Arcadia

by Lauren Groff

  At the end of the song, Bit turns off the radio to savor the pleasure of Cole’s young voice. The lights of the city rise in the windshield. He pushes through the flashing streets. There are fewer pedestrians out now that the disease is rushing toward them, and on most faces there are masks like glowing muzzles. He drives into his poorly lit neighborhood. When he steps from the car, he hears the deep, low hum of the city, both growl and digestion. He only ever notices this sound after returning from the quiet of the country.

  Inside, the house is cool and there is the sweet rot of garbage he’d forgotten to take out when they left. He does the dishes, pays the bills, redirects mail, turns off the water, sets the lights to turn on randomly at night, makes sure everything is secure.

  He takes a cooler of food outside for the family beside the steps. They are under a tarp, in two connected sleeping bags. The heads of the parents curl over the children, two small lumps close together. He watches them for some time and wishes he had the courage to rouse the father, tell him quietly that Grete and he will be gone for some time, to apologize for not leaving food every day now. But he can’t take the risk they’d try to break into the house, to squat there: squatting laws being what they are, it’d take months to get them out. He creeps away, unsettled.

  He spends only a few minutes packing for himself. In Grete’s room he gathers everything he thinks she’ll need: the clothes he remembers her wearing recently, the shoes, the photograph he’d taken of her and her mother when Grete was a toddler, forehead to forehead like conspirators. How alike they’d been, two sections of one soul. He takes the stuffed frog from when she was little, knowing she’ll need it. She looks like an adult now, but there is still a sliver of girl in her that Bit would fight to protect: the uncertainty that steals over her when she’s talking about boys, the delight on her face when he buys her anything pink. The moments when the e-reader has fallen from her hands and she gazes out the window, biting the corners of her long pale mouth, dreamy as her mother.

  He has been staring for a while at a yellow raincoat when he sees that its big pocket is bulging. He reaches in. When he opens his hand, he finds his own Zippo lighter from so long ago, rolling papers, a huge bag of weed. Something catches like a fish bone in Bit’s throat. It doesn’t dislodge again until he’s a half hour away from Arcadia, the sunrise burning in the rearview mirror. He steers down a long straight road with his knees and rolls a hasty joint and smokes it. When his head swims, he tosses the inch-long roach and the rest of the weed out the window in the direction of a maple thick with crows. A mile later, he goes hysterical at the thought of stoned birds, their wings failing them as they drop lazily from the sky.

  The dawn echoes its quiet in Bit’s city-dinned ears. He is making pancakes to wake up Grete and can’t resist gobbling the first four down. Astrid marks Hannah’s medication bottles, and they’re drinking orange juice from powder. It is all they can get anymore, after the citrus blight. He misses pulp and the acid burn of real juice in the throat.

  Honeybees, Astrid says out of nowhere.

  Honeybees? Bit says. He wonders if this is a rational thought that his pot-slowed brain just can’t digest.

  Passenger pigeon, she says. American bullfrog. I am trying to discover what we are, Arcadians. Going extinct. So many of us dead, dying, gone.

  We are the dodo, Bit says and laughs. Abe’s shadow moves, brief and cold, over the room.

  I’ll say honeybees, says Astrid. You remember before the die-off? Their funny fuzzy bodies. Always, they seemed to me, the symbol of happiness.

  I remember, says Bit. But it’s not just Arcadians dying off. It’ll be all of us soon enough.

  Astrid frowns at the bottle in her hand. That sickness hasn’t reached us yet, she says. It will be contained. It always is.

  I don’t mean the sickness, he says. That’s just a symptom. Too many people, too little land, the oceans polluted, animals dying. It makes me think we don’t deserve to be saved.

  She puts down the medicine and spears him with her icy blue stare. If this is what you think, she says, I don’t know who you are anymore, Ridley Stone.

  He opens his mouth, but finds no words there. In any case, he can say nothing for the bald eagles, the bullfrogs, the honeybees, just now filling up his throat.

  The house is quiet, save for the gentle ticking of solar panels on the roof. Hannah has disappeared into her room; Astrid has driven her rented car to the airport, promising to return when she’s needed, damn the fortune it takes to fly these days; Grete has gone for a furious run.

  After so many days full of people, it feels good to Bit to have this solitude. He wanders into Hannah and Abe’s little office. It is shining, even the drafting table Abe had used as a desk. Abe kept some of Bit’s earliest photos on a shelf: Verda’s face, reflected again and again in a heap of tarnished silver; Helle standing on the boulder by the Pond, reflecting into two long girls joined at the ankle; Hannah, gorgeous and young and slender on Abe’s lap, both beaming as they hurtle down Arcadia House hill as fast as Abe’s wheelchair could take them.

  He reaches out with his finger and brushes Hannah’s cheek. He can’t believe what babies they were. The reaction seems to well up all the time now. A few months ago, walking through the city, in the window of an old record store he looked up to see a huge poster of Janis Joplin with round glasses and feathers in her hair, and almost wept at how just-hatched she’d looked. Now, nestled behind his photos, he finds his first Leica, the one his Kentucky grandmother had sent him. He picks it up, marveling at its lightness. Since he begrudgingly began to use digital cameras, a few years back, began doing more commercial work and less of his own art, his own analog gear has sat neglected on its shelf. He has grown accustomed to the ease of digital life.

  He rummages in Abe’s drawers and finds a shoebox of color film. He feels a dizzying upsweep of possibility: the rolls could be thirty years old and useless, true, but the distortion of age could make for the unexpected, the sublime: the emulsion cracked or melted, the plastic fragile and easily rent, the effects unreplicable. In his mind, the images unfold atop one another like layers of translucent tissue: ripples of off-white and red, a watercolor cloud composed from the silhouette of a tree, a bubbled landscape of grasses.

  He wants to sing. How perverse, the possibility of beauty, unearthed when he least expected it. That there could be such surprises left in the world. He goes out into the sunlight, something softening and settling within him.

  The winter before Leif disappeared was the last time Bit had walked out into the forest. He was usually in Arcadia briefly, to drop Grete off for a month in the summer or to spend a night during a holiday. That time, they had all taken a walk together on the twenty miles of trails that Erewhon kept up. His parents were hale, Astrid and Handy were there, Leif even let them see him smile. Bit pushed Abe easily over the frozen ground, his father turning around once in a while to beam at him, his grizzled beard full of ice. Every so often, employees would whip by, snowshoeing or running or in the sleek black uniforms of cross-country skiers, gliding over the hills like tall skinny birds. Grete was a little girl still, her long legs gawky as a fawn’s. She tried to pack the powder into snowballs and heave them into their faces. Their breath wreathed their heads, the crows shimmered so black they were green. It was just an average afternoon in the winter’s dim at the end of a forgotten year, but that day, everyone was happy.

  Now the Pond is forlorn, with its lifeguard chair overturned on imported sand. A kickbuoy between two rocks makes a sad thumping sound in the wind-driven waves. Bit thinks of another man at another pond, long ago; the way Thoreau saw the moon looming over fresh-plowed fields and knew the earth was worthy to inhabit.

  Bit is not so sure. Besides, there are no fields here. In what he remembers as the sunflower patch, he finds thirty-year-old trees, more enormous than the trees of his youth, greener, casting deeper shadows: all the extra carbon in the air. He follows a strange metallic scrape off into the brambl
es and, after some effort, locates Simon’s sculpture for Hannah in a wild raspberry bush. Swords into plowshares, the painful earnestness of the thing. Oh, he thinks, helpless before the squat sculpture. This could be a poster illustrating the early eighties. It is iconic, almost already in silkscreen.

  He laughs, and the forest, which he has missed to his marrow, laughs back at him. He feels everything, the birds swinging on the currents of air, the early ferns uncurling, the creatures hunched somewhere, watching him. Faster, almost running, he goes through the woods that were once cornfields. These he remembers as sorghum, the Naturists bending in their sun-bronzed flesh to weed. He emerges onto the edge of the tennis court Leif put in, plunked in the middle of what had been the soy patch. Already, tiny trees have sunk roots into the clay. They stand, brave and budding on the fault line, like a small child’s prank.

  Back into the woods, toward what he vaguely remembers to be the waterfall, the trail grows narrower, more overgrown. Hannah, when she could still walk, probably didn’t make it this far to trample down the weeds. Two years of growth have almost swallowed the path. The day dims into twilight. He catches spiderwebs with his cheeks.

  He comes into a natural clearing, and a shriek startles his heart to flapping.

  Grete stands at the far side, clutching a stick like a baseball bat, her face paper white.

  Dad, she says in a wobbly voice. Oh, I’m so glad it’s you.

  Lost? he says. He tries not to smile. What luck to find his daughter the one time he wasn’t looking for her.

  She shrugs. Kind of, she says. But mostly I thought you were a bear.

  He takes a photo of her as she picks toward him over the grasses in the last slant of sun. She stops when she is near. She stinks of sweat, has scratches on her face and brambles in her many pink braids, and her face is raw as if she’s been crying. She must have been out here for hours. They are miles from the Sugarbush. On her own, she wouldn’t have been back until deep in the night, if not the morning.

  It’s this way, he says, gesturing into the throat of the woods.

  Okay, she says. She starts, but stops and turns to him. I just. I’m sorry.

  I know, he says.

  I’m scared, she says. I don’t want to watch Grannah die.

  Me neither, he says, pulling her toward him.

  Grete’s teeth clatter. It is colder up here, away from the city; although it’s still late winter, he remembers summer nights so long ago, filled with exactly this fresh dampness, as if exhaled from underground. They come out into the Sugarbush when it’s dark, and the moon fills the tree limbs with a shifting, breathing light. The other houses sit in darkness, ownerless: Midge in Boca Raton for the rest of her days, Titus and Sally having died in a terrible car accident years ago, Scott and Lisa with too many houses to care much about the cottage they’d built in protest of Erewhon twelve years ago.

  Bit and his daughter stand out on the porch of the Green house, unwilling to breathe the bad spores of Hannah’s sadness into their lungs.

  Up the drive, however, come headlights. The car stops and the engine shuts off. A woman emerges, saying, Stone? This is Stone house?

  Nurse Luisa? Bit says, remembering the name Astrid had mentioned yesterday. He flicks on the porch light and sees a very small woman shuffling up the steps. Her face is cracked with a broad grin; she wears a child’s pink backpack high like an extra hump on her shoulders. I lost for half hour! she says. So glad I find you!

  The nurse surprises Grete with a hug. When she turns to Bit, she squeezes him fiercely around the middle and says, I come to make things easier. Now. Have anyone eaten dinner?

  No, Bit says, and Luisa clucks. In you go, she says. Make the dinner.

  Oh, he says. It’s been a long day. Nobody’s very hungry, I think, Luisa.

  She beams up into Bit’s face and says, Times like this? Schedules are lifeboat. Make the dinner, make the breakfast, make the bed. It will help to be strict with yourself.

  He likes this bossy Luisa, this plain brown woman, a stranger but familiar as an aunt. She pats his arm and gives him a little push inside.

  He brings his mother a bowl of soup. She doesn’t open her eyes but accepts half the bowl in spoonfuls. How like a baby bird, he thinks, seeing her open her mouth, her eyes swollen shut, the skin so thin against the bones of her skull. Or, simply, a baby: tiny Grete gazing at him solemnly over a spoon full of pureed peas.

  He goes to the closet to find Hannah another blanket. The night is cold, and the window was left open too long for the house to have retained its warmth. When he opens the door, Abe’s smell rises to Bit from the clothes: that clean sweat of him, the metal of him. The lingering last ghost of his father sideswipes him. He knows it’s absurd, but he closes the door to save a little of his father for later.

  All weekend, Hannah won’t get out of bed save to drag herself to the bathroom. She sips at the soup Bit makes and only nibbles at the toast. Luisa comes at nine every night and leaves at five, and though it isn’t her job to clean, the house is scoured when he wakes in the morning.

  Hannah still won’t talk to him, not a word.

  On Monday morning, Grete is eating the last of the granola in the jar. Her face is so carefully made up that Bit stares at her. She touches her cheek and frowns. War paint, she says.

  You’re going to blow these country kids’ minds, Bit says.

  What if I don’t? she says.

  Then they’re brain-dead, he says. Then they don’t have minds to blow.

  She sighs and washes out the bowl. What are we going to do about Hannah? she says. She needs to get up. There’s no point in us being here if she doesn’t make any effort to be human.

  If she hasn’t gotten out of bed by tonight, we’ll get her up ourselves, he says.

  Okay, Grete says. She shoulders her backpack and says, with Hannah’s old wryness, Goody. That’ll give me something to look forward to while I’m getting wedgied.

  They drive in silence to the school, and he gently takes her hand when she begins to chew her nails to the quick. In the drop-off area of the squat brick high school, Bit sits with Grete, gazing at the flickering clumps of students.

  Boys, Grete says, frowning. They watch the boys buffooning around, and Grete says, I think I’m already starting to miss the all-girls’ pedagogical model.

  Bit laughs. I’m having bad flashbacks of my first day in real school, he confesses. If I can give you any advice, it’s to smile and be cool.

  Smile and be cool, she mocks him. She squeezes his hand. Then she squares her shoulders like a diver at the end of the board and steps gracefully out. A sudden magnet, his tall, bony daughter with her pink hair in this sea of sweatpants and hunting camouflage. Even in his car, Bit can feel the weight of the attention upon her. He has to pull away to stop himself from leaping out after Grete and dragging her safely home.

  He sits in the dark room with Hannah. All day, he tries to feed her soft fresh bread he’s baked and reads her Tristram Shandy to make her laugh; she refuses both. Her breathing is labored. Radio, she commands, and he listens with her to a radical homemaking show (how to make dandelion wine; how to set your own broken bones) and, for as long as he can stay in his seat, to the news. They’re now calling the pandemic SARI, for severe acute respiratory infection. Oops, says Bit. Sorry! But Hannah doesn’t laugh.

  Over seven thousand people are dead; the disease has spread to Hong Kong, Singapore, mainland China, San Francisco, Adelaide in Australia. The Centers for Disease Control, gutted by low federal taxes, have sent out a strongly worded warning for people to avoid hospitals and flights, and nobody is doing much more. Bit stands, agitated. Although it’s early to pick up Grete, he lets himself be chased from the house by the news. First, he’ll stop in town to pick up vegetables and coffee and tofu and rice milk. Muffin’s mothers still run the natural-foods store in town, and they fall upon Bit when he comes in. He finds himself squashed in a middle-aged lesbian sandwich smelling of herbal cough drops and celery.
Cheryl and Diana cry, now, as they hadn’t cried at Abe’s memorial service.

  Abe was the most practical man, says Cheryl. Infuriating as hell, but always got his way.

  He was the last person in the world I thought would do what he did, Diana says. We always thought Hannah . . . And she trails off, stricken, bulging her eyes at her wife.

  That’s why Abe succeeded and Hannah didn’t, Bit says when the surge of pain has faded.

  They show him pictures of Muffin’s children, all eight owlish in glasses, shirts buttoned up to their throats. Missionaries, Cheryl says with a snort. With two old heathens like us, it makes you wonder where all that religion came from.

  Before Bit leaves, Diana hugs him and whispers in his ear, You’ll get your mother out of it. You always do.

  Then she holds up a carrot from their garden. It is an odd, mutant thing that looks like two human bodies twined in coitus. Show Hannah this, she says. Our Kama Sutra carrot. We’ve been saving it for a special occasion. Alone in the car again, holding the lewd thing in his hand, Bit hears the ladies’ jollity ring in his ears and it makes him glad.

  When Grete comes out of the school, he is so flushed with relief his hands tremble. She walks slowly, but her chin is dangerously high. She gets in the car and won’t speak.

  Halfway home, desperate, he says, At least you have all your limbs, and she says a brief Ha! Then she says, Let’s just call it an interesting sociological experiment; and she won’t say any more.

  Bit can barely park before Grete leaps from the car. She marches into Hannah’s room and throws open the curtains. That’s it, she says. That’s enough. She disappears into the bathroom and begins running the water in the tub.