Last Things

by Jenny Offill

  PRAISE FOR JENNY OFFILL’S

  Last Things

  “Last Things mines an interval of childhood before the division of intellectual labor. In this state of innocence, science, philosophy, mythology, bunk, wonder, and sorrow are all one. Jenny Offill’s complicated and arresting farewell to this dangerous time is compelling as few recent novels on the subject have been.”

  —Rick Moody

  “Truly delightful.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “Stunning.… Dazzling.… A delightful novel, rich for its voracious eye onto real and imaginary moments of quandary in the lives of its characters and in the larger life of the universe.”

  —Ploughshares

  “[A] gem of a first novel.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Mesmerizing.… Pitch-perfect.… [Offill] writes with a heartbreaking clarity.”

  —The Times (London)

  “Offill’s debut is a rare feat of remarkable constraint and nearly miraculous construction of a most unique family.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred)

  Jenny Offill

  Last Things

  Jenny Offill is the author of two novels, Dept. of Speculation and Last Things, which was chosen as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Book Award. She teaches in the writing programs at Queens University, Brooklyn College, and Columbia University.

  www.jennyoffill.com

  ALSO BY JENNY OFFILL

  Dept. of Speculation

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 2015

  Copyright © 1999 by Jenny Offill

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, in 1999.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-101-87207-9

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-87208-6

  Author photograph © Emily Tobey

  Cover design by Linda Huang

  Cover image © Mary Evans Picture Library/The Image Works

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  for my grandparents

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Put your trust in the inexhaustible character of the murmur.

  —André Breton

  “Once,” my mother said, “there was no true darkness. Even at night, the moon was as bright as the sun. The only difference was that the light was blue. You could see clearly for miles and miles and it was never cold. And this was called twilight.”

  “Why twi?” I asked.

  “Because it rhymes with sky,” my mother said. “It’s a code word for blue.” Code blue was what they said when someone died, I remembered, and this, too, had to do with the sky.

  One day God called the bat to him and gave him a basket to carry to the moon. The basket was filled with darkness, but God didn’t tell him what it was. Instead, he said, “Take this to the moon. I’ll explain everything when you return.” So the bat set off for the moon with the basket on his back. He flew toward the sky, but the moon saw him and hid behind a cloud. The bat grew tired and stopped for a rest. He put down the basket and went off to find something to eat. While he was gone, other animals came along. (Dogs and wolves mostly, also a badger with a broken paw.) These animals thought there might be food in the basket and pried the cover off, but inside there was only darkness, which they had never seen before. The dogs and wolves tried to pull it out and play with it, but it slipped away between their teeth and slithered off. Just then, the bat returned. He opened the basket and found it empty. The other animals disappeared into the night. The bat flew off to try to recapture the darkness. He could see it everywhere, but he couldn’t fit it back inside his basket, no matter how he tried. And that is why the bat sleeps all day and flies all night. He’s still trying to catch the dark.

  “Which part of the story was the part about Africa?” I wanted to know. I had asked my mother to tell me about Africa and instead she had told me about the bat. “It’s all about Africa,” my mother said, frowning. “Everything except the part about God.”

  When my mother was very young, she lived in Tanzania and studied birds. It was there that she met my father. He had come to Africa to set up a fishery and she had taught him some Swahili and that was that. “Before you were born, I met him,” my mother said. “Before you were even a gleam in my eye.” This made her laugh. I laughed too. I had seen a picture of my parents in Africa, standing on the beach, holding a giant silver fish between them. When they lived in Tanzania, my mother said, village boys would wait near the trees at dusk and scoop bats out of the sky with nets.

  In my notebook, I wrote:

  ornithologist

  Tanzania

  fishery

  Swahili

  a bat is not a bird = mammal

  My mother spelled out each word for me and later I added “idealistic” to the list, which is what she said my father had been once. I kept the notebook because I thought that I might want to be a detective someday. I wrote down everything I heard, and when the pages started to fall out, I stuck them back inside with glue. I had an idea that someday someone would come to me with a mystery and I would open up the notebook and all the clues would already be there.

  My mother told me that another name for detective was P.I. and that this was the word for a number that no one could ever finish writing. I said, “What if you wrote all day and all night and never slept for a hundred years?”

  “Even then,” my mother said, “you wouldn’t be done.”

  About the bat, I wanted to know: Why was the darkness in a basket? Why did the moon hide from the bat? How did the badger hurt his paw? What do bats eat? Where did the darkness run? What happened to the dogs and wolves that started everything?

  “Bats eat fruit and insects mostly,” my mother said. “The darkness ran everywhere at once.”

  “Do bats eat people?”

  “No,” she said. “But there’s a kind in South America that drinks the blood of sleeping things. Sometimes they bite people without even waking them because their touch is as light as a kiss.”

  My mother turned off the light and closed the door. The room became its night self then, full of deep corners that swallowed up the dark. Shadows moved across the wall, chasing the lights of cars. I closed my eyes and tried to dream in another language. My mother knew five languag
es by heart and could dream in three. Her father had been a linguist and once she had wanted to be one too. Sometimes she spent all night translating what one person in her dream said to another. When she woke up, she was so tired she could barely speak. That was why she slept all day and wandered around the house at night.

  In Africa, my mother said, there is a secret city where no one ever sleeps. If a traveler stumbles upon it and falls asleep, he will be buried alive before he wakes. The villagers have never seen sleep before and would think he had died in the night. If he woke up while he was being buried, they would think he was a demon and beat him to death. The only sign you have entered the sleepless city is a certain unceasing murmuring even in the dead of night. Otherwise, it looks like every other place. Travelers are advised to wander through each city, asking passersby, “Where can I sleep?” because in the sleepless city no one knows the answer.

  My mother had taught me a little French. “What is your name?” I knew and “Please, can you help me find …?” Once I’d asked my mother to teach me Swahili and she said, “You already know one word. Can you guess what it is?” I had guessed “detective,” but this had been wrong. “Safari,” she said. “It’s an old Swahili word for travel.” This was the word for the shows my father liked to watch on TV. “Yes,” my mother said. “That’s exactly right.”

  Later I wrote “safari” in my notebook next to the word “Sophie,” the name of my mother’s other daughter, the one who died in Africa before I was born. Once I asked her if Sophie could speak Swahili before she died, but my mother said she had been too little to speak anything at all.

  Another time, my mother told me that when I was born every language in the world was in my head, waiting to take form. I could have spoken Swahili or Urdu or Cantonese, but now it was too late. “Where did all the words go?” I asked.

  “They just wasted away,” my mother explained, “like a leg you never walk on.”

  My mother kept a notebook too; hers was black with shiny rings. I had torn a page from it and hidden it under my bed. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I took the page out of its hiding place and read it:

  Zero order—

  Betwixt trumpeter pebbly complication vigorous tipple careen obscure attractive consequence expedition unpunished prominence chest sweetly basin awake photographer ungrateful.

  First order—

  Tea realizing most so the together home and for were wanted to concert I he her it the walked.

  Second order—

  Sun was nice dormitory is I like chocolate cake but I think that book is he wants to school there.

  Third order—

  Family was large dark animal came roaring down the middle of my friends love books passionately every kiss is fine.

  Fourth order—

  Went to the movies with a man I used to go toward Harvard Square in Cambridge is mad fun for.

  Fifth order—

  Road in the country was insane especially in dreary rooms where they have some books to buy for studying Greek.

  Sixth order—

  Easy if you know how to crochet you can make a simple scarf if they knew the color that it.

  Prose text—

  More attention has been paid to diet but mostly in relation to disease and to the growth of young children.

  A moth flew into the room and fluttered against the shade. I wondered if this might be the same moth that had tried to fly to a star. But that moth had died, I remembered, or maybe it was the moth who had stayed home and circled the street lamp. My mother had told me that story too and said the moral was that stars could not be trusted and moved farther away, the closer you came. “Poor moth,” I said again and again that day until my father put down the paper and asked me to stop. Later he explained that the nearest star was 93 million miles away and this made it unlikely that anyone, a person or a moth, would ever go there. When I asked what the name of the nearest star was, my father said, “The Sun, of course.”

  But my mother said that that was only one way to think of it and that in some places (Africa, for instance) people knew how to leave their bodies and fly up to the edge of the sky, where they hovered like birds. The trick, she said, was not to look down at your body in the bed, or you might lose your nerve and fall.

  I looked for the moth again, but it was gone. Outside my window, slow stars moved across the sky. I could feel myself falling asleep, into sleep, it seemed. This happened when the darkness in the corner pulled me to it like water to a drain. I closed my eyes and waited. Around me, the night buzzed like a fluorescent light. J’ai perdu mon chapeau, I dreamed. Something brushed across my cheek and I thought it was the bat, but when I opened my eyes, there was only my mother, kneeling beside me with her hands like fur.

  There was a lake in town that stretched all the way to Canada. This was my mother’s favorite place, except in the summer, when the city people came. Then it was useless, she said. It was hardly a lake at all. By day, the water swarmed with swimmers, and at night, fireworks hid the stars.

  In the summer, I tried to forget the lake, but still it was there just beyond the trees, I knew. If I wanted to go, I had to get up very early and walk with my mother in the cold dark. She didn’t like to talk along the way. Instead, she shone her flashlight across the sand and to the trees. During the night, every footprint had vanished; only the tracks of birds remained. As soon as the sun came up, old men with metal detectors appeared.

  These men combed the dirtiest part of the beach, just beyond the pier. There was a place there for bonfires, and charred wood spotted the shore. Half-eaten sandwiches floated in on waves. Birds dive-bombed for the bread and for the Alka-Seltzer tablets kids lined up in rows along the sand. I’d been told that if a bird swallowed one, it would explode in midair, though I had never seen this happen. My mother picked up the tablets and put them in her pockets to throw away at home. Often she forgot, and once, in a rainstorm, her coat began to hiss and fizz.

  In the fall, it was different. The lake was empty again and the birds circled high above, never touching down. Every day after school, my mother and I went down to the shore to collect shells and little stones. Orange stones were best, but these were hard to find. If I found one small enough, I put it under my tongue for safekeeping. The rest I collected in my silver pail. There was a little hole at the bottom of the pail where the metal had rusted through. If a stone fell out, I couldn’t pick it up again, no matter what color it was. This was a rule I had made that could never be broken. The best stone I’d ever found had been lost this way. It was small and orange with a black rim around it like the sun. Sometimes, just before I fell asleep, I thought about the way it had looked in my hand.

  Often we walked to the end of the beach without talking. This was the silence game, the one my mother liked best. At first, it was hard to keep quiet, but soon I’d forget what I’d wanted to say. Instead, I pretended I was a wolf who had never said a word before and never would. I thought my mother might do this too because of the way she liked to crouch and run along the shore. The lake was very dark and deep and sometimes when I was a wolf it whispered to me in a secret way. Lake, the voice said. Lake, Lake.

  There was a monster in this lake, but I had never seen it. Only my mother and six other people had. She had seen the monster one afternoon when she was out boating with her first love. Her first love’s name was Michael and he was one of the seven people too. They had seen it in 1973, she said, when everyone else was inside watching TV. “The word for such a thing is ‘uncanny,’ ” she told me, and this meant that it was both familiar and strange at the same time, like the moon.

  My mother always carried a newspaper clipping about that day with her. It was torn and yellow from being folded and refolded so many times. Whenever we went to the lake, she read it to me. I would have liked to hold the clipping and read it myself, but she never let me.

  One day in early June 1973, Michael Maller and a friend were enjoying the tranquil beauty of Lake Champlain when they notice
d the water begin to seethe. Then, to their disbelief, a head and a long willowy neck emerged, curving above a dark, floating mass. This, they realized, was no fish.

  Almost paralyzed with fear, Maller nonetheless managed to aim his camera at the creature and take a quick snapshot. The result was a clear photograph of an apparently animate object, gray-brown in color and with serpentine features.

  Some time later a public hearing was held in Montpelier to support the passage of legislation to protect the creature. Attending the session, Maller fervently declared: “I just want you to know that Champ is out there. Believe me, Champ is there!”

  My mother always read the last part in a silly deep voice to make me laugh. Where was Michael now, I asked, but she didn’t know. She had only one photo of him, which she kept in her wallet inside a plastic sleeve. It had been taken on a honey farm in Texas, she said, the summer they drove across the country in just one week. She had shown me this picture so many times I could close my eyes and see it. There was a field full of white cabinets, each with four drawers. On top of each cabinet was a rock and around the field was a wire fence. The sky behind the fence was bright blue with a tear in the corner where the sun should be. A tall, dark-haired man stood by an open drawer, his beard covered in bees. And this was Michael.

  That was the last picture ever taken of him. Five days later, he disappeared in the desert. By the time they found his car, heat had warped the vinyl roof. The windows were down and the floorboards were covered with sand. On the front seat was his driver’s license, a map of America, and a twenty-dollar bill. This had been in California, my mother said, in a place called Joshua Tree.

  “Where did he go?” I asked, though she always said different things. (In the past, she had told me: Mexico, Milwaukee, the moon.)

  My mother put the picture back inside its sleeve. “I think he became a cryptozoologist,” she said. “There was a monster in the Congo he was desperate to see.” She smoothed out the clipping in her hands. “Do Sea Serpents Have Rights?” the headline said.