for him to cushion the air with idiocies. I would grant him that favor, just as I might long for it now and then for myself. A time might come when it might be necessary for me to talk this way, too.

“We do our best, don’t we,” I said.

Mr. Rubins seemed pained. I must have as well. Who does not seem pained, finally, when you examine them closely enough? He looked at me as if I could help him with his task—to destroy me. Poor man. So out of his league. Death was coming soon, anyway, and then he’d rest in peace, or possibly squirm for all eternity in great agony. We don’t really know. Our vision of oblivion is clouded. It should concern us more than it does—how little we know, how little we are trying to find out.

Mr. Rubins spoke of people in general. What they need versus what they want. “Education, which is what we are selling here, finally,” he said, “makes a guess about this need every day.”

An educated guess? I wanted to ask.

“I wake up and I have to make the right choice,” he said.

Whereas I wake up and feel no pressure whatsoever, I didn’t say. I wake up and decide who among the earth’s gorgeous creatures I will make love to. That’s how easy I have it. A buffet of fuckery awaits.

It was wrong to feel anger toward him. Maybe it was wrong to feel anything at all. Mr. Rubins was being controlled by people in other rooms, I knew. Not in some alien way, but really, actually. These rooms were off-site, no doubt. Not at the school, maybe nowhere close. They had him on live feed, maybe. They had a mic in his ear, whispering formations, plays, strategies of attack. A wire pierced into the sweet core of his brain. Just so to speak, because I know that’s not how it really works. In all of the important ways he was not a real person, but simply a vessel for urges that originated elsewhere. A remote actor. In truth, the very same thing might have been said of me. A carrier pigeon for a set of feelings and ideas that were not mine. Tear away the body and what was left? I felt for a moment that I could stand up and prove what an apparition Mr. Rubins was, just move my hand through his body and wave it around. But perhaps he had the same thought of me, and it was a standoff. Two creatures equally ephemeral, looking to expose each other. A contest of ghosts, swishing through each other like so much wind.

I mumbled something to Rubins about the challenge of doing the right thing, the burden we all faced. And, above all, the responsibility we had to the children.

Mr. Rubins lit up. It was like I had touched him privately. “Exactly!” he shouted. “We have a responsibility to the children, and to their families.”

“And to the community,” I said firmly, waving my hand at the window. Because, of course, they were out there. They were wandering in the snow. They needed to be told what to do, what to think, what to feel.

I’m not stupid. I can read feelings. He was winding up to shitcan me and why not just get it over with? On his desk were papers he kept gathering to his body. He puzzled over what he saw on them, but we know what that means. I would use a similar tactic if I had an animal in my office who needed to be torn to pieces. I’d have a few of the same little tricks. The artificial face of confusion. The artificial face of concern. Postures of empathy and compassion.

“It comes down to atmosphere,” Mr. Rubins said. “The environment here and who is a good fit. It is tough for me to say this, but I also don’t think you will be surprised, Jay. I mean, it can’t surprise you to hear this.”

Oh, surprise. I looked into my past for the most recent example of real, genuine surprise. I used a fucking telescope and scanned that deep, black hole, back to my birth and maybe even before. Where was the surprise? I looked and looked but the field was bare.

“It’s a problem of fit, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.”

He blinked at me. I pictured us far above the earth, hanging from an aircraft, me holding on to his hand as he pulled his fingers away. He would let me go and I would fall and the feeling would not be unpleasant.

The central problem was this, he went on to say: the feelings I cause in others. What people feel when they see me and hear me. What they feel, even, when they think of me. It was a situation the school could no longer abide.

“You’ve gotten some results with these kids, there’s no denying that,” Mr. Rubins told me.

But I could deny it. I would. To the grave. I’d been part of a learning outcomes study. I’d seen brain scans of some kids, before and after their science exposure. All science learning did was take some gray away. Or maybe it added some. I can never remember. In any case there was a color valuation shift in the brains of my children. It’s what might have once been called making a difference. Certainly there would be a chemical shortcut for this kind of learning soon, if the learning was even a desired outcome. This premise, that we as a civilization would be better off if we knew more—the progress fetish, the growth fetish, the fetish for getting out of bed—might prove short-lived and decadent in the larger picture, the longer historical view. It will possibly be seen as a tenable mistake. Maybe we should all be hiding in our homes until the right technology comes along to absolve us from, well, from most things of this sort. It is awkward to live just before a significant invention comes about.

You have to wonder. When death is solved one day, all of us will be viewed as mules. Brutish, dumb, not really human. Because we let ourselves get old, grow infirm, die. Because we let ourselves feel pain. We experienced pain with a certain resignation and acceptance. Maybe we thought we deserved it. There was even a value system, a kind of morality, around who could hide their pain the best. You were a superior person if you hid it better. You were praised and celebrated when you pretended you were not in agony. Fucking mules.

Mr. Rubins shook my hand. Whatever he said about me was true, but any human being in the world could be reduced to nothing with a few sentences. That’s what sentences do. Turn a man or a woman to powder. It doesn’t mean that that powder wasn’t once packed together to form a beautiful shape.

My classes, as of now, were covered by others, Mr. Rubins told me. I deserved a break. I could go on home. But I should gather my things first, of course. Didn’t want to forget that. Remove every trace, Mr. Rubins requested. Which is, you know, what I tried to do. But later you discover that it’s not so easy. Traces remain. Not just one’s dumb things, but the people we have spoken to, who hold traces of us inside them. Do we remove them, too? Where does it stop?

Some cats were asleep in the road on my way home. Everyone seemed tired. People sat on the sidewalks as if they couldn’t wait to collapse in private. Not a lot of people. But here and there. Enough to notice. I steered the car carefully. I was not tired. Not even close. I sensed I would be awake for a long time.

At home I did some math regarding my finances. I’d have my salary for two more months. I had savings for another three. My pension, such as it was, would pay for a bag of apples every few months for one small child. How much longer would we all live, me and Gin and the kids? It was hard to say. A person had trouble coming up with an airtight plan, or even a deluded plan, when basic data of this sort was so hard to uncover. You could fuss with these little life-expectancy calculators on the Internet, but they didn’t always kick out real numbers when it came to kids. Little kids especially, cute or not, healthy or not, creeps or sweethearts. Sometimes the sites shut you out if you punched in, say, a very low number in the menu bar for age—as if you wanted to know something illicit. Life expectancy of a nine-year-old. I mean, why not just say? There’s math behind everything. It’s not a death threat to wonder how long a creature will live. Who has time for shyness?

The upshot was, of course, not enough money. Nowhere close. Maybe that was always the upshot. Maybe that’s the definition of upshot. I loaded up the job lists and clicked into the sweet heart of them. I needed to work alone, in a lonely place, where no one would walk or stand. I needed a job inside myself, a way to get paid for sitting in a dark room, money for steering clear of others. I could clean things and fix things, and I could talk to people who didn’t talk back. I had a made-up language, with words that mostly sounded like breath gone wrong, the last breaths of an old man, and I could recite that for someone if they paid me. I could use my body against the world, where things were wrong and needed to be changed. Digging and hauling and lifting and pushing. I could climb and I could descend and I could travel on the horizontal, unless someone was hunting me. I could make shapes where there were none and maybe they’d be called houses. I could speak to children, if anyone would allow it. I could not sing and I could not cook for a crowd and I could not laugh on command. I did not, so far as I knew, have a bad back. I knew something about the invisible world—the worms we call molecules—but all of that could change—facts could grow up—and then I’d just be a storyteller, lying about what goes on around us, hoping people believed that untruth reveals a kind of beauty, and not just because it’s a medicine against what is real. Maybe it was once true, and maybe it will be true again.

Gin came home and we drank a great deal, because that was the dance style in those days. That was how we fought the night. We roasted the shit out of a chicken and cracked into it like it was a great mythological beast. There was a wine and we put our faces in it, forgetting to breathe. Gin went to the icebox, where she found a frozen old log of something she’d made, bearded in freezer burn, and with my help we sawed into it, making thick yellow discs. Gin kept saying I should trust her, and when these toasted beauties came out of the oven, after ages and ages, they were soft and hot and sweet, and if they burned my mouth they also almost made me cry with pleasure. We attacked a platter of them and left none for the kids. Screw the kids, we were yelling, smashing our glasses against the wall.

The night wasn’t going to go on forever, because no one had figured that out yet. Everyone in the world wished for such a thing, begged for it all the time, but it was as if each of us thought that someone else would do the hard work to bring it about, an endless night now and then, an option, invoked even at extreme personal cost, for no morning. I wanted to sit with Gin forever and die in our chairs. Me dying before she did. But just by a second. Me and then her and then I would have to think a bit about the list from there, who would die and when. There was so much more involved.

“They took my kids away,” I told Gin. I hated to ruin her night, but she needed to know.

“What? What do you mean?”

“They took them from me. I’m fired.”

It probably wasn’t possible for Gin to get softer, but she did. You could have seen it on film, and maybe then you’d see proof that she wasn’t even really a person. What a small, dull word for what Gin was. How obscene. She softened and she almost transformed into a kind of medicine, not just a creature but a whole atmosphere, designed to soothe and neutralize this sad angry thing that had flown into its airspace. Gin had been tapped for a role and I could see her getting into character. Ms. Sympathy. She might have had the decency to leave the room during this transformation. Of course I might have had the decency not to exist in the first place. How rude to come on the scene like I did. How thoughtless.

“We knew this might happen, Jay,” Gin said. She held my hands.

“You did, maybe.”

“Oh sweetie.”

“I know.”

“Oh no. I’m sorry. I really am.”

“Oh it’s not your fault. I deserve it.”

“You don’t.”

“Well, you’re being nice. You’re being paid to say that.”

Gin got her wild and beautiful look. She grinned and I almost couldn’t bear to look at her.

“Ha!” she said. “Not enough. Where’s my money, if that’s so? Why aren’t I rich by now?”

What I did a few days later was to take a special twenty-dollar bill that I’d been given and that I’d saved forever, I don’t know why. A mother might have given it to me long ago, I can’t remember. I didn’t earn it, I know that. It was a gift. A person handed it to me and I had never at that point seen so much money in my life. I just always kept it in my shaving kit, and it had stayed crisp somehow. It was still new money and I probably thought that it had magic, which embarrasses me to admit because mostly I can’t stand that kind of talk. I put it in an envelope for Gin and left it on her dresser. Once I used to collect gin bottles, just for their labels, and I’d steam them off and then scissor out her name, Gin and Gin and Gin. I pasted one of these to the envelope so she’d know it was for her. I wanted to write a note and I thought a lot about what I might say. I wrote it all out in my mind. But there was no easy way to get it out of me. I didn’t know how to extract it. It was all in there, in me, but I couldn’t prove it.

“From me,” I wrote, “for you. Because you are very nice.”

After Gin died, the children went to live with their aunt in Maroyo County, north of here by not so long. This all sounds pretty vague, but trust me, it wasn’t. It really happened and it felt real and there was nothing remotely vague about any of it. Gin’s was the fast cancer, which, I hate to say it, is far cheaper, I mean dollar-wise, and possibly on the emotional side, though I am no expert in that sort of tabulation. How do we count the various ways and styles of nothing we feel?

We used our money for her last days. She begged me not to. Once she even said that I was supposed to drive her out into a field and leave her there. It was one of our favorite places, not that I rank things like that: nice places, fun places, places I like. We used to go there before the kids, and then with the kids, and then alone sometimes, when the kids had their own life. Maybe the kids will go there one day without me. Maybe there will be days when no one goes there, when no one is left. One day it won’t even be a field. Lava will flow slowly over it.

Gin wanted only a blanket and a thermos of soup and then I was to drive off. It was a favor she begged me to grant. A favor. It really didn’t sound like one. We were making pots and pots of healing soups in those days, with the sort of herbs and roots that cost much more, because we knew so little that we were willing to believe a leaf or a root or a seed would make this all go away.

We drove out to the field and I got her set up on the blanket and poured her out a bowl of soup. The day was fair and we didn’t think she’d be too cold. How many nights would she last? It was something we didn’t want to discuss. I asked her was there anything else and she just put her head on me. It was small and cold. When I held it I didn’t feel like I was holding her. That had happened—her body didn’t feel like it was hers. She was somewhere else. I held what she had, anyway. The old, finished body she still showed the world. I touched it and tried to keep it from spilling out onto the ground.

Gin said she didn’t want her pills or anything. One of the medicines was a cream for her head. She also had a tincture in a dropper bottle, which she needed to squeeze into her mouth in the mornings, that ate flesh—the kind that didn’t belong to her, that had invaded her body and grown in her but that was never hers. She was going to have a little bit of time without it all. It made her feel pretty crummy, she laughed, all of that healing. Something about being awake and alive again. Something about not going into a terrible fog. We talked a little of the kids. They knew she was sick but they didn’t know anything. Just like me. Gin asked for things and I agreed. She said things and I nodded. I made assurances I could not keep. She predicted that. She knew it. It was like she was talking to me from the future, telling it all to me. Except here I am in the future, and I don’t see her anywhere.

I stood up after a while to say goodbye. You have been a good wife, I told her. I am sure I did not deserve you, and I am sure you do not deserve this. We hugged without tears and I went back to the car, but on the way I ducked off the path and threw myself into the grass. It was there that I waited and watched her. She sipped her soup and stared off at the trees on the far side of the field. She had the blanket pulled over her, and she was so small beneath it it looked like no one was there. Like I had just left an empty campground. We both knew this wasn’t really happening. We must have. Some things, just a very few things, don’t have to be real if you don’t want them to. When she suddenly stirred and looked around—for me, I thought, I hoped—when she struggled to try to stand, I ran to her and picked her up and took her home. And that was the end of that kind of talk.

The last of our money was spent on the hole we put her in. A coffin and some flowers and some food for the few people who came by. The children went up north, and I was told to come see them, and I was told to hug them, and I was told to talk to them. I did those things and did those things and did those things. They had a good aunt, a fair aunt, and if the uncle was neither he was so far away that it might not matter. The idea was, I needed to find work, and get us some money, or nothing, and nothing, and nothing. Would someone explain that to them, I wondered. When I saw them they crowded into me—warm and wet and weepy—and we walked around as one body. We tilted and we swayed, we lurched from room to room, and sometimes we fell. We’d need to figure out how to go faster, I told them, with them hanging on to my neck. We had to be smooth and quick, in case something happened and we had to run. That was what a family was now, just this one body that had a lot of parts, and several heads, and it had children’s voices and a man’s voice, and it was a force to be reckoned with. So until we learned how to do that, until we could glide through the world as fast as a cat, them hanging from me and me carrying them along, we’d have to be apart. Just for a little while.

You can’t give up what you never started, said someone from my past. A mother, a father, a friend. Such a long time ago. I remember only the vague outline of their body, and the horrible glow from their mouth when they spoke.

I did little jobs, big jobs, no jobs. Coins came in and I smashed them into bread, into meat. I made a deal with County Electric, and they put me on a schedule of darkness, which killed the lights for days, in exchange for no charges, and they leaked me power when they could spare it. A trickle on a Saturday, that sort of thing. The house would suddenly hum, shuddering back on, and I’d see something wild and terrible in the mirror. Enough light to blind a small animal, I’d think. I’m sure I wasn’t the first person to think about bottling it. But what I had was more than enough. I would have been fine with less.

I called the children when I could, and I told them, “Soon.” Sometimes, when they couldn’t come to the phone, their aunt held the receiver into whatever space they were in, or so I pictured, and I shouted it, hoping they could hear me. Soon! Despite how it sounded, it wasn’t a birdcall. It was the call of a man, their father. It was just how he sounded when he needed to reach them. Whenever their aunt said they couldn’t come to the phone, which was more and more, I pictured them trapped on the floor, someone sitting on them. Or blanket after blanket after blanket, covering and smothering them. Or they were in a hole and there was no ladder. Or they were in the water, the wrong kind of water—the black and thick kind, where if you try to swim you slip down lower, you sink, and the more you try to swim, which is what I taught them always to do, no matter the kind of water, the lower you got, until you were standing on the dark sand floor of the darkest, blackest ocean. Of course they could not come to the phone. Of course. They needed to hold hands and push off the ocean floor, first. They needed to swim to the surface, like I taught them.

That year the summer had a glitch. A flaw in the calendar, we were told. Like a leap year, but worse. The days would flicker out early, and sometimes, after sunset, would strobe back on, due to some sort of unspent sunlight that was trapped in the higher atmosphere. People thought it meant something but it most certainly did not.

A star came out in late August, and it took a low position in the night sky, and then it started to make a soft, terrible noise. It had some people concerned. Not just in my neighborhood, my town, where concern runs high, where people polish their worry like a stone. This came from people who know what to watch out for, what to worry about—they said it wasn’t good. In daylight, in sunshine, a planet should respect our border, I believe. It looked dirty from here. I daresay it had a shit stain across it. Of course this was only a local weather system discoloring the planet. I knew that. Weather, in the end, simply adds a shit stain to a place. Gray sometimes. Sometimes yellow. But still, just a stripe of shit over the people and place. Sometimes the shit is clear and wet. It comes in pellets. I do not know why we call it rain.

The next day the star was gone. We know enough about stars to say that this one was never there in the first place, so it could never leave, and it may be that it’s wrong to even call them stars. Whatever one says, or thinks, about stars is no doubt incorrect, and once you follow this line of reasoning, I mean really follow it as if you’re stalking it home for the kill, well, reality pulls away a little bit. Like a skin, it just comes off.

Soon after that I went looking for work and I fucking found it. An unbearable amount of work, everywhere I searched. Because everything was broken, torn, crushed. There were faults in the soil, the buildings, the air. The people, especially, needed work—their moods, their appearances, the way they walked. But of course so did the streets and roads. So did the trees. Disarray everywhere, flaws of design. Error, human and otherwise. A shattered state of things. Would I be paid if I fixed some of these things? Made them right? Not for me to say, I knew. Nothing really was for me to say.

I would have to learn to ignore all of this unfinished work, or it would disturb me—so much wrong, so much left undone. We shirk our duties when we open our doors, when we leave our homes. We shirk and shirk. We walk down the street and we ignore jobs, swirling around us, needing to be completed. We pretend we don’t see.

The job I finally took required so little of me that I wasn’t sure if I was even doing it. It was like getting paid for not dying. I stood and I sat and I walked. I had memories and I had the opposite, when nothing came to me and I listened to music come from the wall—just a piano that sounded like it had been tipped over and kicked to pieces, but was somehow still in tune. The days were driven fast by an engine I could not see. When cars approached, I pressed a button for the bridge, and when they were long gone I pressed that button again. My money began to form a pile and the pile began to glow.

It was October and the roads were already snowy when I finally went to get the kids. The aunt wasn’t even there. The kids were packed and clean and all dressed up and they stood apart from me, because we hadn’t been practicing our single-body power walk through the terrible terrible world. The team had been on hiatus and now we were back together, I told them. I knew that I looked strange and scary, and smelled like someone from the past. I hugged them anyway and whispered a few of the things I’d been saving up to say. In my pocket was the envelope I’d given Gin. We took that twenty dollars and we went out to breakfast. We got eggs and cakes and there was a sweet pudding served in a long bowl that the three of us shared, as if we were the fanciest horses at the most golden of troughs. We dove our spoons into it and we laughed at how good it was. I had a real coffee and I accidentally cried, which no one saw. That was her money I was spending. It would be gone after today. Would she have wanted us to, as I kept trying to tell myself? I am afraid the answer was no, and no, and no, because she didn’t want anything, she wasn’t anything, she had no name and no body and her heart did not beat, and I didn’t even know how to remember her right.

I took a sort of girlfriend before too long, and I don’t use that expression lightly. I actually took her from another man who was asleep at the wheel, just so out of it—as if he were operating his own body with a broken remote control. You could peel off his face and throw it into the woods. I was forty-eight years old. For some reason I was not dead, even though the late autumn season had that smell. Of failure, of the afterlife.

She had a name, and out of respect for Gin I won’t mention it here. The children met her and called her “sister,” and she never got too close or too far. When it came time to test our parts, I found she fit on me, but we all knew where that could go. She hollered at night, out of nowhere, and sometimes it put me in a terrible crouch. She had her own job, her own life, her own children, and even, somewhere else—a city, a town, a cave, I didn’t know—an old, abandoned husband, who didn’t know where she was. I thought of him sometimes.

The deal was that she would always call ahead, and what that sometimes meant was that I’d hear my name, and not just my name but the names of the kids, sounding loud and pretty and strong way down the street. You may not know what it’s like to hear your name sung out loud, from far away, by someone who has beauty in her throat. Bow your head and imagine it. Sometimes in the morning we’d hear it and we’d go outside and wait in the yard. When she got up to us, out of breath and laughing, she’d always say: I called ahead, did you hear me?

I still go down to Foley, the school where I worked. I watch the kids flow in and out. The ones I taught are long gone, now. They are grown, I imagine. Some of them have died, no doubt. Maybe they are buried near Gin. When you’re underground, buried dead like that, distances are different. You are close by to the others. This is understood. You can get to them, and they to you. It’s not like up here, in the holding room called the world, where you have to walk or drive or fly. Where you might have to swim. Where, maybe, you can’t get somewhere else at all, because of mountains, or wars.

At Foley once, I saw Mr. Rubins, walking from his car over to the school. He had his bag and his hat, a newspaper tucked under his arm. He looked the same, not that I had ever really studied him. What impressed me the most was how he walked and waved and smiled, using all the tricks of a real human person. How he clung to the ground and used his body in relation to gravity, as if he weren’t a ghost. He could have floated off, he could have melted down, he could have simply collapsed into a heap of clothing, vacating this world forever, but he held it together, even if it was taking all of his loving energy and soon his chest would explode with the effort. I watched him until he disappeared into the school and the bell rang and everything suddenly went incredibly quiet. I admired his technique. He was a spirit to watch.

The children are home. They keep their own secrets. I no longer curate their minds. No one has time. No one has the energy. Isn’t that the world now? Listless, cowering in our homes. Beset by paralyzing indifference. Too tired to eat, and waiting for a hammer to the head? Witness the birds. Their exhaustion. Please. Look at them closely for a change and ignore the ruse of beauty. Who can finally be bothered to still pretend we’re not moments away from some blistering cremation?

Not that I have specific information. I don’t. I have no gift for the future.

You’ve driven by houses like ours, and maybe you’ve wondered just how the surrender happened inside. Did the body rot from the head down, as legend would have it? Who gave up, and how? A question that is always relevant. Take a picture of a family, of any family, and that is always the caption.

Before her diagnosis, possibly even the very morning we learned of her cancer, Gin was outside doing something to the old tree. She loved the tree, felt it needed to know that. Loved it but feared it. Fretted forever that it would topple over and crush us. Now the kids and I will sit under it. It leans and sways and it makes a tremendous sound sometimes. The sound of a house getting crushed, the sound of a train slowing down, the sound of the world hurtling through space—all of this noise booming inside this monstrous tree. We will look around, at the other, smaller trees, at the leafy bushes, at anything that might move in the wind, and all of it is just so still, as if someone is suffocating the world with a bag and not even a breath can escape. And yet the tree above us sways and sways, observing its own private wind, moving according to a logic we’ll never understand. Sometimes I hope that Gin was right, that this tree is coming for us. Sometimes when the kids get antsy and want to go inside, I hold them close and ask them to wait. Just a little longer, I say, outside in the shade. Just wait with me under the tree here a little bit longer. Something amazing is coming.