by Jesse Ball
Somehow, the ongoing project I spoke of, the project of our life, that my wife, son and I were embarked on, had failed in the figure of my wife’s corpse, and so we had no choice, my son and I, but to undertake some severe action, a reappraisal of sorts. For us that was the census, and so we began, and set out north passing through ring after ring, B and C and D and so forth. E and F and G.
Could it have been something else? Could that reappraisal have somehow appeared in an absolutely contrary form—perhaps an ocean voyage, my son and I on a ship as passengers, eating supper amidst white gloved waiters? That was not the spirit with which we lived our life—so at least that eventuality would not have appeared, but some other? It is hard to say. I know that my wife’s desire to tour the country in the company of my son, myself, somehow hardened in my memory into an irresistible command that was stated by her death. And a simple tour, a tour with no purpose would be—how does one say it, it would be impossible or difficult to make any choices on such a tour. The census could somehow stand in for my wife, where before it would have been she, my son, myself, there now was another trifecta, myself, my son, the census. Held together by a common purpose, we did not need to wonder, and could simply feel.
When we crossed the river and came to J, we were speaking of the nice things that we would have. Like everyone else, when the day crawls on, we begin to speak of what we will have for dinner. I was going to have some kind of soup, a vegetable soup and maybe a grilled cheese sandwich—something nearly any roadside diner provides. My son had his heart set on a hamburger and after that perhaps some pie.
But there was no one in J anymore. The road through it was in good shape, as was the bridge over which we had come, but J was just a long line of shuttered businesses, collapsed roofs, concrete cracked with the festive and brutal hands of plants, the fingers of young trees.
We will have to keep on, I said. Our best plan is to open the peanuts and keep driving. As we drove, I kept picturing the diner we would come to, and the steam rising up from the soup that I would then get to eat.
I don’t think that my wife was disappointed by my son. I don’t think that she blamed herself, or blamed me. Her understanding of things was richer than that. But I do know that she sometimes wished we could have done more. There were things she had hoped to do, and now it is clear, now that she is dead: we simply did not do those things and won’t. I suppose this is true of children in general, of any children, but it seems especially true of a child who must be cared for permanently. I never apologized to her for him, and she likewise never said anything to me about it. If such a feeling of unhappiness existed, it would only have been in the abstract, for the particular were: we felt lucky to have had him, and lucky to become the ones who were continually with him, caring for him. I have read some books of philosophy in which the freedom of burdens is explained, that somehow we are all seeking some appropriate burden. Until we find it, we are horribly shackled, can in fact scarcely live.
K
The people in the next town, which we came to early in the morning, told us, about J, that there had been a mine collapse, and the only local business that mattered had gone down. Everything else went too, and people fled. One old man still lives there. Perhaps you saw him?
The industry in K, which was not one town, but a set of them—three or four along a river, with fields on both sides—was farming.
The thing about farming, a man told me, as I marked him, is: everything goes wrong. Being a farmer is becoming used to every last thing going wrong. No one but farmers understand fairness.
What is there to understand? I asked.
That there isn’t any.
The man’s wife coughed and gave me a mug of coffee.
Miners think that they can just pull precious things out of the ground and get rich quick. But, what happens when the mine collapses?
I said that I thought mining was hard work too.
Oh it’s hard work—it is hard work. But are you putting in the work? Are you? Are you waiting to see the fruits of it?
I didn’t really understand his point, so I tried the coffee, which was terrible, and I praised it, and thanked them. I concluded my census business with the man, and then his wife and I attended to it in the back of the house, by a window overlooking the fields of their farm. She sat next to me on a bench, and I immediately felt her femininity. There is being a man, there is being a woman, being a boy, being a girl, etcetera. No woman is any more a woman than any other, obviously—everyone should have the freedom to be how they like, and to create it from nothing in fact. But there are some who are deeply conversant with what it has meant culturally to be a woman—and how that should appear, and they can sometimes surround themselves with a specific kind of forceful femininity. It doesn’t even matter if they are young or old. This is something else I’m speaking of. I suppose I have even met a man who had it—that femininity. This woman and I, we sat on the bench, and I could close my eyes and draw her. That’s part of it.
She told me a story about herself long ago. For me, this was the kernel that I required of her, and I needed no more as a census taker.
››
She said, when I met my husband, I was married to someone else. He, my first husband, was a foreman in the chemical plant in P. You will go there eventually, I guess, if you keep north on this road. We had a very large house, and two daughters. I was the prettiest girl in town and people were always telling me how lucky I was. You are so lucky, they would say. Two daughters who look just like you. But both my daughters died. There was some contaminant that my husband brought home on his clothes, and somehow it got to them. They were three and five at the time. I remember how small their bodies were. I couldn’t understand anything that was told to me. All I could do was to leave him and to pretend it hadn’t happened. I got on the bus with a small bag. I came here to this town. I married my second husband, continued the work I know how to do. We raised another girl, a daughter. She arrived the year after.
I named her after them, her first name is the name of my oldest daughter, her middle name the name of my second oldest daughter, her full name, the name then of all three, for I kept my name. She is gone now, too—went away to school and never returned, which is something I understand. You can’t ever ask anyone to stay, can you? But this other thing I wonder about. What is the comfort in giving her their names, in using those names again? Why do we try to honor things by pretending they are anything like other things? Does it make any sense?
I said it didn’t make sense—but that I understood, I felt I understood why she would do it. I asked what her husband thought about it all.
He doesn’t know about it. I never told him.
She said she somehow knew eventually someone would come to whom she could speak about it, and until that time, she had been in no hurry. There is always enough to do, so she said.
The fields we looked out on were barren, entirely flat, for it was winter now and the sky held clouds from rim to rim. A bird at the far tree line disturbed the scene, which otherwise was as still as water. Every place you go to—when you are there you feel it is so far from anywhere else, in certain moods. In other moods I feel I can just rise up, almost out of my body and be anywhere else, or everywhere else. Do you know, have you felt that simultaneity?
The house was decorated all over with small cheerful gestures of color and texture. It seemed Swedish to me. I looked out the window again. A thin column of light was falling from a cloud—just like in a painting, and the field around it was shadowed and palled. Then the column spread and disappeared and then suddenly grew and the field was all light, everything in focus. Then the clouds came again.
The woman looked like someone I used to know, a patient of mine who fell from a window. I had fixed her leg and arm and in return she would sometimes bring us a basket of this or that. My wife liked her, though I did not. She would always ask me, why don’t you like her? And I would invent reasons. I would say, she keeps too many dogs, she
can’t possibly know them all, or she wears a raincoat when it’s sunny. This was the way my wife and I spoke to each other.
But I was there in the room not with the woman I disliked but with this farm woman who I did not know and could not—because I myself was no part of the interaction. I was there on the business of the census, beyond like or dislike.
Do you have any other questions for me? she asked.
It had been so many years, I said. Had she been back to P? Had she ever seen her first husband again, the foreman?
I would think he must have killed himself. He must have, he must have killed himself.
She said it with an accent on the word killed, but I couldn’t tell what the accent was.
What do you think? she asked me. What would you have done in that circumstance? Wouldn’t you have just killed yourself?
We went back in the other room where my son was playing checkers with the farmer. My son had three kings and was very happy with himself. The game had been a great success. The farmer had only one king and things were not looking good.
I took a picture of the two of them hunched over the board. My son still had his coat on, and the farmer’s sleeves were rolled up.
The farmer was at that moment, the moment I took the picture, asking if they could agree to a draw. In reply, my son, never one to be hurried, especially not at his gladdest moments, moved one of his three kings, I doubt it even mattered which, and smiled down at the board where the teeth of the torn cobs spread like drawn suns.
L
The country is larger than anyone thinks it is. It contains more—contains so much that any survey will inevitably be made in error. Some think that the answer is to fly over in planes and photograph from above, so that nothing will be missed. The trouble is, things aren’t the same from far above. I had often seen photographs and heard stories of the country north of the capital. I had heard of others who had made a travel similar to our own, and gone the road to Z. But I had heard very little about the area north of L.
As my son and I drove down the long slope putting K well behind us, I could see through the fogged glass of the window a long valley presented ahead and on either side. The remainder of our trip would be made in a sort of industrial hell interspersed with bands of what might be called wilderness, but what were, in essence, abandoned tracts, towns not thought worth exploiting, and the lands around them.
My condition pressed upon me as we went, and I felt again that we should stop, perhaps that we should even stop for some days, but the first motel we came to was filthy, and though we bought a room, my son would not enter it, and we ended sleeping in the car.
Will you please go in? Please?
He would not go in, not for anything.
The motel was the Leapley Motor Inn, and I confess that I did not want to sleep in the room either.
The next morning, we went to an apartment complex and knocked on the first door we came to.
My son and I had argued about whether people would be different here. Or rather, we both agreed they would be, but he thought they would be nothing like the ones before. I disagreed.
The first door was answered by a man of about fifty with a yellowish face and a moustache.
››
The census, huh. All right. Come in.
This man was a detective in the police force of L. He had served in that department for three decades, and in that time had seen almost anything that can happen to a person happen to a person, whether for good or ill.
His wife, a much younger woman, practically a girl, he told us, was out just then, but his son, age nine, was there. They sat next to each other on the couch and we sat across from them. Sometimes one would talk, sometimes the other.
At first the boy was confused about what we were after, which is understandable—since we weren’t exactly after anything. However, the father, being an officer of the law, understood the census very well, and so he explained to the son what it was that we were supposed to be doing there. That meant that although in coming there we had a different purpose, our own purpose (as I have mentioned, in some ways estranged from the typical census activity), we were forced by circumstance to, in this case at least, readopt the general behavior of the census taker as it is typically known.
The son was holding a military style doll which was garbed in thick white cloth for some sort of winter campaign. The doll had a rifle in its hand that was also wrapped the same way.
Will you include Henry in the census? the boy asked.
His father told him that the question was an absurdity. Henry was a doll. He would not be included in the census.
I said, on the other hand, there is no real reason to avoid Henry. There would be so many mistakes in the manner that the census was conducted overall that to add Henry to the data would not cause too much harm. I pointed out also that potentially Henry, as the construction of a person in the culture at large, was likely to represent some consensus point, and should therefore not actually contradict any of the other data.
The father, as a veteran policeman, was quite conversant with the point of view that we should let sleeping dogs lie and conduct momentary affairs to best fit the situation.
All right then, Henry, he said. What do you think?
The boy mentioned that Henry would like to be introduced first.
The detective explained to us that his son had wanted the winter sniper soldier toy for the last six months, but that whenever they would go to the store, there would be no winter sniper soldier toys because they had all already been purchased. The toy store did not permit orders to be put in; you simply had to get there at the right time. Many of the boy’s friends had the soldier toys, and several had the winter sniper soldier toy. Those who had it insisted it was by far the best one. The others were essentially placed around the house for the winter sniper soldier toy to notice and kill. Any other narrative was in dispute. By virtue of this schema, the soldier toys that the son owned were rendered useless for play, and in fact he became disconsolate and spent long hours staring into space.
Finally, about a week before our arrival, the detective had been called to a crime scene. A woman had committed suicide and taken her two children with her. The husband was at large, and was a suspect in a different case, one the detective was working on. While the detective was walking around the house examining things, his eye lit on what was to him a familiar and almost hated sight: lying prone beneath the bed of one of the dead children, the winter sniper soldier toy, rifle and all.
That’s when I met Henry, he said. Henry needed a home. You can’t just go around sniping all the time. At some point you need a home.
I began to have dizzy spells as we drove on, and occasionally I would be forced to stop the car for hours at a time. I often would have trouble breathing.
It seemed to me, as we made our visits, as we obtained the records we needed, that I was traveling not just into L and on to M and N, but that I was traveling into my own past, because as I grew fainter, I felt that I had begun to recognize the people that we came across, and when they told their stories to me, I felt I knew some of them already.
I kept having nightmares. In the nightmares, I was in the census office, and the census chief was telling me that I had filled out all the forms incorrectly, that every last thing I had sent in was going to be destroyed. He showed me what that destruction would look like. He led me to a room and threw open the door. At the far side, there was a sort of fire pit, and all the papers I had obtained were piled there. On the papers were huddled the tiny living shapes of the people I had met, and the whole thing had been set on fire—it was burning. That was one. In another I was cutting people’s hair. For some reason, I was in the census office and cutting the hair of the employees, and I heard them talking about someone, and the person they were talking about was me. They said horrible things about me, and about my son, and they said there was something in wait for us, an awful end, an end that we ourselves should have expected. The humor
of this was almost too much for them, and I had to keep asking them to stop moving so I could cut their hair, something they wouldn’t do, they were enjoying their laughter too much. They kept thinking of new jokes to say about this census taker and his son—this absolutely stupid pair. Meanwhile, the line of people waiting to have their hair cut grew longer and longer.
In another, the bureau chief sat me down and asked me to explain what it was I thought I was doing. He said to me, you were supposed to visit every house in every town. You don’t leave a town until you have visited every house. Don’t you understand?
When I tried to explain why I had not done that, my voice would only come out in a whisper. I would whisper and he would ask me to speak up, and when I couldn’t, he would hit me with the butt of his hand, a brief slap such as you give a child or a dog.
Get up, he kept saying, and if I tried to stand up, he would push me back into the chair.
››
I kept waking up each morning in the car. I felt almost imprisoned by it, yet it was also the only place I could feel any comfort, or if not comfort at least not hesitancy.
We started keeping to the car more and more and so I would wake in the car, we would wake in the car and the windshield would be right there in front of me, opaque, like the cover on a coffin, and I would feel that surely, implacably, I was in a coffin, but then I would hear my son’s breath beside me. I would hear him; sometimes, even he would wake, and reach out his hand to me and we would hold hands. Then I could breathe and breathe and the day would begin.