by CJ Hauser
It is. And we are, Gwen said. That’s the whole point of Mitchell’s Reversalism, anyway. Most of ours. But your father saw it differently.
But aren’t the ducks getting worse? Nolan asked.
The ducks are going backward, Gwen said. Which in most people’s books means worse, yes. But Ian didn’t think backward was so bad.
Gwen lit another Virginia Slim. Elsa reached out and took it from her. The smell of Ian’s shirt had lingered and she wanted to fill her mouth with smoke.
After she’d lit another cigarette, Gwen said: Your father thought it was possible for an organism to evolve too far. He liked to say that going forward didn’t always mean progress, because sometimes taking a step back was the best thing.
Nolan had his hands in his hair. He believed what?
Of course, he was crazy, Gwen said.
Nolan grabbed Elsa, his thumb on the knob of her wrist, pressing it like a button. In Nolan’s grasp, she felt his hopefulness. They had always understood each other in this way, telegraphing desires.
So you’re saying he wasn’t a Reversalist? Elsa said. She jiggled her legs, dragged on the cigarette.
He was a Reversalist, Gwen said. He just disagreed about what Reversalism meant. We don’t agree on much, she admitted, but Ian really ran away from the pack.
Why did he tell you this? Elsa asked.
He told everyone at his first intellectual trust meeting, Gwen said. She held her elbow, let her cigarette burn away. He was so excited. He thought he was bringing us this good news and we’d all be so delighted to hear it. Let me tell you, that didn’t fly at all. After that, Mitchell never wanted your father to publish anything. It would have undermined the credibility of our work.
Credibility? Nolan said.
Gwen nodded. The children looked at her.
Does Mitchell understand, Elsa said, that people…She wasn’t sure how to say it. Does he have a sense of how Reversalism is received—
On the mainland, Nolan helped.
Does he know that everyone thinks we’re crazy? Of course he does, Gwen said. If he didn’t, he really would be crazy.
They laughed awkwardly.
So why did he care if Dad published? Nolan asked. There’s very little to ruin, reputation-wise.
Gwen shook her head. That doesn’t matter. People talk about crazy. They fight about crazy. So long as everyone’s saying the same thing. You know about Scientology, right? About creationism? New Earth theory? You think it’s wrong, but you know what it is and that people believe in it. And that makes it legitimate, whether you like it or not. If people stop spinning the same story, that’s when you go from crazy to invisible.
* * *
——————·
When the Greys returned to their shack, Jinx rushed out, pantingly eager, circling and staring past them toward the path, looking for Ian and finding, instead, the two of them. They stood on the rickety ramp over the tidewater. It was starting to get dark, bugs emerging in the dusk, and Elsa focused too hard on petting the dog.
Ian was joyful in his journals. Ian was beloved by boy geniuses and old ladies. Ian was looking for proof that the world was not going to shit after all.
But Ian was still dead.
Maybe if we found the duck, Nolan said.
Shut up. It doesn’t matter. It’s all crazy, Elsa said, even though she wasn’t sure she believed this herself.
Nolan said, I’m sorry I got so worked up about the test. I just wanted to prove, I don’t even know what.
Why do you care what these people think? Elsa said. It’s just beyond me who you think you’re trying to impress here.
Nolan wanted to say: The grown-ups.
It was what he did at work. It was what he’d done as a child. It was what he feared he was doing with Janine. He had always wanted to please the grown-ups. Because grown-ups were the ones who decided what was good and what was bad. If he didn’t please them first, how would he ever know if he had the authority to be a grown-up himself?
Nolan wanted to say: It’s you I am trying to impress.
Because Elsa had always seemed like a grown-up to him. Had been outspoken about how unremarkable she found him, articulating so precisely the ways he feared his father saw him, and so he could not help wanting her to see him better. To see him as someone who knew Ian. Was like him, even. But this was stupid. Pleasing her was an old trap and they weren’t children anymore.
I’m sorry I made you come out here. Nolan grabbed the walkway railings, bouncing them a little. I just needed to know what he thought was so important.
I mean, I get it, Elsa said. She looked up from the dog. But I think being out here is just going to make you more confused and sad. These are not good people to go looking for answers from.
He laughed.
Elsa said, So let’s just pack up his stuff and go, yeah? We’ve only got a few more days before the post boat comes.
* * *
——————·
The Greys gathered stacked folders of handwritten notes and tabulations. They put the many legal pads, the bags of feathers, the weatherproof notebooks away. They did this quietly. But as they thought about going home, to Park Rapids and to San Francisco, they wondered what this would mean for them. Ex-sister. Ex-brother. After all, Ian was the final thing they’d had in common, and now he was gone. Which meant, once they left the island, there was no reasonable reason for them to ever see each other again.
Eventually, it was late, it was dark, and everything was neatly in boxes.
Elsa was hunched over, reading Ian’s field journal again.
Nolan walked a circle around the shack. He unstopped the vodka bottle and poured some into two cups. The pineapple juice had been sitting warm in its carton and was probably rancid, but Nolan poured a splash in each cup anyway. He handed one to Elsa.
What is this? she said.
We’re mourning.
Elsa stared into her cup but did not drink. She looked up at Nolan.
You know, if Gwen is right about how Ian saw the Reversal, then maybe he didn’t kill himself, she admitted.
Or maybe no one believed in him, so he did, Nolan said.
You mean we didn’t believe him.
Either way, he’s dead, Nolan said, and knocked his cup against Elsa’s, a little too rough. The drink sloshed.
Even in light of what Gwen had said, even though Elsa’s own certainty was slipping, Nolan was starting to understand what Elsa had been saying. Here, on the island, he was coming to think that there was no such thing as a person who would not, who would never, kill himself. Wasn’t continuing to be evidence that a person believed he was owed space among the living? How long could a person possibly last if they didn’t feel they deserved a piece of the world? Nolan felt entitled to precisely nothing. It was possible Ian had come to feel the same. Possible that the years of no one believing in his work had taken a toll.
Nolan drank his whole cup down and poured himself another. Elsa did the same.
She lay on Ian’s bed. Just a mattress on the floor. Nolan lay next to her and held her hand. She didn’t stop him.
I don’t feel sad, Nolan said.
You might not.
Ever?
I might not, Elsa said.
That’s not true.
It’s because we don’t know for sure. Whether it was an accident.
We know, Nolan said. You were right.
She turned toward him. New Baby—
Don’t call me that.
Nolan—
Why do you think he did it? Really?
I’d rather not find out, Elsa said.
That’s crazy.
I am totally sure that most of the time it’s better to never find out anything at all.
Elsa.
Especially abou
t Dad.
This is different, Nolan said.
But Elsa knew it wasn’t.
It was when Elsa found out that Ian wasn’t her biological father that their family had cracked.
It wasn’t the first crack, but it was an irreparable one. Ian had known she wasn’t his for years, since the separation, but had not told her. At the time, the lying had seemed like the biggest parental failing of all, but these days, Elsa sometimes thought that what they should have done a better job of was hiding it from her. Sometimes she thought that if they had protected her from the truth more thoroughly, everything wouldn’t have gone so wrong. Elsa had made them wrong, yes, and pulled Nolan down with her, but the knowing was what had started it.
He loved you just the same after he found out, Nolan said. It didn’t matter to him.
But he left, Elsa said. So it did. He left to start a new fucking family.
He left Ingrid. He still loved you. In spite of the biology, which was a really big deal for him, and you’ve never appreciated that. He only felt differently once you went and messed it all up later.
I messed it up?
Are you serious? Nolan sat up on the mattress.
I was hardly alone.
Nolan thumped the floor, and Jinx startled awake.
Yes, Elsa. You fucked things up.
The dog barked.
Elsa sat up and grabbed Jinx by the snout. She held her velvety muzzle as if to comfort her with her own silence. What a fucking child Nolan was. As if he had not been willing to come to bed with her. As if anyone ever did anything they didn’t want to do. Elsa felt a quickening in her blood. A tingling in her knees. The vodka at work. All Elsa ever did was give people permission to be who they really were.
You helped, Elsa said. She prodded Nolan with her foot. If I remember, you were very good at helping. She laughed.
Shut up, shut the fuck up, Elsa. He slid away from her. Sat against the wall. You were the one who couldn’t handle your shit and so you started with the sex stuff. And you only did it because you knew what it would do to him. And then after you’d properly fucked me over, you dropped me. Because I was never the point. Ian was the whole point.
It had nothing to do with the sex for him, Nolan.
Yes it did. Evolution, genetics, everything was about sex for him.
It was about you.
It had remarkably, fucking insultingly little to do with me, and you know it.
It was that he didn’t want you to be ruined.
Nolan threw his hands up. Well, you did it. Fucking congratulations.
Did what?
Ruin me. For him and anyone else.
You seem shipshape, Nolan, Elsa said. I think you’ve turned out just swell.
Are you insane? That’s why we’re here, Elsa. Because you did ruin me. You ruined all of us. You ruined Dad. And if he killed himself? Guess why.
These were her own worst fears in Nolan’s mouth, and Elsa felt the blow in her spine, in her gut, behind her eyes.
We were just stupid teenagers, she tried. It wasn’t that big a deal.
You weren’t, Nolan said. It was your birthday weekend. You weren’t a teenager.
That’s not right, Elsa said. She got up, too fast, and the blood rushed from her head. For a moment she saw white.
You had just turned twenty, Nolan said.
Elsa felt as if she might be sick. She pressed her eyes with her fingers, hard.
Had her math really been wrong? She wasn’t sure why it made any difference if she was twenty and not nineteen. And yet, it did matter that they weren’t both teenagers. Nolan was right. She was going to be sick to her stomach. She looked around the shack, but there was nowhere to go. She was trapped. The post boat wouldn’t come for days.
I’m going swimming, Elsa said.
What?
Elsa started stripping her clothes off.
It’s past midnight.
I’m a big girl.
It could be dangerous, Nolan said. Dad—
Grow up, Nolan.
Elsa pulled on her bathing suit. Nolan saw that her flesh was damp and creased from her clothes; they had been cutting into her. Everything Elsa had ever done seemed to be a fight with her skin. A fight to get out of it or to find something beyond it that mattered to her half as much. Nolan had watched her struggle for years, and he could see it now—in the creases across her belly where her shorts buttoned, in the red welts where her bra straps had hung on her—all the ways she was still not free.
But Nolan loved Elsa’s body. He loved it precisely because it was not like his own. The sameness of bodies was for real siblings and they were something different.
It was never the sameness of their bodies that made things monstrous between Elsa and Nolan. It was the sameness of their thinking. Their cultural Greyness. The way they snarled, worried, knew each other’s thoughts as if they were their own.
Their bodies pulled together the same way other people’s bodies did. And when it had all gone wrong, when they’d had sex, years ago, Nolan didn’t really know why everyone had been so surprised. After all, he was half Ian, and Elsa was half Ingrid, and weren’t those poles that had attracted before?
Elsa banged out the door, wearing only her swimsuit. Gone.
Elsa, Nolan called, but not very loudly.
Jinx came and sat her bony haunches in Nolan’s lap. He pet her tentatively.
It’s okay, Nolan said. Good girl.
A constellation of mute insects danced around the cup of vodka and pineapple juice Elsa had left on the floor. Nolan reached for his drink, and as he sipped, he thought that maybe Elsa was right that they would be happier knowing nothing. Maybe if they could forget that Ian had lost his mind for this research. Forget that he had slowly become someone unrecognizable to them. Forget that he had given up on either of them amounting to anything. Forget that he had stopped caring about his children. Forget that it was all maybe their fault. Maybe then, if they knew nothing, they could become something like happy.
Nolan ruffled the soft hairs behind Jinx’s ears that would not lie straight. He thought of turning her loose. Just letting her run out the door.
You wouldn’t last one day in these woods, he told the dog.
Lake Itasca
TEN YEARS BACK
Years before she swam in the silty Gulf where the Mississippi lets itself go, Elsa went to Itasca, the river’s Minnesota headwaters. The Mississippi ran clear at the source, as yet unmuddied by its travels, and how Elsa loved its clean-pooling mouth.
It was Ian who took her. The first time she had seen him since the troubles.
Keiko had been sick, but she was fine, Ian said. A touch of cancer. She was being treated and they expected her to soon go into remission.
This story had come confusedly across the telephone line as Ingrid used a porous blue sponge to delicately soap away egg yolk and crumbs from fruit-patterned plates. Elsa sat at the kitchen table and watched Ingrid, the cordless nestled into her shoulder. People often called Ingrid when news of sickness came; a hospice nurse, they imagined, would know what to do. But this was different. Ingrid hrmmmed at Ian, while she looked not at the plate she was redressing so tenderly, but out the window, at the shore of Potato Lake, where a plastic six-pack ring was being lapped at on the shore, a six-pack ring almost certainly left there by a lakeside boy who’d spent all night waiting for Elsa to come out and fuck and when she hadn’t, had found no consolation besides whatever those rings had contained.
Elsa thought Ingrid looked at those rings like she knew.
But Elsa had stopped going out to the lake.
Since she had driven to see Nolan and he had kissed her in the truck, she’d felt wobbly and frightened, like the past was going to explode in on her again at any moment. As a preventive measure, she had called the man n
amed Dylan who had written his number on her arm that same night. The numbers were smudged when she’d arrived home after the long drive from Northfield, but they had worked. She and Dylan had been dating for a month now, and in spite of her reasons for calling him, Elsa found she actually liked Dylan: liked his worn jeans and sly humor, liked how he was the only thing that kept Elsa tethered to the present at all.
Still, when the phone rang, and it was Ian, Elsa felt sure that despite being twenty-five years old, she was about to get in trouble with her parents all over again.
Ingrid said, We’ll see you soon, and hung up the phone, and tousled the little fruit plate dry with a clean towel, and placed it carefully back in the cabinet, while Elsa told herself she would not ask her mother who was coming. She could not make it so plain that she cared. Ingrid lifted the next dish from the breakfast table, jam smeared across it obscenely.
Who will we see soon? Elsa asked, even though she hated herself for it.
Life is too short, Ingrid said. It was something, as a hospice nurse, she was allowed to say. But it wasn’t an apology. It was the kind of empty sweetness she’d tried to fatten Elsa on for years.
* * *
——————·
Apparently, because Keiko was sick, because life was short, Ian was reaching out to Elsa. He wanted to see her. After going silent for the five years since she and Nolan got in trouble. Despite moving out when she was six, the year he found out she was not his.
Elsa protested, but her mother refused to engage her.
Since Keiko’s sickness, Ingrid had started to read Anna Karenina, a thing she had always meant to do and never found time for.
The women were sunk in the soft, low couches of the living room, waiting for Ian to arrive. It was cloudy and hot outside, threatening to rain, and Elsa was of the opinion that this whole outing should be cancelled. Because what was the point, really, of going to a park in the rain.