by Ben Dolnick
“You’ll get sick,” she said.
“Eh.”
“How was the school group?”
“Fine,” I said. “Donna yelled at a boy who kept breaking people’s pencils.”
She nodded. “What about the Wrighters? Were they crazy?” Her eyes were closed again. Each word had to work slightly harder than usual to get out, a kind of swimming-up through thick water.
“Crazy as loons.”
. . .
The next afternoon I was standing on the porch—having spent another day dealing with the museum instead of writing music—when I heard something from up by the porch’s ceiling. A kind of rustle-chirp. There was a bird’s nest there on top of one of the square wooden pillars that Hannah and I had been watching for a few weeks. She’d point it out to kids when they came in, and they would ooh and ahh and ask their parents to hold them up so they could see the eggs. And now, when I went over, there were six or seven baby birds in their place.
This was, I was fairly sure, just the thing to rouse Hannah from her sickness. She’d spent most of that day in bed too—she did have a fever, it turned out, and she’d had another bad night’s sleep—but she’d gotten up that afternoon to take a shower, and the birds would nudge her a bit back further toward health. Life indomitable.
I called to her and she came slowly out onto the porch in the red robe that was illness incarnate. She rose up on her toes and peered into the nest, smiling feebly.
“Look at that,” she said.
We’d never seen baby birds up close before, certainly none we’d known as eggs. They were these tiny waxy featherless finger-puppet-looking things, with beaks permanently open and pointing upward. “They’re like aliens,” she said.
“They’re like velociraptors.”
We stood looking at them, Hannah interested but maybe not quite inspired in the way I’d meant for her to be, until it was time for me to go in and clean up the quills and inkpots from that day’s activity. The mother bird fluttered crabbily around our heads.
That night Hannah went straight back to bed after dinner, and just after I’d climbed into bed too—it couldn’t have been any later than ten—it started raining as hard as I could ever remember it raining in my life. Just endless pounding and pounding, so loud that it woke Hannah up. I got out of bed and I couldn’t even see outside—the windows were just squares of white. “Do you hear that?” I said, but she couldn’t hear me. I imagined the house, the woods, the graveyard, the meadow, all being Sorcerer’s Apprentice’d away.
But when I woke up the next morning—Hannah was already out of bed—the sun was out, the house was standing, and the world looked exactly as if it had never rained at all. “Are you better?” I called out. I was alone in our room. It was a cloudless bright fall day; the tree by our window didn’t even look wet. I’d just turned on the coffee machine when I heard Hannah, out somewhere in the museum, say, “Oh no.”
“What?” I called, figuring we’d missed the meter reader, or maybe a school group had canceled.
But she just said, “Oh no,” again, so I walked out and found her standing on the porch with her hand over her mouth.
“What? Are you okay?”
She shook her head and pointed. The rain had washed the nest down from the rafters. The baby birds were lying on the floorboards, writhing, like tiny paraplegics tipped out of their wheelchairs. “Shit,” I said.
“Why didn’t we do something?” she said. She sounded borderline frantic. “It didn’t occur to you when it was raining?”
“What could we have done?”
“We have to do something,” she kept saying, leaning over them. “We have to do something.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine. Do something.”
The plan we settled on was that I was going to scoop the birds up onto a shovel and then toss them, or place them, over in the woods by the side of the house, where nature would do its work. Which meant, we both understood, that they’d be eaten by snakes, or starve to death, or whatever horrible thing happened to half-dead baby birds; it just seemed more dignified, somehow, that they should do this in the woods—this was, after all, where the Wrights were buried—rather than on the museum’s porch. Or maybe it was just that we wouldn’t have to see them.
But as I approached them with the shovel from the shed—I’d also brought a flattened cardboard box to help in gathering them up—Hannah called out, “Stop! Stop!” Because the birds, or maybe just Hannah’s unhappiness about the birds, had shifted into a more acute phase. They were struggling to move; when I leaned close I could hear that they were even faintly chirping. “Maybe we should leave them,” she said. “Maybe they’ll be okay.” But none of them, in the time we stood watching, came even close to getting on their feet. A school group from Millbrook was coming in an hour, and the kids would have to step around this horror show just to get inside.
“Well, what do you want me to do?” I said, for the third or fourth time. I was in my boxers and T-shirt, holding the shovel, still barefoot.
Finally Hannah, in a voice so quiet I could hardly hear her, said, “I think we have to drown them. I don’t know what else we can do.”
I’ve thought since then about where this idea may have come from. There’s an image, I think, from the collective folk wisdom fund, about taking an unwanted litter of kittens down to the pond in a sack—maybe this was a natural extension of that. Or maybe it was the rain that had given her the idea; the birds’ trouble had started with water, so it might as well end with it.
Anyway, I didn’t have a better idea, and I didn’t want to argue. I went and got the metal trash can from the shed, lifted out the heavy bag of birdseed (there was, I saw but didn’t tell Hannah, a long-dead mouse flattened at the bottom of the can), and then, using the hose next to the porch, I filled the can with a few inches of water. Wincing—my body, it turned out, was less okay with all this than the rest of me was—I swept the chirping, writhing birds, one by one, up onto the shovel, and then slid them down into the water. Each one was smaller than my pinkie. They all accepted what was happening to them, or at least they didn’t have the energy or the musculature to resist. A couple of them plunged right under, a couple of others gasped at the surface for air, no more (or less) alarmed than they’d been on the porch. And so now I had to do a thing I very much wanted not to do, which was to press the ones that were still fighting for air under the water with the back of my shovel and hold them there.
Hannah had gone back into the museum by then, so I hoped she’d moved on to thinking about something else, but when I looked up I saw her stricken face in the window of the front hall. When all of the birds had stopped breathing (but not, horribly, stopped floating to the surface), I carried the can over to the edge of the woods and tipped it over, sending the birds and their soaked nest into the leaves, where they would, I told myself, make some beetle family’s month.
I don’t want to overdramatize—this was unpleasant, but it was also, to any actual rural person, to Butch, presumably no more noteworthy than emptying the mousetraps in the basement. I walked back inside, washed my hands, and went back to our room to put on pants.
But for the rest of the day, through that morning’s school group and then the couple of visitors in the afternoon, Hannah wasn’t herself. I felt it in the way she thanked me when I brought us back lunch from the deli on Cold Spring; I felt it in the set of her mouth while she was doing inventory on the computer after dinner.
That night was as clear and crisp as the night before had been rainy—the stars, when I stepped out into the backyard, looked like an enormous city seen from an airplane at night. “Come out here,” I called, but she was in our room already and either couldn’t hear me or had decided to ignore me. When I got into bed she was still treating me coldly—she held Wright’s book of letters so it blocked most of her face—but just after I’d turned off my light and rolled onto my side to go to sleep, she took a breath and sa
id, “That was so horrible.”
We hadn’t mentioned the birds since that morning. She sounded completely awake.
“I know,” I said.
“I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“It’s over,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“But it must have been so awful,” she said. “They were there for hours. And where was their mother? I didn’t even think about it until later. Did you see her?” She was, I could hear, in danger of crying.
“What’s going on?” I said, resting a hand on her hip. “Are you okay?”
“I am,” she said. “I am. I’m just tired. I’m really tired. I’m okay.”
We lay that way for a while, with my hand on her, but when I woke up an hour or so later, I could tell, from the feeling of her body or the rhythm of her breathing, that she was still awake. But I knew too (or anyway I told myself) that she wouldn’t want me to say anything, that she wouldn’t want me even to acknowledge that she wasn’t asleep. Losing someone is not a trip along a straight road, but this—her fever, the birds—was a mile marker, and I blew past it. I rolled over onto my side away from her, the sheets wrapped around my arm, telling myself that I’d say something if she still seemed to be awake in…I fell asleep again before I’d even finished the thought.
[from Lydia Gibbens’s introduction to Edmund Wright, The Encyclopedia of Ordinary Human Sensation, volumes I and II, edited by Lydia Gibbens]
…What one must understand, in order to properly appreciate Edmund Wright’s encyclopedias, is that in writing them, despite the seeming impersonality of the endeavor, Wright came the closest he ever would to penning an autobiography.
His ambition, in the encyclopedias, was as simple as it was quixotic. He would, with the precision of a scientist and the sensitivity of a man of letters, set down on paper all the suffering that a person could reasonably expect to experience in his life, and then all of the pleasure. And it was his hope that by comparing the two, he would once and for all settle the question that had haunted him since his earliest childhood. Though it may not have been his conscious intent, he was, with this pair of books, giving body to the conflict that had so bedeviled his parents’ marriage, and so had formed the backdrop to his upbringing:
Was life, despite its myriad difficulties, an unfathomable wonder, as his pious and tenderhearted mother would have it? Or was it a Boschian array of horrors, punctuated only by inadequate bits of relief, as his revered but unstable father tended to believe?
Thus can these haphazard and incomplete lists be read as an account of the battle that raged first within the tempestuous marriage of Matthew Wright and Alice Riley, and then, long after they had passed away, within the ever-fertile mind of their eldest son. When Wright fled to Hibernia—hounded by creditors, beset with troubles—his plan was to complete and publish Volume I in the fall of 1868, and Volume II in the summer of 1869. They would, he wrote to his stable and successful younger brother Harry, “stand as the twin pillars at the center of my professional life.” It will surprise no one familiar with Wright’s biography that these plans were to prove unduly optimistic.
But the encyclopedias continued, until weeks before Wright’s death, to function for him as a solace, a home to which he would return again and again between flights of curiosity—whether into spiritualism, or botany, or the science of anesthesia. In these books, never finished, the consummate intellectual dabbler found a subject—or rather a pair of subjects—that were finally beyond his powers to exhaust. Wright may have failed to settle the decades-old battle within himself, but he succeeded gloriously in illuminating the inner struggle, and the confounding blizzard of private sensation, in which modern readers—presented here for the first time with an edition worthy of Wright’s original vision—may see their own lives reflected…
[from Edmund Wright, The Encyclopedia of Ordinary Human Sensation, volume I: Pains, edited by Lydia Gibbens]
…
• Pain of central chest muscles, very nearly a sensation of fibers being torn, pursuant to certain especially violent acts of sneezing.
• Unbidden memories of one’s deceased parents, very often colored with a vividness and intensity that outdoes one’s daily sensory perceptions, and accompanied by feelings of remorse, longing for reunion, and a sense of matters never to be finished.
• Faint ache, quality of pulsation, just above one’s eyebrows, quite as if one had, unconsciously, spent hours glowering with concentration.
• Tender sensation in right kneecap, most noticeable while walking out of doors; a component of this sensation’s peculiar stamp being the irregularity of its comings and goings, viz. that it will manifest for a number of steps, intensifying almost to a quality of burning, before retreating quite as suddenly as it came, leaving its possessor in a state of anxious unease.
• Realization that said tender sensation is unlikely to improve of its own accord, and is in fact more likely to worsen and to act as a harbinger for pains both excruciating and various, afflicting body parts vastly more difficult to look beyond than the knees.
• Disappointment in oneself upon realizing that said tender sensation, despite consisting, in point of fact, of frankly negligible quantities of pain, has nonetheless darkened one’s outlook considerably.
• The act of drinking water from a glass that has been left on a table for rather too long a time and has, in consequence, acquired a taste quite like the smell of an unswept corner of a room.
• The sensation of gazing into a mirror and finding oneself appalled, viz. realizing that were this face to appear before one on the street, one would without hesitation inwardly enumerate a great many flaws; this initial start very often being followed by the further, and equally dismaying, realization that only a certain wishful generosity of self-perception, even perhaps a state of delusion, has allowed one to look in a mirror all these many years without rendering a similarly severe series of judgments.
• The recognition that one is, according to all sensible scriptural and psychological definitions, vain.
• The rather debilitating sensitivity beside one’s fingernail that results from the too-vigorous extraction of a hardened or pointed protrusion of skin.
• Quite the majority of dreams, viz. dreams of plummeting from a considerable height; dreams of finding oneself an object of fun; dreams of having regressed, either in chronology or in circumstance; dreams of having mislaid an object of tremendous import; dreams of being separated from a beloved person, frequently with associations of mortality or tremendous shame; dreams of conducting quite furious arguments, nearly always regarding matters that appear minuscule or frankly incomprehensible in the morning’s light (and which tend nonetheless to color one’s daytime relations with one’s “dream combatant”); dreams of sexual congress with strange and unwelcome partners (which tend, similarly, to color one’s waking interactions, lending commonplace interactions a quality of nearly intolerable embarrassment).
• The sudden dread that overcomes one in the wake of certain dreams, particularly those that are, for reasons of psychic self-protection or circumstance, interrupted prematurely, and the consequent sensation of having glimpsed, through a doorway ordinarily shut (and beginning already to shut again!), a thing both terrible and true.
…
4
The story we were told about Hannah’s predecessor, Jim—to the extent we were ever really told one—was that he’d left because of a personal crisis. He’d been director for four years, beloved by the Wrighters, tense somehow with Donna and the museum’s board, and then something had happened in his personal life—a breakup, maybe; a sudden illness—and he’d gone back to Poughkeepsie, where last anyone heard he was volunteering at a children’s museum. Donna occasionally alluded to disagreements they’d had—Jim had wanted to do an exhibit on Wright’s interest in water cures, which Donna thought was ridiculous—but all in all his name came up strikingly little.
We’d seen a picture of him—it was still on th
e Special Events page of the Wright House website (which looked like it was, and may in fact have been, designed on GeoCities). He was wearing a too-big beige blazer, posing with his arm flung around a startled-looking woman in purple. He looked like a long-serving, not-especially-beloved high school history teacher: a thin gray beard; a corduroy shirt that was probably missing buttons; a crooked smile.
The only time Hannah or I ever referred to him was when we heard something in the house, the walls moaning in the wind, a thump upstairs. This was, although I can’t quite remember how it started, one of the jokes we had, that he was plotting to get back into the museum, maybe hiding out in the basement. “Jim’s pissed tonight,” I’d say. “I think he wants his Pert Plus back.” Hannah once left a chocolate chip cookie on the mantel as an offering to him, the way you do for Santa Claus. That’s what I expected him to stay for us—a private joke, a name on a stack of business cards in a drawer.
But that October, as it started to actually get cold, Hannah’s fragility—her remoteness, her weepiness, whatever it was—got worse, and her capacity to make or appreciate jokes basically disappeared. She went from sleeping poorly to, many nights, sleeping hardly at all. Some of this, I figured, had to do with the museum: visitorship had declined from minimal to near nothing; an evening reading event that she worked on for weeks was attended by just me and Donna. And some of it may just have been seasonal, the general unnervingness of fall in the country. The line between romantic getaway and lonely creepy farmhouse is, it turns out, fairly thin. The yard and woods around the museum were carpeted in curled brown leaves. The windowsills were scattered with dry, dead flies. Driving back to the house from the grocery store, we wouldn’t pass a single other car; if it weren’t for the smell of fires burning in fireplaces, we might have thought everyone in town had been raptured away.