The Stone Loves the World

by BRIAN HALL

  Sometimes his father came out of his study to watch. Sometimes he even played. It was the only time he and Susan got along. He played better than Mark, but not as well as his daughter. Mark—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—had become dimly aware that his father was depressed, maybe had been depressed for years. Mark could count on two fingers the times he’d seen his father happy. The first had been after a snowstorm. His father hated snowstorms. He hated clearing the driveway, he hated ice on the paths, he hated the chance of a power outage, he hated making a fire in the fireplace when there was an outage because it heated the house unevenly. When Susan had lived at home, he hated the runaround she gave him when he asked her to help shovel. But on this one day, for some inexplicable reason, after the shoveling was finished, he made a snowball and threw it at Mark. Mark, nonplussed, threw one back. Susan joined in and peppered the old man up and down his long winter coat with snowballs until he begged for a ceasefire. She granted it, and when she turned around he snuck up behind her and dropped a chunk of plowdrift over her head. He laughed so hard he wheezed.

  The second time happened at pool. Dad and Susan were playing Rotation, and it was usually a case of watching Susan run the table, but Dad had a couple of good early turns, and then Susan flubbed two shots in a row, and suddenly he found the zone, he sank the eight, the nine, the ten, and now he was on the downward slope picking up speed as the table cleared, and the next three shots were not that hard, and he really lucked out on a bank shot for number fourteen, and Susan called him Minnesota Fats, and the last was a straight shot down the whole table, and he banged it home. The part that Mark couldn’t believe, but would always remember, was the utterly uncharacteristic (although if he did it, didn’t that mean it was some buried part of his character?) silly dance that his father broke into, pointing to various corners of the room as he jived over to his workbench, picked up a stick of chalk, and scribbled the final score on the basement wall:

  Susan—4

  me—116

  Tuesday, February 16, 2016

  Baltimore in the dark. The bus is late, throbbing into the station at 6:18. She has two minutes for the transfer, makes it in one. People everywhere, in chairs, in lines, on the new bus. No matter where you go, what rise you top, what cape you round.

  She grabs one of the last empty pairs of seats, sits at the window with her knapsack on her lap, watches the subsequent boarders. Eyes slide over her without a snag. Coats find overhead compartments, asses find cushions. The bus pulls out of the station with four empty seats, one of them next to her. On the bus out of New York there were three empty seats, one of them next to her. Twenty-seven pairs of seats on a Greyhound bus, therefore random odds of this happening to her on the two buses so far are three twenty-sevenths times four twenty-sevenths, or about 1 in 61. Couples prevent seat selection from being truly random, but she can’t determine couples with any confidence, so fuck that, fuck them.

  She places her knapsack on the seat next to her. Pulls out her notebook.

  Her greasy hair? Her thick glasses? Her bomber jacket, her black lipstick, her scarlet pants, her shitkickers, her jug ears, her fat lips, her horse teeth?

  She gazes out the window. Her manner, her gaze, her affect, her smell? Maybe people can tell she hates having anyone sit next to her. Even the single women shy away.

  Broad lazy river of taillights drifting with the bus, inexhaustible torrent of headlights rushing against. High-rises with brilliant windows in their thousands. Higher, blinking winglights of jampacked planes. Seven and a half billion chimps, rubbing noses, dominating, submitting. Since yesterday, another 220,000. This one has never belonged. She opens her notebook, writes, Here is a Miss who here is amiss.

  Sunday was Valentine’s Day. She always thought it was the stupidest of all the holidays, and that’s saying something. Glancing through the steamed-up windows of full restaurants as she walked home, flowers on tables, couples leaning into each other, I love you, meaning, You must remain exactly this way for me, otherwise I’ll hate you. Yet she wondered, this past Sunday, every minute of the day, where Alex was, what they were thinking, who they might be talking to, who they might be talking about.

  She’s not blind, she’s known all her life that people look at her funny. Why doesn’t she speak up? Why doesn’t she smile? Why doesn’t she wash her hair? Why doesn’t she stand up straight? Why doesn’t she ask me how I’m doing?

  Their ignorant second-guessing: I recognize her type. I know what she needs.

  Don’t understand me too quickly, somebody said. (She googles it: some writer named Gide.) How about, Don’t understand me at all? How about, Get your grubby thoughts off me. She didn’t just want to be left alone, she wanted to float free of their stupid judgment, their stupid categories. Don’t have the foggiest fucking notion what to say about me.

  Then she met Alex. A new hire at Qualternion, the imaging software company she worked at. A little older than her, she’d guess. Or maybe just more easy in the world. It shows how solitary her life had been, how out of touch, that there it was, October 2015, and Alex was the first person she knew who floated free of that most grubby-finger-smeared category of all, gender. Alex was a “they.” She had to learn what AFAB and AMAB meant, and she had no idea which Alex was. Breasts or no? She couldn’t tell. Then she realized she was smearing her own grubby thoughts all over Alex, and to her intrigue was added sympathy. Not to mention self-disgust. Then she started noticing everything about Alex: their programming skill, their hilarious sly comments, their generosity, their abundant freckles, their gleaming white straight teeth, their ten different-colored baseball caps. When they looked at her. When they asked, when going out on an errand, whether she wanted something. When they remembered the way she liked her coffee. She still doesn’t know if Alex is AFAB or AMAB, or cis or trans, or if those labels apply in this case, they’ve defeated that deepest of all chimp-reflexes, Do my genes pass through you or do yours pass through me, they’ve rendered the question as stupid as it should be, and there’s something pretty fucking awesome about that.

  She had never had a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a nonbinary-romantic-friend or a Platonic friend and had never wanted one, and then she found herself thinking about Alex, knowing where they were in the office, wondering what they might say to her, and did they ever think about her and what did they think. Being alone suddenly seemed undesirable, and that terrified her, and she hated herself for thinking about Alex, You must remain exactly this way for me, all ten baseball caps and each tooth and freckle in place, but argued with herself, that wasn’t true, Alex could be anything, it was their floating-free that she loved, but wasn’t that bullshit, what if Alex stopped floating free? Not just her self-respect, but her self-possession, her control, were gone. She was all she’d ever had or wanted, and suddenly she wasn’t enough. Alex, save me, Alex, I love you, by which I mean, give me exactly what I want. So, just at the time she started to give a shit about whether a person liked her, she was convinced even more than usual that no one could, because she had turned into exactly the kind of presumptuous needy private-space-invader that she detested.

  She composes a snowball sentence:

  I am all done, folks, really (raucous applause, gradually increasing).

  Sunday, February 14, 2016

  Mark wanders through the emptied house at dusk, switching on lights as he goes. He contemplates each room for a long time.

  Of course this is like his old dream. Which makes sense. Even as a kid he must have known that he would be the one to clear out the house after his parents died. Susan would have had neither the desire nor the patience. He’s driven the six hours from Ithaca one last time for the closing tomorrow. He’ll spend the night in his old bedroom, in a sleeping bag on the newly polished floor.

  He is fifty-six years old, a professor of astronomy. His expertise is in two subjects of little interest to the public, astrometry and galaxy formation. He prefers it tha
t way. Let people in the spotlight worry. Strangely, perhaps, for a recluse, he’s a good teacher. He has always been excited by the implications of the big view, and he loves explaining things. (Someone once told him he loved it too much.) He has won teaching awards.

  He never married, but has a daughter who is now twenty. She was raised by her mother.

  The house is in excellent shape. The realtor told him that the easiest houses to sell were those owned by engineers, because they were the best maintained. Mark was tempted to remind him that his father had been a physicist, but the other man, in a way, had intuited a deeper truth.

  So . . . Does Mark feel a peaceful euphoria? In fact, yes. And when he recalls the numinous words from that dream, It’s all over now, they flow through him with their old comforting power. For twenty years his father suffered terribly from Parkinson’s disease and its associated Lewy body dementia. When he died, Mark thought his mother would feel liberated, maybe rejuvenated, but instead she fell into a steady mental decline. It reminded him of something he had read years ago, comparing long-married couples to plants with interpenetrating roots. He wondered if, in fact, a shared biome was indicated. Perhaps regardless of the conscious feelings involved—the presence or absence of love, for example—long cohabitation adapts two bodies to mutually interacting pheromones, skin and mouth bacteria, intestinal flora, etcetera, on which the couple gradually grows dependent. Remove one partner, and the surviving organism weakens.

  Whatever the reason, the moment his father died, his mother started dying. For six years she blurred and shrank and drifted backward into the past. She returned to the period when she loved dogs and hated cats. She forgot that Mark was an astronomer. She forgot that Susan was dead. When she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she couldn’t retain the news, so she spent her last weeks contentedly smoking her cigarettes and watching her beloved horse movies on DVD. (Severe dementia had finally enabled her to enjoy TV.) Pain only came in the last week, and was alleviated by generous applications of morphine in the hospice facility to which Mark had moved her. To the very end, whenever she was awake, she was peaceful.

  “What are you reading, Markie?” she would ask when she woke up and saw him sitting with a book in her hospice room.

  “Berlin Diaries, by Marie Vassiltchikov.”

  “Is it good?”

  “It’s interesting.”

  “Oh, good!” Maternal relief in her voice. Marky-lark was happy. She would open a book of her own, Ruffian, the true story of a racing horse with a big heart who died young. She had been staring at random pages off and on for the past two years. Like a small child, she would gaze at the text for a few seconds, then fall asleep with her finger in the book.

  Mark contemplates the kitchen. Her domain. “I hate this fucking kitchen,” she would spit out every few days, when the appliances were from the fifties and there was too little countertop space. One Christmas Susan gave her, as a joke, a poster that read Fuck Housework in huge fluorescent letters and Mom surprised everyone by putting it up on the wall next to the refrigerator. It stayed there for ten years, only coming down when she finally had the kitchen remodeled. She liked the amenities better after that, but she still announced regularly that she hated cooking. Yet every night she made dinner.

  She never allowed anyone in the kitchen while she was cooking. It took Mark years to figure out (when did he figure it out? he can hear Susan calling him a dumbass, and later, when she was kinder, referring to his “healthy obliviousness”) that his mother had arranged her day so that she would spend as little time as possible with his father. Dad got home from work at 5:30, at which point Mom was already in the kitchen cooking. Dinner was at 6:30. At 7:00, Mom would go upstairs with a gin and tonic and a mystery, and read in bed until she fell asleep at around 8:00. She would sleep through the evening as heavily as Susan did all those afternoons when she was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, doing drugs (about which Mark was equally clueless). When Dad climbed into the marriage bed toward midnight, Mom would pop out to walk the dogs, then sit downstairs in the living room with another gin and tonic, reading more in her mystery until—well, Mark doesn’t know. Susan probably knew.

  Maybe his father was as blind as he was. Hard to believe, but evidence suggested it. When Mark was in graduate school, his mother moved into his old bedroom, informing his father of the new state of affairs, and Dad seemed thunderstruck. As far as Mark knew, Mom never relented, and Dad never got over it. Through all Mark’s childhood, his father had not uttered a word to him about his marriage, but now he broke down regularly in Mark’s presence. “She says she’s not sure she ever loved me. I asked her, ‘Were the children, at least, conceived in love?’” Mark noticed that his father—who had never talked about emotions, either his or other people’s, or their existence as a human attribute—drew on an almost Victorian vocabulary now that he was forced to. Mark, heartsick and helpless, would tentatively pat his broad back as he crumpled over the nearest tabletop.

  For years Mark heard the same anguish every few weeks, virtually word for word, the story frozen, the pain ever fresh. He began to wonder himself if his mother had ever loved his father, and his old nighttime dream of visiting the house in the future morphed into a daydream about traveling into the past. It was like an answer to that silly hypothetical question people sometimes ask, as far as Mark can tell, just to keep a conversation going—if you could go back in time only once, when and where would you choose? For Mark, there was no contest. He would return to some weekend in 1965. He would ring the doorbell of this house, and when his parents answered (not recognizing him), he’d convince them to let him come in, a friend of a friend (though his parents had no friends), a third cousin, a census taker, an anthropologist, and he’d spend the day observing. What did the young couple talk about? Or if they didn’t talk, were the silences companionable? Seething? Who was the genius loci, the serene boy in his bubble of hobbies, or the smarter, haunted girl?

  He eventually came to believe it was Susan, because his mother said such bitter things before and after his father died. But then one day he was sitting with her at the kitchen table, looking at some photos of the old man she’d unearthed during one of her unremembered rambles through the rooms and drawers, and she murmured in an unsteady voice, “He was such a good man.” She began to weep. “I miss him so much.”

  Mark was gobsmacked. Time-traveling, his mother had arrived at the station where Mark’s boyhood lived. “Mom,” he wanted to say. “What year is it? Look around, do you see a newspaper?”

  He leaves the kitchen and enters the dining room. The ceiling light is reflected in blurry stars on the newly polyurethaned floor. Probably a consequence of the circular polishing. The walls are a beige cream that the realtor chose, and earlier today apologized for. “Against the white trim, there’s too much green in it.”

  “Looks all right to me,” Mark said truthfully.

  His family never ate dinner here. That’s what the kitchen was for. Instead, the dining room table was where he did his schoolwork. During his high school years it was covered a foot deep in his books and papers. In his busiest period, the winter of eleventh grade, he would come downstairs at four in the morning to finish an essay and sometimes he’d fall asleep huddled next to the radiator. He would dream that he still had his paper route, but had somehow forgotten to do it for years, and all his trusting, loyal customers had been wondering where their newspapers were. Their wounded patience was the most painful part of the dream.

  The upright piano used to be here, too. Every time the piano tuner came, his mother would push him into playing a piece for the man. He’d pick something short, since the poor guy must have had other work to get to. When he was sixteen, he considered applying to Oberlin to do a double major in physics and piano performance, and his father volunteered to fly with him to visit the campus. This was surprising. Mark knew how much his father hated to travel. Only later did it occur to him that
perhaps his father was hoping he’d become a professional pianist. He would never have expressed this directly to Mark. He had always said he believed that every child had the right to find their own way. (Susan would pipe up here, “Just so long as that child’s name is Mark.”)

  Mark steps into the living room. He looks at the spot where the TV always stood. Where are the hassocks of yesteryear?

  The original broadcast of Lost in Space is an expanding shell of electromagnetic radiation now 51 light-years in radius, a volume of space containing approximately 1400 star systems. How many little alien boys are now having weird dreams about Billy Mumy? But the signal is likely far too weak to be picked up by extrasolar receivers, even if they were monitoring the correct frequency. To Mark’s six-year-old self, John Robinson seemed the perfect dad, and Maureen, he half believed, was based on his mother. The two women had the same wavy hair, pointy nose, chirpy voice. Years later he could see that John Robinson looked like JFK, and a sad fact he’d picked up somewhere was that Lost in Space was John F. Kennedy Jr.’s favorite show in 1965.

  When Mark visited during his mother’s decline, every morning she would wake up and say, “Markie, I’m worried about the TV. I don’t think it’s working.”

  “Let’s check. It was working last night.” He would accompany her downstairs, where she would settle on the couch and he’d hit the remote. She never tried to turn on the TV herself, convinced as she was that it was far too complicated.

  “It seems to be working, Mom.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “What would you like to watch?”