Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  “You change the subject,” she answers at last. “You confuse me. You talk about whether the problem is actually some sort of ethical rot, the death of basic sociability, whether it all stems from that. You tell me to turn on the radio so I don’t get so sad. You tell me to shape up for Nora, so I don’t give her a complex. You do everything you can to tell me my feelings don’t matter, short of telling me my feelings don’t matter. You say everything right up to that line. We don’t live in the same world.” Patrick listens to the static coming over the connection, throbbing in and out like cicada song. It’s a very loud silence, over the phone, when nobody speaks.

  The blond figure in the parking lot stops under a streetlight, leans a bony shoulder against the lamppost, stares down at her feet for several long seconds. It’s Cassidy, Patrick realizes, but with a murky look on her face and a blackish scrape across her knee. She cuts through the empty parking lot, drawing a long, scrawling arc across the painted lines and concrete medians until she seems to see the van. She approaches haltingly, her steps so slow at times that it looks as though she’s drifting off to sleep. As she gets closer, Patrick sees an expression on her face that reminds him of stiff-dressed, long-braided sister wives being marched out of their compounds on the TV news, trading in a comprehensible life for one whose parameters are entirely unknown. It’s an expression crafted for another world, an unimaginable place populated by peaceful and blurry things.

  A latch releases, and the back doors of the van swing open, noisy and metallic.

  “Now you’re driving,” Cassidy mutters vaguely, as she climbs into the cargo area. Peering back at her as she scales the horizontal flooring on hands and knees, he feels as though he’s at the top of a steep cliff, looking down. She curls her body against the boxes of bottled water, lies down on the rough carpet, her face submerged in darkness. He realizes that he no longer exists for her, her mind is somewhere else. Uncovered limbs extend slender and pale from the openings of her jean shorts, as smooth as plastic, luminous, like they’re gathering up all of the stray light in the parking lot for some hidden purpose.

  On the other end of the line, Alison hangs the phone back on its hook. The night air on the mountain is clear and chilly, and she wraps her arms around her torso under a pooling of artificial light, feeling pulses of anger move through her body. Every time her mind comes to rest, some remembered remark from Patrick starts it back up, and suddenly she’s ready to call him back, yell or cry, some unknown behavior that she knows wouldn’t move him one inch. She wishes he would stop bringing up the fucking lawn. Though she accepted that it had been a mistake, a bad mistake, revisiting it made her question why she had agreed so early on to see it his way. When she thought about her period of disturbance, she heard a strong, clear voice inside telling her that she had come out of the quagmire with the help of her family’s love and support—but below that dwelt a deep, wordless certainty that she had been wronged.

  The crickets call from the trees in a single, dispersed voice. In the dining hall, the crafting house, the gymnasium, the windows are all dark, the other dwellers back in their assigned bunkhouse reading or telling stories, strumming loosely remembered songs on the porch. She can’t go back like this, angry and unresolved. There’s no real privacy here, not privacy as she knew it in their midsized suburb, where at least you could shut yourself in the bathroom and weep with the fan on to mask the noise. At Earthbridge, despite the official emphasis on mourning as the healthiest way of processing the inevitable decline of the planet, crying for your own problems is seen as indulgent, even a bit embarrassing.

  Patrick was always asking her when it had started: he imagined that if he could discover the point of origin he’d know how to undo it. She found something to say each time, but it felt dishonest. As with most catastrophes, she knew it hadn’t happened all at once. She remembered the day the man-made pond behind her grandparents’ house ruptured during a record thunderstorm, spilling out its contents down the manicured hill and into the woodland below, the trout thrashing on the mown grass, their mouths opening and closing as they drowned in air. So much had prepared the way for the moment when the overfull reservoir inundated the weakest part of the bank: days of rain and drizzle softening the ground, seasons of silt gathering on the lacustrine bottom and reducing its holding capacity, the unchecked bloom of water weeds and lilies in the fervid humidity of that year’s early summer. You couldn’t say when it began, only that at one point it was certain to unfold. By the same token, even before the days when she had wept every morning while making her coffee, wept in the shower, wept when seeing Nora go off to school, wept in the parking lot of the elementary school with conditioner still in her hair, wept in her office with the door tightly shut, wept while reading the news on her computer or phone, wept for lack of sleep and lack of consolation, she had experienced other strange moments and impulses that Patrick would never have known to include in the narrative of her breakdown.

  All the things he hadn’t seen, things he wouldn’t even have known how to look for. She grew teary-eyed in the grocery store, looking at a can of peaches in syrup. She spent three hours trying to free a white moth that had gotten trapped inside the screened-in porch. She crawled across the lawn after he had mown it, looking for survivors, afraid that she would find the bodies of insects crushed and chopped, traces of burrows destroyed and mangled rodents. And all the while, he kept buying paper towels in family packs, great pillowy bundles that he would carry into the house on his shoulder as if he were some sort of hearty, strapping lumberjack—even though they had agreed to use the reusable bamboo versions she bought online, which he threw away one afternoon by accident. She cringed when she started the car and the gasoline smell began seeping into the air. She put all the produce into a single tote bag and unloaded the pieces in random order, one by one, onto the checkout belt. They fought over the cost of solar panels. They fought over whether Nora should be raised vegetarian or whether, on the other hand, she should eat her daily fill from the limbs and torsos of big, sloe-eyed animals that had never lived a day without being destined for the slaughterhouse. Why couldn’t you live life the way you wanted to? Why were you always strapped to the sinking people around you, why were you held to their standard of living, why was the only choice paper or plastic, rather than being able to choose to buy nothing at all?

  Gradually, Alison realized that the lawn was a perfect illustration of her unfreedom. It had never been very nice turf, covered with fine-bladed yellowish grass that grew thin for no apparent reason in the sun-soaked front yard. It needed fertilizer made from synthesized nitrogen every couple of months, toxic herbicide to keep off the weeds, sprinklers all through the late spring and summer, and it had to be mown twice a month, severing the beginnings of the small, tidy seed pods that were, in her opinion, the only thing that made them look like real plants instead of some gaudy outdoor carpet. In February, she came up with a plan to replace their dwarfish lawn with hardier perennial grasses and a small vegetable garden that would thrive under the heavy sunlight. There would be tomatoes, cucumbers, and zucchini for dinner that summer, and they would be able to retire the weed killer for good, using the hand-weeder and trowel instead. Patrick informed her that the HOA bylaws allowed only traditional grass lawns, ornamented by tasteful flowers, bushes, and trees. They didn’t allow lateral-growth ground covers that might spread and infect neighboring properties or overly large stretches of gravel or stone. They didn’t allow fountains, fake foliage, non-American flags, or effigies of animals and people. Alison and Patrick owned the house and the land, but all they could do with it was what everyone else around them did.

  It was easy, then, to fixate upon the lawn: a grotesque, unwanted presence visible from every window of the house. She thought it was symbolic, the vulgar dominance of one thing when there should be many, a fruitless, joyless labor performed for the eyes of others. She thought possibly that it was poisoning her, making her thou
ghts foggy and her reasoning weak, and she held her breath every time she walked adjacent to the long green spans that lined both sides of this street and the next and the next. How could it be that she had worked so hard, saved so much money, endured long hard years building her veterinary practice, and still she had no say about how she lived, what she grew on her own damn lot? Unable to sell because the market was down, and even if they could, they wouldn’t move because Nora loved her school. Adulthood was a curious inversion of childhood helplessness; you were pinned in place by what was below you and around you, by what you owned and loved, rather than any sort of higher authority. She stayed up all night looking at photos of dead whales, their stomachs bulging with dirty plastic, acid-bleached coral the pale color of zombie skin, the horrifying videos of animal abuse, and the equally horrifying videos of abused animals too hurt to move being lifted up and carried away whimpering by humans seeking donations for their South Asian animal-rescue organizations. And around sunrise, with Patrick and Nora still asleep, she climbed out of bed and walked around the neighborhood, looking at their lush green lawns, tender and exposed in the sleepy hours of the morning.

  Yes, it was selfish to have been so sad. That was the first thing they agreed on. The second was that the sadness was foreign to her nature, it was an aberration, an invader, a weed in her berry patch. “You used to be so happy,” he told her. “Just remember how you used to laugh when we went to feed the gulls at the beach.” She started to see a therapist, who told her that it was unhealthy to hold on to so much guilt and pain regarding things that were just inevitable parts of human life. We had a need to use paper, she said, to use gasoline and meat and bubble-wrap mailing envelopes and rare earth metals. Her task, said the therapist, while wearing one of her several dozen pairs of baffling, serpentine earrings, was to learn to forgive herself for living. “She wants me to forgive myself,” Alison told Patrick with disdain. Quash the new impulses, fold back into society. The therapist didn’t care whether Alison lived an ethical life, didn’t care whether she got better, meaning became a better person. “It’s not like a personal trainer at the gym,” Patrick said. “A therapist doesn’t make you over in whatever shape you want. They make you healthy.” Nora slept with noise-canceling headphones on in case they fought after she went to bed. She brought back a magnet from school with the suicide-prevention hotline number and stuck it on the fridge. “You don’t love me,” Alison said, “name one thing about me that you love.” Patrick said he could name a dozen. He loved how she sang along to songs when she drove without realizing she was doing it, he loved going to the movies with her where they’d get the jumbo-sized popcorn even though it was too much for anybody to finish. He loved the gentle way she touched her face when putting makeup on or taking it off. He loved how she could taste a dish at a restaurant and name every ingredient in it, down to the herbs. “What you’re talking about,” Alison told him, “that isn’t me. That’s our lifestyle. Who would I be to you without it?”

  Early on a Sunday morning, Alison went outside in her bare feet wearing only a long tee shirt and began tearing up the lawn with her bare hands. She grabbed fistfuls of green, but the roots were still there, unscathed. She knew that there were sometimes native seeds in the soil below, lying dormant for years and years, waiting for a chance to grow. It was possible to free them, if only she could clear out all this bullshit. She chose the crowbar from the garage, because she thought it would be faster. After she did her own lawn, she could move on to the neighbors’. Lift the crowbar high and strike down with force, lodging the beveled end deep in the root system. Then drag that motherfucker, till that bitch, tear up big clods of white-rooted sod with a sound like hair being ripped from scalp. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, no streaks ran down her face, but every so often the tears made it too hard to see, and she had to drag her soiled hand across her face to get them off. By the time Patrick came out to stop her, she had made good work of their own yard and was moving on to the Koffmans’ next door. It’s hard to restrain someone swinging a metal rod with one wicked end and no off-switch. By the time he pinned her to the turf, they were being watched from the stoops and through the windows of nearby houses. Back inside, he pushed her into the bathroom and propped the door shut with a chair, leaving her in there alone as the daylight grew and aged and sank away. Around dinnertime, he opened the bathroom door and they all ate microwaved mac and cheese in a deep, inky silence. Weeks later, when she saw Antonia Koffman in the supermarket, she continued on her path, pretending not to see her, planning to show no emotion, but when she got close, she found herself smiling and apologizing and blaming her behavior those weeks ago on a bad Ambien reaction. Afterward, she hated herself with a new sharpness, an icy, pointed pain reserved for a weak person who presented herself as even weaker than she was.

  From behind, a shift in the quality of light and a sound like wood and metal moving against each other. Alison turns to find Klaus watching her, smelling of sawdust, wiping his hands on a discolored cloth, and smiling faintly.

  “Talking to your husband,” he says politely, ignoring her balled-up fists and moist cheekbones.

  “Oh, I was,” says Alison quickly, “but it’s late, I need to get back to Nora.”

  “I’ve been working on making several lazy Susans for the dining hall,” he says, and pauses, like he expects her to say something.

  “It’ll be good,” he continues, “to be able to access all the condiments or sauces from any place at the table. We have older people here, we have people who are infirm, we have children with short arms. When I’m done, everyone will be able to reach for themselves.”

  Alison smiles small and tight. Then she tries to smile a little bigger, to be friendly.

  “Oh, that’ll be nice,” she says. “We won’t have to pause the conversation to ask someone to pass something.”

  “Well, I hope people will still ask each other for help,” says Klaus with a note of worry. “I believe it’s good for the community to ask and to give, to rely on one another.”

  Alison looks off toward the bunkhouses. She can see the front lights shining in the distance, indicating that the cabins are still awake, its denizens not yet gone to bed. When the light is out above her door, she has to sneak, change her clothes in near-complete darkness, all without making a noise. Then she feels a hand heavy on her shoulder—two pats and it’s over.

  “It bothers me too sometimes,” he says emphatically. “The contradiction between how peaceful it is here and how difficult things are in the world. I can feel guilty in moments when I think of a person I know who would thrive in this place but is still struggling out there with the sort of problems we were so glad to leave behind. For that reason, the mourning early in the day sometimes feels a bit shallow to me—as if it were a way to absolve ourselves, and enjoy the rest of the day. But I think it is all right to enjoy it here. It is all right for you to enjoy it, if you can.” She dredges up a real smile for him. The moths circle the spotlight, mistaking it for a small, accessible moon.

  As she walks the narrow gravel path back to her house, she thinks about his assumption that what pained her was her own contentment, how he must see her to assume this, how odd it was that his consoling gesture made her feel a bit better even though he was so far from understanding her feelings. It seems possible to Alison that if her husband were to join her here, they might understand each other at this basic, gestural level of exchange—the desire to comfort, the desire to communicate, even if the message itself came through garbled. With the time and space to focus on intention rather than outcome, they could remind each other of two people who only want the best for each other. But it seems more likely that he’ll stay in California, growing ever more frantic about the distance. The path back to her cabin shines under the moonlight, and her footsteps mark the stillness with soft crunches, like boots through snow. Tomorrow she’ll hike to the top of the mountain and send the photos, like he asked. M
aybe she’ll tell Nora to do some drawings of the campground that she can send by mail, something physical that he can hold and touch, something to put him at ease.

  * * *

  —

  In the first episode of the second season of Kassi Keene: Kid Detective, Kassi is a high-school junior running her own private-investigator business from out of the apartment she used to share with her still-missing father. She’s turned his empty bedroom into her office, a desk with a banker’s lamp and a potted fern on it where his bed used to be. During the days, she sits through calculus, U.S. history, honors English, but on the weekends, she manages her father’s landscaping company, trying to keep the few employees he still has paid up and loyal until he comes back—if he ever comes back.

  In this episode, she drives the riding mower in tight, squiggly lines across the expansive back lawn of a Paradise Cove estate owned by a former talk-show host, headphones blasting her favorite local band, the Lady Wolverines. Suddenly, a sound loud enough to cut through the chorus. Kassi kills the mower’s engine, climbs off, and slides her headphones down around her neck. Through a three-inch gap in the hedgerow, she peers into the neighbor’s yard, where a man in a trim charcoal-gray suit is sliding a handgun back into its holster. The owner of the house, distraught in tennis clothes and visor, cradles a small white object with both hands. “You bastard, you killed Jonesy,” cries the distressed man, holding the tiny body to his chest. “I’ll vote for your wicked bill. But why did you have to shoot the dog?” The gray suit slips on a pair of Ray-Bans and strolls away, slowing briefly to admire a rosebush. And as Gray Suit revs his engine and speeds off toward some unknown endpoint, we watch through the hedge gap as the remaining man looks down at the delicate mangle, the toy poodle’s broken splay, blood dotting his crisp white polo knit.